Sex ed and patriarchy-smashin'

[bloodygranuaile]

For the politics book club for March, we wanted to read something about #MeToo, but were stymied by the fact that the #MeToo movement is like two months old and so nobody has written a proper book about it yet. But it turns out there is indeed a recently published book that touches on a lot of the issues being looked at with #MeToo, and that I already had a copy of it, because back in December, Annie and I went to see Jaclyn Friedman talk at the Cambridge Public Library and had thus gotten signed copies of Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All.

 

Friedman is a sex educator, not an academic or a theorist, but she takes a really holistic view of sex education that means she incorporates a lot of feminist and other kinds of theory into her educative mission, and she does a lot of reporting on what sex researchers and other social science researchers are up to. One result of this is that the book covers a lot of ground, including political movements like the rise of the Religious Right, economic issues like the cooptation of sexual liberation rhetoric by advertisers, the sorry state of scientific research on how women's sexuality "works," and labor issues surrounding sex work and the trafficking narrative. One unavoidable side effect of having such a large scope of topics is that the book was either going to breeze through a few things or be a thousand pages long; Friedman (probably quite sensibly) went for the first option. The book clocks in at around 250 pages plus notes, and there are plenty of other resources out there if you want a more in-depth history of, say, the Religious Right's adoption of abortion as a galvanizing issue when it stopped being politically feasible to mobilize around opposing interracial marriage, or on sexism within the various other '60s/'70s political movements.

 

What this book really does is provide a framework for discussing issues within our sexual culture and learning how to demystify the bullshit that gets thrown around to keep us all in line and buying increasingly technically advanced underwear or whatever. I don't know if Friedman identifies as a socialist (although she's based in Boston so: Jaclyn, join the SocFem Working Group), but one of her main points is that the issues with our sexual culture are systemic, wrapped up not only in patriarchy but in interlocking systems of capitalism, white supremacy, etc., and that the constant message that if we're unhappy, it's all due to our own individual failures and we should individually find ways to be better, is the gaslighting propaganda these systems use to prevent us from taking collective action to demand and create a better culture. (She also identifies this "there's no such things as society; everything's on you personally" worldview as neoliberal ideology specifically.)

 

One core concept that Friedman uses heavily in this book is the idea of fauxpowerment, which is a bit of a goofy-sounding neologism that I think nevertheless sums up a lot of what's wrong with our current sexual culture overall and many segments of the feminist movement's obsession with lifestyle policing and writing endless takes about whether individual bits of pop culture ephemera are empowering or not. In the fauxpowerment narrative, empowerment is personal, it is something you feel rather than something you objectively are or are not in relation to other power actors, and it must be performed so that everyone knows you feel sufficiently empowered and we can all feel good about how empowered we all are and nothing has to change. (This was always the most desire-to-stab-my-eyeballs-out-inducing part of the wonderful chaos that was the aughts-era ladyblogosphere, for me. Endless fucking thinkpieces about whether this sex act or that sex act or this movie or that pop star "is empowering." Do you know what felt empowering? Realizing I didn't have to give a shit and closing the browser tab on those thinkpieces.) In the fauxpowerment narrative, at its most pernicious, even things like threat of violence or actual violence are all about whether you have a "victim mindset" or "are letting fear control your actions" and blah blah blah and none of it's supposed to have any relation to, like, whether or not you actually are at risk of violence or have in fact been victimized. It ultimately ends up demanding that people not process or react to any input from their environments at all, which is just not how people work.

 

Friedman says: To hell with all that, neither wearing pants nor not wearing pants is inherently objectively empowering or disempowering. The problem here is that we have all these cultural systems that let other people have way too many opinions about other people's pants-wearing (or lack thereof) and, most crucially, that some of those people have actual power over other people to punish them for doing pants wrong. It's not a brand-new insight; as long as there have been shitty hot takes by creepy gender study professors who later turned out to be not qualified and preying on their students (a-HEM) about how purifying jizz facials are or whatever, there have been people pointing out that this is stupid and not the point. But Friedman here provides tools for breaking down and talking about why it's stupid, which is very valuable, even if one of those tools is a silly portmanteau (but then, so was "mansplaining," and that was Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2014).

 

The chapter titles are also fun. I realize this isn't particularly important, although I like how Friedman's casual, bloggy writing style works; it feels kind of like you're hanging out in a bar with her or possibly still in the wacky world of the feminist netroots. (Some of the stuff she talks about might also be more awkward if she tried to use a more formal writing style--it's a book about sex, after all. Go ahead and giggle.) But the chapters are titled things like "The Separation of Church and Sex" and "Our Internet, Ourselves," which I think beats being super dour all the time. Just because our sexual culture is garbage doesn't mean we can't poke fun.

 

Unscrewed also profiles a bunch of activists who are currently doing work on de-upfucking fucking, with information about the kind of organizing they do and the things their organizations have accomplished. You know, just in case you're interested in getting involved. A brief epilogue, How to Join the Resistance, gives a few starting points and bits of advice for newbie activists, much of which should be broadly applicable to any kind of social justice work. It's not quite the Revolution Inna Box that everyone seems to want to find at the end of books on social issues, but if anyone had figured out how to put a revolution inna box then things wouldn't still need so much fixing, would they?

 

As someone who has opted out of American sexual culture about as much as she could figure out how to opt out, this book was an interesting read for me not necessarily because it challenged me to be a better ally to people who don't want to just nope out (I've been painstakingly educated on being less of a judgmental ass about that kind of thing over the past several years, so while it helped, it wasn't a new idea) but because it challenged me to try to imagine a culture I wouldn't want to opt out of. Over the years I've sort of identified as various places somewhere on the ace/grey/demi spectrum, but only in the past couple of years have gotten comfortable identifying as This Is Too Much Work And I Can't Be Arsed--and I've gotten very, very comfortable identifying that way! But what if it was less work? What if it didn't come with an omnipresent lurking threat of sexual violence and a side of imbalanced expectations for emotional labor? What if I'd never felt pettily constrained by the desire to not prove Those Assholes right about anything ever? It's oddly terrifying for me to try to imagine what my sex life would look like if it wasn't shaped by years of seething resentment at the expectation that I have one because that's what people do and what women are for. I might even have one. I have absolutely no way of knowing. Trying to think about it is pretty anxiety-inducing so I'm going to stop thinking about it and focus on political activism instead. (Note to self: Write state lawmakers about that horrendous cop rape loophole already.)

 

Anyway. Discussion next week should be fun, especially as we're having a brunch book club so we'll be in a restaurant where there might be other people who can hear us. Scandalous!