CHAPTER 4

JUST LET ME LIBERATE YOU

TWO WEEKS AFTER I TURNED TWENTY-TWO, I asked my friends to take me to a bar and help me pick someone up. A request like this was unprecedented. I did not drink, I did not go to bars, and I avoided so much as holding a person’s hand. Furthermore, I had blabbed about Henry and our plans to meet over the summer. It was now April, and with that meeting only a couple of months away, it seemed stupid not to wait.

But I hadn’t told my friends about my insecurities. I hadn’t told them that I felt so old-fashioned and backward for only wanting sex if it came with love. They knew that Henry and I planned to have an open relationship, but I had not been honest about the extent of my fears around this situation. Neither the entire history of human relations nor the testimonies of male and female friends alike assuaged my rumination. Nothing could stop my suspicion that Henry was lying when he said that sex without love was common and that he could have sex with others without becoming emotionally entangled. Filled with doubt and also guilt for doubting, I decided to prove to myself that sex without attachment was possible and, hopefully, make myself more amenable to free love. I needed to live up to the goals I had set for myself: to be modern instead of old-fashioned, a good feminist who lived out my beliefs, and to not be repressed.

“Repressed” is the opposite of “liberated.” An insult. In culturally liberal circles, the sexually conservative woman is often considered to be sexually repressed—and the sexually repressed woman is a symbol of a time before freedom. She is uptight and in denial, white-knuckling her way through life. She is the perfectly coiffed fifties housewife, lacking the ease of liberated counterparts who are in touch with their bodies and secure with their place in the world. The sexually repressed woman is an object of pity and a reminder of the importance of progress. She is embarrassing.

I believed all of the assumptions embedded in this archetype of the woman who doesn’t embrace sex: that she is prudish and prim, that she hasn’t done the proper work of liberating herself from shame, and that she is politically conservative too.

None of this aligned with my goals. The words used to describe women who didn’t have sex (celibate, abstinent, pure, chaste) seemed either clinical or moralistic in a way I disdained. The words used to describe women who did (free, empowered, bold) I liked and wanted to apply to me. I absorbed the language of archetypes and aesthetic tropes—the repressed woman, the liberated woman—instead of thinking more critically about whether these stories were true and, if so, what they might imply about how we connect sex and politics and power. I reuse these archetypes and aesthetic tropes now because they represent the way these messages were handed down. Few people would explicitly say that sexually conservative women are wallflowers, but popular culture made that insinuation clear, and so I had a vague, unquestioned feeling that the women who pursue sex are more fun and feminist than the women who don’t. Perhaps my attitude can best be summarized by anti-rape activist Alexandra Brodsky, who told journalist Rebecca Traister that she hears from women who believe that “not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure.”¹ I could easily have been one of them.

My ideas about the humiliation of repression and the meaning of liberated sexuality did not come from nowhere. For so long, women have been encouraged to deny our sexual needs and instead serve the needs of men. Our worth is tied to sex. We are sexualized until we are too old, yet shamed and policed for being sexual ourselves, prevented from exploring what we desire or are allowed to desire—and this is doubly true if the women in question aren’t straight.

The politics of sex became central to American feminist discussion in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, activists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin led the movement that would be known as sex-negative feminism. MacKinnon and Dworkin might not have thought of themselves as sex negative, but their work certainly did not focus on the liberatory possibilities of orgasm. With titles like Sexual Harassment of Working Women and Woman Hating, their books focused less on the pleasure of sex and more on the ways that sexuality could be used to harm.

The very basic argument was that unequal power dynamics are the backdrop to heterosexual sex, always, so true consent is almost impossible to achieve. Their structural analysis concluded that sex under patriarchy was inevitably compromised and unfree. Activist groups that sprang from this tradition were against pornography, sadomasochism, and sex work, all of which they deemed exploitative ways for men to degrade and hurt women.

In 1982, when the annual Barnard Conference on Sexuality decided that its theme would be “pleasure and danger,” members of the group Women Against Pornography protested, wearing shirts that read “For a Feminist Sexuality” on one side and “Against S/M” on the other.² The next year, MacKinnon and Dworkin tried to a pass a law to ban pornography in Minneapolis. After that effort failed, a similar ordinance was introduced in Indianapolis, endorsed by conservatives and the avowedly anti-feminist lawyer Phyllis Schlafly.

MacKinnon and Dworkin were a well-matched team, writes New York University professor Lisa Duggan in a retrospective of the period published in Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Cultures. MacKinnon, with a degree from Yale Law School, was the polished, patrician, rational one, Duggan recounts, and Dworkin the fiery speaker who told supporters to “swallow the vomit you feel at the thought of dealing with the city council and get this law in place.” Her words were memorable and she was not afraid of appearing extreme. “See that the silence of women is over,” Dworkin said, “and that we’re not down on our backs with our legs spread anymore.”³

The Indianapolis anti-porn ordinance was signed into law. Similar ordinances were suggested—and narrowly defeated—in places like Los Angeles, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Challenges to these ordinances made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately supported the idea that these porn bans are unconstitutional.⁴

Feminists have never all agreed with each other and feminist attitudes toward sex have never been static. For feminists like Ellen Willis and Susie Bright, the MacKinnon-Dworkin approach encouraged a sexual conservatism that did not serve women. In a landmark 1981 essay titled “Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?” Willis struck back at the attitudes that, as she put it, “tap into the underside of traditional femininity—the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims.” Bitterness was not the same as an actual solution, and the doom-and-gloom hyper-focus of sex negativity pushed women to “accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men’s sexual freedom as a substitute for real power.” Plus, she continued, “in this culture, where women are still supposed to be less sexual than men, sexual inhibition is as integral to the ‘normal’ woman’s identity as sexual aggression is to a man’s. It is ‘excessive’ genital desires that often make women feel ‘unfeminine’ and unworthy.”⁵ MacKinnon and Dworkin may have helped women become more aware of how complicated sex could be, but they hardly helped anyone have better sex.

Sex-positive feminists like Willis and Bright did not believe that porn was always demeaning. They did not approve of the conservative allegiance to ban it or of giving politicians (who were so often men) so much power in controlling women’s sexuality. It was important to undo the social conditioning of shame. Pleasure was possible, even under patriarchy. Women had agency and were not such fragile creatures, easily broken.

Having sex is cool; not having sex is less so. Sex is not only a commodity for men to buy. Women can now participate, too, conspicuously consuming sex to show off and also to be able to say that this consumption is empowering because we are using our power to have the same rights as men. Female horniness is to be cultivated. This is not an explicit memo but a feeling in the air that makes “prude” a gendered pejorative and motivates aces to rush to claim that we are not judgmental about sex at all.

Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall in the blockbuster show Sex and the City, is one iconic representation of this modern, sex-positive woman. She’s a high-powered publicist, ambitious and confident, with some of the funniest and best lines in the show. An unapologetic sexual libertine, Samantha talks a big game about her many affairs and calls herself a “try-sexual,” as in, she’ll try anything once. “I will not be judged by you or society,” she says, in a memorable scene that has been GIF’ed all over the internet. “I will wear whatever and blow whomever I want as long as I can breathe and kneel.”

Twenty years after Sex and the City premiered, HBO debuted the teen drama Euphoria. Fictional teens of today, as represented by the show, treat sex cavalierly, with hotel room trysts and hookups at other people’s houses. In one early episode, the character Kat Hernandez confesses to being a virgin and is told, “Bitch, this isn’t the ’80s. You need to catch a dick!” Kat does, losing her virginity and gaining confidence by becoming a cam girl.

In real life, too, women talking about sex can build up a certain cultural cachet. Cosmopolitan continues to provide readers with sex tips, articles in other publications combat the stereotype of the sexually demure woman by claiming that “women are horny as heck,”⁶ and the women’s magazine The Cut has a week of content dedicated to being horny.⁷ Last December, the New York Times declared 2019 “the year women got ‘horny.’”⁸ Coolgirl singer Tove Lo sings about being wet through all her clothes and Charli XCX insists she’s “no angel” who likes to fuck in the hotel but it doesn’t mean anything. In her song “Das Me,” rapper Brooke Candy says that “slut” is now a compliment, “a sexy-ass female who running shit and confident.” Top stars like Ariana Grande, Cardi B, and Nicki Minaj boast about sex and sexual prowess in both their music and their public personas.

Nicki Minaj’s “Feeling Myself” has a line where Nicki brags about a lover telling her, “Damn, bae, you so little, but you be really takin’ that pipe.” That line was the cause of overwhelming disorientation for a friend of mine while she was listening in the car one day. How strange, she thought, that being able to have rough sex was a rap-worthy compliment, that it would be described as taking (making the woman seem like a recipient instead of a participant) a pipe (a brutal metaphor), that Nicki would brag about being able to get fucked and that she, listening, would instinctively understand why Nicki was bragging and also like the song. It all felt mixed together and messed up.

If having sex were merely cool, this would have bothered me little. However, sex had also become feminist and this I cared about. Through a subtle series of twists, like in a game of telephone, sex for liberal women has become more than a way to enjoy ourselves or even prove that we’re desirable. Conspicuous consumption of sex has become a way to perform feminist politics.

First, the important message that most women are conditioned to be sexually inhibited was delivered with a lack of nuance. “It seems that the message is ‘we have liberated our sexuality, therefore we must now celebrate it and have as much sex as we want,’” says Jo, an ace policy worker in Australia. “Except ‘as much sex as we want’ is always lots of sex and not no sex, because then we are oppressed, or possibly repressed, and we’re either not being our true authentic selves, or we haven’t discovered this crucial side of ourselves that is our sexuality in relation to other people, or we haven’t grown up properly or awakened yet.”

Jo is far from the only one who feels this way. In college, the ace blogger Framboise (who writes as Radical Prude) was heavily influenced by sex-positive feminism and “talked endlessly with my feminist friends about desires and throwing off repression.”⁹ Throwing off repression is necessary, according to sex-positive feminism, because men control and shame women into not having sex. Shame can be so ingrained that it feels natural, so active work is required to overcome hesitation. Encouraging women to try whatever necessary to enjoy sex is praxis. None of this is wrong, but taken too far, Ellen Willis’s claim that conditioned sexual inhibition is “integral to a ‘normal’ woman’s identity” becomes the belief that sexual inhibition is the only reason women don’t want sex.

It is then the strong, brave women who think critically about shame, who break free from patriarchy and reclaim their pleasure. Enjoying sex is proof that someone has done the work of self-liberation while staying at home alone can feel like disappointing the activists who worked so hard to offer women other and more exciting options. When Framboise spoke of her ambivalence toward sex, other feminists reacted by suggesting that she try masturbation and kinkier sex to help her process, explore, and defeat this repression. Notably, a certain other option is rarely presented. “[I was] never once told, ‘Eh, maybe you just don’t want sex. That’s okay,’” Framboise writes. There was “little to no prominent affirmation of non-desire in sex positivity and a lot of suggestions on how to ‘fix’ yourself.”¹⁰ It was taken for granted that every woman would love sex, if only she could figure out how.

And if having sex liberates, then kinkier and more transgressive sex will be even more liberatory, both personally and politically. This belief is an inversion of a concept called the charmed circle, coined by anthropologist Gayle Rubin in her 1984 paper “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.”¹¹ The charmed circle illustrates the existence of a hierarchy of sex acts. Inside the charmed circle is everything that is socially acceptable, which traditionally means monogamous, married, vanilla, heterosexual sex in private. Outside these borders would be, for example, promiscuous sex, group sex, and so on. The charmed circle represented the conservative, rigid status quo.

Instead of realizing that the problem is the very existence of the charmed circle, liberals simply reversed it. Now, much of what was on the outside has become charmed and elevated. As University of Missouri gender studies professor Elisa Glick writes, the quest for a feminist sexuality free of male violence “is replaced by the quest for a politically incorrect sexuality that transgresses movement standards.”¹² In other words, the more “transgressive” the act, the more inherently liberated it is from old norms and old politics and the better it is, and the more liberated you are when you do it. New rules are put in place.

Finally, as this vision of sexual liberation dominated the feminist platform, not having sex—or only wanting vanilla sex or only having sex within the confines of monogamous, heterosexual relationships—becomes a sign that someone is allied with backward, conservative political beliefs. Sexuality, which is already a maturity narrative where sex leads to adulthood, then becomes a political maturity narrative as well, an evolution in thought and practice. An imaginary line runs from “immature,” both sexually and politically, to “fully realized.”

On one end is our old friend, the sexually repressed woman. She is heterosexual, probably a Republican, maybe a WASP. She is blonde and stays at home with her kids and clutches her pearls when she’s not clutching a cross. On the other end is a woman who is down for anything: threesomes, polyamory, kink, sex clubs. She has multiple orgasms and multiple partners and wants to abolish ICE.

All this creates pressure for feminists to deprogram ourselves by moving along the line from frigid and conservative to lusty and liberal. “In queer radical circles and in much of the left, the worlds in which I operate, there’s a widely held idea that one’s political radicalism can be attached to one’s sexual practices,” writes activist Yasmin Nair.¹³ “And too often, we hear of people coming out into radical queer communities, often at very young ages, being told that they can’t possibly be radical enough unless they’ve entered into polyamorous and orgiastic relationships. I’ve heard from too many people that they felt pressured, especially as young and vulnerable new activists, to be particular kinds of sexual beings and made to feel less political simply because a particular sex scene wasn’t really their scene.”

At first glance, the connection between political radicalism and sexuality seems to make sense. The politically conservative are often also sexually conservative, at least in their public personas. People who are gay or trans are less likely to support conservative politicians that oppose their rights, and the power of association is strong. Once again, just because two things are often paired does not mean they must be paired. Yet a new kind of sexual normativity has developed. Preferences are judged if they do not align with this correct—politically incorrect to conservatives—vision of female sexuality. Transgressive sex becomes a political act against patriarchy; its opposite, submission to patriarchy. Asexuality does not exist but is only the byproduct of male oppression. None of this is what the sex-positive feminists wanted. It’s doubtful they would have approved of this change or other changes, like the way that sex has been commodified and feminism has become a buzzword to sell products and television shows and personal brands. That hasn’t prevented good ideas from being co-opted and turned into material for manipulation.

The writer Lauren Jankowski knows this well. Lauren is a fantasy author, an adoptee, and a feminist. Today, she runs a website called Asexual Artists and is fierce in her resolve that one does not need to want sex to have a happy life, though at one point that belief had brought her to places of stark self-doubt.

After graduating from high school, Lauren took classes at the local community college. But what she really wanted was to be a novelist, so her father arranged for their next-door neighbor Chris to be her writing coach. Chris was a journalist, he and his wife were good friends with Lauren’s family, she had babysat for their son, and it appeared to be a good fit all around. The two met for a few hours every Sunday in his dining room, an area that was kept perpetually dark because the family had stopped cleaning the windows after birds kept flying into them. The other walls were covered with shelves packed with books, and one of the shelves held a fish tank. Lauren would look at the colorful fish swimming around, trapped in there, and think that she knew how they felt.

Lauren came out to Chris early on because it was the easiest way to explain why she wanted to write ace characters. For her, identifying as asexual was already a victory. In high school Lauren had been convinced that her disinterest in sex was caused by cancer or a brain tumor, going so far as to order blood tests to diagnose her mysterious condition. It was important that no one else go through that same anxiety and uncertainty.

The first thing Chris said was that asexuality wasn’t real. It was an idea made up by misogynistic men to keep women from being sexually liberated. Chris knew this because he was a worldly professional, a writer who could name-drop artists and liked to talk about Freud. She was his shy, anxious neighbor, a teenager who looked up to him and had attention deficit disorder to boot. Her opinion would not matter here.

Chris told Lauren to keep a dream journal and went through the entries with her, taking on the job of interpreting her dreams, which he claimed were all about her sublimated desire for sex. He edited her first novel, a fantasy murder-mystery about queer women, so that the main character was no longer asexual. Another character, who was both ace and aromantic, he turned into a villain, because evil was the only reason a woman wouldn’t want a relationship. “It felt like something that I loved had been tainted,” Lauren says, “and I didn’t understand why I felt that way and it didn’t really click until much later. But I’d remember going through those lines and thinking, ‘That doesn’t sound like me, but he’s happy so it must be good, and I must be good.’”

Soon, nearly every meeting included a mention of the downsides of asexuality. Either the ADD medication was to blame and Lauren wasn’t actually asexual, or she was and it was a great tragedy. Chris’s lectures had a showy logic to them, demonstrating step by step how asexuality would lead—inexorably—to the ruin of all Lauren’s ambitions. Being asexual means you can’t have passion, he’d say. If you don’t have passion, you can’t write. Therefore, if you don’t have sex, you can’t be a writer. Identifying as ace means you’re brainwashed by the patriarchy and you need to work harder to fight that. Otherwise, you can’t be a feminist, and you certainly can’t be an artist.

It must be said that Chris is almost too convenient. He is the literal voice of compulsory sexuality, the perfect avatar spewing warped beliefs. In one way, he is nothing new: men have long used shame to control women. The genius of Chris’s manipulation was not that he used his power as an older male authority figure. It was that he updated the tactic, directly connecting Lauren’s asexuality to her feminist politics and sense of identity, to her dream of being a writer and what she could hope to understand of life. He twisted the language of female sexual liberation to serve his own ends—which were revealed when he confessed to Lauren that he was in love with her. When Lauren didn’t reciprocate, he called her a lazy, talentless failure and stopped working with her. Chris took the idea that women should be free to pursue sex and turned it into the idea that women aren’t free unless they have sex—with him. Old male entitlement armed with a few new ideas, now hijacked in service of his libido. He is like Robin Thicke in “Blurred Lines”: Just let me liberate you. He, and the feminists that Framboise knew in college, and myself when I was twenty-two, are all wrong.

One more time: sex is political. The questions of who deserves pleasure and what is considered transgressive and the very definition of sex are political. The meaning of sex and feminism and liberation is different for poor women and women of color, disabled women, and women of faith. Wealthy women with many partners are more likely to be considered liberated, for example, while working-class women with many partners are more likely to be considered trashy. Queer women have to deal with homophobia, the stigma of hypersexuality, and fetishization. Trans women are shamed and their gender identities are denied. All this can make it difficult for women to express their sexualities at all.

That doesn’t mean every sexually indifferent woman is repressed. Patriarchal control is often responsible for women not enjoying sex. It is not always responsible. The truth of the gender inequality in sexual freedom, and the importance of teaching women to honor their sexual desires, has distorted into the belief that female sexual liberation only looks like one thing—and that’s the opposite of what women’s lives looked like before. Overcorrection doesn’t solve the problem. It only redistributes the shame and the stigma.

To believe Chris and the rhetoric that female sexual apathy is always caused by repression is to forget that there have always been many ways to want sex and have sex. It is to be a victim of what Rubin, the anthropologist, called “one of the most tenacious ideas about sex,” that “there is one best way to do it, and that everyone should do it that way.”¹⁴ This belief is wrong when only heterosexual, monogamous sex is accepted. It will still be wrong in a world where only heterosexual, monogamous sex is not accepted.

People may realize that they enjoy certain acts, but there is a difference between addressing desires that are already there (or exploring to see what you might like) and going searching for what must be there. It is true that many women are inhibited and perhaps do not yet know it. It is not true that inside everyone unwilling to try a threesome is a freak desperate to let her flag fly. Perhaps there is no flag.

The assumption of a ubiquitous, voracious libido ignores the reality of sexual variation. The idea that there always exists some secret sexual self to liberate only makes sense if you believe that we are all the same deep down—that everyone wants the same things, only some of us don’t know yet that we get off on being flogged. Because sexual variation exists, there is no universal vision of liberated sexuality. The personal is political, but what’s best for each person may be different. Liberated sexuality—that is, sexuality free from social shaming—can look like promiscuity or it can look like celibacy. And because liberated sexuality exists in many forms, there is no reason that being sexually conservative must mean being sexually repressed and no reason that being sexually conservative must prevent one’s political radicalism.

It is also troubling if the focus on personal liberation takes attention away from the true power of political organizing. Having transgressive sex can be individually powerful, but it rarely changes the greater structure of politics, law, and culture that continues to shame alternative lifestyles and sex (and enforce other forms of regressive norms) for everyone else. An emphasis on personal, transgressive sexuality can result in a situation where “queerness, for example, is revalued, [but] the political and economic conditions that are responsible for its devaluation remain unchallenged,”¹⁵ writes Glick, the University of Missouri scholar.

Political gatekeeping based on sexuality also alienates feminists for whom sex is not the priority. One such feminist is Rafia Zakaria, a Muslim lawyer and activist who first learned about sex-positive feminism in a graduate seminar. “In the competitiveness that graduate seminars breed, my classmates rambled on about threesomes, triumphant and unceremonious dumpings of emotionally attached lovers (who has time for that?) and in general lots and lots of sex,” she wrote in an essay for the New Republic.¹⁶ “Our smug professor, nose-pierced and wild-haired and duly sporting the scarves and baubles of the well-traveled, encouraged it all. The question of how and when sexual liberation had become not simply the centerpiece but the entire sum of liberation in general never came up.”

Zakaria did not fit in among her graduate school classmates, aware that she would be labeled as a prude, “a Muslim woman to save, to school in the possibilities of sexual liberation.”¹⁷ Hardly in need of saving or schooling, she instead rejected the idea that the free love ethos would be the most fulfilling for every woman and the idea that sexual liberation needed to be the keystone of female liberation, as if the two were one and the same. As a Muslim feminist, an identity that some foolishly see as incompatible, she found it hard to explain that she was opposed not to sexual pleasure, but to the way that it has been constructed and the stories about sex that have been taught, the hollow example of more sex as more liberation that sometimes overshadows other issues. It is not a coincidence that the types of sex-positive spaces Zakaria describes are often the domain of upper-class white women who are demographically similar to many of the feminists who ignited the discussion and who are often the loudest voices in the room. White upper-class women, less affected by racism and classism, are also less likely to see the need for a broader vision of feminism that emphasizes these concerns and, therefore, are more likely to center this narrow vision of sexual liberation as female liberation.

Sex was not the center of Zakaria’s feminism. Sex is not the center of my feminism either, and I do not have time for those who would say that this calls my feminism into question. I am no longer concerned with having a super-exciting sex life. Even if I put in the work to make my sex life the envy of all, that would mostly help me alone. Pursuing pleasure can be wonderful, but not having a super-exciting sex life does not make one a political failure, not when there is so much other work to be done, on issues of violence and economics and education and more. The woman who hates sex and may be repressed but who supports comprehensive sex education and pressures legislators to pass equal pay laws is a political success. The one who brags about using men but ignores the need for any greater action, less so.

Or, as Nair writes, “The revolution”—the one that helps all of us—“will not come on the tidal wave of your next multiple orgasm had with your seven partners on the floor of your communal living space. It will only happen if you have an actual plan for destroying systems of oppression and exploitation.”¹⁸ Sexual diversity of all kinds is important, and one’s personal sexuality does not create the limits of their political activism, in either direction.

Twenty-two years old, arrogant and reckless and also scared, I did not challenge the belief that a good feminist would not be apathetic to sex. I also clung to a related mutation of feminist values: that women should not only be able to do what men supposedly do but that they were superior if they could do what men do—which in the realm of sex meant hookups and sex only for physical pleasure. This (misguided) version of sexual liberation felt necessary, yet I berated myself for being so conservative and unable to change. I read The Ethical Slut and blog posts promising to teach me how to “hack myself into being polyamorous,” and filled out worksheets to “map my jealousy” and try to contain it or, better yet, obliterate it. I believed that my desire for monogamy and disinterest in casual sex were not preferences worthy of honoring, but political and moral failings that must be overcome. I thought I was weak and stupid.

So my friends and I went to a tiny bar in Pacific Beach, a neighborhood in San Diego. It had neon lights, a single television showing sports, and maybe four men total. I couldn’t bring myself to approach a single person and ended up insisting that we leave right now but at least get carne asada fries on the drive back to make up for a wasted evening.

The next morning, I logged onto OkCupid and messaged someone who periodically visited my profile page and seemed nice enough. I no longer remember his username. I no longer remember his actual name either, or anything about him other than that he was twenty-eight and had brown hair and was happy to go along when I explained what I wanted.

An hour later, the two of us were sitting outdoors at a strip mall near where I lived. He ate sushi from one of those clear plastic grocery containers. I ate nothing. He told me that he liked technology and occasionally thought of applying for a fellowship at Wired. I told him I had considered applying for the same fellowship. We drove in separate cars back to his place.

The detail that will always stand out has nothing to do with the man or having sex. Burned into my memory is the surprise I felt when I entered his house and it was filled with children. At least four of them, probably relatives, were piled on an enormous couch and watching a movie featuring an animated princess with long blonde hair. (A week later, I looked it up. It was Tangled.) Nobody so much as glanced at me, a small blessing for which I remain grateful.

The sex was painful and perfunctory and over quickly. I dressed and left, triumphant. Emotionally, I hadn’t felt anything—which, after all, had been the point. So my fears about Henry’s claims had been wrong! Sex without feeling was possible. So my fears about myself had been wrong too. I was not repressed, not clingy. I was all of those words I had hoped to embody: strong, individualistic, bold, and, dare I say it, empowered by my own apathy.

Falling into any female stereotype, like wanting emotional commitment before sex, felt like defeat, so the sole hookup of my life had been in pursuit of political growth, not for anything remotely close to pleasure. By going out and having sex “like a man,” I had destroyed the possibility of myself as the caricature of a sentimental damsel waiting for true love. For that assurance, having a one-night stand—a one-afternoon stand, really—seemed a small price to pay. For once, I was progressive enough.

When I told Henry, he said congratulations and that he was happy for me. Later that summer though, one night in the dark, he told me that part of him had felt weird about the whole thing. He had intuited, correctly, that in some ways my action was a punishment and a sign of distrust. And he felt weird because maybe some small part of him had wanted to be my first.

What I had called feminism was spite and fear disguised as performance. It was partly about verifying for myself what everyone else said was possible about sex separate from love. (Though, since I had not actually felt attracted to this man, it never reassured my fears about what being sexually attracted to others meant.) It was also about control and distance and ego and politics and insecurity.

I didn’t want Henry to be the first person I slept with. I was not sure I could handle it because I was afraid of falling too much in love with him. Denying him this was a way to assert power, to take away something that I could give and something that people seemed to think I should save. It was the one thing I had been told might hurt him and make him feel a little bit of the discomfort that I did.

My actions were the result of a funny reversal of the importance of sexual purity. I had thought myself feminist in rejecting outdated notions of waiting for love, but being motivated by disproving outdated notions shows that those expectations continue to exert influence. As anyone who has done reverse psychology on a child knows, acting against the status quo only because it is the status quo makes you easy to manipulate. As with the charmed circle, a reversal nevertheless holds power. The righteous woman once guarded her virginity jealously to prove that she’s pure. Now it can be more appealing to throw it away at first glance to prove she doesn’t believe in purity. She once hewed to gender stereotypes to prove she belonged; now she is valorized for having sex the way men stereotypically do, though maybe more men should have sex the way women supposedly do.

It would be disingenuous to blame feminism for my decision when my own personality flaws are a big factor. It would also be naive to think that certain strains of sex-positive feminism had nothing to do with my choice. I don’t regret losing my virginity in the way that I did; it did not harm me and I rarely think about it. The real price I have paid is not any trauma from this encounter, but that I feel such awkwardness around the topic of asexuality, a constant management of my own defensiveness because I know what many people believe about asexuality and, by extension, about me. The stakes of this new kind of sex normativity were never that young women might lose their virginity to strangers—I don’t care about that—but that women are presented with more rules for how to be instead of fewer. I am affected not by my one-night stand, but by the assumptions that led me to the one-night stand in the first place.

If asexuality, mine or anyone else’s, comes up in discussion, it must always be qualified. It feels like I can’t say “I’m ace” and let that stand on its own; I must always fight the impulse to tack on frenetic caveat after frenetic caveat.

ONE: Asexual isn’t the same as celibacy!

TWO: I’m asexual, but I’m also kinky!

THREE: Many aces are in relationships!

FOUR: I have a raunchy sense of humor, and I’m not judgmental!

I dislike both these caveats and the fact that I am tempted to use them. “I’m X but Y” always throws someone under the bus. “I’m a girl, but one of those cool girls” emphasizes the default view that girls are not cool. “I’m ace, but I’m kinky and not celibate” is an insult to those who are vanilla or celibate. “I’m ace, but not ace in the boring way that you’re thinking” is still a dart, a subtle reinforcement of all the lessons taught about what it means to be frigid. Celibacy can be eroticized because the supposed restraint implies a rich appetite underneath. After all, Eve was the woman who took a bite out of the apple. It can be interesting to be a lusty broad with a hearty appetite that she is denying. It is not interesting to have no appetite at all. That’s just nothingness.

None of this is to downplay the good work that sex-positive feminists have done. The lesson that women deserve sexual equality has always been worth championing. Thanks to these activists, sex education has become more comprehensive and LGBTQ+ and alternative families have become more acceptable.¹⁹ The sex-positive movement gave us lesbian-run erotica magazines like On Our Backs (its name a spoof of the anti-pornography magazine Off Our Backs) and the legendary woman-owned sex shop Good Vibrations. Sex can obviously be a source of positivity, and women have agency even in situations with tricky power dynamics.

Hard-won gains don’t mean that the work of fighting sexual inequality is finished. Beyond and even within these liberal corners of the world, old ideas hold; horny women are still feared and women receive plenty of pushback for speaking out. The article exploring the “sex recession” highlighted that, despite all the cheering over new sexual freedom, young people remain anxious and unsure about how best to proceed.²⁰ My most feminist, sexual friends tell me of instinctively slut-shaming themselves, though they also know they have done nothing worthly of shame.

“Feeling Myself” and Euphoria and every example I listed earlier have value. I agree with Sex and the City’s Samantha that everyone should wear whatever and blow whomever they want (if they want). Explicit lyrics and content about desire are not a problem, but that this type of content can dominate or be relentlessly pushed in young, liberal, queer spaces is. Dominance of any one idea can be harmful. It can skew the lesson.

So the other side needs attention as well. It isn’t necessary to follow in the exact steps of MacKinnon and Dworkin—I do not share their views on porn or BDSM or sex work—but their more critical attitude toward sex is worth revisiting. In fact, the shift may have already begun.

In 2015, the New York Times Magazine ran an article titled “The Return of the Sex Wars,” which discussed feminists argument over how to deal with campus sexual assault.²¹ Two years later, the #MeToo movement spurred more analysis over the dangers of sex and sexual aggression, with some claiming that the movement has gone too far and others, not far enough. Andrea Dworkin, once the figure women cited to say they were feminist, “but not like her,” is the latest figure to be appreciated anew. A collection of her essays was rereleased in 2019.

The important thing now, as Arizona State University gender studies scholar Breanne Fahs writes, is to integrate these perspectives, which represent what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the two kinds of freedom: positive and negative liberty, or “freedom to” and “freedom from.”²² Sex-positive feminists have focused on the freedom to: freedom to have sex, freedom to enjoy ourselves, freedom to do the things that men do without the unjust inhibition caused by a double standard. They were right. Sex-negative feminists were concerned with freedom from: freedom from being treated as sexual objects, freedom from feeling obligated to have sex to show that we are cool, freedom from the idea that sex is by default good. Transgressive personal sexuality shouldn’t be the price of entry to radical spaces and sexual liberation shouldn’t be the sum of women’s liberation. They were right too, but they received less attention.

All these perspectives deserve consideration. I, for one, am not pro-sex. I am not sex-positive or sex-negative. I am pro-pleasure, which does not need to include sex at all, and I am pro-sexual choice—real choice. It is not enough to say that everyone should only do what they want. That’s a bromide that anyone can parrot and it ignores the ways that society pressures us to want certain things. Back it up. Show us examples of powerful, enviable women who are openly indifferent to sex, secure in that decision, and not constantly challenged by others. Don’t reinforce the new charmed circle with comments about how polyamory is more evolved than monogamy, or look down on vanilla sex. Stop assuming that sexual behavior must be linked to political belief or that horniness is an interesting personality trait. That’s closer to what I mean by real choice.

I am what sexuality scholar Lisa Downing calls “sex-critical,”²³ aware of both women’s personal agency and the continuing inequalities of society. It is possible to encourage others to experiment while trusting them if they say sex doesn’t do anything for them. Someone shouldn’t be feted either because their sex acts are very kinky or because their number of partners is very low. It is cause for celebration whenever anyone is, to the best of their ability, making their own choices free from pressure—and also working to change the social and political structures that will let everyone else have that same sexual freedom, and freedom of other kinds, too.

All this is what I wish I had known at twenty-two, when I was jumpy with anxiety and unsure about myself, desperate to fit into the charmed circle and terrified of vulnerability. I got exactly what I wanted, I wrote in my journal right after my one-night stand. I was in control the entire time, and I still have Henry, whom I love dearly. I got what I wanted then, but, of course, the decision looks different now, years later. I wish now that I had wanted something else, something other than to always be in control, something other than to push Henry away, something other than to use sexuality to prove myself.