CARNAL NATION

These days, if you read much about sex or hang out in a sex-friendly community, you’ve likely heard the phrase “sex-positive.” But do you know what it means? I’ve had my ear to the ground and have concluded that for some, it’s confusing.

To say that you’re sex-positive doesn’t just mean you like sex (though I hope you do, or at least aspire to). Your own relationship to sexual pleasure and possibility is only one part of what makes you sex-positive. Since there’s no dictionary definition yet, and since I’m one of the people most identified with this phrase, I figured I’d celebrate the launch of this fabulous new site, CarnalNation, by essaying a basic meaning for this not-well-understood philosophy. I call sex-positivity a philosophy, by the way, because as far as I’m concerned it’s well-described as “a theory underlying or regarding a sphere of activity or thought” and a “search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative… means.” 

First, though, why me? I came to San Francisco in the mid-1980s for three main reasons. I was chasing a girlfriend (star-crossed—it didn’t last); I was looking for my own personal sexual utopia (found it, pretty much, after I got over the girl); and I was aiming to get a doctorate in sexology. The latter reason is what connected me with the notion of sex-positivity, a phrase already in fairly common use at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Hearing it gave me one of those “A-ha, Dr. Einstein, everything IS relative!” brain explosions, and pretty much my whole life of experiences, experiments, and struggles with sexuality fell into place. I had always been one of those people who didn’t quite fit in a box. My identity morphed over time. My sexual desires were fluid, and in my previous life I had been a very bad little lesbian indeed because I kept wanting to get tied up, or fuck guys sometimes, or who knows what. In fact, if you had a fresh sexual idea, I probably wanted to try it. I once worked as a barmaid in Texas and went home with the ugliest guy in the bar just because his pickup line was so great: “Hey, have you ever done it standing up in a hammock?” In the context of my Ph.D. program, I was just another little sex scientist doing her labs, but the study of sexology finally gave me a context for my always-curious sexual urges. Before, I’d felt like I was from Mars, or that, at least, my sex drive was.

So the notion of “sex-positivity” gave me the perspective I deeply needed to see that there really was not just one (or a few) “normal” way(s) to be a sexual person; that our culture’s push to get us to identify one way or another (and then stay that way) is really a manifestation of sex-negativity--not to mention usually homophobia, because when you’re all but forced into a binary way of identifying, one side is usually the privileged one, the other side the realm of deviance. (In fact, I had gotten very good grades in my undergrad Sociology of Deviance class, which basically covered most of the things I already did or wanted to do: Homosexuality, check! Smoking pot, check! Prostitution… hadn’t done that, but hmm, how much does it pay?)

So let me tell you what I think sex-positivity is now, lest I’ve given you the impression you have to start turning tricks to do it right. You don’t have to be bisexual (or trisexual), kinky, non-monogamous, or even sexually active. In fact, some of the most interesting discussions about sex-positivity I’ve had this year have been with a guy who’s busy organizing asexuals into a community of support and affiliation. Yep, you can even be sex-positive if you don’t ever want to have sex, just as you can be very sex-negative indeed and still have plenty of hot sex that you enjoy to the fullest.