You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium’s
Liable to walk upon the scene

Coming to a more grown-up sex-positivity has bubbled up in no less than three places in the last month. First over at Susan Quilliam’s blog, in her post “Reclaiming Joy“:

Sorry to revisit a topic I was going on about only a few weeks ago… but if there is one thing that I really “got” when I was rewriting Joy of Sex, it is that while sex may be the same as it was in 1972, the joy certainly isn’t. Given the drip feed of horror stories in the press and the continuous warnings about the dangers of sex from all sides, we’ve somehow lost our optimism, our innocence - somehow, we’ve flushed the joy baby out with the bathwater.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not advocating condom-free orgies or emotion-free lust-fests. I’m as aware - and as vociferous - as anyone about just what we all need to do is order to make sex safe, sane, concensual and super-enjoyable. But I do feel that we’ve forgotten that sex is a Good Thing.

Then over at Clarisse Thorn’s Blog in relation to the screening of SEX POSITIVE in the sex-positive documentary film series:

As someone who grew up in the late eighties and nineties, it’s stunning for me to think about a time when safe sex was considered a sex-negative idea. Everyone in the subcultures I run in takes the idea of safe sex for granted … including just about everyone I’ve ever met in my age group (though maybe we should keep in mind that I was raised in liberal New York). Sure, we aren’t always perfect about practicing safe sex, but we take it for granted that we should be — and we all know exactly where we can go to get information on how to have safe sex. In fact, safe sex messages bombard us so thoroughly that we’re practically bored by them (another point highlighted by the documentary).

… the film raises personal questions about how important certain messages can be — how important we find certain messages, and what we’re willing to sacrifice to promote them when we know the task could be (a) totally thankless and (b) an eventual failure, partially or completely.

And here’s another activist-type question, arguably harder, raised by Lisa during the discussion: Obviously, Berkowitz was somewhat silenced by his community because his criticism was perceived as an attack … but his criticism was also necessary and important and, in the end, lifesaving. So how do we ensure that our communities allow space for tough criticism? How do we make sure that we ourselves give a fair chance to messages that could require us, and our communities, to change — change in major, identity-threatening ways — but that could be so important?

And then picked up by Audacia Ray at her blog WakingVixen.com in post Sex Positivity Includes Negative Experiences

This and conversations at the event last night really made something click for me, and that’s the title of this post: sex positivity includes negative experiences. Sometimes sex positive people get upset or squirmy when unpleasant conversations see the light of day (and that’s viewed as the airing of dirty laundry), but these conversations and challenges need to happen in order for sex and culture to evolve in a healthy, boundary-pushy, stigma-defying way.

Here’s the comment I left at Susan’s blog:

If I look at the films from that same era, what I see is a tremendous degree of naivete. It would seem that the denizens of the early 1970s thought that the pill and abortion would do away with all negative consequences of sex. (Or that anyone who suffered any sort of a wound that was not related to an unplanned pregnancy was simply a “prude” who needed to “get over it.” 

Of course by the end of the 70s it was becoming rather clear we had not entered a new, care-free sexual utopia. New physical dangers emerged, and there was still (and ever will be) the chance of getting your heart broken.

My own thinking about sex, both in my personal life, and as a filmmaker is tremendously influenced by my experiences as a surfer, rock climber, skier, and various other pleasures that reward responsible risk taking. Some of the most interesting literature in the mountaineering world is devoted to forensic examination of tragedies, which necessarily invite the reader/climber to reflect on their own values and form judgments.

“Judgment” is fairly nearly a dirty word in the sex-positive community, but it need not be. Good judgment is at least as fruitful a route to joy as anything else.

On Clarise’s blog, I simply commented on the sex-positive community’s ongoing failure to distance itself from AVN:

Watch it happen in real time as the sex-positive community grapples with its association with and patronage of AVN.

And on Dacia’s blog, I expanded on my comment left at Susan’s blog:

I would go on to say that the 70s naivete has been (largely) replaced by a stultifying combination of cynicism and/or pranksterism; hardly an environment that fosters being honest about sexuality as a holistic human experience, or reclaiming joy. (What was that line in Shortbus? “It’s like the 70s, only with less hope.” Something like that.) I also can’t help but think that much like the late 60s/early 70s, we’ve come to the end of an era and let yet another opportunity slip through our fingers. Over on thebuild.com, Blowfish’s Christophe placed (correctly in my opinion) the end of the organic search gold rush at September 2006. The marketing calculus for new ideas has changed, and not in way that favors new ideas about how sexuality can and should exist in our culture. While sex-positivity dithered over being inclusive and non-judgmental, the cynics and the clowns defined what sexuality, and especially what commercial sexuality is, with the same predictable result.

The conversation’s overdue. Maybe the next time a golden opportunity comes along, it won’t be squandered.

One conversation I think is long overdue is a sex-positive examination of the attitudes towards STIs in the “adult industry.” A few years back, when Vivid backtracked on their condom-only policy, I remember Chi Chi La Rue stopped working for the company. He said he couldn’t reconcile his concerns and public record advocating condoms and safer sex with Vivid’s new policy. But other than La Rue, I don’t remember anyone taking much notice.

From a producer’s point of view, building an industry around the acceptance of STI transmission between those who work in “the trenches” doesn’t seem very “sex-positive” to me. From a viewer’s point of view, watching depictions of people engaged in high frequency, multiple partner, unprotected sex doesn’t seem very “sex-positive” or for that matter, very entertaining.

The argument is that “the market” demands condom-free performances. The argument is that male performers find condoms inhibit their erections and that female performers find them irritating, especically in the extended sex sessions that are standard practice in the “adult industry.” The argument is that without the expectation that performers engage in high volumes of  unprotected sex with multiple partners, the “adult industry” would not be economically viable.

All these things may be true. But whether or not Vivid, or Evil Angel, or any other “adult entertainment” company can survive is not my concern. My concern is that I make films in a way that does not treat my subjects’ sexual health as something that can be sublimated to concerns about profit. That means I don’t ask people to do things in front of my camera that they are not already enjoying together as a part of their own, personal, off-camera sex life.

I simply cannot see how the introduction of a camera makes it “sex-positive” for performers to do things that we would decry in any other circumstance. Would a “sex-positive” person claim that a sex-worker is exercising ”agency” if she engages in unprotected anal intercourse with multiple clients? Or would we call this out for what it is, an unwise and risky practice? And when the sex positive community judges the “adult entertainment industry” by a different set of safer sex standards than we offer in any other circumstance, we diminish both the concepts of sex-positivity and safer sex.

The sex-positive community has already had, on more than one occasion, self-satisfied three-minute hates about phthalates and anal-ease, where we congratulated ourselves on our modern and progressive notions about sexual health and our discriminating taste in sex toys. We have repudiated the makers and purveyors of these products for being unconcerned with the with the health of their customers.

Will the sex-positive community be able to muster the same level of outrage and reject the health risks that are currently accepted as part and parcel of making “adult entertainment?” And if we did, wouldn’t that bring the world a little closer to a more grown-up and joyful understanding of sex?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 10:42 am and is filed under Blogging, Censorship, embarrassing the angels, safer sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.