I wrote an article about polyamory, examining the value of “literal social networks” using technology as a lens with which to understand it, titled “Non-monogamy: A Human Internet for Compassionate Payloads.” When I asked for feedback, I got some very interesting advice on the piece, including some critiques related to attitudinal concerns I thought were especially worth noting. Specifically, some felt the title would trigger “the ‘that makes me think of jizz’ effect” (since I used the word “payloads”), and others felt similarly about other parts of the piece; the article was, they argued, intended for publication in a sexuality ‘zine, after all.

While a valid and potentially constructive critique, certainly, it didn’t sit well with me. At first I didn’t know why. Then I realized what was bothering me, and I responded with the following comment, originally on Facebook:

[T]o those of you who are making the very valid argument that the title and the word “payloads” in it in particular will evoke thoughts of eroticization rather than non-erotic, intellectual connotation, see also Audacia Ray’s excellent piece a couple years ago on that very problem, “Taking the Erotic Out of Sexual Culture.” In essence, I am incredibly frustrated by the expectation that anything sex-related is going to be treated as an erotic aid. It makes things especially hard for me, as a theorist, to do just about anything without also incorporating an attitude [of] ORGASMS! FISTING! LIVE! NUDE! GIRLS! which, while there’s nothing “wrong” with any of those things per se, really isn’t the way I go about thinking or writing or presenting about sexuality-related topics. […]

The fact that sexuality is almost always eroticized even by sexuality culture people is a really, really big problem and one that negatively effects me every damned time I try to exist in sex-positive spheres. In other words, yes, some people really do read playboy (or MaleSubmissionArt.com, for instance) for the articles. I’m one of those people.

And to bring it all home on this article, I think part of me wants to leave the title as-is because it’s basically a big “Fuck you” to anyone who reads the title and expects it to be porn-y. Because really, that whole paradigm of expectations can suck my big, intellisexual cock.

This isn’t a new realization, but it is one I’m increasingly hearing echoed by others—a kind of socially-aware Baader-Meinhof phenomenon—as I drift from the topological center of The Scene towards its permeable edges. Ten months ago, I first articulated this frustration as follows:

I believe the world needs a place for sex to exist that is neither on one extreme or the other. That people’s sexual rights and sexual freedom—which I define as an equal-opportunity circumstance for everyone on Earth to live a sexually satisfied, self-actualized, and autonomous life—can not be realized when there is no middle ground between sex-as-stigma or sex-as-erotica.

There are so many places, many of which we’ve talked about on [Kink On Tap], where sex is derided or hated or sexualities are marginalized or made to feel less than worthy. And although they are constantly attacked, demonized and threatened with censorship, there are also so many places where sex and sexuality is celebrated. But I never felt welcome in those spaces either, those places of sexual celebration, because I am not comfortable with outright sexualization, and the means of celebration that these places—places I call the sex communities—commonly used (be they parties, or dressing up in fetish wear, or whatever) often felt just as alienating and often just as downright fucking sexist and classist and exclusionary as what they said they were breaking free from in the hegemonic overculture.

I was deeply, darkly depressed when I spoke that into a microphone. I was physically shaking, crushed by a kind of informational fog-of-war veiling the expressive knowledge I knew I wanted but didn’t know in what direction to explore in order to acquire it. Almost a year later—after I cried “mayday!” to the Internet, used “the fury of the righteous” to pull myself out of a nose-dive toward suicide, and barreled boldly into quite a number of new, intellectual frontiers—I guess it makes sense that I’d eventually come back around to this same frustration. It’s an obviously sociosexually-relevant, sociopolitical optimization problem with no good solution as yet.

For me, asexuality provides some of the greatest insight into the problem space because, as I learned at the Western Regionals LGBTQIA Conference last year, arguably its core critique of sex-positivity is that very same frustration:

GLBT “spaces are often very, very sex focused. […] All well & fine, but it leaves me feeling dry.” Okay to discuss sex, but ALWAYS? #WRC11

And:

Themes: asexuality often excluded, marginalized w/in ostensibly “inclusive” space. Key point: GLBT focus on sex act is alienating. #WRC11

That’s a site of strong feelings of kinship I have with asexual struggles. It’s why, when another commenter replying to my request for feedback on my article back in the Facebook thread said “then there’s folks like me who prefer/want to eroticize EVERYTHING (not just sexuality) and are tired of the assumption that this makes me sophmoric and/or unable to appreciate the theorist POV,” I went on a bit of a tear:

[R]espectfully, I sense that your eroticize-everything-POV *is* the majority view. Eroticization itself IS privileged. See also: asexuality. So, while I can empathize with your desire, frankly I have no sympathy for your position because it is actually really important to stop sexualizing goddamn fucking everything all the goddamn fucking time.

I look over these words and others time and again. Each time I do, my frustration with “sexualizing goddamn fucking everything all the goddamn fucking time” (often mocked with accusations of “prudery”) seems less and less petty, less “minor,” less like a niggling concern and more like a trunk leading to the root of something I cannot yet name. “[T]here is no middle ground between sex-as-stigma or sex-as-erotica”; “I am not comfortable with outright sexualization.”

I look around at “sex-positivity,” at supposed colleagues, friends, even lovers, and there is a nebulous, disquieting anxiety ever present in my interactions. I poke and prod at the thing, hoping it will respond in some predictable fashion, but tentatively because the poking and the prodding hurts me—I am poking at pieces of myself. Broken, bruised, jagged, jaded pieces.

I look over the ideological fence at the anti-porn activists, the sex-negative crusaders, at their cult-of-mono: monotheistic, monopolizing moralism. And, sometimes, when I look at them, I wonder why I am not standing there, with them. I know we have some of the same pains, they and I. To the sex-positive movement, I could be a devastating turncoat. But “beware the Dark Side. […I]f once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will….”

Back on Facebook, the conversation about “eroticizing everything” continued.

Them:

The reference [to asexuality] you provide does not describe how I feel about sexuality (in how they describe sexualized people). Rather, it provides a perfect example of exactly the perception (and assumptions) I am complaining about.

I do not deny there are a great many people who fit these descriptions (or so it appears to me anyway), and I freely recognize that I enjoy privilege. My point however is that there *are* some of us who eroticize [most] everything *without* putting sexuality on a pedestal.

Or, to put it another way: I eroticize everything not because sex is important, but because I classify sex at the same level as a bike ride or soaking in water - two other things I enjoy.

Me:

[T]his conversation is veering off-topic but I’ll entertain it in this thread for just a bit longer.

An anecdote may help here. A friend of mine was once invited to a birthday party. The birthday person was going to host it at their place, with a newly-acquired trampoline. “Come one, come all, and have fun on our trampoline!” Awesome. Except then came the second line of the invitation: “And wear something *sexy* cuz, wink wink, bounce-bounce on the trampoline!” Eye-fucking-roll. My friend chose not to attend the party in the end because it was clear that an environment of eroticization would be present. He didn’t tell the host to change the environment of their party, he just abstained; arguably the most ethical thing to do.

So, I’d argue that you are missing the point of my—and numerous other people’s, asexual identified or not—discomfort and frustration with prevailing eroticization if you are trying to make some claim to eroticization’s validity rather than its omnipresence. Or, put another way, it is not possible for eroticization to not be on a pedestal when it is present while jumping on a trampoline, AND riding a bike, AND soaking in water, while the reciprocal facts are not true. I.e., you are not riding a bike or soaking in water while you are on a trampoline, and thus those things are not omnipresent.

Them:

I agree. I’d be happy to continue the discussion, but I don’t want to hijack your post. I was simply sharing one of my triggers and was not attempting to argue against asexuality or the pervasiveness of sexuality and erotica in our culture.

I left it at that.

Meanwhile, I’m still on board the sex-positive bandwagon, but I also don’t think the simplistic dualism presented by “sex-positive versus sex-negative” discourse is any of accurate, helpful, or compassionate. Most of what I’ve seen in the sex-positive world leaves it infuriatingly blind to its own failings, and its purported contribution to societal values—valuable as, yes, “sex for every body” is—is still a deplorably crude hammer with which to treat relationships. I want the freedom to reject sex.

Unless “sex-positivity” also offers adherents the freedom to reject sex-positivity itself, it is a hypocritical ideology no better than the familiar sex-negativity it, itself, claims to reject. I have never felt more unwanted, coercive peer pressure to enjoy sexualization than when in sex-positive environments. And no matter how many times people tell me “it’s all individual choice,” when everyone around you is into it, the fact is there’s very little that’s individual about it.

So although I don’t feel like I have the linguistic precision to thrust a shim in between what this community says they do and what they actually do to look for the source of this dissonance, that’s what I’m trying to do. Because I believe that buried under layers of despicable shaming, the “anti-sex” radfems are on to something. And if we really want to serve “sex-positivity,” we better figure out what that is.