What Sex Positive Feminism Offers Rape Survivors

There’s an article making the rounds entitled Sites of Violence: Why Our Notions of “Sex Positive” Feminism Are in Need of an Overhaul. It uses the Cliteracy project as a jumping-off point to discuss the culturally relevant “sex-positive” feminism that I ascribe to and write about from time to time.

Kelly Rose Pflug-Back argues that sex-positive feminism fails to meet the needs of women who are unable to enjoy sex due to past trauma. She details her own abuse and the effect it’s had on her entire life, including the way she has sex. She also criticizes it for failing to address “state violence, environmental degradation, poverty, racism, and the wide variety of other hardships women must tackle in the contemporary world, in addition to a lack of sexual gratification.”

Most arguments against sex-positive feminism end up being straw-men. I appreciate that this isn’t one of those posts. However, I’d argue that the post isn’t the takedown of sex-positive feminism Pflug-Back may have intended. In fact, it fails to appreciate how sex-positive feminism can both help trauma survivors and help prevent future abuse.

What Is Sex-Positive Feminism?

Sex is important. Unfortunately women (and men) still face barriers to a fully enjoyable sex life. Sex-positive feminism seeks to help overcome some of those barriers, including, as Pflug-Back mentions, “suppressed knowledge of the female sexual anatomy.” Slut-shaming, prude-shaming, kink-shaming and more make sexual freedom unpleasant for women (and men). Sex-positive feminism is an antidote. It posits that no one should be ashamed of their sexual activities or lack of activities.

Another barrier to good sex is sex-negative feminism, to which sex-positive arose as a counterpoint. Briefly, sex-negative feminism holds that sex is an inherently political act which, even if performed with enthusiastic consent, constitutes an act of aggression upon women by men.

One might assume that sex-positive feminism is the opposite of sex-negative feminism. Meaning that sex-positive feminism holds that sex is an inherently non-political act which does not constitute an act of aggression upon women by men. More simply stated, if sex-negative feminists think even consensual sex between men and women is always bad, sex-positive feminists must think consensual sex between men and women is always good.

This view is understandable, and mistaken. And it leads people to think that sex-positive feminists believe things such as that everyone should be having sex, or that sex is necessarily good, or that people who don’t enjoy sex are wrong.

In reality, sex-positive feminism posits that sex is not inherently or necessarily anything at all.

For some people, every sexual act is political. Some women feel aggressed on after sex they agreed to have. Some women just don’t like sex, or have decided to take a break from it, or decided they have better things to do with their time. Others, such as Pflug-Back, have a complicated relationship with sex due to past trauma.

Sex-positive feminism respects and does not seek to negate any of those views or experiences. It just only refuses to universalize them. It recognizes that there are serious drawbacks to someone with a negative view of sex attempting to apply her experience universally.

So it’s fine to say sex is a political act for you. It’s not the best to tell me that my sex is or should be political. In this way, rather than being the opposite of sex-negative feminism, sex-positive feminism improves on it greatly by taking a more humble, individualist stance on what sex is and isn’t. For a sex-positive feminist, “consensual” is the only thing sex necessarily is, because everything else is rape.

Some sex-negative feminists disregard or downplay the role of consent in sex. Sex-negative feminists essentially describe all heterosexual sex as rape, with varying levels of subtlety. One problem with this is that it offers nothing to people who don’t see it that way.

Sex-positive feminists, on the other hand, do see a huge distinction between sex and rape, namely, consent. And by clarifying that distinction and educating people about it, sex-positive feminism makes it easier to talk about, and avoid, what most people consider sexual abuse.

Pflug-Back claims that sex-positive feminism has very little to offer rape survivors. I think this is incorrect. Sex-positive feminism promotes the idea that however survivors want to cope with their abuse is okay as long as it’s consensual.

It’s partly true that sex-positive feminism fails to address “state violence, environmental degradation, poverty, racism, and the wide variety of other hardships women must tackle in the contemporary world.” But that doesn’t really make sense as a critique because the sex-positive part of sex-positive feminism only refers to a view on sex and the difference between sex and rape. The feminism part is what deals with all those other problems, as they relate to sexism.

I’m glad Pflug-Back wrote her story. It’s important for all feminists, everyone really, to remember that abuse happens, and to be sensitive to survivors. But attacking sex-positive feminism doesn’t really do anything to prevent abuse or to make feminism more effective.

If anything, sex-positive feminism can be helpful in preventing abuse and helping abusers. It helps first by clarifying the distinction between sex and rape through a focus on consent. Then it helps reassure survivors that their coping mechanisms, from hypersexuality to aesexuality, are nothing to be ashamed of.