The feminist future of straight sex: Lesbian sex culture

Sex in the future is going to get a lot more queer-looking for straight people, as the normalization of consent culture gradually creates safer spaces for women to openly express our sexuality, and this progress will resemble current shifts in the queer sex community.

When I was an undergrad back in the Pleistocene era, I took a course on Sex, Values, and Human Nature, taught by a professor with joint appointments in Biology, Philosophy, and Women, Gender & Sexuality.

The first exercise we did on day one was to write two columns, one for acts that are “really sex,” and the other for acts that are “not really sex.” Then we discussed the results as a 120-person lecture hall for about forty minutes of eliciting and confronting everyone’s “common sense,” which was a blast. We all went home with the assigned reading of Are We Having Sex Now Or What? by Greta Christina. As it happens, I knew of her from being an avid reader and dabbling writer in the atheist blogosphere, and had read that particular post already, so had the inside track—and I was chuffed to see her writing being cited in a college class!

What does (and doesn't) count as sex?

After I stopped blogging, I kept arguing on the internet for a while, and I would sometimes link that article. And a strange thing happened over the years: searching for the title used to return Greta Christina’s article as the top result, but since then she has fallen farther and farther down the page as other sources cite her and become paradoxically more relevant than the source itself (at least to Google). To me, this says that the idea itself is becoming gradually more embedded in our cultural consciousness, causing the source to slowly lose relevance (in a momentary and Google-focused sense) as the discourse moves forward.

Greta’s story recounts some of her sexual experiences with regard to the increasing difficulty she had in quantifying them, trying to determine if this or that act “counts” as “a time you had sex.” This problem was compounded by the intricacies of lesbian sex, group sex scenarios, and sex work. She ultimately concludes that “being sexual” is both more important and more fun to focus on than the quotidian matter of whether it “truly counts,” and that the numbers don’t matter anyway.

But to a lot of people, they do. If you’re really good at holding your nose, you can descend into some pretty vile corners of the internet and find men splitting the very finest of hairs, not only on what’s gay, but on what even counts at all. This is not a valuable part of the discussion, so I won’t dwell on it with citations (I stopped lurking in right-wing hate spaces for a reason), but the fact that it happens is important to note. Even “normie” straight men do this, albeit to a somewhat less toxic degree.

As more people have this discussion with themselves, interrogate these values over time, and see how different ideas and dynamics play out in their experience, more people will come to find that the best way to be intimate with someone is to stop worrying about what’s “godly” or what “counts,” and start working on connecting with each other for mutually satisfying experiences. You just can’t do that without challenging patriarchal values on a fundamental level, because sex and our attitudes towards it are, respectively, ontologically and psychologically central to who we are in the first place. And challenging them in this way—deconstructing and dismantling, instead of merely flipping them around—will basically involve doing some very similar work to what queer women, nonbinary people, and many trans men have been doing for decades already. (Gay men have a much more complicated relationship to patriarchy, especially gay trans men, and can’t be characterized so broadly in my experience.)

Safe spaces and sexual openness

One of the local BDSM dungeons in my city hosts a regular sort of “social night,” a free night when everyone but cisgender men is encouraged to attend a combination educational presentation and open play session. For those not in the know who also might be reticent to read too much into something, let me be clear: an "open play session" means that space is set aside so that anyone there may approach anyone else for kink and/or sex acts (a.k.a., "play"). The reason cisgender men are excluded is because they routinely cross boundaries that other genders do not. Trans men, trans women, nonbinary people of all stripes, and cis women all tend to respect the rules of the space and the boundaries of others, regularly enough for this type of thing to be possible and also a safe and consent-forward space.

And before anyone jumps down my throat about "reverse sexism," please be advised that cis men are not explicitly barred from attendance, they are merely strongly encouraged to attend other free events. The occasional dude who shows up is, shall we say, warmly welcomed by a small handful of self-appointed sapphics who will happily discuss gender and consent with him until his character reveals itself, and then he is treated accordingly: if he can play Look Don't Touch until or unless someone clearly consents to his involvement, then hooray. If he can't see two people touch without whining, "Why not me too?," then the door's right there.

Anyway, the point is that many women are a lot more openly sexual when we feel it is safe to be so open. (Some women are just ace, or demi, or even modest, and that’s all valid and fine. I’m talking about female sexuality in the broadest of strokes here.) In fact, when women feel safe and are attracted enough, we are equally as interested in casual sex as men. The breakdown of why is fascinating. Terri D. Conley wrote a paper on four studies about or based on the Clark & Hatfield Sexual Proposition research, and Yes Means Yes has an excellent writeup of Conley’s paper (the paper itself is behind a paywall).

When you ask a man about being approached by a random woman, he imagines Jennifer Lopez levels of hotness being just offered to him. When you ask a woman about being approached by a random man, she imagines someone more like Carrot Top. If you control for the relative attractiveness of random initiators, or add in factors like “you know he’s good in bed,” then the difference disappears. The difference shows up because men and women both assume a random woman will be good in bed and safe, but women assume random men propositioning them will be bad in bed and unsafe. So we don’t see this openness in everyday life, because everyday life is not safe for women to be so sexually open.

But in spaces where consent is mandatory and enforced, it’s a lot safer. I go to orgies pretty regularly, and the general level of safety is very different in gay male spaces, as compared to dyke and trans spaces. In gay male spaces, the male gaze is not just normalized but expected, beyond even what you can legally say in public. If you look up “cruising etiquette for gay male spaces,” you’ll find a lot of nice talk about establishing consent, either verbally or nonverbally, and checking in, and everything you’d expect—but that’s on paper, and in practice, things are more “loosey-goosey.” I know some elder trans women who were socialized into gay male spaces during their youth and they’ve reported to me that those “rules” are usually just talk.

In dyke and trans spaces, we actually enforce them. At the first orgy I went to, I was assaulted by someone who groped me from behind without so much as speaking a word or making a half-second of eye contact. When I reported it to the orgynizers, she was banned, because they went to great lengths at the start of the event to emphasize the importance of consent, and this lady flagrantly disregarded their exhortation. She and I eventually reconciled, but she felt bad about the ban and we haven’t kept in touch. Six months after that, I finally felt healed and safe enough to start walking around topless with “Free to play!” written in permanent marker on my breasts.

The point is that lack of safety is genuinely the reason for a lot of sexual reservation among women. A safe and consent-forward space promotes healing and openness and authentic vulnerability, but repeated violations preclude such felt safety. So as we normalize consent culture, female sexuality will continue to assert itself. And I tell you, it is voracious.

But until men can get their collective act together, this development is only going to happen away from them, because we don’t feel safe enough to share until they act safe enough for us to be open and vulnerable.

Except for sometimes when the woman is allowed to be in control, which is why next I’ll be talking about femdom.