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Towards My Personal Sex-Positive Feminist 101
There's an aphorism from the early 1900s literary critic Andre Maurois: "The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion but to know it." Even though I identify as an activist and genuinely want to make a real impact on the world based on my beliefs... I often think that much of my blogging has been more an attempt to figure out what I believe, than to tell people what I believe. And sometimes, I fall into the trap of wanting to be consistent more than I want to understand what I really believe -- or more than I want to empathize with other people -- or more than I want to be correct. We all gotta watch out for that.
But I'm getting too philosophical here. (Who, me?) The point is, I am hesitant to write something with a title like "Sex-Positive 101," because not only does it seem arrogant (who says Clarisse Thorn gets to define Sex-Positive 101?) -- it also implies that my thoughts on sex-positivity have come to a coherent, standardized end. Which they haven't! I'm still figuring things out, just like everyone else.
However, lately I've been thinking that I really want to write about some basic ideas that inform my thoughts on sex-positive feminism. I acknowledge that I am incredibly privileged (white, upper-middle-class, heteroflexible, cisgendered etc) and coming mostly from a particular community, the BDSM community; both of these factors inform and limit the principles that underpin my sex-positivity. I welcome ideas for Sex-Positive Feminism 101, links to relevant 101 resources, etc.
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Some Central Sex-Positive Feminist Ideas, according to Clarisse Thorn
1) Desire is complicated, and people are different. These ideas both seem basic and obvious to me as I write them, but I wanted to put them out there because I think they're useful anchors for all the rest.
2) Gender is not a binary, and gender cannot be determined by a person's outer appearance or behavior. Different people experience and display gender in a galaxy of ways. No woman in the world is perfectly submissive, perfectly hourglass-shaped, perfectly kind, etc, although these are stereotypes commonly associated with women. No man in the world is perfectly dominant, perfectly confident, perfectly muscular, etc. While many people reduce the idea of a person's gender to whether they have a penis or a vagina, the existence of trans people and intersex people proves that this isn't a valid approach. Individual people have all kinds of qualities that are attributed to the "other" gender... and the concept of an "other" (or "opposite") gender is weird in itself, because why does one gender have to be the "other," and what does that imply?
All this having been said, gender is frequently perceived as a binary, and many people fit themselves into the possibly-arbitrary system of gender that currently exists. There are ideas of "men" and "women" that are culturally understood, widely adopted, and socially enforced. Feminism has its roots in women resisting men's violent and social dominance, and in women resisting the cultural emphasis on stereotypical men's desires.
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