So since this topic Will Never Die: What does hetero feminist sex look like? Is there any sexual act that is inherently ‘unfeminist’?
Possibly NSFW below fold.
Please read responses at Renegade Evolution too.
Anyway, my short answer is, no, not if they’re consensual. Not if you’re comfortable with it. Not if it gets YOU off.
I wrote on “what do I want” about wanting sex without guilt, and looky what happens as soon as I mention that shit–more ways to feel bad about your sex life! Since I don’t have a sex life at the moment, it works rather well for me, but what about the one in my head? Should I feel guilty about that one, then, if it involves a bit of kink? Or more than a bit?
I am all about ‘examining’ sex. In case you haven’t noticed, I write about that shit a fair bit, especially lately. It’s endlessly fascinating to me, especially since somewhere in my little twisted brain I seem to have successfully cut the cord between desire and denial, between sex and ‘bad,’ between pleasure and guilt. I feel guilty about lots of things–about spending money on myself when I’m pretty broke and am dipping into savings, about eating a bunch of food I didn’t really need when there are people in the world going hungry, about not returning phone calls or emails. But what I don’t feel guilty about are pleasures that don’t cost someone else anything. And sex most definitely falls under that category. ESPECIALLY fantasies, shit, those don’t even require another participant.
But even if they do–so the fuck what? I’m straight, I like men, I’ve asked before if that makes my sex life inherently patriarchy-pleasing. Should I just deny myself any pleasure because it might also cause a man pleasure? I doubt most feminists would say that I should.
But yet we have this discussion that says there are certain things–rough sex, BDSM sex where the female is submissive, even blowjobs–that are inherently unfeminist.
Back when I was a young pre-feminist (middle school and high school) I would get annoyed because my girlfriends were giving their boyfriends blow jobs so they didn’t have to have sex. Because if they lost their ‘virginity’ (and yes I put it in quotes because it’s a stupid concept) they would be ’sluts.’
Even back then, yeah, I thought that was a bit problematic because there seemed to be no concept of their pleasure in the equation. There was just a boyfriend who had to be pleased or he’d move on to another girl who would put out.
Later in my high school career, I had a friend who was a bit more voracious in her appetites, and I remember clearly one day talking with her about the guy she was seeing, and when I asked what went on, she wiggled her eyebrows and rolled the lollipop she was sucking on around in her mouth with a wicked smile. That to me stuck out as a pretty clear expression of her oral pleasure (and yes, her pleasure in her ability to get him off, because women can take pleasure in successful performance too, damnit).
Same action, totally different attitudes toward it.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s not the action that is wrong or bad or whatever, it’s how it’s done and your ability to choose it. Like I argued about porn, it’s about consent. It’s about whether you decided of your own free will that you wanted to do something. When it’s in porn, occasionally that something is negotiated for money, but it’s important to still recognize that just because you get paid for it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily against what you’d do otherwise.
When it’s in the bedroom, still sometimes things are negotiated for one or the other person’s pleasure at different times. But it still comes out of the context of wanting to give the other person pleasure. I think that’s why relationship-sex gets better–because one-nighters tend to just be rather selfish, getting yourself off and not really caring about the other person’s desires, while when you actually care about someone you often (not always) want to make them feel good too. And that’s still your desire.
Anyway, I’ve digressed a bit, but there’s a notion I’ve mentioned before that I want to return to: the question of putting your politics where they don’t always belong. We’ve all been raised on ‘the personal is political,’ and to a large extent that may be true, but it doesn’t mean that our choices are up for plebiscite.
Just as I can still be a feminist and like the Rolling Stones, or read comics about Vikings hacking each other to bits, I can be a feminist and like to do things in bed that make some people queasy.
I write. Occasionally I write fiction. It has yet to pay, but I hope it does someday. And the other day I got into a discussion with a coworker about writing feminist fiction. I noted that I don’t think you can write from your politics. You have to write from a story you want to tell, and because I am a feminist, I think that’ll come through in my writing. But what if I want to write a story about falling in love with a man? Is that unfeminist of me? What if the first thing I publish has a male protagonist (it’s the closest thing I have to being finished and worth publishing)?
Art is often political. But it’s also personal, and it comes from someplace deep inside us, and sometimes we don’t know why one week we’re creating one thing and the next week it’s something completely different. All we can know is that it’s what we want to do, and it’s making us happy.
Well, I’d say that it’s even more true in the bedroom. If I try to fuck politically, I might get a pat on the head from a certain bit of the feminist blogosphere, but I sure won’t be having much fun if every time we’re shifting positions I’m thinking “Gee, is it unfeminist of me to swing my leg around here and do this this way?”
So, as Ren said, why don’t we stop telling women what they’re allowed to enjoy? Why don’t we think about our own pleasures? If you feel bad after doing something, don’t do it! If you feel good and then someone later tells you you should feel bad, instead of questioning yourself, why don’t you question their need to limit and control your pleasures?
Sex without guilt. Creativity without guilt. Like I said yesterday, I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it. It’s a discussion we should have, like Jill said in that Feministe thread, but it’s one that should absolutely not come with some preconceived notions of what gets other people off. It just ain’t my business. My business is making sure that women (and by extension all people) get to make choices and do things that they want to do.