Time to start being against marriage again! Obviously as an issue of equal rights, I'm for expanding marriage to cover same-sex couples, but marriage has never been something that I actually like. As a recognition of gay couples it's been great to see the tide shift, but as an article on Slate recently wrote, it has gone together with a greater appreciation for marriage among everyone. Which is a great pity, because no matter what everyone else thinks, I do want to destroy marriage.
Ok, so if a couple or other constellation of people want to make a promise to each other and refer to it as a marriage, that's great for them and I certainly hope no one would stop them. But what I do want is for the state to stop privileging marriages as the legally recognised relationship above all others. As the same-sex marriage debate has made clear, there are several rights and privileges exclusive to being married, and above all else, it's the easiest way of clarifying your relationship in a way that will be legally recognised. Which is great for the people who see close, monogamous, long-term relationships as the way they want to live their lives (and actually end up doing so; best laid plans don't always work out), but leaves the rest of us in a bit of a bind. I'm not going to list the myriad of ways that people might prefer their relationships that don't fit the narrow definition expected by legal marriage, as they should be obvious to most. Start with polyamory or shorter term relationships and work from there, if you want to.
It's a well-known phenomenon (at least in Sweden) that when couples have children they get married if they weren't before. Why? Because of security - it's a way to make sure that they have the benefits that married couples do and make clear the relationship in case of death or other forms of upheaval. To be in a clear situation in regards to the law, your potential children, and to your partner(s) is important to most everyone, though. Keeping marriage (and common-law marriage and limited cohabitation laws) as the main way to organise that, you disadvantage a lot of people who don't want to order their lives according to those principles.
So what I want is for the state to offer a simple way for people to organise their lives with others, whether it's based on a romantic connection, platonic, friend, or family relationship, so that you have an easy and widely accepted way to make clear your wishes in regards to property, medical decisions, and any of the other situations that come up when people share their lives. It should be as simple as possible to do and to change (though obviously we must allow that people have reasonable expectations once you've started sharing property, not to mention what happens when children are involved). Won't be easy to implement, but it's way past time to open up more possibilities for letting people organise their lives together with others.
Some people prefer getting the state out of people's relationships entirely and don't see a need for registries of that sort, but most people don't have the resources to spend researching legal arrangements that can help in relationships, and that's why I think the state can be helpful in providing a shorthand for that kind of thing.
I also have pretty strong opinions about marriage as an institution in general (antiquated, hetero-normative, unrealistic, patriarchal mess that it is), but I will leave that for another post. This one is simply trying to say: let people live the lives they want.
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Monday, June 17, 2013
Monday, January 14, 2013
Myths take a long time to die
Sometimes, trolls on the internet are successful in generating a response when maybe you should just leave it alone. Like when they try to sound reasonable and yet manage to hit a point I find completely illogical or based on flawed assumption with pretty much every argument they make. And when they apparently count as legitimate intellectuals in Estonia.
Jaan Kaplinski, an Estonian author, wrote a blog post at the end of last year giving his views on rape, naming it Rape or Non-consensual Sex. In it he presents several arguments about why some kinds of non-consensual sex happens, and why it is sometimes, in his mind, not rape. He explicitly calls out "radical Scandinavians" and since Radical Scandinavian Man are some of my middle names, I feel compelled to answer. The radical thing in this case is to not accept non-consensual sex, apparently. I will warn the reader that I have other radical notions like "try not to harm others" and "women and men are part of a category called 'people' and it is possible to communicate with them".
Mr. Kaplinski's basic assertion is that men can have problems understanding a no in certain situations, and that it shouldn't be illegal when a man then penetrates a woman without consent. I have several problems with this, and will go through them in order (though obviously some of them overlap). Mainly, I find that the argument is immoral by itself, that it is based on flawed assumptions, and that it is an argument that has negative consequences for society as a whole.
The moral argument is quite simple, when you remove all the frills. It is wrong to do what you want with another's body against their wishes. I don't think I need to ask people or Mr. Kaplinski to imagine how they would feel if they were penetrated by someone without consent, as it should be pretty obvious that it constitutes harm. Sometimes, there can be circumstances where you can transgress against someone to stop some greater harm from taking place, I do not see how penetrating someone against their will could possibly stop some greater harm. This seems like the kind of thing that is so self-evident that I almost don't want to write it down - as someone who thinks sex can be a wonderful thing you do together with another person, I don't think I should have to. And what argument does Mr. Kaplinski make for why doing this kind of harm is acceptable? Because communication is difficult sometimes. If it's not clear by now, I am no great philosopher, but it seems to me that if you're in a situation where you could potentially cause great harm, you have some responsibility to make a decent effort at avoiding it. Making an extra effort at communicating with your sex partner seems like a very small effort to make, if you are indeed motivated to not do harm to your sex partner (which I sincerely hope).
Mr. Kaplinski makes several assumptions that I don't think hold when analysed critically, the first being that communication is necessarily so complicated. Take these quotes from his blog post:
In the second quote, Mr. Kaplinski suggests that the male body understands the presence of a female body meaning a "yes" to sexual intercourse. The answer to that is easy: the body is wrong. And as Mr. Kaplinski writes, men can back off at that point. He says it takes effort, but as mentioned, making an effort to avoid inflicting great harm is obviously the right thing to do.
A second assumption used by Mr. Kaplinski to explain why communication is so difficult for men is an appeal to nature: in mating rituals in the animal world, no doesn't necessarily mean no, and men, by their nature, are "autistic" and have more problems understanding others than women.
Perhaps more importantly, we live in a world where women have at various times been considered frigid, at other times too emotional, at some times dangerously part of the natural world, and at others removed from it. Men, on the other hand, were often seen as their opposites (and often somehow better because of it). What I mean by that is that if we lived in a society where boys and men were encouraged to have an active emotional life, strong empathy and caring for others, and put a greater focus on communication and friendships over gender lines, we might well end up with men that are different than what seems natural right now. Will gender differences persist? Quite possibly, but looking at history, there is obviously a great variation in behaviour among men and women alike so we should never be too tempted to see our behaviour at present as being "natural". In addition, we live in a society where women's voices in general are given less validity than those of men's, if we were to make more of an effort to not denigrate women's opinions, maybe there would be less of a problem to understand them in more intimate settings.
The mention of autism is interesting. People who are diagnosed with autism often have problems throughout their lives, whether interacting with men or women. Autism is not a problem that occurs only in the bedroom or when dealing with relationships. What people with autism spectrum disorder usually do is to learn to cope with their problem so as to improve their social life, using certain cues as signals for moods and situations they don't instinctively get. If you care about social interactions where you might have a problem (and if you think you might cause harm by misunderstanding consent, I hope you do care), you will hopefully take steps to rectify it, by learning various cues and ways of communicating for that which you don't understand instinctively. It might be prudent to add, in this context, that literature and other culture is a way of understanding the world around us; romance literature and movies are overwhelmingly coded as feminine, and are to a great extent read by women. Though I won't make any absolute statements about it, it's entirely possible that Mr. Kaplinski's experience with romantically psychic women is merely the effect of a group of people taking a more intense interest in romance than he (or his male friends) do.
A third assumption that seems to motivate his post is that women are not attracted to "good guys" but rather macho-men who are, presumably, not good:
Secondly, in my experience women don't particularly like bad guys (though obviously that also happens) - they like interesting, funny, confident, attractive people in a mix, much like men do. I can't mention that many female friends of mine who find someone being nice being a turn-off; however, if "nice" or "good guy" was the main thing they could say about a person, I would also not assume that they're very attracted by him. Confidence and being clear about what you want probably helps quite a bit in many kinds of social interaction, flirting and getting into bed with someone among them; being withdrawn probably doesn't. Of course, if a woman is mostly interested in getting laid for a night or for a little while, getting together with an attractive guy who clearly signals he's into that is probably the right way to go. I don't know if those guys are what some people see as "bad guys", of course. In many blog circles, this kind of thing is called "nice guy syndrome", and plenty has been written about it.
Additionally, in the context of this post, wouldn't the fact that women are supposedly more interested in macho-type men mean that there were less situations where consent was lacking? I mean, if they were attracted by them, wouldn't it stand to reason that they actually had consensual sex when they did have sex? And what's wrong with that? The lesson here should not be (and never should be) "care less about women's consent", it's (if it matters that much to you) "become more attractive".
A final assumption is the way Mr. Kaplinski sees the interplay of men and women in society in regards to sex:
Though it's certainly a long process (and one that's been championed by feminists for a long time), if you don't like the game, the right response isn't to punish someone by minimizing their wishes and to do them harm; it's to change the game.
Before going to the final section where I'll add why I think Mr. Kaplinski's argument is a bad thing for society as a whole, I must comment on this part:
I will add that Mr. Kaplinski urges women to consent more because of this risk to men's health. To me, that would more or less amount to pity sex, which I can frankly do without, as I prefer women to have sex out of pleasure, not out of obligation.
At long last, a comment on the responsibility of a public intellectual and this kind of argument about rape and consent.
Culture and society matters. It matters to how people relate to each other, the acceptance of violence and oppression. You only need to look to times such as that of the Slave Trade, apartheid in South Africa, World War II, pretty much any occupation, and any place or time where women are considered to be property rather than citizens to make that clear. In these countries, the people who are in power gain great power and privilege over other groups, which are commonly denigrated, dehumanized and devalued. Though people are, in my opinion, generally decent people who want to do right, power corrupts, and when you have a society that tells you that some people are not worthy of respect and that your wishes matter more than theirs, great ills can be done to the oppressed in a casual manner by anyone who's sadistic, having a bad day, frustrated by their lot in life, or any other reason. That is understandable, though obviously something that is unacceptable and we should always work to prevent. So culture matters, and can increase the number of people in society who commit violence against others, or who simply stand by and do nothing when harm is done. We need to look no further than the recent rape cases in Steubenville and Delhi for examples of cultures where sexual violence against women is done and few if anyone intervenes to stop it.
However, as I mentioned before, I think that people as a rule can be decent, and with a society and culture where people are treated as equal, most people will not treat others as less worthy, they will be. To back up that point, especially in regards to rape, I would like to point to recent research in the US that has given rise to Predator Theory, which is simply that most rapes are actually committed by a small group of men who victimize many women. They target the women they identify as most vulnerable and get them into a position where they know they have what society regards as plausible deniability: they were drunk, she didn't say no clearly, she seemed interested earlier, and the like. As the research shows, however, they are well aware that they are assaulting non-consenting women, and will continue to do so. This is well in line with other criminological research, which shows that most crime is committed by a small minority who are repeat offenders.
With that background, I think Mr. Kaplinski's argument that men have problems understanding a no and because of that non-consensual sex should not be seen as rape or something illegal is not only immoral, but also on the larger scale promote a society and culture where women's wishes and consent are ignored, which would likely lead to increased victimization, and effectively give cover to the group of rapists who repeatedly and wilfully victimize others by letting them say that consent and communication is "confusing" when in truth it is navigable by most with a bit of effort, and those who don't make the effort or don't care are clearly in the wrong.
What bothers me the most about Mr. Kaplinski's blog post is perhaps that it presents sex and sexuality as something joyless, where it's not about people doing something pleasurable together, but rather a social competition where spending time with someone else stops mattering in favour of the raw mechanics of sex. As someone who thinks that the person you're doing it with and mutual enjoyment both while having sex and while spending time together otherwise is important, it seems like a very strange world where women's personalities and desires are erased in favour of a worldview where putting notches on your bedposts is the only positive you gain from having sex. That is not the kind of society I want, and indeed I am surprised that anyone would.
Jaan Kaplinski, an Estonian author, wrote a blog post at the end of last year giving his views on rape, naming it Rape or Non-consensual Sex. In it he presents several arguments about why some kinds of non-consensual sex happens, and why it is sometimes, in his mind, not rape. He explicitly calls out "radical Scandinavians" and since Radical Scandinavian Man are some of my middle names, I feel compelled to answer. The radical thing in this case is to not accept non-consensual sex, apparently. I will warn the reader that I have other radical notions like "try not to harm others" and "women and men are part of a category called 'people' and it is possible to communicate with them".
Mr. Kaplinski's basic assertion is that men can have problems understanding a no in certain situations, and that it shouldn't be illegal when a man then penetrates a woman without consent. I have several problems with this, and will go through them in order (though obviously some of them overlap). Mainly, I find that the argument is immoral by itself, that it is based on flawed assumptions, and that it is an argument that has negative consequences for society as a whole.
The moral argument is quite simple, when you remove all the frills. It is wrong to do what you want with another's body against their wishes. I don't think I need to ask people or Mr. Kaplinski to imagine how they would feel if they were penetrated by someone without consent, as it should be pretty obvious that it constitutes harm. Sometimes, there can be circumstances where you can transgress against someone to stop some greater harm from taking place, I do not see how penetrating someone against their will could possibly stop some greater harm. This seems like the kind of thing that is so self-evident that I almost don't want to write it down - as someone who thinks sex can be a wonderful thing you do together with another person, I don't think I should have to. And what argument does Mr. Kaplinski make for why doing this kind of harm is acceptable? Because communication is difficult sometimes. If it's not clear by now, I am no great philosopher, but it seems to me that if you're in a situation where you could potentially cause great harm, you have some responsibility to make a decent effort at avoiding it. Making an extra effort at communicating with your sex partner seems like a very small effort to make, if you are indeed motivated to not do harm to your sex partner (which I sincerely hope).
Mr. Kaplinski makes several assumptions that I don't think hold when analysed critically, the first being that communication is necessarily so complicated. Take these quotes from his blog post:
[...]often the female no is not an absolute no but can be a step toward finally saying yes.[...]
Here, it is not simply a person understanding another person, but a body understanding another body. And a male body tends to understand the closeness of a female body in a very straightforward way. Yes, with an effort, a man can even then abstain from sex.In the first case, obviously the sex should wait until you actually get that yes, while using the skills you have gained in other social interactions to make sure that you're not badgering, intimidating, or making the woman you're talking to feel uncomfortable. If we see the important word as being "yes" rather than "no", we seem to avoid a lot of the problems. To the extent that women are conditioned to not express sexual desire for fear of being accused of being a slut or similar shaming language, I suggest working to tear down sexist double standards on the structural level, and making sure that there is enough trust between you and your sex partner to express desire despite it. As long as you honestly care about communicating with your partner, most of the time you should be able to make it work. If there's still uncertainty, well, lack of sex has never killed anyone. Of course, Mr. Kaplinski is here talking about situation where two people have come quite far sexually already, so that a yes shouldn't be quite that difficult to express, if the other person is indeed interested in expressing it.
In the second quote, Mr. Kaplinski suggests that the male body understands the presence of a female body meaning a "yes" to sexual intercourse. The answer to that is easy: the body is wrong. And as Mr. Kaplinski writes, men can back off at that point. He says it takes effort, but as mentioned, making an effort to avoid inflicting great harm is obviously the right thing to do.
A second assumption used by Mr. Kaplinski to explain why communication is so difficult for men is an appeal to nature: in mating rituals in the animal world, no doesn't necessarily mean no, and men, by their nature, are "autistic" and have more problems understanding others than women.
We are willingly or unwillingly a part of animal kingdom and our erotic rituals are quite similar to the rituals of some other animals. And in these rituals, often the female no is not an absolute no but can be a step toward finally saying yes.[...]
Yes, we men tend to be autistic. As I have been explained by women, they always understand whether a man is interested in them. Not so with men.First off, and it is perhaps needless to say, that something is natural does not make something right. A person who is angered and kills someone else can not excuse it with death being a common result after conflicts in the animal kingdom, nor can someone who kills their children say that animals often do it during hard times.
Perhaps more importantly, we live in a world where women have at various times been considered frigid, at other times too emotional, at some times dangerously part of the natural world, and at others removed from it. Men, on the other hand, were often seen as their opposites (and often somehow better because of it). What I mean by that is that if we lived in a society where boys and men were encouraged to have an active emotional life, strong empathy and caring for others, and put a greater focus on communication and friendships over gender lines, we might well end up with men that are different than what seems natural right now. Will gender differences persist? Quite possibly, but looking at history, there is obviously a great variation in behaviour among men and women alike so we should never be too tempted to see our behaviour at present as being "natural". In addition, we live in a society where women's voices in general are given less validity than those of men's, if we were to make more of an effort to not denigrate women's opinions, maybe there would be less of a problem to understand them in more intimate settings.
The mention of autism is interesting. People who are diagnosed with autism often have problems throughout their lives, whether interacting with men or women. Autism is not a problem that occurs only in the bedroom or when dealing with relationships. What people with autism spectrum disorder usually do is to learn to cope with their problem so as to improve their social life, using certain cues as signals for moods and situations they don't instinctively get. If you care about social interactions where you might have a problem (and if you think you might cause harm by misunderstanding consent, I hope you do care), you will hopefully take steps to rectify it, by learning various cues and ways of communicating for that which you don't understand instinctively. It might be prudent to add, in this context, that literature and other culture is a way of understanding the world around us; romance literature and movies are overwhelmingly coded as feminine, and are to a great extent read by women. Though I won't make any absolute statements about it, it's entirely possible that Mr. Kaplinski's experience with romantically psychic women is merely the effect of a group of people taking a more intense interest in romance than he (or his male friends) do.
A third assumption that seems to motivate his post is that women are not attracted to "good guys" but rather macho-men who are, presumably, not good:
And it was a shock to me to discover that men relish talkint obscenities, that in their discourse sex is very much connected with rude force, even with violence. And the greatest shock was to find that girls were more interested in such macho-type men than in good guys as me.[...]
[...]I was too good a guy and couldn't understand that bad guys had more luck with women than good guys. And quite possibly still have.First off, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that a guy who is truly good would not write a resentful blog post decades later complaining about not having had enough sex.
Secondly, in my experience women don't particularly like bad guys (though obviously that also happens) - they like interesting, funny, confident, attractive people in a mix, much like men do. I can't mention that many female friends of mine who find someone being nice being a turn-off; however, if "nice" or "good guy" was the main thing they could say about a person, I would also not assume that they're very attracted by him. Confidence and being clear about what you want probably helps quite a bit in many kinds of social interaction, flirting and getting into bed with someone among them; being withdrawn probably doesn't. Of course, if a woman is mostly interested in getting laid for a night or for a little while, getting together with an attractive guy who clearly signals he's into that is probably the right way to go. I don't know if those guys are what some people see as "bad guys", of course. In many blog circles, this kind of thing is called "nice guy syndrome", and plenty has been written about it.
Additionally, in the context of this post, wouldn't the fact that women are supposedly more interested in macho-type men mean that there were less situations where consent was lacking? I mean, if they were attracted by them, wouldn't it stand to reason that they actually had consensual sex when they did have sex? And what's wrong with that? The lesson here should not be (and never should be) "care less about women's consent", it's (if it matters that much to you) "become more attractive".
A final assumption is the way Mr. Kaplinski sees the interplay of men and women in society in regards to sex:
I cannot but agree with the assertion that a female no is a no when it is told seriously, not as an element in a play where woman rises the stakes, present herself as a more valuable partner asking for an effort from the male to get access to her favours.Mr. Kaplinski seems to see sex as a commodity, something that women possess and men must bid to gain access to. A similar idea is that sex is something men want and seek, and women's role is only to accept or deny. I won't deny that a lot of people follow these concepts, and that a lot of social rules are based on them, such as shaming women for having sex (giving it up too easy). However, what I do say is that we should all work to change it. I have never understood what women supposedly give up when they have sex to make society get all scandalized; sex should be something two (or more) people do together because it's enjoyable for both of them. They both get enjoyment and both "lose" some time (they probably weren't going to do anything better with it) and give some physical effort. To me, at least, sex is worth having so long as everyone involved is into it; I want partners who find me attractive and are confident enough to take pleasure in my body as I take pleasure in hers, and more than anything the confidence to ask what I like. As long as people are aware of the risks in regards to STIs and unplanned pregnancy, why should we expect men and women's attitudes to sex and sexuality to be so different from each other?
Though it's certainly a long process (and one that's been championed by feminists for a long time), if you don't like the game, the right response isn't to punish someone by minimizing their wishes and to do them harm; it's to change the game.
Before going to the final section where I'll add why I think Mr. Kaplinski's argument is a bad thing for society as a whole, I must comment on this part:
[...]last minute abstention is detrimental to male health. Strong arousal without following gratification, without the possibility of penetration and ejaculation can easily lead to inflammation of the prostate and the lower urinary tract. If it becomes chronical, it can lead to prostate cancer and other nasty illnesses.That is silly. I'm not going to dig up the incidence rate of prostate cancer for men who become aroused and then don't ejaculate vs. those who don't, because the dilemma Mr. Kaplinski presents here has such an obvious solution: if you're concerned that not ejaculating after becoming aroused is dangerous for your health, most of the people reading this have two hands. Do use them.
I will add that Mr. Kaplinski urges women to consent more because of this risk to men's health. To me, that would more or less amount to pity sex, which I can frankly do without, as I prefer women to have sex out of pleasure, not out of obligation.
At long last, a comment on the responsibility of a public intellectual and this kind of argument about rape and consent.
Culture and society matters. It matters to how people relate to each other, the acceptance of violence and oppression. You only need to look to times such as that of the Slave Trade, apartheid in South Africa, World War II, pretty much any occupation, and any place or time where women are considered to be property rather than citizens to make that clear. In these countries, the people who are in power gain great power and privilege over other groups, which are commonly denigrated, dehumanized and devalued. Though people are, in my opinion, generally decent people who want to do right, power corrupts, and when you have a society that tells you that some people are not worthy of respect and that your wishes matter more than theirs, great ills can be done to the oppressed in a casual manner by anyone who's sadistic, having a bad day, frustrated by their lot in life, or any other reason. That is understandable, though obviously something that is unacceptable and we should always work to prevent. So culture matters, and can increase the number of people in society who commit violence against others, or who simply stand by and do nothing when harm is done. We need to look no further than the recent rape cases in Steubenville and Delhi for examples of cultures where sexual violence against women is done and few if anyone intervenes to stop it.
However, as I mentioned before, I think that people as a rule can be decent, and with a society and culture where people are treated as equal, most people will not treat others as less worthy, they will be. To back up that point, especially in regards to rape, I would like to point to recent research in the US that has given rise to Predator Theory, which is simply that most rapes are actually committed by a small group of men who victimize many women. They target the women they identify as most vulnerable and get them into a position where they know they have what society regards as plausible deniability: they were drunk, she didn't say no clearly, she seemed interested earlier, and the like. As the research shows, however, they are well aware that they are assaulting non-consenting women, and will continue to do so. This is well in line with other criminological research, which shows that most crime is committed by a small minority who are repeat offenders.
With that background, I think Mr. Kaplinski's argument that men have problems understanding a no and because of that non-consensual sex should not be seen as rape or something illegal is not only immoral, but also on the larger scale promote a society and culture where women's wishes and consent are ignored, which would likely lead to increased victimization, and effectively give cover to the group of rapists who repeatedly and wilfully victimize others by letting them say that consent and communication is "confusing" when in truth it is navigable by most with a bit of effort, and those who don't make the effort or don't care are clearly in the wrong.
What bothers me the most about Mr. Kaplinski's blog post is perhaps that it presents sex and sexuality as something joyless, where it's not about people doing something pleasurable together, but rather a social competition where spending time with someone else stops mattering in favour of the raw mechanics of sex. As someone who thinks that the person you're doing it with and mutual enjoyment both while having sex and while spending time together otherwise is important, it seems like a very strange world where women's personalities and desires are erased in favour of a worldview where putting notches on your bedposts is the only positive you gain from having sex. That is not the kind of society I want, and indeed I am surprised that anyone would.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Sex education - core values and a wide range of options
For a while now I've thought of writing down my thoughts about sex ed, as it is a topic that interests me greatly, but I have not really structured my thoughts on. So I'll try to do that here (this sprung out of some thoughts I had involving safewords sort of developed towards healthy communication surrounding sex in general, being a bit of a prerequisite for more complicated conversations).
In sex education, there are five core values which I think should encompass the entire educational programme:
This is not to say that all sex has to be super-pleasurable, nor that sex should be an activity always targeted at achieving orgasms. That can quickly lead to people putting mental pressure on themselves to perform, either by always being ready for sex (which is pressure often put on men today) or to always orgasm (pressure that is often put on women to be an ideal sex partner). Putting the expectation on people to be up for sex are against the ideas of pleasure and consent both. Not everyone can reach orgasms, or cannot do so easily or in certain situations, but can enjoy sex all the same. Putting mental pressure on someone to have a certain small set of reactions is also pretty antithetical to the idea of pleasure.
Continuing the point about pressure above, communicating when you want or do not want to have sex should also be free of any kind of guilt, and no one should feel that they need to fit what they want to express to some ideal standard of sexuality.
To tie communication to consent a bit further, it is also important for people to start questioning those who do not seem to care about communicating with their partner, and make it clear that there is no excuse for not making the effort to understand your partner or presumptive partner.
At the end of the day, these values are what I think should be expected parts of sexual interactions (there is, of course, an argument that they should hold true for all interactions). It is perhaps important to note that these core values are the same for everyone, I see no reason for different core principles for different genders, although in practice how we relate to them might differ as we are dealing with a long history of male, hetero and cisgender privilege which behooves us to take extra thought on how to realise these values. The idea of sex as a transaction (where men gain something and women lose something) or the idea of women as gatekeepers and men as sex seekers are both pretty wide-spread, so that even though I want to define a new normal, it might be better to specifically argue against prevalent and pernicious ideas of sex and sexuality.
In presenting these values I am not saying that sexual education is just about teaching them in a vacuum. Regurgitating the definitions of the words would serve little purpose; what we need is to build knowledge and understanding about our bodies, sex, and sexuality in a way that makes the above terms possible and meaningful, which is what I'll try to do in the following part presenting a rough outline for the topics that should be covered.
Moving up in age, learning about erogenous zones and how everyone's different in that sense and how they can find different sensations pleasurable is of course also important, as is learning about the wonders of pregnancy and vectors for infection - ideally before anyone can become pregnant.
Learning about our bodies is essential to create confidence in our physical selves, gives us understanding about what pleasure is and can be, lets us understand the risks associated with sex, and thus improves the foundations of communication and makes possible informed consent.
Personally, I think a programme for sex education should, at the very least, include information (and, based on the recommendation of a friend, personal stories from these perspectives) about people who are not interested in having a sex life at all, for whichever reason, who are not interested in having a sex life with other people, who only have sex in long-term relationships, who don't connect sex to romance, who have sex with any gender (and hopefully the discussion would make it obvious that "any gender" does not mean "any person"), who have trans bodies, who have sex with one particular gender, who associate pain with sex, who associate giving pain with sex, who associate dominating others or being dominated with sex
Though all the different views on sex and preferred kinds of sex above are different in many ways, I think the values of consent, pleasure, communication, confidence, and safety remain true for all of them, and the best way to communicate how those values relate to different situations is to talk about it and discuss in an open manner. It's important to note, to avoid becoming lazy, that the above values might be most important to talk about for sex that has been considered the "normal" for a long time; if you're doing something that is not considered "normal", you're more likely to think more about the fact that there are things that you like doing that your partner might not like, making communication more clearly important. If "everyone knows" about a specific kind of sex, then people might think communication isn't as important, meaning people might end up not having as good a time as they could.
Though I could probably present some ideas stressing the value of having relationships where you communicate with your partner and mutual respect and all that, I think I will leave it at the sex, for now.
Finally, I should mention that I do not think that a sex education programme can be a panacea to things I think is weird with the way sex and sexuality is treated in society today, but it is one factor we can and should strive to make as good as we can, while we also work to make the rest of our culture and the messages communicated about sex and sexuality better. Of course, there are lots of passionate people who do sex education already, and have worked on doing it for a long time, so this should be seen as no more than my thoughts about (part of) it given form. To be better informed, there are lots of other sources to consult, from Sweden and elsewhere. I'm also going to link yes means yes! because I really like it and it has been really informative about consent and sex.
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I've added a follow-up to this post.
In sex education, there are five core values which I think should encompass the entire educational programme:
Consent
Consent is perhaps even more than a core concept, indeed without it the idea of a positive sexuality is a joke. To be more specific, what I'm writing about here is affirmative consent, and preferably enthusiastic consent, meaning that people should expect their partner or partners to be into the idea of having sex with them and that cajoling someone into sex is pretty weird. The lack of a no should not be understood by anyone to mean "yes". If everyone had enthusiastic consent as the standard, the points about communication and confidence would be unnecessary, as they would be part of the definition of consent. Alas, we are not living in a world where enthusiastic consent is the universal norm, and that's something we have to deal with.Pleasure
I must admit that I kind of took this for granted until I was reminded that it's really a pillar of the entire activity, and though I find it to be obvious, what motivates me to write this post is, after all, that the way sex is handled in society does not seem to be aimed at pleasure. Having pleasure as an expectation both for yourself and for your partner gives a pretty good goal to reach for with your communication. Of course, everyone gets to define for themselves what is pleasurable.This is not to say that all sex has to be super-pleasurable, nor that sex should be an activity always targeted at achieving orgasms. That can quickly lead to people putting mental pressure on themselves to perform, either by always being ready for sex (which is pressure often put on men today) or to always orgasm (pressure that is often put on women to be an ideal sex partner). Putting the expectation on people to be up for sex are against the ideas of pleasure and consent both. Not everyone can reach orgasms, or cannot do so easily or in certain situations, but can enjoy sex all the same. Putting mental pressure on someone to have a certain small set of reactions is also pretty antithetical to the idea of pleasure.
Communication
Communication makes most social interactions better (imagine that!) In fact, you could even say that sex itself is communication, using verbal and body language. As such, it's important to let people gain a vocabulary for expressing themselves, as well as understand that everyone's different in how they communicate, and of course respect for the fact that communication is a mutual and reciprocal activity. By nurturing ideas of the value of communication, we make the sex that does happen more enjoyable and into more of a positive experience, and hopefully avoid sex that would not feel good or be a negative experience in the long run.Continuing the point about pressure above, communicating when you want or do not want to have sex should also be free of any kind of guilt, and no one should feel that they need to fit what they want to express to some ideal standard of sexuality.
To tie communication to consent a bit further, it is also important for people to start questioning those who do not seem to care about communicating with their partner, and make it clear that there is no excuse for not making the effort to understand your partner or presumptive partner.
Confidence
Having a vocabulary for sex and consent is all well and good, but it's useless without the confidence to express it. That means that people need to be confident that they will not be shamed or mocked for their bodies or sexual desires, and take pride in yourself. Although every aspect of sex education is something that is made difficult by the wide world out there with its many different messages, the way a lot of those messages whittle down our confidence in ourselves and shame us for who we are might be the most obvious. There is also, sadly, a constant pressure to conform to the right kind of sexual drive, like being constantly "up for it" as referenced above, or to perform a certain way while having sex. Confidence can be important to stand up to that kind of pressure to conform, and to be able to communicate what you actually want and what would be most pleasurable to you. Confidence also means accepting that people have a wide range of reactions to sex, and to listen to your partner with an open mind instead of, say, getting upset when they might not want to have sex or when they react to something while having sex in an unexpected way.Safety
Safety means both getting the knowledge you need to have sex, as well as learning warning signs for stuff like patterns of abuse, both to keep yourself safe and to protect others by calling others out for unacceptable behaviour.At the end of the day, these values are what I think should be expected parts of sexual interactions (there is, of course, an argument that they should hold true for all interactions). It is perhaps important to note that these core values are the same for everyone, I see no reason for different core principles for different genders, although in practice how we relate to them might differ as we are dealing with a long history of male, hetero and cisgender privilege which behooves us to take extra thought on how to realise these values. The idea of sex as a transaction (where men gain something and women lose something) or the idea of women as gatekeepers and men as sex seekers are both pretty wide-spread, so that even though I want to define a new normal, it might be better to specifically argue against prevalent and pernicious ideas of sex and sexuality.
In presenting these values I am not saying that sexual education is just about teaching them in a vacuum. Regurgitating the definitions of the words would serve little purpose; what we need is to build knowledge and understanding about our bodies, sex, and sexuality in a way that makes the above terms possible and meaningful, which is what I'll try to do in the following part presenting a rough outline for the topics that should be covered.
Our Bodies
It is pretty important to understand our bodies - sex education should allow kids of all genders to understand their bodies and what happens to it during puberty, and appreciate that the body is a pretty awesome thing. This of course also has to give information about cis- and transgender issues as well as other gender identities. Perhaps most importantly, it has to instill a sense that it's good to ask those who are knowledgable if you wonder about something and not create a dichotomy of "normal" and "other". When teaching younger kids, I must admit that I'm a bit uncertain of how to teach kids about sexual abuse in a way that does not send mixed signals - explaining meaningful consent and age seems a bit too complex, but simplistically making some parts of your body "bad" for touching seems like it could be negative in the long term - this seems like something I should read up on.Moving up in age, learning about erogenous zones and how everyone's different in that sense and how they can find different sensations pleasurable is of course also important, as is learning about the wonders of pregnancy and vectors for infection - ideally before anyone can become pregnant.
Learning about our bodies is essential to create confidence in our physical selves, gives us understanding about what pleasure is and can be, lets us understand the risks associated with sex, and thus improves the foundations of communication and makes possible informed consent.
Sex
A problem with teaching about sex is that it's impossible to define what a good sex life is. It varies from person to person and trying to impose a model of normality in it would be both foolish and wrong. It is easier to teach what good sex isn't, but has a potential to get mired in negative messaging where you tell people what not to do all the time, which doesn't seem very pedagogical or constructive. What is needed is to give some notion of what sex can be while having an open and constructive discussion about what can go wrong, ever keeping an eye on the five core principles above. What is most important is to give a sense of the possibilities that exist, while stressing that it comes down to personal preference and communication with your partner or partners. I see no reason why we should privilege either sex in long-term relationships or sex as an activity like any other as the "normal". It might sound a bit trite, but people really should do what is right for them, based on being given solid information and the tools to use that information in a positive and constructive way.Personally, I think a programme for sex education should, at the very least, include information (and, based on the recommendation of a friend, personal stories from these perspectives) about people who are not interested in having a sex life at all, for whichever reason, who are not interested in having a sex life with other people, who only have sex in long-term relationships, who don't connect sex to romance, who have sex with any gender (and hopefully the discussion would make it obvious that "any gender" does not mean "any person"), who have trans bodies, who have sex with one particular gender, who associate pain with sex, who associate giving pain with sex, who associate dominating others or being dominated with sex
Though all the different views on sex and preferred kinds of sex above are different in many ways, I think the values of consent, pleasure, communication, confidence, and safety remain true for all of them, and the best way to communicate how those values relate to different situations is to talk about it and discuss in an open manner. It's important to note, to avoid becoming lazy, that the above values might be most important to talk about for sex that has been considered the "normal" for a long time; if you're doing something that is not considered "normal", you're more likely to think more about the fact that there are things that you like doing that your partner might not like, making communication more clearly important. If "everyone knows" about a specific kind of sex, then people might think communication isn't as important, meaning people might end up not having as good a time as they could.
Though I could probably present some ideas stressing the value of having relationships where you communicate with your partner and mutual respect and all that, I think I will leave it at the sex, for now.
Finally, I should mention that I do not think that a sex education programme can be a panacea to things I think is weird with the way sex and sexuality is treated in society today, but it is one factor we can and should strive to make as good as we can, while we also work to make the rest of our culture and the messages communicated about sex and sexuality better. Of course, there are lots of passionate people who do sex education already, and have worked on doing it for a long time, so this should be seen as no more than my thoughts about (part of) it given form. To be better informed, there are lots of other sources to consult, from Sweden and elsewhere. I'm also going to link yes means yes! because I really like it and it has been really informative about consent and sex.
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yes, really. Consent, pleasure, communication, confidence and safety are important terms and reading about the BDSM community has further informed my opinions about them to a great extent - I think discussions about relationships like that would be useful. One can of course discuss at which age such a discussion should take place.I've added a follow-up to this post.
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