Carrying Other People’s Sexual Baggage

Audacia Ray has another thought provoking post on Feministe, this time about the difficulty of talking about sex. Specifically Audacia is responding to the frustration most people who try to talk about sex publically feel when we’re forced to manage the expectations of others.

Here’s a bit of her post:

I’m co-hosting a new reading series in NYC called Sex Worker Literati, which features stories and performances by people who’ve worked in the sex industry. These stories are sometimes about some kind of sex taking place, but they are frequently *not* sexy. Because really, the act of providing an erotic experience for a living is not always that arousing to the person doing the providing. It’s a job.

So of course I rolled my eyes at this obnoxious comment on our Facebook event page:

Is anybody putting out, or all talk, no action.

Maybe I’m a cranky feminist who needs to get laid more, but I think it is really important to have language to talk about sexuality that isn’t itself coded as sexual. So no, dear douchebag commenter, no one is “putting out” (and that phrase is such a lovely way to frame the female experience of sexuality. shudder).

I recommend reading the whole post and checking out the comments (it gets really interesting and meta by the time Zak Smith comments).

Her post made me think of a similar frustration I experience every time I’m involved in public discussions of sex with sex educators and sex researchers.

The problem in this different but related public discourse about sex isn’t that people expect sex talk to be sexy, it’s that they require it to be completely non-sexual, or clinical to the point that the discussion seems unrelated to actual human experience. Researchers historically have felt the need to do this in order to legitimize their work and prevent attacks from right wing politicians or administrators. They need to prove that studying sex can be serious, and to do that they need to make sex seem like anything else. The problem is that sex isn’t like anything else (even though it may be like some other things). And the result is that discussion of things like sexual pleasure or the lived experience of being sexual is essentially non-existent at most of the important professional sexuality conferences.

The kind of public discourse that Audacia is describing is very different from the one I am. I think what they share is a legacy of the way we all talk about sex. First off, everyone feels like they have a connection to sex and something to say about it. This isn’t true for all topics. And secondly, sex, and more broadly sexuality, is so value laden and so under interrogated that everyone comes to ANY discussion of it with a lot of baggage they usually aren’t even aware they are carrying.

The result of course is that anyone who opens up a public discussion of sex becomes a kind of porter for all this baggage. And it’s hard work to try and stack the suitcases and duffel bags properly, to carry them from the door to the car, to figure out where they go once you’ve got everyone together. Plus it gets annoying when everyone forgets to tip.

Read more – Audacia Ray: Taking the Erotic Out of Sexual Culture