Sex Neutrality

It isn’t uniquely sacred or harmful. It’s just a part of life.

A couple sharing dessert— one partner is spoon-feeding the other a bite of tiramisu. Photo by Keriliwi on Unsplash

Imagine a world where we looked at having sex the same way we do going out dancing or grabbing dinner.

Some people really enjoy visiting dance clubs or restaurants, include their partners in these activities, and make them a cornerstone of their social calendar; other folks are quite indifferent, and can take or leave them. Some people might only like engaging in these activities when they are completely alone, and others among us have highly specific preferences for the ways we might participate in them, if at all.

We don’t tend to assume a person’s life is incomplete if they have never been to a rave, and if a new buddy recommends we take an invigorating walk instead of grabbing an order of tibs and injera, we probably don’t bat an eye. If a romantic partner doesn’t share our passion for darkwave it might cause us problems, but we could just as easily call up a buddy with a Boy Harsher shirt and still have a good time.

Most of us recognize there’s potential for trauma surrounding body movement and food, but we don’t consider a person fundamentally broken if their parents forced them to eat vegetables or take a ballet class. We’ll consider it wrong that their feelings weren’t respected, and understand if they never want to join us for Black Swan and cheese fondue.

We don’t clutch our pearls if a child finds out that people twerk or drink wine. Even when forms of these activities are firmly for adults-only, it’s evident to all of us that they can be openly discussed, that no one is harmed by acknowledging their existence. These parts of regular life are not seen as magical, or assumed to be always beneficial or always negative for a person. Sometimes you eat an incredible burger. Sometimes you trip over your feet and briefly look like an ass. Neither defines your life or brings you to ruin.

And in the bold, sex neutral world that I am proposing, we’d have much the same attitudes toward intimacy. If we could view sex neutrally, we wouldn’t necessarily consider it a deal-breaker if a romantic partner enjoyed floggings and we preferred Tantric massage. A person who eschewed all sex or only had sex alone would be a bit of a private type, not a fundamentally different or lacking type of being. If a person was forty-five years old when they made their sexual debut, we’d treat them like someone who found a new hobby later in life, not like they were carrying some major social defect.

When sex was used as a tool of abuse or exploitation, we’d focus a lot more on the facts of the mistreatment, rather than the lurid details of the sex. We wouldn’t treat sex as radioactive, imbuing all it ever touched with a kind of sinister energy. And because we wouldn’t have to push back against such a demonized view of sex, we wouldn’t have to claim that sex was some life-changing, sacred activity that possessed a special ability to cement marriages or alter bodies, either.

Sex would just be a blasé thing, like going to the grocery store, getting a foot massage, taking a shit, or rolling a joint: highly pleasurable to some, completely squicky and uncomfortable to others, varying in its importance over the course of our lifespan, and never fundamentally good nor evil, just a regular part of human life.

We could think dispassionately about sex if this were the case, not viewing gay men in puppy hoods as predators simply for existing in the open air, or penalizing librarians for giving kids resources about their own bodies. We could acknowledge, without flipping out, that fetuses masturbate in the womb, children sometimes tie their dolls up in proto-fetishistic ways, and teenagers have sex with one another.

We would not consider it pathological if a young person had no interest in any of this, or if any person enjoyed sex in ‘unusual’ ways — they’d be no more strange to us than a lover of peanut butter and pickle sandwiches.

And if a child were sexually exploited, or an adult person coerced into sexual activity, sex neutrality would allow us to look to the power and access that made such an awful violation possible. We’d see the problem was that a child had no one but their parent to rely upon, and nowhere else to go when that parent blocked them from seeing friends, restricted their access to food, or used them for personal gratification. Rather than being blinded by our aversion to sex, we’d be able to name all three controlling behaviors as equally wrong, all potentially fraught and traumatic.

If an administrative assistant were groped by her boss, we could say easily that the problem was that her boss has control over whether she gets to remained housed and fed and that he uses this control to manipulate her, not that she has visible breasts or that he was horny.

If a post-partum mother was pressured by her spouse to have sex every single night, terrorizing her, we wouldn’t ever tell her that she needed to get over her pain eventually and do that special thing that defines her marital bond. If her body were forever changed and she never wanted to have sex again, she wouldn’t have to worry that she was no longer a wife or a woman.

Sex neutrality allows us to clear the fog of stigma, obligation, and moral panic surrounding sex that makes it almost impossible to speak about. It makes no presumptions about any person’s feelings toward sex, nor does it elevate sex to any special cultural role.

Sex neutrality lets sex mean whatever it means to the person having it, be that jerking off, getting their ass eaten, sleeping in a cage, or having missionary for reproductive purposes under a full moon. And while sex neutrality takes the potential for sexual abuse with all due seriousness, it doesn’t believe there is any inherent damage done when individuals see evidence of sex — a collar around the throat and a nipple peeking through a shirt are mundane, and have no special power to harm.

What keeps us from attaining this enlightened state is sex exceptionalism, the cultural notion that sex is particularly fraught with meaning, both more suffused with evil and loaded with sacred potential than any other human activity on earth. Sex exceptionalism forces us to treat all signs of human sexuality as removed from the rest of regular life, and to try and wall off our sexualities from everyone else — which leaves us a lot more ignorant, reactive, and uncomfortable about the subject than we’d otherwise be.

But we can change that.

Is this photo of me in a latex deer costume sexual, or is it artistic expression? It could be either! What it literally is is just a picture of me dressed as a deer. (Photo by Kelly Lenza).

The term sex neutrality was popularized in 2021 by licensed clinical social worker Christina Tesoro, who wrote then about how difficult it was to discuss sexual issues with her clients.

As the COVID pandemic raged on, some members of couples wanted to soothe their anxieties with sex, whereas others had no libido and wanted to withdraw. They struggled negotiating these tensions because of their many loaded feelings about sex. Was the low-libido partner denying themselves a chance at connection? Was the high-libido partner a sex addict, or pathological escapist? It was hard to see this conflict as a simple difference in preferences. Everything that a person did or did not do symbolized something else.

Many of Tesoro’s clients and colleagues had come from repressive Christian backgrounds that trained them to feel ashamed for their sexual desires. As teenagers, many of them had tried to reclaim their body autonomy by having sex — but the outcomes of that weren’t always pleasant. Just because the choice to have sex was made freely didn’t mean the sex itself went well. Then there were the concerns of sex workers and educators, who sometimes viewed sex as a lifeline, but also had to view see it as part of their jobs — a dreary obligation that could just as easily burn them out or traumatize them.

Tesoro observed the competing push-and-pull between the culture’s rampant sex negativity, and the overly simplistic sex positivity that attempted to fight it. She felt that both perspectives left little room for asexuals, people who do not enjoy having sex, and anyone else for whom real-life sexual experiences weren’t always bad, or always good, and often were incredibly complex.

“Sex positivity often gets boiled down to, sex is good, and pleasurable, and healing, and you should be having it, if you want to be considered a healthy, well-adjusted, and sex positive person,” Tesoro writes. But she was more interested in asking clients why they had sex, and what came of it.

“Why do we have sex? Why have we chosen to have sex in the past? Why do we choose it now?,” Tesoro asks her clients. And without any judgement, are you enjoying it?

Aubrey Gordon’s book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.

Tesoro’s concept of sex neutrality was inspired by a writer and fat liberationist whom I also look up to named Aubrey Gordon, aka Your Fat Friend. Gordon has frequently critiqued the surface-level, individualistic politics of body positivity, which claims to overcome the systemic legal, medical, and social exclusion of fat people with positive affirmations, self-confidence, and personal choice.

Body positivity gave us Dove billboards in which unblemished size-fourteen women with tight waists leap around attractively, and Superbowl commercials for Ozempic that mislead the public about the risks of a medication that isn’t FDA-approved for weight loss. According to body positivity, what matters most is that a person feels good about themselves, and does whatever they need in order to get there — no matter how much it actually punishes their body or reinforces beauty norms.

Body positivity and its discontents.
What happens when your body doesn’t qualify for body positivity?medium.com

Victory is found in a soft pastel panty set with a mesh control top, or a weight loss supplement that helps a plus-sized person overcome their “struggles with body-image.” There is no room in body positivity for discussions of food deserts that under-nourish poor Americans, doctors who refuse to treat fat patients, the inaccessibility of most medical equipment and public transit for fat bodies, or to explore any collective solutions to such problems. And if a fat person does feel badly about their body, body positivity politics views that as a personal failure, not a logical consequence to years of being attacked.

In her book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon suggests body neutrality replace this endless fixation with personal feelings and silencing of social critique.

“Having a better body image won’t end body-based oppression,” Gordon writes.

At its best, body neutrality can encourage us to set aside our feelings about our bodies and stop viewing those feelings as the site of political struggle — where the battle will actually be raged is in the hospitals, at the grocery store checkout lines, in the clothing company boardrooms, and in the halls of the National Institute for Health and the National Science Foundation as they issue their policies and hand out their grants.

The inclusion of fat bodies will be accomplished through policy decisions and financial support, and by ending the harassment of plus-sized people —  not by repeating platitudes about loving the skin one is in.

Beyond Sex Positivity
What Curiosity, Neutrality, and Non-Judgment Can Teach Us About Ourselves christinatesoro.medium.com

A similar principle applies to liberating sex from the moral Puritanism, paternalism, homophobia, and institutional control that gives us sex negativity. It is not by feeling good about sex or even having freaky sex that we end the oppression of all sexually variant people. Instead, we have to destroy the policies, laws, and social norms that treat sex as exceptionally dangerous and so unlike any other aspect of human life that it doesn’t merit discussion or care.

We live in a fundamentally sex negative society, which regards joyful expressions of human sexuality as both menacing and unnecessary. In the name of supposedly protecting children from ever encountering nudity or mentions of sex, laws like SESTA and FOSTA have driven “adult content” off the social internet, purging decades’ worth of art, social criticism, scholarly articles, educational resources, and yes, fun smut that has brought millions of people a brief moment of pleasure.

Even mourning the cultural loss of all this material is somewhat controversial. It’s considered somehow perverse to care about documenting how people have lived their actual lives, or what’s contained within their fantasies.

Because social media companies risk being held legally responsible for anything their users post, they enforce sexual content restrictions with an extreme and unyielding harshness. Depictions of queer identities are heavily filtered throughout social media, no matter how benign, and any mention of sexual abuse or violence can get content removed from the likes of Instagram or TikTok, and demonetized on YouTube.

How does making it impossible to report on cases of child sexual assault on the internet protect children? Who benefits when words like pedophilia, rape, and sex are banned? Given the fact that children who are not educated about sex or sexual assault face a much higher rate of abuse (largely because they have no way to name what has happened to them), who benefits when sex is removed from public life?

Mourning Porn on Imgur, Mourning Trans & Kinky History.

It’s as illegal to rape a person as it is to stab them, or to drop bombs on civilians. Why can those other forms of violence be widely depicted and discussed on social media (or the classroom, or the metaphorical public square) but sexual violence cannot? What makes sex so exceptional that even mentioning it is a violation, akin to assault itself? And what happens when we equate learning about our bodies with being violated?

Sex negativity has been around a whole lot longer than social media, of course. Most of us grew up in the grips of a religiously-sanctioned sex negativity that taught experiencing desire was evil, pleasuring oneself was a sin, and enjoying sex for anything other than procreation within a heterosexual marriage was a waste of the body’s potential. Laws informed by such religious doctrine prevent adults from even bearing their bodies in nature, and place young people who send one another nudes on to sex offender registries.

Children who grow up under these conditions do not get to feel that their bodies are their own, to do whatever they wish with. They feel suspicious of the tingly, positive sensations that happen when they touch themselves, and are ashamed of how the slime monsters or muscle jocks on their favorite cartoons make them feel. They learn to suppress these good feelings, and all their other body feelings too — at school they’re expected to silence their rumbling bellies and hold in their pee until an adult finally grants them relief.

And if adults control so many of a child’s body functions, what’s to say they shouldn’t control all the rest? Children are told how to dress, how and when to bathe themselves, how to sit, how to pray, what to do with their hair, what to believe; when we’re young, it doesn’t seem strange if an adult also tries to control what’s between our legs.

When I was a child, my father commented incessantly on my physical attractiveness. Once I hit puberty, he fixated on the curve of my hips and the size of my breasts and my relative hotness compared to anyone else. I knew it was creepy, and I laughed it off, but somewhere deep inside, I also took the attention as a compliment. As he’d often ‘joked’ when I was small, he’d brought me into this world, so he could take me out of it. He’d also threaten suicide sometimes when he was unhappy. I was therefore strongly motivated to get his approval, and being sexually attractive to him kinda made my life worthwhile.

When my sister and I were each in the womb, our dad declared we couldn’t be given the name of any woman he’d ever found unattractive. After I got glasses in grade ten, he lamented that boys would no longer make passes at me. I’d been punished the one time I was caught masturbating on the couch. How was I to see myself as anything but a sexual object? My sexuality was obviously not for me. It existed outside of me, in the beholder’s eye, to fulfill others.

Sex was nothing like taking karate classes or learning to cook my own meals, all signs of growing autonomy that I enjoyed as I grew older; it was exceptional, a spiritual and psychosexual entity outside of my body, rather than a series of choices I got to make.

The kind of cheeky sex-positive content that always makes me cringe. Photo by Malvestida on Unsplash

Sex positivity emerged as a necessary pushback to the culture’s prevailing fears and moralization surrounding sex. Sex positive educators like Tristan Taormino and Nina Hartley celebrated human sexuality as a source of pleasure, praised women for expressing their desires, and tried to free sexuality from the confines of monogamous marriage. And like a lot of people raised in sex negative cultures, I rushed into the welcoming arms of sex positivity seeking a refuge.

No one in my home or at school taught me about sex, but there Dan Savage was, in a fresh article every single week, speaking about proper blowjob technique and explaining the symptoms of herpes (and also declaring that vaginas resembled canned hams dropped from great heights and no gay man in his right mind would ever want to be anywhere near one. Oh, well.) I couldn’t ask about sex, but I could watch porn, using dial-up internet to watch latex-clad women blasted on cocaine choke and fist one another, declaring the whole enterprise feminist.

(And look at me, still appreciating latex and intoxication scenes to this day.)

In many ways, I do relish that I had the opportunity to explore the many sides of adult desire (dark and light, messy and wholesome) when I was young. I don’t believe that any “adult content” I witnessed online traumatized the younger me, and whenever I did happen upon a sight that was extreme, my own curiosity had brought me there.

I looked up photographs of dead bodies and natural disasters on Rotten.com as a teenager too, and while gawking at such things is distasteful, I still feel I was exercising a freedom that left me better prepared for adult life rather than hampered. I do not envy the children of today’s internet, whom most adult users have to preemptively block to protect themselves against accusations of abuse. I benefitted from having at least one tiny, private outlet in which to explore and express myself — and to sometimes chat with peers and adults who mostly respected me and treated me well.

But the impact of obligatory sex positivity lingers, and not all of it was good. Dan Savage preached that certain “vanilla” sex acts were basically obligatory in a relationship, and emphasized that every partner ought to be good (at sex), giving (of pleasure), and game (for just about anything).

This exact language was used against me and several of my close friends, mostly by straight male boyfriends who wanted us to offer ourselves up for threesomes or open relationships, even when we didn’t want them. The first time I gave a blowjob, I did so pushing myself through tears, remembering I not only could, but should, be dumped if I didn’t.

In the liberal-minded queer communities I moved through as a young adult, there was no option but to be sex positive, and that meant reveling in conventional pleasure and not expressing any real hang-ups about sex. Like the sex-positive cartoonist Erika Moen, we called ourselves perverts and threw around sex toys with performed nonchalance, until the men who were gratified by this act reached down between our legs and took what they wanted from us — or just as likely, what they’d been taught that they had to want.

Like the body positivity that Aubrey Gordon has so rightly critiqued, sex positivity did nothing to address the reasons why so many young women and other gender minorities in my social circle felt so disgusted with their bodies, so unable to enjoy sexual encounters, and so ill-equipped to actually articulate what stoked their desires. That some people lacked any desire for sex was barely a consideration. Dan Savage, after all, routinely said back then that asexuals did not exist.

A doll with a rope harness on her chest. Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

I know that it isn’t fair to place the burden of correcting a lifetime of sex negative indoctrination and generations of Christian scolding onto one quippy gay writer who never pretended to be an authority.

My beef isn’t really with Dan Savage — or Erika Moen, Tristan Taormino, Nina Hartley, or any number of other sex-positive figures who strongly influenced me. Often, they impacted me for the better. I’m only able to write a piece like this now because I spent so many years looking up to and emulating many of them, particularly Dan. And for so many young people who knew nothing about STIs or bodies, their brand of sex positivity was healing.

But what I and so many other young sexual beings needed wasn’t to be told that sex was exceptional — either for the good or for the bad. What we needed was education into all that sex was, a description of the rich buffet of options that existed, and the freedom to always walk away.

Authority figures had trained us since birth to fear sex, but also in highly particular ways to laud it — — when I came out as asexual at age sixteen, even the most queer-supportive adults around me were baffled and insisted that some day I would change my mind, and find the beauty in this inescapable, terrifying, magic thing. What would have really helped was demystifying sex, and affirming that for all its baggage, it just wasn’t that big of a deal.

By framing sexuality as a unique aspect of the human experience that can veer toward the sacred, sex positivity still separates the activity from the rest of regular life, which distorts our thinking around it. It can lead to people believing that having an engaged sex life is necessary, even if they do not want it, and that sex only includes a limited range of activities that are walled off from everything else that we do. It leads people to behave as if any semblance of sex must be kept away from public eyes, as if the mere act of feeling satisfied or good in one’s body is dangerous.

The reality is far more complex. I have kinky friends whose first forays into sexual exploration involved tying up their dolls and torturing them with play guns and knives. Now they play out these same roles with real humans, and sometimes it involves genitalia, but not always. Other kids felt good crawling on the floor pretending to be cats. For some this evolved into a fetish, and for others it didn’t.

Do these childhood pretend games become retroactively inappropriate because they carry a sexual charge now? Should all children be banned from playing pretend or taking on the role of the “bad guy,” because some might realize doing so makes them feel good?

A screenshot of a 4chan thread in which a poster observes that one of the animators of The Fairly Oddparents seemed to really like drawing muscle guys.

Many people of my generation have taken to reviewing the media of our youth and noticing that certain animators had a recurring interest, let’s just say, in depicting characters with bulging muscles, or drawing the finer details of a hand. Their fascination verges on the fetishistic, and some people even feel retroactively violated by the fact that as a child they were exposed to a subject that an adult found interesting enough they learned how to draw it very well.

It was probably a freaky adult who snuck some hypnosis content into the Pokémon and Sailor Moon animes, kindling my own childhood fetish for the subject. Was I groomed from thousands of miles away by an adult who never met me? Or did their art give me a glimpse into the complexity of the human psyche, and I saw a part of myself staring back?

Sex is a lot more than just sex, even for the most conforming of people. Look at how Ms. Bellum was drawn on the Power Puff Girls — her extreme waist-to-hip ratio and long flowing hair surely reflect the twisted mind of a man with a femininity fetish, how dare he expose children to that. It’s obvious that many straight men fetishize breasts, so much that they can’t be attracted to a woman who lacks them, but this barely registers to most people as a fetish at all.

Certain qualities (like female beauty) are deemed mostly nonsexual in our society — because liking them is normal and therefore does not need to be spoken of. Liking breasts can be quietly taken as a given, no open acknowledgement of sex required. But the moment a person confesses that yes, in fact, they do experience desire and pleasure, especially in an unusual way, it takes on a malevolent cast. They have made sex into a thing that must be spoken of, negotiated, and brought out into the light.

The Three Fundamental Human Freedoms That Modern Society Lacks

We all play with roles and personas, from the time we’re young imaginative children until the day we stop having to LARP as our “worksonas” to keep making rent.

In Dawn of Everything, anthropologists Graeber and Wengrow describe how many human societies throughout history have uplifted “play kings” and “play soldiers” who were granted temporary authority that everyone pretended to believe in and obey. These same kings sometimes turned into fools when the season changed. Is that really so different from a stranger on Fetlife pretending to “own” somebody for a night? How can we know who got a boner from all this and who didn’t, historically, and does that change anything?

People have always adorned themselves with costumes and makeup, thrown shadows upon the wall, covered ourselves in animal furs and feathers and snarled. Is it inappropriate to become a football mascot only if you like it? Why does it terrify people so much that furries can both enjoy play-acting as creatures for simple social fun, and because it turns them on?

It is only because of sex exceptionalism that we cannot handle these conversations. The idea that sex is categorically different and removed from everything else in life means we can’t cope when it leaks out. To suggest that sex can and does exist everywhere sounds dangerous. It feels like it could morph into an apology for blurred boundaries and violations of consent. The problem is that by not acknowledging the reality of sex, and its presence in our lives, we are allowing the boundaries to blur and be crossed almost all the time.

We deny that some people subjugate or hurt others because they desire to do so, and that our bodies are constantly signaling to us what we enjoy and what we hate. The hand briefly on your waist in the elevator, the wink from the old man in your building, was it sexual? To accuse an innocent act of being sexual is to be ‘hysterical.’

By why is a nonsexual act an innocent one? Did you not want to be touched all the same? And, on the flip side, why are good feelings worse if they are the sexual kind of good feelings? And what if you can’t always tell the difference, if the beautiful face that catches your eye could be arousing you, or might ‘just’ be inspiring you to draw in your sketchbook for hours?

Are sexual feelings both more suspect and powerful than anything else? Do our other feelings not matter?

A selfie I took at Midwest Furfest, holding the head of my fursuit. I’m shirtless with dark jeans on and a long-sleeve tee tied around my waist. Is this sexual? You tell me. I’m more clothed than anyone at the beach.

I can already hear some of you saying: if we really view sex as no different from getting dinner, what’s to keep children from having sex with adults? In other words, if sex is not treated as special and separate from the rest of life, how will we protect children and others vulnerable to sexual abuse?

I’m not actually mind-reading here. I know this is a common reaction to the idea of sex neutrality, because it’s one I got in my inbox when I first started posting about it. Here’s a pretty representative and reasonable question about it all:

Let’s take that dinner question down to its logical conclusion, Anon, because I do think you are getting at something.

Children are forced to eat food they strongly dislike (due to sensory issues, allergies, or just run of the mill unfamiliarity) quite regularly by their caregivers. They are also sometimes denied the right to eat because they didn’t behave the way their caretakers liked and sent to bed hungry, or barred from eating food they can handle because they wouldn’t eat food they can’t handle.

Treatment like this causes a lot of food issues and trauma to children. It can create an eating disorder, and erode a child’s sense of their own body autonomy. It can also cause children to have nutritional issues, stall their physical development, and give them a scarcity mentality around food that can be really damaging.

My sister is a lifelong sufferer of ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, which is often comorbid with Autism), and I remember what it was like to see her be forced to take food into her body that it hurt for her to eat.

My sister was repeatedly held down, thrashing and screaming, while a toothbrush was jammed into her mouth, because she couldn’t stand the taste of toothpaste. Her disgust for most foods got her criticized and yelled at. As so many parents were instructed to do at the time, our parents tried sending my sister to bed hungry to make her desperate enough to try new foods. But she dropped so much weight and was hospitalized for pneumonia so many times they eventually gave up, and let her decide what to feed herself.

For decades afterward, any commentary on my sister’s eating habits would provoke a traumatized and enraged reaction. She hated all communal meals. She felt insecure about her body. She still gets no pleasure out of eating. And despite all the pressure she faced, my sister’s palate never widened. She still subsists on plain white bread, cheese, chicken nuggets, and cereal in her 30s, exactly as she did as a kid.

My sister’s bodily boundaries were violated numerous times as a child. Things were forced into her body that she didn’t want, her feelings were ignored, and she was denied the ability to nourish herself until her health deteriorated. All this was done to supposedly “help” my sister, with no sexual intentions in mind.

Do we imagine that her trauma is any lesser than that of a child who had their boundaries crossed in a sexual way? If so, it is only because sex exceptionalism. Controlling a kid’s body and forcing things inside them is somehow seen as less damaging and sinister if it’s not sex. It’s so incredibly common for kids to be controlled and pressured with food that it barely registers as abuse to us at all.

Similarly, the vulnerable are forced to share meals with people who make them uncomfortable all the time. Employees are forced to sit down with clients who debase them or harass them. Young people are forced into sharing tables with relatives who have insulted, bullied, and struck them. People in recovery are expected to break bread with family members who push them to drink or consume foods that aren’t safe for them.

When a powerful institution wants to exert control over other people, it often does so using food. Prisoners are given almost no control over the kind of food they eat, and are often given rotten food, or food that violates their nutritional requirements or religious beliefs. So are patients in hospitals and mental health facilities. People in poverty are expected to eat anything they are given without complaint, no matter how nutritionally incomplete.

Food is quite frequently a tool of control and abuse. Yet it is not because there is some magical quality to food or to dinners that make them uniquely fraught with the potential for trauma. These experiences are traumatic because they involve a violation of a person’s body autonomy, and a lack of social power.

Sex isn’t any different from dinner. There are even elements to adult meals that children need to be protected from, such as alcohol and allergens, just as there are forms of sexual exploration that a child is not ready for. And just as it is wrong for a parent to treat their kid as their drinking buddy, it is wrong, always, for an adult to have sex with a child.

Unfortunately because we consider dinner to be a neutral activity and sex to be an incredibly fraught and almost magical one, we ignore the massive amounts of coercion, pressure, and violation surrounding food — and we really only take sexual abuse seriously when it’s overt, and committed by someone that society has decided shouldn’t have power over a child. When a child’s sexual abuser is their parent, and the abuse is not driven by attraction but rather by a desire to control or “protect” them, nobody blinks.

Open up the Mother-Daughter Sexual Assault (or MDSA) subreddit and you’ll find thousands of accounts from survivors who almost never find justice or even sympathy for the abuse they have endured — because their perpetrators were the women that raised them, and the abuse wasn’t motivated by obvious pedophilic desire.

The daughters on these forums recall being forced by their mothers to endure regular “inspections” of their genitals, breasts, and rectums well into their teens, being followed into bathrooms and dressing rooms and stared at as they undressed, and having every aspect of their life from the clothing that they wore to the tampons they put into their bodies regulated, monitored, judged, and controlled by their parent.

Every single story listed is one of child sexual assault — but because most of the abuse was done out of supposed “care,” and wasn’t necessarily arousing to the perpetrator, it is not seen by most of the world as sexual, and therefore assumed not to be traumatic. Usually, no one in the child’s life clocked any of this as abuse— because controlling everything about a child’s body and life is simply a parents’ right. Unsurprisingly, many of these abusive mothers heavily monitored and controlled what their daughters ate, too.

So if I am really being honest with you, Anon, no, your boss shouldn’t be able to force you to get dinner with someone. It’s only because of the economic power he holds over you that he can. This power differential is why one of the common perpetrators of sexual violence, after relatives and romantic partners, are people’s bosses.

Photo by Louis Galvez on Unsplash

When I was first outlining this essay on my Tumblr, a survivor of severe childhood sexual abuse reached out to me to share their perspective. They wanted readers to understand that our deeply rooted discomfort with all discussions of sex does not keep children safe. In fact, sex exceptionalism leads many authority figures to disbelieve assault allegations, because they sound too unfathomable or extreme.

“I was seriously sexually, physically and emotionally abused as a child. We’re talking bruises as a baby, rape by different family members, serious neglect, etc.,” they wrote. “I tried to tell adults as a child about this multiple times, and found that no one wanted to believe me.

“Recently the UK released a report into institutional failure around CSA in the UK [the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse], and found that one of the reasons was that adults were too afraid to ‘touch’ the subject of child sexual abuse [and] so just wouldn’t act on reports of CSA by children.”

“The intense fixation on child sexual abuse as a type of evil above anything else becomes a mechanism by which to say that evil could never actually happen / you’re lying / that adult would never do that / I don’t want to think about this,” they told me.

I’ve read through the full inquiry’s report and it’s filled with the stories of young people who were taken advantage of by trusted loved ones and guardians, and who were disbelieved when they approached authorities for help. 47% of respondents who reported their abuse said they were not believed. Often this was because the person they reported the abuse too considered sexual violence too unspeakable to really consider.

Numerous survivors shared that they were accused of lying about their sexual abuse to ruin their caretakers’ reputations. Here is how one young man who was abused by a nun describes his treatment:

Survivors also reported perceiving themselves (and being perceived by others) as fundamentally tainted by their sexual assault experiences. 88% struggled with mental health symptoms in adulthood as a result of their abuse, and 31% reported struggling with sexuality and intimate relationships.

Survivors who had felt arousal or enjoyment during their abuse felt guilty and blamed themselves for it. They feared disclosing their experiences to loved ones or potential partners, or seeking support, because they suspected having the mark of CSA survivor on them would change how they were seen.

So many of these struggles are exacerbated by sex exceptionalism. If sex has a unique power to either liberate or doom a person, then a traumatic sexual experience is far worse, and far more life-changing, than any other form of assault. Survivors are seen as broken by the experience, sexually untouchable and mentally warped.

And the fact that many assault survivors experience physical pleasure from being touched, or form an emotional bond with their abuser? It’s seen as a perversion on the part of the victim. Arousal and even orgasm during rape are quite common; it may be a simple physiological reflex, like a sneeze, or even an attempt by the body to reduce the risk of physical damage.

But because arousal is linked to sexuality, and sexuality is treated as special and exceptional, victims are judged for how their bodies responded to their rapes. Their body’s instinct to lubricate itself, develop an erection, or to orgasm is seen as suspect, and means the survivor is either twisted or really wanted it all along. Feelings like that don’t just happen, you see. They’re not normal. Sex is not normal. And anyone who has been harmed by sex must be very abnormal indeed.

Me in my latex deer suit, at the Magic Hedge. Photo by Kelly Lenza.

Part of the reason we exceptionalize sex is because it protects us from having to think about the many many ways that power, coercion, isolation, and pressure are used against us every single day. If rape is bad because it’s a violation rather than because it’s sexual, we’d have to acknowledge how often we all get violated. We’d also have to get serious about honoring the autonomy of kids.

The other reason we try so hard to separate sexuality from the rest of life is because ours is a culture that’s deeply suspicious of pleasure. Anything that relaxes us or causes positive feelings is an abdication of our duty to endlessly suffer, work, and produce. We view hard tasks as more moral than easy ones, valorize sacrifice, and look to anyone who does less than they absolutely could with a deep suspicion.

Sexual pleasure is the most threatening of good feelings, because it’s so anti-productive: it does not create children, it doesn’t cost anything, it’s inventive, creative, and frees us within our minds. In our sexual worlds we can play at holding power that we lack, at obeying authorities that we choose rather than the ones that force us, and transform everything from our bodies to our most fundamental relationships.

Sex reveals the full potential of all human beings can do — and all we can refuse. It’s silly, expressive, dark, exposing, inconsequential, forgettable, memorable, improvisational, funny, and terrifying.

It can be wonderful if you want it. If not, that’s fine — the world is full of potential dinner dates.