The liberation of sexuality from a strict moralistic framework provides such rich opportunities for communication, conversation, exploration, for understanding!
It can be an indulgence, a fantasy, a respite from restrictive social pressures, as discreet or proud as you like, without having to be a dirty secret. It can remain a guilty pleasure without needing to carry the baggage of shame. It can be the emotional scratching post that spares the couch and curtains.
There's this broad, derisive conception that explicitly sexual art is a thing people consume desperately, like sneaking a cigarette. People think of porn as a debased medium of cruelty and shame because the historic institutions of puritanical, patriarchal, cisheteronormity have tarred all consideration of sexual expression with that brush.
There's a wonderful comic graphic by Sen Grisane that provides a great visualization for this.
What the general public sees as the attractive and repulsive spectrum of sexuality is a severely and intentionally mis-calibrated instrument. We see acceptable sex and harmful sex, but the thing is so chopped-up and compressed that huge sections are missing or unrecognizable.
When anything but procreative sex is considered immoral and recreational sex and casual expressions of sexuality are driven underground, a vast amount of human context is buried alive. The binary of good sex vs bad sex erases so many ways a person can be. By burying the ways that real people express, connect, and protect themselves, and the ways they consider and care for others, we reduce the expression of sexuality to whatever is bland, bizarre, or forceful enough to show through.
For example, it's assumed that a normal, healthy person would have to be coerced into sex work, because what little we see of it is projected through a lens of crime and exploitation, as an unscrupulous opportunist selling a victim for profit. We've made it that way by removing what little assurance of safety, equal protection, and autonomy that workers in almost any other profession have rights to. By removing these rights, we also remove the expectation of accountability, safety, and professionalism that customers of almost any other profession have a right to.
It's assumed that only craven fiends and degenerate addicts engage with sex work or sexually explicit material because most everyone but those most visible participants has to do it on the down-low. This sharpens the double-edged sword by forcing ethical creators and consumers into the same ditch as the perpetrators of sexual exploitation and violence while providing cover and concealment for sex pests, predators, and their networks.
You make porn?! But you're not some sweaty degenerate!
It's so hard to belive these powerful people could be sexual predators! They don't act like perverts!
If you pay attention, you can't help but see how well these stereotypes serve to insulate powerful predators from consequences.
If you look to people who express their sexuality in sincere, mindful, empathetic ways, you see real quick how broken those stereotypes are. You see how important safety, and community, and care are. You see how much effort goes into insulating non-participants from the scene and insulating the community from dangerous people. You see how essential consent is, and that there are clear, inviolable safeguards in place for the moment that consent is withdrawn. You see how people take care of eachother when the line wasn't where they expected it to be, and respect when someone wanted more than the other could give. The illusion of power is shared, assumed, surrendered, but with the sacred understating that anyone who wants this to stop gains final authority. In the context of art, fiction, games, that authority is yours. The safeword is, I don't like this.
There's a profound difference between doing something with someone, and doing it to them. So much harm has been done in the idea of sex as something that can only be done to someone. It's a lesson larger than sex, but sex can be a damn good allegory for it.
Gender-prescriptivism relies heavily on this, declaring that one gender does and the other is done to. Deviation from those roles is called aberrant, unnatural, incorrect. Doing it willingly is weak, sick, or degenerate behavior. Again, it sorts the spectrum of human sexuality into correct and dangerous.
The moralization of sexuality also erases the expression of asexuality in any context but the monk, the fanatic, the outcast, the hermit, the genius, or the failure. It's ether heroic to be so devoted to your faith, your duty, your calling that you sacrifice this aspect of yourself to achieve it, or you're so incapable of achievement that even sex is beyond you. Why should a person have to be super or sub-human not to desire sex? Do we need a good reason to reject a traditional lever of control?
This burial and denial of unacceptable sexuality smothers so much about the natural ways humans can be. It robs us of knowing, of being known, of empathy, and respect. It robs us of connections, of expressions, of protections, and boundaries. Denying our autonomy denies freedom to and freedom from, our duty to others and ourselves, of our yes and no.
Acceptance of things we don't share, understand, or enjoy doesn't require us to participate or endorse them. It doesn't require a slippery slope where abuse and predation must also be tolerated. A more curious and fluid understanding of what humans can be empowers us to identify the roots of suppression, control, privilege, exploitation and joy! A more complete understanding of how we relate and interact empowers us to address the harm in what people do to others rather than what we imagine strangers do with each other.
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