“There is no ’should’” and the sex-positive “agenda”

What’s my “agenda”? What does it mean to be a “pro-BDSM activist”? What’s the “sex-positive agenda”? Who is part of the “sex-positive movement”? These are all questions I’ve been thinking about a lot lately — and they seem to constantly recur around the blogosphere, in varying forms. But here’s a question that’s rarely posed explicitly, and it’s the one that preoccupies me the most: What action can I take in the real world to help create a powerful, energetic sex-positive — and pro-BDSM — movement?

I’m thinking fairly pragmatically and concretely these days. Sure, I love discussing highly theoretical questions like, “Why is there stigma against certain sexual identities?” But what I really want is to have a larger cultural impact, not just worry ineffectually at these mysteries like a dog worrying at a bone.

Right before we showed “Kinsey” last Tuesday at my sex-positive documentary series, I spent some time deciding how I would initially address the audience. I was trying to think of a way to summarize “sex-positive” quickly, for a group with a wide variance in exposure to integral concepts like third-wave feminism and non-abstinence sex education.

What I came up with was this:
“It’s really hard, maybe impossible, to sum up the sex-positive movement in a sentence. But if I had to, I would summarize it this way: Among consenting adults, there is no ’should’. The whole idea behind being sex-positive is that we don’t want people to be having — or not having — sex because they feel like they should.”

(If you want to read some more basic descriptions of sex-positive feminism, then I recommend Amber Rhea’s reference list.)

I like my little summary, because I think I’ve found a quick way to get the sex-positive message across. I also think that the film series will create — that it already is creating — a really awesome venue for broad, public, real-life, diverse discussion about positive sexuality. Hopefully our sexy posters (which all say SEX+++ in huge writing) will be bringing in, not only us gender-theory/sexuality nerds, but people who haven’t been exposed to these ideas at all: so this will be their first impression of the sex-positive movement. I’m glad to think that I’ve managed to frame the idea of being sex-positive in an accessible and friendly way that people have a hard time disagreeing with …

… but I also know that’s only step one. Where to go from there?

I recently spoke to a woman who heads a Chicago wellness center; I was trying to convince her to let me give my BDSM Overview presentation through her organization. We talked for half an hour and she took a page full of notes. By the end of it, she told me how much the conversation had made her re-think ideas of consent and sexual negotiation. (The next day, when we were following up by email, she started her message by writing: “Just this morning I was thinking about how our talk really opened up some new ways to think about old concepts. For example, I will never again think about consent as simply being yes or no. So thank you for that.”)

But she also told me that there’s just no way she can authorize a lecture on BDSM for her group. The topic is too transgressive. She wanted to know if I could develop a new workshop: a vanilla workshop on the topic of sexual communication.

And I’m totally fine with that. I agreed without hesitation.

I could worry that I’m “compromising my message” … but I’m not even a little bit worried. Yes, I want to get out some knowledge about BDSM … I think that’s important. But it’s far more important to get people pondering the best ways to talk about sex, what it means to have awesome sex — what it means to have a fully consenting partner who enjoys that awesome sex with you.

Here is my agenda: Consent is everything. Here is my agenda: There is no “should”. My agenda is this: if someone wants to have sex with men, or sex with women, or sex outside marriage, or sex within marriage, or sex with multiple people, or crazy kinky sex, or sex for money, or sex on videotape, or no sex at all … that’s all totally fine, as long as everyone involved feels good about it. My agenda is to treat good sex as something everyone deserves, that everyone can be taught about and trained in, and — more importantly — to convince other people to see it that way too.

Once people start believing these things, then I’m pretty sure they can’t help but be okay with BDSM. Once people start thinking deeply about consent and sexual communication, I don’t see how they can avoid concluding that BDSM is acceptable. Once people start examining their own desires, considering how they themselves are more interested in certain acts than others, and learning how to tell other people about it … it seems to me that they must then agree that other people ought to be able to do the same thing. And alternative sexuality tolerance is just a short jump from there.

“Pro-consent” and “pro-sexual communication” are the same as “pro-BDSM”. For that matter, they’re also the same as “pro-LGBTQ”, “pro-polyamory”, “pro-swinging”, “pro-sex workers’ rights” ….

So, yeah. I’m happy to somewhat submerge my BDSM-tolerant message and “only” talk about consent. I’m absolutely positive that if I can just get people thinking about these issues, that’s half the battle.

And I’m sick and tired of people thinking that we can only focus on one sexually open agenda at a time. I know that there’s tons of polyamorous people out there, or swingers, or sex workers, or pornographers, or furries, or queers — or even mainstream straight people! — who fundamentally agree that consent is key … and yet so many of these groups never even think about the others. We hide in our underground subcultures, we create our dedicated organizations … and while those are not necessarily bad things in themselves, I think we’d all benefit if we could act as a group. In a very fundamental way, we’re all on the same side!

If one person talking about positive sexuality and consent and sexual communication can forward BDSM acceptance, then just imagine what all of us can do … and just imagine what I, with my pro-BDSM agenda, can do for you and your group.