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Authors: Friedman,Jaclyn Friedman,Jessica Valenti

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BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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A Love Letter from an Anti-Rape Activist to Her Feminist Sex-Toy Store
 
BY LEE JACOBS RIGGS
 
 
 
“I’M SELLING DILDOS AND VIBRATORS,” I reply pleasantly to the smiling faces of my parents’ two best friends, a married couple who have known me since before my birth, but who, these days, I see only about once a year. We’re at a restaurant near my parents’ home in rural western Pennsylvania for a celebration of my mother’s victory over cancer. This is a version of a conversation I’ve had throughout the evening with various relatives and friends of the family—middle-class white people like me. They are, in other ways, so unlike me. I am the only queer-identified person at this party.
 
The female half of the couple inquires about profits and the potential for me to become a partner in the business. This is not where I want this conversation to go, but it’s not surprising that it does. This particular line of chitchat never lasts very long.
 
Later, my sister and I run into each other in the bathroom, each of us toward the end of our second gin and tonic. We dish about the events of the evening, and I laugh a little at my own frankness about my work with this nice, churchgoing crowd. We discover a shared childhood crush on our dad’s best friend. “He was always so funny and nice,” she explains. I think,
How can you pass up the opportunity to say “dildo” to one of the first people you imagined sleeping with?
I make a mental note to try to write a dirty story about it later.
 
The questions that he and his wife, like most people, didn’t give me the opportunity to answer were the ones that get at the core of
why
I sell dildos and vibrators (and, incidentally, butt plugs and feminist porn, but those didn’t make the family-friendly cut). Why do I actually believe that this is valuable work? What makes me reject the idea, implicit in their questions, that this is just a thing I’m doing to get by, like selling jeans or shoes, before I move along on my middle-class career path?
 
why do you do this?
because it’s joyful.
why do you do this?
because it’s painful.
 
 
 
That’s the other piece. The other part of how I’ve spent my time and paid my bills that most people don’t really want to hear too much about. The painful part. For years before starting at Early to Bed, the small, locally owned, feminist sex-toy store where I’m currently employed, I worked at Chicago’s largest rape crisis center as a medical/legal advocate for survivors of sexual assault. People don’t really want to talk about rape over Christmas dinner or at the club.
 
During that time, when asked casually about their occupation, a lot of my colleagues would answer that they were counselors or social workers. I never chose to take that route, because, for me, talking about it was a part of the work. Even outside the context of the nonprofit industrial complex,
1
advocacy wasn’t just a job I did, a hat I could take off when I left the office or the emergency room. Running my mouth about the prevalence of sexual violence and the ways in which survivors are revictimized by the responding systems is one step in resisting the silence that perpetuates victim-blaming rape myths.
 
In a parallel but later universe, I was signing up for a credit card the other day. When the bank teller asked for my job title, I told him that I was a sex educator. “I’ll put down ‘teacher,’” he responded after a minute. “I don’t want people to know.” I let this unexpected and somewhat amusing censorship slide, but I
do
want people to know. I am proud of what I do, and I believe that it matters.
 
Sex matters. Pleasure matters.
 
 
It is a truism in the anti-rape movement that rape is not motivated by sexual desire; it is motivated by a desire for power and control, working to uphold systems of oppression. To say that sex and rape are unrelated, however, is to both ignore the deep scars across the sexual selves of masses of people and avoid the dismantling of the symbiotic relationship between a sex-negative culture and a culture that supports sex in the absence of consent.
 
Let’s be clear. By “rape,” I mean a sexual encounter without consent. Consent is saying yes. Yes, YES! This is the definition, in my experience, employed by today’s rape crisis services. Their models for prevention education, however, fail to teach young people how to really articulate or receive consent. They instead focus on how to say and listen to “no.” “No” is useful, undoubtedly, but it is at best incomplete. How can we hope to provide the tools for ending rape without simultaneously providing the tools for positive sexuality?
 
The ways in which interpersonal sexual violence is a barrier to positive sexuality are intricate and specific. It is not only folks who can point to precise sites of violation in their personal histories, though, who are burdened by complicated and often painful relationships to their sexual selves. For me, the effects of living and growing up in a sex-negative culture have been illuminated by an exploration of my past, spurred by the vicarious trauma I felt while doing rape crisis work, as well as the conversations I now have daily around sexual relationships and pleasure.
 
By “sex-negative culture,” I mean a culture that values the lives, bodies, and pleasure of men (and in particular white, middle-or upper-class, heterosexual men without disabilities) above those of women and transgendered people, and promotes shame about sexual desire, particularly female or queer desire. Sex-negative culture teaches us that pleasure is sinful and provides us with narrow scripts for appropriate sexual encounters. Conversely, a sex-positive culture would use the presence of consent as the only requirement for acceptable sexual encounters and encourage the interrogation of or playing with power and control. Sex-negativity teaches us that sex is not to be spoken of. This directly shapes the aftermath of sexual assault, in which survivors are shamed and discouraged from talking openly about their experience. Rape is not taboo because it is violence; it is taboo because sex is the weapon of violence.
 
The abstinence-only education camp that holds political and economic power in this country is at the forefront of maintaining a sex-negative culture, but this force is by no means the only place that sex-negativity manifests. It can be found in nonprofit rape crisis organizations’ one-dimensional or absent analyses of issues such as pornography, the sex trade, and child sexuality. It is exemplified within some so-called sex-positive queer and “radical” spaces that set up a narrative of orgasm as ultimate enlightenment and create a hierarchy of sexual practice. Our own feminist communities must be examined critically for the ways in which our work does or does not address the diversity and breadth of experiences in relation to sex, as well as sexual violence.
 
 
I left rape crisis work in part because I felt drained and frustrated (not to mention flat-out dirty) operating within a framework that positioned the criminal legal system as the primary remedy for sexual violence. The prison-industrial complex, to which the mainstream rape crisis movement is intimately and often unquestioningly linked, is an embodiment of nonconsent used to reinforce race and class inequality. Prisons take away the rights of people, primarily poor people of color, to control their own lives and bodies. This is glaringly apparent when one sits in a courtroom and observes the ways in which race, class, and power intersect in this space. How, then, do we as a movement whose fundamental principle is consent see this as an appropriate solution? A successful anti-rape movement will focus not only on how rape upholds male supremacy, but also on how it serves as a tool to maintain white supremacy and myriad other oppressive systems. When this is done, the importance of creating alternative ways to address violence becomes more apparent, and the state-sponsored systems that reproduce inequality seem less viable options for true transformative change.
 
We have said, “I want a world without . . . ” and, “I want a world where women don’t fear . . . ”—but that’s not really articulating a positive vision. As part of rape crisis services, I became tired of putting energy and resources into fighting against what I didn’t want, rather than building toward the world that I did want. Every day at Early to Bed, I witness and am a part of people reaching toward their desire. I support women in rejecting the notion that they are not sexual beings (at least not outside the realm of relationships with men). Our bookshelves are filled with stories that speak the unspeakable, working off of the belief that if it is consensual, it is speakable, doable.
 
Early to Bed also has a small but growing collection of pornography founded on the idea that erotic imagery is not in and of itself degrading to women, but, like any reflection of our larger culture, the porn industry often is. Erotic imagery isn’t what gets everyone going, but it does have clear benefits. Pornography can be a less risky way for survivors to reintroduce sexuality into their lives before they are ready to do so with another person. It can serve as a spark for creativity or a tool with which to introduce something you’re interested in to your partner. It can be a safe way to explore fantasy that you wouldn’t necessarily want to act on in your own life.
 
Feminist pornography, like that produced by Early to Bed, S.I.R. Productions, and Good Vibrations, provides viewers with actors of diverse sizes and shapes and examples of people using safer-sex methods. Director Shine Louise Houston continues to put out hot films that include people of color outside of stereotypical roles, and footage full of realistic orgasms. This can be useful in normalizing pleasure and the different ways that people communicate pleasure, helping people to embrace their own unique forms of expression. If the second-wave feminists that comprise the leadership of many rape crisis centers truly advocate for a world in which women are in control of their sexuality, it may be worthwhile for them to take a look at some of this work and evolve their arguments beyond the anti-pornography stance that is so often the dominant message within the movement now.
 
I am in no way proposing that feminist pornography or feminist sex-toy stores are the vanguard of the revolution or are more important work than rape crisis work. I am arguing, however, that in order to fully eradicate rape culture, we need to start talking about sex. We need to start insisting that people don’t proceed with sexual play until their partner expresses yes. We need to give people the language to do that.
 
 
Those of us invested in ending rape culture also need to start discussing kink, or BDSM (bondage/discipline/domination/submission /sadism/masochism). Kink isn’t superior to other consensual sex practices. (Sex-positivity, after all, is about doing away with the valuing of some consensual practice above others.) Mainstream culture could, however, benefit greatly from considering some of the principles that BDSM communities practice routinely. Kink, in many ways, may be the most responsible form of sex because you
have to
talk about it. You have to articulate exactly what you do and do not want to happen before anything starts happening. Consensually playing with power and control, for many people (survivors included), is a safe way to confront the twisted, violent, inequality-ridden society that we live in, and to muddle through the ways our lives and experiences intersect with that. Kink, as well as the larger values of a sex-positive culture, rejects the models that we’re given for sex that teach us that it’s something based on uncontrollable impulses, something that happens organically in a realm beyond words. These are the same models that result in safer-sex negotiations and practices being seen as an interruption of the sexual experience, and the same models that contribute to a culture that accepts silence as consent. Some more progressive rape crisis centers, particularly ones that serve the LGBT community, have statements clarifying that BDSM is not abuse. Generally, however, there is a large silence around the practice, or it is demonized and the question of consent is conveniently omitted.
 
I believe that Early to Bed and sex-positive environments of its ilk possess the qualities of openness, shamelessness, and creativity that are necessary to support people in becoming agents of personal and political change. It is, after all, a toy store, a place to ponder play. As a friend of mine recently said in a discussion about kink, play is how children, as well as adults, learn about themselves and their environments and imagine other realities. The store manages to attract a relatively diverse clientele because the owner prioritizes having toys in various price ranges, starting at $9. It’s not the products, however, that reflect progressive values. Vibrators are great, I’ll be the first to tell ya, and they’re damn good for self-care when you’re overworked or stressed out, but they are still pieces of plastic. They are still fraught with all of the same problems that any goods in a capitalist society have. What is radical is the creation of an environment where people can access information, normalize their experiences, and begin to break the silence and embarrassment about pleasure.
 
 
My own formative sexual experience is burdened with a heavy silence, a blip in the movie sequence of my memory. I remember saying no. I had never sucked dick before, and I didn’t want to start now. Blip. Then the memory is like a film with the sound turned off, his dick in my mouth, his hands on my head. For the next year or two I let him touch me, never saying no, never saying yes, never probing too much into what his on-and-off girlfriend knew or thought about it. At the same time, I reclaimed the word “slut,” told my friends it was good, I wanted it. I excelled at giving blow-jobs because I had wanted to excel at something.
BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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