Part Two (of Three)

The light-hearted answer that I give is that it’s impossible to like sex as much as I do, be a girl, and not be a feminist. As a female who likes to have lots of fun, frequently, with a variety of partners, I need to be outspoken and confidant about the fact that I am doing exactly what I want. If I do not make it overwhelmingly clear that I am happy with my choices, the assumption is that I should be ashamed of them. I am a feminist because the world expects me to be a virgin, or at least monogamous, and I can't tolerate either of those options.

I think one of the main reasons people are so dismayed by my sex life is that Americans seldom engage with female sexual pleasure. In high school sex ed we learn all about scary sex. We’re told abstinence is safe, sex can lead to STDs, condoms are not always safe, sex can lead to pregnancy, and birth control is not always safe. We learn about not having heteronormative sex because male orgasms make kids. Since female orgasms are not necessary for procreation, and sex ed is about preventative (not pleasurable) sexuality, women disappear from our representation of sex. In this limited treatment of sex, men are actors and women are wombs. I further believe the acknowledgement of male pleasure is closely tied to the fact that all of my male friends have had orgasms, and the erasure of female pleasure contributes to many of my female friends’ being completely unaware of their sexuality. (SEE THIS ARTICLE POSTED TODAY http://community.feministing.com/2009/02/the-orgasm-gap.html). I will continue to be a feminist at least until all my friends start climaxing.

Another major obstruction to healthy sexuality is our culture’s association of someone’s self-worth with the number of sexual partners they have had. For men, worth is generally viewed as increasing with every additional partner, and for females the opposite is true. This is especially clear in our treatment of virginity, something for which men are ridiculed and females are rewarded (up to $3.8 million apparently). Right after I started having sex, I remember telling my mom that I was thinking about having sex in order to gauge her reaction. She urged me to wait longer, saying “if you start having sex now, you’ll probably sleep with other people before you get married, and when you finally do find the right person you’ll feel bad about that.” A few weeks ago I emailed my mom and suggested the “performative model” for understanding sex, presented in Valenti’s Yes Means Yes. In this model, I explained, virgins are analogous to amateur musicians with lofty dreams but little skill, practice makes perfect, and new partners present exciting avenues for growth. I need to be a feminist because not everyone knows that they have the option to claim their number, rather than letting it own them.

These are some of the things I mention when I talk about feminism. Lots of people, male and female, have never questioned their understanding of gender and sexuality before and they find doing so is really interesting. Many will even add additional reasons to the why I’m a feminist list, whether or not they have had experience with feminism before our conversation. bell hooks was very right when she suggested that most people do not identify as feminists simply because they are unaware of what it means.