farhakhalidi.substack.com
It's an essay about the various flaws modern feminist sex positivity culture has for women, and that it's often a good idea to refrain from sex even if one isn't religious. The author is an Only Fans model for context. I thought it did a great job laying out the downsides of ubiquitous sex.(Reposted because I accidentally linked to reddit instead of the original essay earlier).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I enjoyed the article. I think I'm one contributing factor here is what Scott identified over a decade ago in should you reverse any advice you hear. People in either sex positive or purity cultures are probably in thick information bubbles that take those positions to pathological extremes. This is probably even worse today than when Scott's article was written.
I suspect a lot of people operating in an enthusiastic consent framework would agree with the author that the circumstances she describes some of her friends having sex under were problematic. There's a reason those articles have the disclaimers they do. I suspect they would do so using a language of consent, that various kinds of pressure had rendered the sex in question not really consensual. The problem with this angle is that it turns what is supposed to be a simple and intuitive concept into one that hides a lot of complexity and nuance.
From my perspective it seems like there are two key issues. Firstly, women feel a social and interpersonal pressure to have sex they don't want. Like they need a good reason not to have sex with someone. This is totally backwards to how it ought to work. You do not need any reason to refrain from sex with someone beyond "I don't want to." "No" is a complete sentence, as they say. Related to the first, many men apparently feel no compulsion to respect that "no." Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds. So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.
You've got to create a consent culture. If most women positively responded to very fastidious requests for explicit consent and respect for hesitance or rejection, men would go for it, every bit as much as they would start walking everywhere on their hands if that's what women wanted.
But, having spent too much time in the wild, women generally hate it when you ask for explicit consent; I've been told multiple times that I ruined the mood by asking if it was okay if I kissed her. Instead, there's a set of implicit rules that men are never explicitly taught but are expected to learn through repeated failed attempts. Underlying all of that is still the goal of discerning real consent, but obscured by social games. (This isn't something that comes up nearly as much in gay culture; if you want to fuck, you can ask someone if they want to fuck, and it won't affect your chances either way.)
So long as that's the landscape that heterosexual men have to navigate while dating, there will still be "consent accidents" where the man mistakenly misreads a signal, and there will still be men who take advantage of the ambiguity to get what they want but excuse it by feigning confused signals.
For sure. I definitely don't intend to place all the onus to change on men. It's a cultural change that includes changing behaviors by both sexes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link