Seriously, where the fuck are these people who apparently cause so much trouble by calling themselves sex-positive feminists and then being shitty to people who don’t want to/don’t have sex?

I finally just googled “sex positive feminism”, and read everything in the first two pages that I hadn’t read before. (With so many people I’ve heard of, it doesn’t seem like I’m in some little isolated community like I thought I was, does it?) It all seems to be either not part of the problem, or people talking about the problem. With only one specific example of someone doing a problematic thing: the Cliteracy project, the artist of which doesn’t seem to call herself sex-positive? I mean, I don’t see the word in articles about it, I don’t see it on her website, she doesn’t mention it in the one of her videos that has a transcript, there are some people posting about it on Tumblr and describing it as sex-positive but that’s the extent of the connection as far as I can tell!

Seriously, somebody please tell me where these people are who are misusing sex-positive. I want to go give them a piece of my mind. But I honestly have not yet found any of them.

(I’m going to bed and will delve deeper into the google results and possibly tumblr tomorrow.)

“They aren’t doing x AT you.”

This is one of Captain Awkward’s catch phrases, and I think it’s a really useful way of thinking about a lot of situations. But I think that sometimes, people do for instance express their emotions at people. “I am unhappy and it’s your fault, now fix it in the way I choose,” is a way of manipulating people. So is “Do what I want you to, or I will make a huge scene out of my upset feelings that will have bad consequences for you.” This is something that’s hard to identify, of course, since the same actions can be manipulative or just sincerely upset depending on the intentions of the person doing them. And I think some people are more likely to feel like they’re being manipulated this way than others, since some people are more sensitive than others to the emotions of people around them. So a particular emotional reaction can look like Serious Scary Consequence to one person (causing them to feel pressured) but look like nothing special to another (and so not have a manipulative effect on them).

I don’t know, maybe this isn’t the best way to think about it/ term to use for it. It’s just what came to mind for me, to describe a couple of situations I’ve been in. Thoughts?

I don’t usually doubt my own feelings about what’s good for me, but…

For some reason today I ran across a whole bunch of different people talking about nail-biting and hair-pulling and lip-biting and so forth, and how they struggle with them and are trying to stop. And it’s making me start to doubt my usual confidence that the things I do aren’t bad for me.

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