Sex Positivity and the Power to Say No

In the supplementary reading assigned this week, "The Game is Rigged," there's a section devoted to exploring the ability for women to say no given their sex positive stance. The promotion of sexual equality and the chance for women to explore their sexuality in a positive way has created an unfortunate inability for women to say no without potentially seeming prudish or negative to the movement. As is mentioned in the text, "not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure."

Now, I don't want to pretend as though this isn't a problematic statement in the first place. As we discussed in class, there are a number of emotional and social reasons why it is difficult to say no to sex for people of all gender spectrums -- men must want sex, and women cannot embarrass a man without fear of punishment, for instance. Women are still overwhelmingly subjected to the Madonna-Whore Complex which creates in itself a punishment regardless of a yes or no in relation to sex. A woman is punished if she says for being a whore, but is equally punished for saying no as she's prudish.

But I'm interested in the idea of sex lives as political, and specifically the lack of a sex life as a political failure. Obviously the female body is heavily politicized, and sexuality is politicized, and often both of those things overlap, but I've never thought of having sex as an inherently political act. A subversive act, perhaps, which should logically lend itself to being political (in that if something is subversive it is acting in a counter-cultural way against common social and political biases) but it simply never registered itself to me as such.

So the thought of not being able to comfortably say no to sex as being a political failure is interesting and saddening to me. We've built up so much discourse around the power of no that seeing how limiting that is (and, indeed, even the saying of yes as failure) seems like a massive step backward, even while I understand that it is necessary for further growth in our understanding of sex and sex positivity. It creates a significant amount of work, certainly (in that we now have to examine our personal, social, and political practices in sex-positivity) but it is necessary, and it opens other avenues of exploration. How do we incorporate sex-positivity while also embracing alternative sexual practices like demi-sexuality or asexuality? I obviously understand the need to break down heterosexist norms of sex and sexual pleasure, but is it not also necessary to explore the political implications for those who have sex as well as those who don't?

I'm grateful for the new mental connection of sex as a political failure, even if the mental exploration makes my head hurt.