Amanda Marcotte says a bunch of things that need saying about the trends towards prudery, towards slut shaming, and against sex positivism.
pandagon.net
. . . And lately, I've just generally noticed a trend towards more openly bashing people for seeking pleasure, even and often especially if they harm no one else in doing so. Hipster-bashing is actually a good example! Between prudes and libertines, there's a major imbalance, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that libertines just aren't nearly as interested in getting into the business of prudes as vice versa. And in a way, it's a lot easier to be prudish, to stick your nose in the air and claim that you're too good for base interests in humping and sucking and just giving yourself over to pleasure. The fact that we are conducting sex scandals that don't actually have any public importance is only part of it. I compiled a mental list of examples over the course of the day, and hope I can even remember them all:
*Trend stories about women who are just so tired of sex.
*The surprisingly little amount of pushback that the Republicans have gotten for suddenly, as a party, moving towards an anti-contraception stance. They're still hedging their bets---they're only against it if you're too poor to afford it on your own---but the fact of the matter is this is a radical anti-sex position that they would have been afraid to have a few years ago. Even a few years ago, most conservatives wouldn't have been so eager to close down Planned Parenthood and screeching that you need to just shut your legs if you don't want to have babies, but now that's becoming a mainstream sentiment that is getting very little pushback from inside the Republican party. From the outside, there has been resistance, but the vast majority of it has been rooted in the "necessary evil" argument---i.e., that we have to have these services because of public health problems if we don't---and very little has been geared towards saying, "Sex if fucking awesome, and anyone who's against it can suck my left one." And part of the reason is that even liberals are afraid to defend sex.
*To an extent, the ongoing hysteria over pop stars being sexy. I just don't completely grasp why the fact that Miley Cyrus wears booty shorts is such a national scandal, honestly. When I was 8, 9, 10 years old, I loved Michael Jackson and Madonna, and both of them blew any kind of naughty crap Cyrus does out of the water. Pop stars are supposed to be sexy.
*The Twilight books. Sex-and-woman-hating propaganda like that should be provoking a national outrage, not a spate of high-grossing movies. If I had a child reading this crap, we would be having a series of talks about the importance of test driving cars before you buy.
*That the reaction to SlutWalk involved, on any level, discussion about why women who are wearing short skirts are asking for it. I feel more people are saying this in 2011 than they were in 2001. Just a hunch; obvs, no stats.
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