Content warning: sexual content
Everyone acts like they know how to have sex long before they actually do. Pretence is an age-old ingredient of fornication. It’s always awkward to see your first penis and it’s unsurprising to pretend to be a liberated sexual maestro when really you’re experiencing something not dissimilar from a turkey prepped for Christmas. It is perhaps a unanimous human experience, if you’re lucky, to be out of the woods from the days of complete pretence; that sweet relief found when things start to feel okay and genitals aren’t solely fear-inducing.
What isn’t intrinsic to sexual development, however, is the unavoidable interference of pornography that is meddling with sexual newbies. Anyone born from the 2000s onwards can rest assured that their first sexual encounter will be almost entirely informed from the porn that they or their partner have watched. Watching porn has been naturalised almost to the point of sex itself. The 2023 Online Safety Act (UK) being a lazy and symbolic attempt at regulating children’s intake of porn, acts more as an insight into the ignorance that law makers hold towards the capacity of a tech-savvy generation. Whilst it is undeniably delighting to exist in the age of ‘sexual liberation,’ where do our liberated dreams come from, and who are they actually serving?
The sex of our generation is no longer informed by the limited, prudish, and awkward efforts made by elders to pass on minimal, if any, information. We no longer go in blind, but with expectations and embedded sexual ideas. Porn plays on extremes, taboos, fantasies so dark that watchers only indulge in it on the pretence that it isn’t anything they’d do in real life. Porn isn’t neutral. It’s rarely tender or awkward and it often, if not always, encourages ideas that the excitement surrounding sex is its relationship with power.
If there is an entire generation of youths having porn-informed sex, how would we know? Even the wokest of the ‘sexually liberated’ generation are unlikely to share their raunchier bedroom stories with anyone far from their own age—people with the same socialisation and pornography exposure. It doesn’t take a genius to pinpoint where the sudden nation-wide fixation on asphyxiation has derived from. The Sentencing Council found that there were 342 strangulation homicides between 2011 and 2021, with 75 per cent being women. The fetishisation of female pain, the correlation between sex and conquering, the ideas of the ‘giver and taker,’ the sexual roles – not new ideas, but how much are they being exacerbated from kink into standard?
Women, having only recently been allowed into the we-get-horny club, are still years behind in terms of legitimising and vocalising our own sexual desires. Therefore it feels in part that the most feminist sex is simply any sex that fulfills our own desires, whatever they may be. But where, in the age of power-obsessed male-written porn, have such desires come from, when one if not both parties of any early sexual experiences are functioning off of standards set by an industry that profits from exploitation, trafficking, illegal taboos, and ultimately the hyper-sexualisation of subordinating women. Not to mention the intersectionality exacerbation within porn that places white women into the naïve-virgin ideal whilst women of colour are often subjected to more violent stereotypes.
Part of me wants to throw caution to the wind; have frivolous sex, push boundaries, take risks, fully absorb the age of modern women rejecting any shame derived from becoming sexual beings. I’ve previously believed that having casual sex in the same way that men do was the most feminist-informed way to be a liberated woman. In general, however, casual sex does not have the same consequences for women and men. Women on average produce nearly four times as much oxytocin post-sex than men, so however casual the sex may be, there’s a hormonal intuition to seek for connection. The era of ‘shame-free’ casual sex very rarely comes without any shame, raising questions about who ‘sexual liberation’ is really benefitting.
The most feminist way to have sex, put simply, is without shame; have lots of it or none at all, with as many or few partners. But be aware of where it comes from. Do we like the things we like because we saw a video of it when we were too young and it became embedded in our brains as an expectation? Because in a patriarchal society, it’s hard not to eroticise male validation.
Yes we should try and prevent porn, or at the very least not simply accept it as a natural coming-of-age milestone. But more importantly, we should accept that thanks to the porn industry, ideas on sex are being formed in a very specific way at a very young age, with no real sign of changing. We can’t meet this fact with the traditional Brit-embarrassment-avoidant approach. The typical consenting-cup-of-tea video seems a bit outdated when you imagine what many school-aged kids are consuming at night. In order to understand our desires, our own sexual identities, what should and shouldn’t indict shame and what ‘normal’ sexual standards are, we need to get a bit more real with our conversational and educational approaches.
Feminism is about information, choices, and empowerment, in that order. If we’ve come to normalise porn, let’s normalise discussions; what pornified expectations are not real, what practices might become damaging, what is okay to accept and what absolutely justifies a punch in the face.
“The women’s right to wear shoes, but I like to walk barefoot.” by brain salad surgery is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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How to Have Feminist Sex
Content warning: sexual content
Everyone acts like they know how to have sex long before they actually do. Pretence is an age-old ingredient of fornication. It’s always awkward to see your first penis and it’s unsurprising to pretend to be a liberated sexual maestro when really you’re experiencing something not dissimilar from a turkey prepped for Christmas. It is perhaps a unanimous human experience, if you’re lucky, to be out of the woods from the days of complete pretence; that sweet relief found when things start to feel okay and genitals aren’t solely fear-inducing.
What isn’t intrinsic to sexual development, however, is the unavoidable interference of pornography that is meddling with sexual newbies. Anyone born from the 2000s onwards can rest assured that their first sexual encounter will be almost entirely informed from the porn that they or their partner have watched. Watching porn has been naturalised almost to the point of sex itself. The 2023 Online Safety Act (UK) being a lazy and symbolic attempt at regulating children’s intake of porn, acts more as an insight into the ignorance that law makers hold towards the capacity of a tech-savvy generation. Whilst it is undeniably delighting to exist in the age of ‘sexual liberation,’ where do our liberated dreams come from, and who are they actually serving?
The sex of our generation is no longer informed by the limited, prudish, and awkward efforts made by elders to pass on minimal, if any, information. We no longer go in blind, but with expectations and embedded sexual ideas. Porn plays on extremes, taboos, fantasies so dark that watchers only indulge in it on the pretence that it isn’t anything they’d do in real life. Porn isn’t neutral. It’s rarely tender or awkward and it often, if not always, encourages ideas that the excitement surrounding sex is its relationship with power.
If there is an entire generation of youths having porn-informed sex, how would we know? Even the wokest of the ‘sexually liberated’ generation are unlikely to share their raunchier bedroom stories with anyone far from their own age—people with the same socialisation and pornography exposure. It doesn’t take a genius to pinpoint where the sudden nation-wide fixation on asphyxiation has derived from. The Sentencing Council found that there were 342 strangulation homicides between 2011 and 2021, with 75 per cent being women. The fetishisation of female pain, the correlation between sex and conquering, the ideas of the ‘giver and taker,’ the sexual roles – not new ideas, but how much are they being exacerbated from kink into standard?
Women, having only recently been allowed into the we-get-horny club, are still years behind in terms of legitimising and vocalising our own sexual desires. Therefore it feels in part that the most feminist sex is simply any sex that fulfills our own desires, whatever they may be. But where, in the age of power-obsessed male-written porn, have such desires come from, when one if not both parties of any early sexual experiences are functioning off of standards set by an industry that profits from exploitation, trafficking, illegal taboos, and ultimately the hyper-sexualisation of subordinating women. Not to mention the intersectionality exacerbation within porn that places white women into the naïve-virgin ideal whilst women of colour are often subjected to more violent stereotypes.
Part of me wants to throw caution to the wind; have frivolous sex, push boundaries, take risks, fully absorb the age of modern women rejecting any shame derived from becoming sexual beings. I’ve previously believed that having casual sex in the same way that men do was the most feminist-informed way to be a liberated woman. In general, however, casual sex does not have the same consequences for women and men. Women on average produce nearly four times as much oxytocin post-sex than men, so however casual the sex may be, there’s a hormonal intuition to seek for connection. The era of ‘shame-free’ casual sex very rarely comes without any shame, raising questions about who ‘sexual liberation’ is really benefitting.
The most feminist way to have sex, put simply, is without shame; have lots of it or none at all, with as many or few partners. But be aware of where it comes from. Do we like the things we like because we saw a video of it when we were too young and it became embedded in our brains as an expectation? Because in a patriarchal society, it’s hard not to eroticise male validation.
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Yes we should try and prevent porn, or at the very least not simply accept it as a natural coming-of-age milestone. But more importantly, we should accept that thanks to the porn industry, ideas on sex are being formed in a very specific way at a very young age, with no real sign of changing. We can’t meet this fact with the traditional Brit-embarrassment-avoidant approach. The typical consenting-cup-of-tea video seems a bit outdated when you imagine what many school-aged kids are consuming at night. In order to understand our desires, our own sexual identities, what should and shouldn’t indict shame and what ‘normal’ sexual standards are, we need to get a bit more real with our conversational and educational approaches.
Feminism is about information, choices, and empowerment, in that order. If we’ve come to normalise porn, let’s normalise discussions; what pornified expectations are not real, what practices might become damaging, what is okay to accept and what absolutely justifies a punch in the face.
“The women’s right to wear shoes, but I like to walk barefoot.” by brain salad surgery is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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