On Sex Positivity, Liberation, & Enlightenment
“It’s the air that I breathe.”
When I was around 24, 1 year after moving to London from Yorkshire, my tinder profile was performing well. And although I was always open to the idea of having a romantic partner, there were times when lightning hadn’t struck me with any of the people I was dating. The desire for sexual variety was programmed into me.
Colleagues would ask me about the dates I’d been on recently and noticed that there was a rota of lucky ladies that often was in the double figures. This wasn’t met with disgust but with glee as I shared what I liked about and did with these girls. I hadn’t had many girlfriends at that point, having been to 2 all-boys schools, which both co-incidentally started accepting girls only in my last 2 years in each school. During university I was in a long distance monogamous relationship the whole time. And early adventures on tinder were so frustratingly lacking in matches that I even wrote to support@tinder.com to check if the platform was legitimate and working as described. Yes I know.
I was so enjoying the adjustment into London life that I didn’t know that my behaviour was atypical. And I also didn’t know that I’d reached what I came to call the 2nd of 3 stages of sexual enlightenment.
In fact my sex positivity got me into trouble with Eolanda when I went through a period of craving other women. I disgusted myself at how much I was discussing sex with my friends.
Another time chat about sex got me into trouble was with an employer when we spent a day doing internal presentations in a Marketing offsite in a hotel conference space in Windsor. There were drinks afterwards being paid for by the company so everyone was fairly merry when we took taxis back to Eton Riverside station. I was in a cab with 2 directors and discussing my second job as a singer in the classical music scene in London.
“Are you good?” one director asked.
“Well they keep paying me so I suppose somebody thinks so! I feel guilty though because I never had tutoring and just rock up certain evenings and weekends after working my nine to five job with you guys. And I never practice at home on dexterity, range, quality, nor learning a repertoire.”
“Why don’t you practice?” asked the other Director.
“Well groups do rehearse together in the hour leading up to the gig. But I don’t alone at home I suppose for the same reason I feel awkward eating meat on the tube. I’m just wary about annoying people. Everyone’s so tightly packed together in London you’re never more than six metres away from someone.”
“No that’s rats.”
“Same difference,” I said. “Anyway so yeah, no public carnism, no unrefined singing, and no loud sex.”
The cab went as quiet as my neighbours wished I would be when smashing through my complete collection of Mozart piano sonatas. We reached the train station where I was able to detach myself and talk instead to colleagues at my level of seniority. The next day I was summoned into a meeting with HR and they issued me a letter of employment termination. Of course the wording on such things says “unsatisfactory performance” or “not meeting expectations” and in the UK you are fairly unmovable from a position after the 2 year mark. But at this point they could fire me without a performance improvement plan or similar. I went to work for a competitor who allowed a bit more self-expression, as well as dogs in the office.
I am compelled to offer some definitions so that we might better navigate my references to different terms and relationship models:
Sexual Positivity: seeing sex as not always useless, dirty, corrupting, nor coercive. Not being held back from sex by cultural societal religious reasons or aspersions, viewing sex as healthy, natural, and beneficial. Not shaming oneself or others for wanting sex, having lots of sex, having no sex, having kinks, being queer, and being asexual.
Sexual liberation: being able to isolate sex from romance as a discreet atomised goal of an interaction separate from romance (If you can pursue and enjoy sex with someone you otherwise don’t like then you are liberated).
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from naplab.com
Sexual Enlightenment: the incorporation of sexuality into one’s other personas. The 3 stages of sexual enlightenment explained:
1st Stage — The enablement of sex as a regularly available option in one’s weekly schedule. This stage is normally enabled by having a regular partner and normally between the ages of 14 and 18. This is a period of some discovery and finding comfort association with things hitherto heard and spoken of but not yet experienced.
2nd Stage — The categorisation of casual sexual encounter to a mutually welcome and beneficial extension of social interaction. This stage befalls an individual of moderate sexual experience whilst seeing multiple partners in parallel. In women this is a hallmark particularly of innate or newfound sexual positivity — regarding sexual acts as being out of reach from the trappings of romantic obligations and further untethered from the biological, societal, religious and cultural historical narratives on sex which traditionally surround it. It also covers engaging in frequent casual sex to explore sexual compatibility to inform whether people are good long term partners. This stage can also be a period of sexual discovery when individuals discover their and others’ kinks such as public sex, anal sex, sex toys and waterworks.
3rd Stage — The assumption of sexuality into a primary persona, where sex is no longer an extension to relationships with other people, but a core element of one’s being (a tent pole in the tent analogy). Hallmarks are the further exploration of kinks, regular group sex, and celebrating the philosophy, theory, psychology and art of sex. It can remove the mysticism around sex and approach it with deliberation and sobriety but access levels of maturity around it that challenge norms. The attendance of adult play parties and frequent engagement with like-minded couples and singles are par for the course. For some it can mean incorporating sex into a work persona such as prostitution and adult performance.
To the very sexually liberal, sex can be a huge part of their lives but from another angle it can be quite throwaway. The paradox is that to non mono people, sex is everything but sex is nothing. They don’t enter exclusivity periods because they value sex with others so much. But they are not affected by their partner having sex which might make them come across as sociopathic. On a personal level, so much sex and then more explorative sex such as group play and kink-based sex become so de rigueur that individual encounters are low stakes and easy cum, easy go.
This can make it incredibly frustrating when propositioning sex to the uninitiated who place a lot of weight on it and need many more re-assurances that it will be worth the investment, primarily along the veins of adequate safety, pleasure, aftercare, and privacy. Receiving a “no, thanks” in these situations is humiliating and can be taken very personally, because we suspect that there is someone that the person we are propositioning would say “yes” to, but it’s not us. But, as we will come to see with Dismissives’ approach to managing intimacy, the problem isn’t our being unable to make a strong pitch, the problem is normally them being unable to recognise a strong pitch, and being overridden by unfounded fears.
My collaborator Tantric Eric (tantriceric.com) told me about this analogy using an offer of tea to represent an offer of sex, and how the recipient is permitted to say “no” to a proposal which is correct. However our formulation of such a negative stance without being able to state reasons why, is intellectually lacking. This incongruence is at best self-unaware, and at worst dishonest. We have reasons for doing and not doing everything. Our inability to recognise that is a failure in self-awareness, our inability to understand that is a failure in our intelligence, and their inability to communicate those reasons is a failure in our self-sureness. We should always be able to communicate our reasons for wanting or not wanting sex. Giving the conclusion and not the reasons can be especially damaging to sexually liberal individuals with fiercly logical brains, of which I am one. I have been hurt many times by even the lightest of proposals to women that I had been sexually active with mere days before the rejection. A sexually active male’s most common reason for not opting for sex is normally: “I need to save my strength for a date later tonight”. Followed by “I haven’t washed since the last girl I was inside”. They are being explicit, but honest, and it hurts not to be met with the same frankness.
Furthermore the offering tea analogy is a terrible one because tea is quite meh. Enjoying it together involves but 1 giver and 1 receiver, unlike sex, unlike a course of rhubarb and custard. I’ll explain.
The 3 course meal model of intimate social reinteractions is a corker. The ‘starter course’ is the small talk where friends catch up on everything that needs catching up on since last they were together. The ‘main course’ is the core activity which the friends end up doing together on that particular day, even if that just means talking about podcasts, friends, philosophy, dating, or culture on a deeper level. The ‘dessert course’ is the sex.
Some meet-ups don’t involve starters. Some meetups don’t involve dessert. But a meal without a main course is a little shallow and unfulfilling. It’s possible, but rare.
The ‘rhubarb and custard’ analogy is a delicious upgrade on the tea or no tea analogy. Let’s imagine that the dessert (sex with your friend) is a wholesome serving of rhubarb and custard. One person is in charge of bringing the rhubarb and the other the custard so both can benefit from the beautiful marriage of bitter garden root and sweet eggy wonderfood. One can’t have rhubarb on its own as it’s too tart. One can’t have custard on its own as that’s like having a bowl of gravy. So if one party fails to bring their prescribed component then all parties are stuck. And so all parties have reason to be annoyed at the lack of complimentary ingredients that should have made for a good night, especially if that’s what terms were agreed through words or assumed through patterning.
When a friend revokes the supplication of custard in a relationship built on those terms, there’s a violation in the assumed or discussed contract, and so the rhubarb bringer’s unspoken minimums have been reached and that is a legitimate reason to apply some distance.
The way to become more sexually liberated is to have more sex with more people. Fleeting intimate moments aside, it would be inconceivable to fall in love with all 6 people we have first dates with in the last month. Some recognise the pursuit of multiple encounters as a cycle of novelty chasing, where the excitement lies in the newness rather than in the depth of any bond. But that’s the point of sexual liberation — liberating sex from emotional packaging, like watching porn but more living it, the thrill of the physical and carnal. The same reason we can have favourite meals, but would go mad if we didn’t branch out and try the new additions to the menu. Moreover, emotional detachment teaches a necessary shield. The repetition of intimacy without commitment may begin to feel fruitless, a series of gestures without meaning, but sexual liberation anchors us in the arena that hooking up — that is sex outside of courting prospective or making love with existing partners — is just sex.
