For how obsessed our culture is with sex, we are pretty terrible at talking about what good sex looks like, how to have it by talking with our partners about mutual and shared pleasure, how to ask for what we want, how to say what we don’t. We are especially really terrible at teaching our kids that sex shouldn’t be shameful. Toxic masculinity requires selfishness, violence, and disinterest in consent and the pleasure of our partners. Rape culture has normalized equating sex with violence, and violence as sexual.
All of this has led to a culture of unhealthy relationships, bad sex, sexual violence, sexual repression, and trauma.
In a blog post for Wear Your Voice, an amazing source for radical feminist and anti-racist writing, Sherronda J. Brown writes about her experiences with sex and sexuality, and coming to terms with the reality that she doesn’t actually dislike sex, as she had started to believe. In fact, she doesn’t “like feeling like shit afterwards.” Brown’s piece is a powerful condemnation of toxic masculinity, normative heterosexuality, performative sex, and rape culture.
In order to have better sex, empathic relationships, and smash the shit out of rape culture, we have to talk honestly, directly, maybe painfully, about sex and sexuality. We have to come to terms with where have been, and how we have treated our partners. We have to recognize the ways violence has been normalized in our culture, our relationships, our sexual encounters, and ourselves. We have to teach our children differently. We have to be willing to talk, and particularly for men, we have to be willing to listen.
– Brett Goldberg
Read Brown’s post via Wear Your Voice.
