#sex-shaming
Every Friday, Boggle adopts the format of a traditional advice column to answer someone’s question in-depth. Have a problem you can’t fit in an ask, but you still want to get Boggle’s input? Write to him here! You will always remain anonymous.
This week: The letter isn’t long, but I knew my response would be. A teenager writes in about sex and shame.
Boggle, I am sixteen. I have had sex with six different people already. Half of them I thought I loved at the time, but the other half, I knew I didn’t love at all. I feel like a whore, and due to this, I have begun to despise myself. Any advice?
You are not a whore. But I am worried about you. Please let me explain why.
Right now a lot of people are telling you what you should do with your body. This never really stops? But it’s definitely at its worst when you’re a teenager, which is especially unfortunate since you probably haven’t had time yet to decide what you want to do with your body. So I am not surprised you feel ashamed, although–and I want to be so, so clear about this, anon–you haven’t done anything to be ashamed of. It's your body. Sex is your decision. Nobody else gets to decide if it’s okay for you to have it. And while there are certainly people who would disagree with me when I say this, I do not believe that the choice to have sex–with one person or a dozen–says anything about you other than that you felt like having sex at the time. Sometimes I just feel like ice cream, you know? It’s not a character indictment.
Okay, obviously the choice to have sex is a bigger deal than the choice to have ice cream. But I’m trying to say something about the inherent moral weight of your decision. The choice to have sex with somebody isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s just a thing you can do, hopefully with an eye towards the potential consequences (emotional and otherwise). And I don’t find the idea of an arbitrary age at which sex magically becomes acceptable very useful. Of course ‘the age of consent’ is important to protect young people from exploitation, but that’s not what I’m talking about right now. I know adults who started having sex at fourteen who have never had anything but positive feelings about it, and adults who started at eighteen or nineteen who later admitted to feeling too young. So the fact that you are sixteen, and you are having sex, with multiple partners, is not why I am worried in and of itself, okay? I respect your right to make your own choices, and I would never, ever judge you for them.
So after all that, I hope it goes without saying that I don’t believe you should feel like you have to be in love with someone to have sex with them. That’s a good rule of thumb for some people, but a lot of other people are perfectly happy having more casual sex, and it doesn’t say anything bad about them. If that’s you, that’s fine! Be safe and have fun!
What I hope for is that you only have sex if you actually want to have sex.
You’ve taken on so much negative emotion because of your sexual behavior that I’m worried that hasn’t always been the case. Now, I’m not talking about rape (statutory rape included); while I don’t know if anything like that has happened to you, I certainly hope it hasn’t, and for the sake of this letter I’m assuming that none of the sex you’ve had has been against your will, or in circumstances where your consent was in any way compromised. But there’s this big, weird, kind of depressing space between “sex that you didn’t want to happen” and “sex that heck yes you wanted to happen” where sex just sort of happens. Because you don’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings. Because you want somebody to like you. Because you’re dating, and you feel like sex is something you owe them. Because they want to have sex, and you don't mind if you have sex, so the sex just sort of goes ahead, because you decide that “enh” might as well mean “yes.” Because you’re worried that the other person will stop liking you if you don’t.
These are all really lousy reasons to have sex, especially when you’re young and you’re still kind of figuring out how you feel about this stuff. And they can really do a number on your self-esteem, because you can start to feel like you’re only worth how much sex you’re willing to have. You’re great. Your partners are lucky just to hang out with you. People are going to like you whether you have pants on or not. Sex should be fun, and something you look forward to, not something you do out of obligation or anxiety.
Was any of this actually advice? I think it probably wasn’t. But I hope it has helped you get a new perspective anyway. This stuff is really hard, and confusing, and people get incredibly judgmental about it, but ultimately all of these decisions are up to you. I just want you to stay safe (please stay safe), and do things that will make you happy.
Take care of yourself out there.
this website has got to stop treating sex as something that’s inherently impure, dangerous, and disgusting
Funny, from where I’m sitting, it looks like sex is treated as compulsory, and even if you’re asexual you’re weird if you don’t at least want to read porn.
the thing is, these perspectives aren’t as exclusive as they sound at first
sexual moors are contradictory and impossible all the time. you can have people who are simultaneously aphobic and bigoted towards even the most vanilla of kinks. You have a ton of people who see sex as natural, inevitable - and therefore people who don’t want it as unnatural - but also as something dangerous, something that has to be strictly controlled and something that’s only morally ok in narrowly defined circumstances. that’s the dominant cultural perspective, but shades of it travel into queer spaces all the time, removing some gender barriers but maintaining the same fundamental “you must experience attraction to the people and ideas that we’ve decided are ok”.
It’s the classic “if you don’t want it, you’re a prude; if you want it, you’re a slut” catch-22, with a socially progressive hat. It’s not really a good situation for anybody.
You really nailed this description, thanks.
This goes with how radfem rhetoric is often essentially patriarchal and conservative in nature, due to being a re-skin of the authoritarian cultures its adherents were usually raised in.
so i’ve been on a comic reading binge lately and recently read alan moore’s “lost girls” (which if you have never heard of it is basically the kind of Problematic Queer Porn antis would tell you to kill yourself for writing, starring fairy tale characters in all their E for Explicit glory) and it wasn’t really to my tastes but because i’d heard it was regarded as a controversial work, i wanted to read over some reviews of it and see what other people’s opinions were and i found this review by Arthur Graham in particular that i read and loved and found extremely relevant to the kind of shit we constantly talk about in fandom discourse.
i’m not going to copy/paste the whole thing because it’s long but three parts that stand out are:
“Any furor that might erupt over Lost Girls is down to the fact that it has pictures,” argues Moore. “After all, far more violent and brutal pornographic prose novels, like those by the Marquis de Sade, are still in print, and no one is currently trying to prosecute them in court.” And though Lost Girls did manage to overcome its initial legal difficulties, it was still refused by several book sellers on the grounds that its visual content was too offensive. This tendency to censor images more strictly than words has been a characteristic of our culture ever since Moses supposedly stepped down from Mt. Sinai with the Second Commandment, which, when taken literally, seems to prohibit images of any kind. In the realm of the sexual image, however, censorship has been even more virulent.
As one example Moore cites William Blake, whose well-meaning followers, upon his death, “completely excised all of the erotic work that he’d done, because they didn’t want people to get the wrong idea of him.” Illustrating the tendency towards self-censorship, Moore reminds us that even Aubrey Beardsley, one of the finest British artists of the late Victorian era, requested on his deathbed that his beautiful illustrations of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata be committed to the flames, along with his many other “obscene” works. In both cases, however, the motivating force behind the censorship was essentially the same: moral pressures of the time simply did not foster a very high tolerance for sex or sexual imagery. And, according to Moore:
the moral pressures of [Beardsley’s] time, looked back on from a more enlightened future, were simply wrong. The moral pressures of his time were what destroyed Oscar Wilde and everybody and every publication that Oscar Wilde had been associated with. I can see why Beardsley was nervous, but he shouldn’t have been, because he’d done nothing wrong. And if that applies to 1820, it certainly applies today.
The prohibitions against sex and sexual imagery, though certainly relaxed two centuries later, nevertheless continue to contribute to the denigration of pornography as inherently dirty, shameful, and generally undeserving of the status accorded to most other forms of art and literature. In response to this, Moore asks, “Why must these often very tender pieces of artwork be damned, consigned to this grubby under-the-counter genre, where there is a miasma hanging over the very word? That is another reason for stubbornly calling [Lost Girls] ‘pornography’, because I wanted to reclaim the word.”
and:
It may be hard to find a single image in all three volumes of Lost Girls that isn’t being used to explore deeper sexual themes and issues, but for the reader who finds sex and sexuality inherently offensive, this may not be enough to affect a pardon. “If we couldn’t offend anybody,” jokes Moore, “then how could it be a transgressive work of pornography? We would have been rightly accused of having done something that was a literary work, which dodged the real issues that it set out to address.”
However, before judging the book’s content or presentation, it is important to remember that the authors aren’t necessarily condoning or advocating all or even any of the sex acts they portray, any more so than the writer of a murder mystery is necessarily advocating the act of murder. “As a work of pornography,” Moore explains, “Lost Girls follows a basic tenet of the genre, which is the thrill of vicariously experiencing something taboo or transgressive.” He continues:
We don’t seem to have much of a problem in distinguishing between fact and fantasy except for when it comes to sex, and I’m not entirely sure why that is, why we make a special case for sexuality. It’s okay to show murders in most of our great art, it’s perfectly okay to show how life can be ended, but there is something suspect in showing the ways in which life can be begun, or just showing people enjoying themselves.
and third:
“The sexual imagination, which is the biggest part of sexuality, is not well served in our culture,” explains Moore, “and I really don’t understand why that should be.” It is this lack of sexual imagination, according to Moore, that limits the ways in which we’re allowed to view, think about, and practice sex. However, if the millennia of erotic art between the Venus of Villendorf and Lost Girls is any indication, “Pornography has always been with us and always will be with us, and nothing’s going to change that. The only question is, ‘Is it going to be good pornography or is it going to be bad pornography?’ And given that most pornography today is very bad indeed, it’s probably about time that people make a serious effort to reclaim this despised genre.”
If bad pornography limits and constricts sex into a very narrow, ultimately hollow commodity, then good pornography should enlarge and challenge our ideas concerning sex and sexuality, finally doing justice to the rich sexual universe we live in. By refusing to cater exclusively to any one sex, gender, or orientation, by refusing to portray the sex act as separate from the deepest self, and by refusing the bounds of physical reality their puritanical reign over the limitless sexual imagination, Lost Girls has done precisely this. Even if it breaks a thousand taboos along the way, so be it: as a work of pure fiction, it could break every sexual taboo known to man and never hurt a thing.
you can read the full review here(TW for NSFW images and topics in the review, keeping in mind that it’s for a piece of NSFW media).
the general gist of it being that there is a difference between fiction and reality and fiction is a safe and healthy place to explore one’s fantasies and take one’s imagination to wherever it can possibly go without harming anyone because that is what what fiction is for.
also,nota point by the reviewer but by myself: if an author as talented and well respected as alan moore can write thiskind story with thiskind of content without it defining his worth as either a writer or a human being and without it ruining his reputation or his life, then all of you fic writers and fanartists and smaller original content creators out there who create work with similar themes certainly don’t deserve to be treated any differently. despite current fandom climate, please don’t believe otherwise.
I’m not one for analysis of social behaviour (Jared, 19) but anyone see the idea that alloaros are sex addicts? Like just the idea that since our romantic attraction is non-existant then we must be filling the gap with sexual attraction? Like how wrong is that?
I’m not a sexual person even if I do feel sexual attraction like any allosexual. However I’m not out every night hooking up? I’m just me, doing me. I shouldn’t have to explain this.
Yeah plus I hate the implicit sex-shaming in this idea. Like, if someone did do those things that would be fine and it’s not really anyone else’s business.
