On Liberation and Empowerment

Found this recently through a reblog on the deviantfemme tumblr (NSFW).

sexual liberation comes not just from having sex
but from the decision to have your sexual experiences on your own terms
which can mean deciding to have sex with whomever and however many times you want
or deciding to have no sex
the empowerment comes from the decision and having that decision respected

Source: Young Black and Vegan

I've been letting it roll around in my head ever since.

When I talk about things like how women are portrayed in games, a common response is to attack me as a person. The claim is that I don't get it because I'm supposedly sexually repressed and a prude, a pearl clutcher, a Tipper Gore. Clearly, living in the US, I must have a fainting couch and smelling salts.

What I love about the quoted text is that it acknowledges that sexual liberation is way more complicated than how comfortable you are with taking your clothes off or with seeing sexual imagery. It's about being able to choose and part of choice is the ability to say no. When that decision isn't respected, as in the case of the "You're just a prude" response, we are not talking about a sexually liberated world. We're still talking about one that is built for others' pleasure.

And it's messed up because the world isn't liberated for anyone. As much as it sucks for me to deal with an environment that sends the message "Tits or GTFO," I statistically have less to worry about than those who make the choice for yes. Yesterday was the tenth annual "International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers." An important image went around with stats about the violence sex workers face.

From HIPS.org

Sex work is just that, work. The risks sex workers face don't have to be inherent to their job. They are risks we create through our treatment of them. The collective and common disdain shown towards sex workers allows the people who attack them to do so. It allows bad cops to abuse them, especially with the artificial power differential we create through criminalization and non-legalization. That attitude gets reflected in our stories and games. Women who engage in sex work often are seen as one of the few classes of women where it's ok to either watch or participate in violence against them (via movies, books, video games, and the like) and that view is rarely if ever questioned. We live in a world where once you've done sex work or anything people might consider sex work, you're considered tainted for the rest of your life and can lose your job if anyone ever finds out, no matter how many decades have passed.

It needs to stop. We need to question narratives that normalize violence against sex workers (which is what that petition in Australia regarding GTA V was about). We need to question narratives that say their lives don't matter or that focus on their lives through an outsider lens. We need to stop telling women that they are only good for sex and we need to support women's choices about how to express their own sexuality, whatever that choice is. Policing women's choices, whether by calling them a prude or a whore, needs to stop and we need to stop pitting women against each other for these choices. We need to stop acting like women's sexuality is binary, you're either sexual or your not. We need to stop telling women that they either need to be comfortable with little to no clothes or that they have to be happy with being modest. We have to allow for complex emotions regarding pornography, monogamy, sexual desire, and more. We need to change media rating systems that rate expressions of sexuality commonly equated with women's pleasure as more mature than those commonly equated with men's pleasure.

If you are looking for different narratives, here are some suggestions:

• Gail Simone's Red Sonja
• Sex Criminals
• Rat Queens
• The Wicked + The Divine
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
• Bitch Planet
• Genius
• Pretty Deadly
• Saga
• Shutter
• Scarlett Takes Manhattan
• Princeless
• Smut Peddler
• Love and Sex in the Ninth World

There are so many more, but this is a good start. Challenge the narrative. Don't be compliant. Become empowered.