In Which She Links Her Previous Posts And Breaks The Labels Feature

Someone at "The F-Word" asks:

While I’m here, can I ask: why are there next to no “sexy” images of men on sex positive* sites, or sites focusing on porn for women etc?

A post to which I reponded:

Well, my 'sex-positive for lack of a better term' blog doesn't have photos of hot men on it because I respect my partners' privacy and anonymity in that forum.

And anyway, it's not their blog.

Belledame of Fetch Me My Axe has written about being a sex-positive lesbian and a short sidebar on slash writing; Caroline at Uncool talks about her use of imagery. When I think about people who are posting images of men (and sometimes women) they find sexy just on my blogroll, I immediately think of E for Eclectic (whose second post from the top as of this writing is titled 'The Beauty of Men'), Natalia Antonova, Aishwarya at Kaleidoglide. There are others, too; that's just a quick sample.

But that's neither here nor there.

I just went and looked at my "beauty" tag. And in there among the anti-poly sizeism post or the one about the gorgeousness of correct taxonomy and recognising the beautiful humanity of a stranger and the politicality of hair and beauty vs. brains and body image stuff I find things like me writing about male beauty and my problems with the mainstream conceptualisations thereof or my recent post about beauty and power dynamic and lust and some theology using male beauty as the central image.

Just to focus on what I know, which is what I've written.

And I think there's something actually insidious about the notion that a sex-positive blog is necessarily a sex blog is necessarily a porn or erotica blog, at all. That the whole thing about being sex-pos is about working to titillate, arouse, or engage sexually with one's audience. Perhaps, that it's all about the 'hawtt titjobbe bisexee suckfuckers', that sex-positive asexuals do not exist.

The sex blog I've been reading longest is Sexeteria, which currently features a herbaceous porn header: the unclothed genitalia of a tulip. (Actually, looking at it again, it's not a tulip, but I don't know what it is, and I can sidetrack myself for hours trying to figure it out to properly improve my one-liner. Thus, moving right along ....)

This is a sex-positive blog.

Note the lack of sexy images of men or women. Not because of any political impulse, but because I'm not interested in sexy images of either, for the most part, and I respect the privacy of the people I do fancy ogling at length.

Note, also, the lack of explicit writing, scene reports, tales of sexual prowess, and similar things. Not because of any political impulse, but because my private sex life is none of your damn business, my assorted readership and stray explorers who got here by Googling "pixie sex" or "nine letter relationship word status" (good luck with your crossword puzzle, whoever you are!). This is not a sex blog.

It is a sex-positive blog. It's here because I'm writing about my personal sexuality, BDSM, the difficulties and damages and risks inflicted by a surrounding culture that is frankly defective about matters sexual. Because I want to write about learning about sexuality and how to have healthily constructed sexual experience. Because I'm concerned about the marginalisation of various people's sexualities, including my own. Because I write about divine ecstasy.

And, you know, I've occasionally considered writing a post about porn, because it's one of those going subjects in the sex-pos blogworld, but I'm not up for writing a post about something I've never seen, participated in, or had any particular interest in. I might write something someday about written stuff I've found hot, or visual stuff I've found hot -- I may have mentioned my reactions to Tigana in passing -- but that's not a particularly compelling subject to me either.

Asserting my claim on my own sexuality is a compelling subject for me, because it's something that I have been wrestling with for twenty years or so, because there are forces that make it very necessary work to do, people who think I should avoid things I find sexually satisfying for political reasons, moral reasons, social reasons. Doing the work to make the world safe for me as a polyamorous kinkster, and as part of that same work to try to make the world safe for all the other people with their varying sexualities and lacks thereof because we are all people, is what makes this a sex-positive blog.

If one is mistaking "sex-positive" for "providing wanking material", one will miss a lot of the work that a lot of people are doing. The internet may be for porn, but this blog isn't.



On a related note, I appear to have missed the fourth carnival of sexual freedom and autonomy just like I missed the third, but just because I don't have anything in it doesn't mean that I don't think people shouldn't go read it if they're so inclined.