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That
Is Not It
At All,
That Is Not What
I Meant At All
--a clarification by Sexa
Rubelucia--
Imprecision of
language may not, in truth, be the cause of all the world's problems,
but it is
certainly the device by which they are perpetuated.
And that's why today I find it necessary to
address the word promiscuity as it
relates to my message on this site concerning feminism, and to this
site's
philosophy in general.
In
the process
of internet-stalking myself (oh, like you don't do it too) and even
sometimes
in the process of in-person conversation, I've discovered that a lot of
people
read this site's brand of feminism, and my feminist philosophy in
particular,
as "promiscuity as feminism." Because
a campaign of individual correction seems
likely to be
inefficient, let me correct the assertion as a whole, rather than
yelling at
each person one by one.
Quite
simply,
you’re an idiot. I
have never defined
promiscuity as feminism. If
any of the
people making such an accusation had actually bothered to read my
essays rather
than just seeing photos of a half-naked chick and essays that mention
sex and
assuming "Cock-Happy CumWhore For Feminism!" they'd know that calling
1585 "promiscuity as feminism" is just blatantly incorrect and
betrays them to be both stupid and an asshole.
Let's review our
brief but glorious bibliography, shall we?
In Female Arrogance, I talked
about the
power of women who are Hot and also Geniuses.
The point of the essay was to debunk the idea that
female intelligence
and female physical beauty are somehow two opposed or mutually
exclusive
entities, as per the ingrained assumption (deny it as much as you want)
in our
culture. I
mentioned promiscuity, I
believe, in light of my desire to grow up to be the modern female Lord
Byron. Lord Byron
was a big slutty,
slutty ho. He was also a genius and the first rock star. I was writing about
creating a female
intellectual rock star archetype, which, oh source of my despair, does
not yet
exist (or didn't before me, anyway).
Therefore, I used the existing male rock star
archetype as a model, and
Byron is the Ideal Form of rock star.
Male rock stars are big whores, so it follows that
promiscuity would
come up when addressing such a topic.
But
if I'd meant
that promiscuity will empower women;
if promiscuity in
particular,
were among the characteristics of the male rock star I thought most
necessary
for women to emulate in creating a new archetype, you know what I would
have
done? I would have
come right out and
said it. It's not difficult to get to promiscuity
from the subject of rock star.
Yes,
I talked a
lot about hotness.
Yes, I do believe hotness
to be a quality important to feminism, one capable of
empowering women. But
hot and promiscuous
are not anything close to synonyms.
I did make some points in that essay about geniuses
generally being people who’ve had a lot of sex, because that
gives them a
greater understanding of the world and more material about which to
make art,
but I never stated that as one of the criteria for the female archetype
I
espouse. And having a lot of sex is not even the
correct definition of
promiscuity.
In
short, if
you’re reading “promiscuity as feminism”
from this essay, you’re assuming hot
to be a synonym for promiscuous,
which means you don’t
actually know what promiscuous means, and you just like using words
with lots
of syllables because you think they make you sound smart. This makes you no
different from the girl I
know who spent a semester living in Spain and kept telling
people she was
“excitada” about everything, not knowing
“excitada” means aroused
rather than excited. People who assumed she was “promiscuous”
were
in fact using the word correctly. You’re
just being stupid.
But
I’ll give
you the benefit of the doubt and move on to the next essay.
Perhaps you
gathered this conclusion from “Kinky Sex for Social
Justice,” in which I argued
for female sexual submission and/or masochism as an empowering,
feminist act
that is in some cases actually more
empowering, and more challenging to normative gender roles, than female
dominance. I used a
great big
overarching metaphor about Morrissey and the Smiths.
It was pretty awesome.
I’m not cliff-noting you further; go read
it.
Now,
I have
little to say here because I have no earthly clue
how you could derive the thesis “feminism as
promiscuity” from
this essay, unless you just assume that this is the thesis of any woman writing about feminism in a
sex-positive context, and from there I return to my point
that you’re just
being stupid. The
essay said absolutely
nothing about quantity of partners, how one should choose those
partners, how
well one should know one’s partners, or any
other choice that could conceivably be thought to have anything to do
with
promiscuity. It
had to do with the
larger sociopolitical implications of particular sex acts and fantasies. It had to do with kink as
a positive
expression or mode of female empowerment.
Anyone who assumes from this essay that
I’m espousing feminism as
promiscuity or vice versa is
assuming kinky to mean promiscuous. Once again, this
means you
don’t actually know what promiscuous
means, and
you’re using the word because
it makes you look super cool to all your super cool Internet friends. Or, worse, it
means that
you do know what promiscuity
actually means,
and you’re purposely
using it incorrectly, in the same way
that in high
school you used to talk about how you hated kids with whom you were
actually,
secretly friends, because talking about how much you hated them gave
you
something to say.
Or
maybe you
located this thesis in my most recent essay “A Defense of
Trendy
Bisexuality.” This
essay was about
making out or having sex with girls in part to please or turn on a male
third
party—an action often, and wrongly, considered promiscuous. But what that essay was
really about, if you
actually read it and didn’t just look at the pictures, was
the fact that
anti-sex Academic Feminism vilifies male sexual pleasure, particularly
female
sexuality in which a woman is turned on by giving her male partner
pleasure,
calling this aspect of sexuality demeaning and disempowering. Sure, the essay was about
girls making out
with other girls, but if you scratch that shiny surface what really
matters is
that it exposed one more way in which Academic Feminism recreates
exactly the
kind of inequality and hypocrisy against which it supposedly rails. If you understood this
thesis and still read
this essay as “promiscuity as feminism,” then
you’re once again assuming sex-positivism
to mean promiscuity, and
are one of those miserable people who secretly despises everyone you
fuck for
the simple fact that they’re willing to fuck you. And even if you just
looked at the pictures,
and thought “she wrote an essay glorifying girls making out
with girls to get
guys off: Promiscuity as Feminism!”, you still
don’t understand the word you’re using.
But
in truth,
you probably took that conclusion from my sprawling third essay,
“Men are the
New Women,” which expanded upon Grammaticus’s essay
tearing apart Glamour columnist
“Jake.” “Men
Are the New Women” was about how the
sensitive-boy trend in which men believe that not
having sex with someone shows that you respect them is in fact
just the new misogyny. It
was about how
equality between the sexes has turned into everyone
is equally terrified and disempowered.
It had to do with the rampant loathing of sex and
sexuality that
permeates even the most seemingly sex-saturated aspects of our culture. And yes, it was all over
the place. I adore
this essay and I’m also very much not
happy with it; at some point I will go back and attempt to fashion it
into
something clearer and stronger that does the bits of it that happen to
be the
most beautiful prose I’ve ever written in a non-fiction
medium justice. So
if you’re getting your assumption from
this essay, it’s possible you’re not an asshole. You’re just not
the smartest condom in the
pack.
Yes,
I glorify
sex. I glorify sex
all over the
place. I glorify
sex like a big, sexy
sex-glorifier. You
know what? It’s
about fucking time. Sex,
particularly sex had and enjoyed by
women, is terribly and constantly vilified.
I think it’s time it was glorified a bit. Yes, I write about
one-night stands I’ve
had. I write about
the guy I fucked only
because of the books in his bookcase. I allude to sex in dive
bar
bathrooms.
You’d be right if you said I support the idea of feminism as the enjoyment of sex. Well, no, actually, you
wouldn’t, because
I don’t claim to define feminism
any more than I think I can
define love or art
or America.
There are words that have grown too big for a single
philosopher, too
meaningful to be possessed by one voice. But you
wouldn’t be
misguided in
assuming that I believe sexual enjoyment to be important to the
empowerment of
women.
So
then, you’d
say, well, you write about casual sex, about sex with multiple partners
at
once, or with many different partners, or with people you
don’t know well, as
many of your examples of the importance of sexual enjoyment. And you do write about
feminism a whole hell
of a lot. Therefore,
isn’t your point in
fact promiscuity as feminism?
Promiscuity is
defined by Oxford primarily via
the adjective
“indiscriminate.”
One of the examples
of its use is “promiscuous
sexual union,” but the definition itself does not in fact
include a mention of
sex. So
we’re already dealing with the
dangers and consequences of imprecision of language by dealing with a
popularized colloquialism a little deviated from proper usage through
popular
understanding. Promiscuous is used by people who want to just say slutty,
but also want everyone to understand that they’re an intellectual talking about sex, which
makes it totally okay to call hot
girls whores because they’re hot.
But what promiscuous
and its shameless kid sister slutty
really mean is right there in Oxford:
It’s not whether you wear short skirts or
high heels or talk about sex
in public or what kind of photos you post on MySpace or whether you
take off
your clothes in bars. It
is not about
whether you suck copious cock in public bathrooms in the tradition of
Frank O’Hara
or only have slow, gentle sex with your husband with the lights off in
the
missionary position. It
is not about
whether or not you enjoy sex and whether or not you tell people about
it. It is not about
whether you equate sex with
love, or divorce sex from love. It
has
nothing to do with whatever relationship you locate or engineer between
sex and
love. It has only
to do with decision,
or rather, lack thereof. A promiscuous
person has sex with whomever. That’s what indiscriminate means: not discriminating,
without choice. So
to parse your phrase correctly, oh
internet prosecutors, what you’re saying is that I am defining feminism as the act of having sex with
absolutely anyone
available.
Find
me a
fucking sentence where I say that. Go on.
I’ll wait.
I
have much more
of a problem than you would think with the way in which the word
“slutty” has
been “reclaimed” by third-wave feminism, and
precision of language is the issue
on which that problem centers. Actually,
all of my issues with
third-wave
feminism pretty much have to do with its wild and irresponsible use of
extremely powerful language. The
only
word more certain to hit a woman like a fist than slut
is fat, and yet
third wave feminism thinks it can just merrily take both of these and
turn them
positive by sheer force of smiley-crocheted vegan positivism. That’s a
beautiful fantasy, but any woman who
self-identifies with either of these words is cringing on the inside,
and walks
around with repressed self-loathing piling up like constipation. Cultural significance is
very, very, very
large and you, my well meaning, BBW, ethical-slut friends, are very,
very, very
small in comparison. Telling
a woman
she’s fat is just telling a woman
she’s
fat, just like it fucking sounds before you enact a
translation service on
it, so take your hands from behind your back and put these large,
dangerous,
and largely immutable concepts right back where you found them.
It
is nice to think that
“slut” can mean
something positive. It is nice
to
think that fat can just be
re-appropriated and come to mean “awesome.”
It’s very nice.
It’s also wrong,
and that wrongness will keep you up at night just like it always does
when you
lie to yourself. For
decades now, the
word slut has been a derogatory
term,
an intended punch in the gut, and when a woman tries blithely to say
that she’s
happy to be a slut, each time she invokes the word the weight of those
decades
of significance will come crashing down on her, and she will end up
smiling too
hard, and wearing her feminism in brittle defensiveness, not true
empowerment.
So
if you want
people to stop insulting you, stop acting like you’re ok with
it. Don’t
say “well, people call me dumb, so I’m
going to decide that it’s awesome to be dumb.” Instead, say “I
am not dumb, and the
people who call me dumb are
assholes, and I will call them out on it, and make noise about the
total
asshole injustice of it every single time
until it stops” (unless you actually are dumb, in which
case, become smart first, and then say that).
When
people call
you a slut, it’s no different.
I
respect, and have great empathy for, women who have been called sluts
all their
lives and so finally, in powerful defiance and frustration, decide to
co-opt
the term and use it proudly. But
I think
they’re selling themselves short, and validating the people
who insult
them. I think
instead we should all
vigilantly point out the idiocy of people who call us promiscuous,
until those
people are so inundated by our counter-insults that they slink the hell
off to
go have their abstinence balls, or drink alone with their secret porn
stash, or
whatever else it is that they do.
I
do not self-identify as promiscuous, nor do I consider
the many sexy, highly
sexual, and very sexually active women I know to be promiscuous. I know women who have more
sex than the
people who call these essays promiscuous
could ever dream of having, and I
do
not for a second consider those women sluts.
Promiscuous means
having sex
without good reason, or rather, without reason at all; indiscriminate;
sex
because it’s there; sex without thought, without choice.
The
whole point of the exuberant
glorification of
casual sex in “Men are the New Women” was to
demonstrate the way in which
casual sex is not necessarily promiscuous sex. I was writing
specifically about
the reasons I have sex other than because
I’m in love (not that that wasn’t one
reason I
mentioned). I’ve
had sex for many, many
different reasons, but there always was a
reason. There’s
always been discernment when
I’ve had a one-night
stand, and the same goes for the many sexy women I know who choose, for a variety of reasons that
would baffle these prosecutors’ tiny minds, to have all
manner of sexual
relations. My point
was that sex outside
of a committed, monogamous relationship—sex itself, isolated
from
justification—is valuable and deeply meaningful, and that the
meaning of sex,
the experience of sex, exists outside of the meaning of the
relationship you
may or may not have with a particular sexual partner.
This
does not
make me promiscuous, and the assumption that it does demonstrates the
insidious
loathing of sex, particularly of sexual women, still absolutely
prevalent in
our culture. You
might be asking, Why is
this topic worth an essay?
As
an
organization that claims sexual choice should not be something by which
people
are judged, you sure talk about sex a lot.
This accusation goes hand in hand with that of the
individuals who claim
we’re doing the exact same thing as the people we claim to
oppose—those who say
everyone who has sex is bad, and everyone who doesn’t have
sex, good. Certain
opponents claim that we’re judging
people, and prescribing behavior in the exact same way, by mandating
sexual
libertinism. But
this accusation is also
wrong. The reason
why we write about sex
constantly is not because we think
the Only Way of Good and Right is to Fuck Everyone All of the Time. There’s no
particular sexual choice, in terms
of action, that we believe to be
inherently better than any other.
We
would love to not have to write
about
sex at all (or religion, for that matter).
We’d love to live in a society so
enlightened, so tolerant, and so
mature, that no one questioned or tried to mandate anyone
else’s sexual
choice. But until
such a utopia exists,
we’ll keep yelling about what’s wrong, because
someone’s got to do it.
And
what’s wrong
is that any mention of sex that is
not a tirade or warning against it is immediately read as a glorification of promiscuity. This mistake is a
classifiable logical
fallacy; that of affirming the consequent. I make the statement
“sex is not inherently
bad,” and you assume that by “sex is not inherently
bad,” I mean “promiscuity
is the answer.” Now,
it is true that if
I meant, “promiscuity is the answer,” I would also have to mean, “sex
is not inherently bad.”
But
by inferring the first (“promiscuity is the
answer”) from the second (“sex is
not inherently bad”), you’re affirming
the consequent: inferring
from
something that very obviously would be
implied in a larger conclusion that I must be drawing that larger
conclusion,
when there is in fact no trace of the larger conclusion. This is like assuming that
when I say, “I’m an
American,” I must also mean, “I am George W.
Bush,” because if I was, in fact,
George W. Bush, the statement “I’m an
American” would also be true.
If
you have not
yet figured this out from the pictures, I’m not George W.
Bush.
But the people
enacting this logical fallacy aren’t even really worried
about
promiscuity. If promiscuity actually mattered to them,
they would know what the fucking word means.
So
let’s be
clear: By promiscuous,
you mean sexual, or maybe openly
sexual. Fine. Even if you corrected your
use of language,
you’d still be wrong. I
don’t think
women have to be sexual, highly sexual, or openly sexual, in order to
be
powerful or efficacious feminists.
I
know plenty of women who have very little sex who are fabulous,
brilliant,
empowered Hot Geniuses. I
don’t write
about sex because I think everyone needs to be having lots and lots of
sex all
the time. I
don’t particularly care if
you have sex, how much sex you have, or what kind of sex it is, as long
as
you’re enjoying it. But
I do care very,
very fiercely, whether or not you are judged or stigmatized for that
sex. And women who
have a lot of sex are still
considered promiscuous. And promiscuous
in its pervasive, if consciously ignored, correct meaning means indiscriminate.
And indiscriminate means
not making choices. And not
making choices sounds a whole lot like not
thinking. And
not thinking means unintelligent.
And so women
who have a lot of sex, however much you may try to deny it, are still
assumed
by most people, Liberal and Conservative
alike, to be stupid.
And
if a woman
who has a lot of sex is considered
to
be completely stupid, then a woman
who has some sex must be
considered
to be somewhat stupid. And a woman who has any sex is therefore stupider than a
woman who doesn’t have sex at all. And
so until my intelligence is not equated with how much sex I choose to
have or
how many partners I chose to have it with, I will keep telling you
about my one
night stands in beautiful and complex language, I will keep posting
highly
sexualized photos of myself next to logically rigorous tirades, and I
will keep yelling about sex as though it were
the
most important thing in the goddamn world.
This is not just about me, and this is not just
about other women who
happen to like to have a lot of sex. This
is about every single sexually active
woman. As
long as “some sex” means “stupider
than no sex,” championing sex as something that intelligent
women do is an action
for the good of every woman who wants to have sex at all.
I
have heard
from various sources the idea that feminism fucks itself over with its
obsession with sex; perpetuating the very image it supposedly seeks to
dissipate. I’ve
been told that if we all
stopped talking about sex, sex wouldn’t be such a big deal. I’ve been told
to turn the other cheek, but I
also know that one thing on which every warring sect of feminism can
agree is
that your silence will neither empower nor protect you. So I say, stop calling me a
slut, and I’ll
stop calling you stupid.
THE END
of
That Is Not It At
All...
...but Sexa Rubelucia will return
in
I'm Done with Bust!
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