Lots of Questions

I found this week’s readings difficult to go through. Wednesday’s class, while a really great in-depth look at the readings, was a difficult one as it brought up a lot of hard to work through ideas – agency, the power of language, how we would even go about researching a topic like this.

This week was also difficult because it’s such a rarely talked about area. In the NYmag article, it’s summed up nicely:

It may feel as though contemporary feminists are always talking about the power imbalances related to sex, thanks to the recently robust and radical campus campaigns against rape and sexual assault … [But] outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking.

I know personally, I have had discussions on power imbalances related to sexual assault, but have never really had the opportunity to talk about consensual but unwanted sex, or even sexist ideas surrounding sex. And I don’t think I am alone. I think that a lot of the people I interact with on a daily basis don’t know how to talk about bad sex. We don’t know how to talk about why we feel weird or unhappy after consensual sexual encounters which have sexist undertones, or were unwanted.

As has been brought up in some other blogs, I think that there’s an idea that you have to be “normal,” you have to do what is expected of you in sexual encounters. Gavey discusses this quite a bit. It’s disheartening to think that there are so many people out there experiencing seemingly consensual sex, but feeling so on edge about it after. The issue I see is how do we even define “normal?” How do we, as a society, imagine what is normative? And why do so many of us internalize these ideas? More than that, how do we work to change these engrained and embodied ideas of what “normal” sex is? How do we change the idea that we owe sexual partners something or that unwanted, bad sex is a regular part of our sexual lives and identities? Sorry for so many questions, I'm just still working through this all.