TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to explore the one thing about the sex positivity movement with which I am in fundamental disagreement. At first, I thought I was totally against the sex positivity movement, mostly because so many people who called themselves sex positive came out against me for things that I said in my videos, saying that I was judgmental about sex and critical and shaming people and being sex shaming and things like this. It was like I wasn’t really sure what to make of it.
So I started reading about sex positivity, and I realized, especially when they talked about how to raise children in a sex positive way, a lot of it seemed really good. Most of it, in fact. I liked the idea of being frank with sex education about children in an age appropriate way, naming body parts correctly, not giving them funny strange names, not teaching children to be ashamed about their bodies, talking about good healthy boundaries between children, uh, saying giving children the responsibility and the right to take care of their own boundaries, to not do inappropriate things to other people, not to cross other people’s boundaries. This is all stuff that I think was great. It actually would have done really well for me if my parents had been sex positive toward me as a child according to these definitions.
But the basic thing about sex positivity with adults that I just don’t agree with, I think it’s sick and wrong, is this idea that any sexual exploration or activity between consenting adults is healthy, it’s okay, it’s morally good. And I just don’t agree with that. I see all these examples all over the place around the world where it’s really terribly troubling. And yet, how can I disagree with adults, two consenting adults, three consenting adults doing things that they’ve talked about, that they agree are okay, and they’re trying things out with each other?
Well, the basic reason that I don’t agree with it, I don’t, I think it’s wrong, I think it’s not even true, even, is that what I see is the sex positivity movement, at least as much as I’ve interfaced with it and read about it, doesn’t acknowledge unconscious motives for sexual behavior. It doesn’t look at how trauma affects people’s sexuality in terms of the behaviors they’re motivated to do and to express. And what I’ve learned about trauma throughout my life, personal experience, watching so many others, from the time when I was a therapist, from the time before I was a therapist, and since I quit being a therapist, is that when people get traumatized, especially early in their lives, they get stunted.
And although they may grow up to become physical adults, physiological adults, reach the age of majority, be 10 years older than the age of majority, be 28, 38, 48, 58 years old, in the parts of themselves that are traumatized, they are not adults, and their behavior reflects that. And when that behavior gets linked up with their sexuality, with their physiological adult sexuality, it becomes incredibly troubling. People can express all sorts of unresolved traumatic behavior, post-traumatic behavior, through their sexuality. And not just sexual traumas that people experience, but also traumas of power, traumas related to love, traumas related to abandonment, deficiencies in certain things that their parents did or didn’t do.
People can look to get loved through sexuality. People can express hatred and rage through sexuality. In our world, so much is really forbidden when people really try to heal from their traumas. People can get pushed out of their family systems when they try to heal from their traumas. I mean, that’s totally normal. People can get pushed out of their religions and their societies. People can get hated by everybody, censored, judged for feeling angry at their traumatizer, feeling furious at their traumatizer, bitter for confronting their traumatizer. I know it’s happened to me. I’ve seen it happen to so many people. They confront their traumatizing parents for things that the parents actually did, and everybody in the family system, the greater family system, everybody in society even can say you’re wrong for confronting your parents, or that never happened, or you shouldn’t have those feelings, or you’re a resentful person. There’s something sick about you.
Resentment is like swallowing poison and hoping the other people die, the people you’re resentful of. You have to learn how to forgive. And people, myself included, pretty much everybody in our world that I see at some level takes these messages to heart. These messages that healing trauma is unacceptable, especially trauma that happened within the family system in relation to our primary love object, our parents, the people whose job it was to love us the most when they failed us. And they failed us in all sorts of different ways, and it screwed us up. Healing it is against the rules. We’re supposed to accept them for what they did. We’re supposed to empathize with them.
And so often what I’ve seen, what I know, is that people express all of these post-traumatic feelings and all these post-traumatic longings, all the things that they’re not allowed to feel inside their family, through sex. A lot of people do it through sex, through sexuality, and through sexual experimentation. And that’s what I’ve been criticized about when I talk about that this is unhealthy. It’s acting out this type of post-traumatic tendrils that come through the lens of sexuality. This is sexual acting out.
And what do I mean by acting out? I think a lot of times in society people say, “Oh, when you say acting out, that just means bad things, things that are wrong, things that you should not do.” That is acting out. But what I mean by acting out isn’t about morality in terms of badness or wrongness. It’s about literal theatrical acting, using life, using others as the theater through which and on which one can express one’s unresolved traumas. And that’s what sexual acting out is. It’s people expressing their unresolved traumas and dramas on the theater of sex, interactively with others, even with their own selves, or through pornography.
It’s like pornography is a classic example, a basic example of people—I’m talking people who make pornography or let themselves be used consensually to make pornography about them and their bodies, or people who watch it, myself having been one of those people—that this is using sexuality and sex as a theater stage onto which people express what happened to them and what they didn’t get, the love they didn’t get, the violations that happened to them. And there’s sex provides a great way to explore all of these things unconsciously. It’s an unconscious exploration.
And what I found through painful personal experience is that the sex positivity movement, I want to say by and large, but I haven’t seen exceptions to it, accepts all this sexual acting out, all this really unhealthy stuff that people are expressing through sexuality unconsciously, without any self-reflection about what it means or where it comes from or how, heaven forbid, to heal it. They just accept it as healthy, as good, as a positive thing. And I think actually maybe I’m a bit wrong here because I don’t know enough about it, but it’s sort of my gut feeling. And what I’ve read and about sex positivity and talked with others who are even into it is the feeling I get is sex positivity is sort of a mirror image of the sex negativity of a very repressive conservative religious upbringing.
It came as a reaction to it, not a conscious reaction, but just a reflexive reaction against sex is bad, sex is shameful, you must only do it in marriage, you cannot explore your sexuality, women do not have sexual—they cannot have sexual feelings, they are just recipients of their husband’s sexuality, homosexuality is inherently bad. It’s like all these old religious, ancient religious dictums that came from who knows where, sources who may have never even existed, some random person writing stuff that may have just been them expressing their own shame through these religious laws, the shame of perhaps what they felt or what they were actually doing or what happened to them, perhaps without their consent.
And so much of what I see of the sex positivity movement is just a reaction to that, saying sex isn’t shameful, sex is good, sex exploring it outside of marriage in this way, as long as it’s consensual, it’s good. But here’s the basic thing that’s so part and parcel of what I’m talking about, why I’m against all the sex positivity stuff is that in the parts of traumatized adults, physiological adults who may…
Be 30 or 40 or 50. Those traumatized parts of them are not actually adults. They’re still stunted to the age at which they were traumatized. They’re stunted to the ages of 2, 3, 4, 5 years old when they were abandoned by their parents, literally sometimes or emotionally. When they were sexually violated, perhaps when they were children, when they were humiliated, perhaps not even sexually, but it traumatized them. All sorts of different ways that children get traumatized, they get stunted to these ages.
And if they don’t deal with the traumas, heal from the traumas, resolve the traumas, those parts of them, those sides of them, remain stunted little children expressing themselves through a physiologically adult body. And what I think is those parts of them, those sides of them, those traumatized, wounded, stunted sides of them actually can’t give consent. They’re in no psychological or emotional position to give consent to others.
And so when they’re engaging in sexual relationships with others and expressing their traumas and maybe even feeling, quote, good because of it, good sort of like a dissociative addict, because they get in some way to discharge some of their post-traumatic feelings, nothing about healing them, but just, I don’t know, in some way feeling empowered by this sexual acting out. Because people can feel empowered, it doesn’t mean they are empowered, but they can even delude themselves into feeling empowered. They’re actually violating themselves again, and they’re violating others.
Even though someone says, “yes, you can do XYZ to me sexually,” when the person is saying, “you can do XYZ to me,” and that consent is coming from that traumatized, wounded child part of them, they’re not really giving consent. And when those sexual things happen to that person, they’re being violated again. That’s not positive. That’s not sex positive. That’s not anything positive.
And then you look at the world of the consequences of this sexual behavior. And even if people are using condoms and protecting themselves in a sex positive way, the consequences aren’t positive. It’s not loving. And I think it’s actually really not even sexual exploration. I think it’s sort of a stand-in for what real healing would be. Real healing of the trauma, real true exploration of not just what happened to one that traumatized one, but feeling all those feelings.
I think a lot of times all the sexual acting out that’s called sex positive isn’t about feeling the feelings. It’s about not feeling the feelings. It’s about diverting from the feelings. It’s about blocking the feelings. And I think for a lot of people that’s just a lot easier than healing.
Yes, people might feel what they call joy and release and freedom through the sexual acting out that’s called sex positive, but it’s a lot easier to feel those feelings. And I say feelings in quotes a lot of times. I think it’s just dissociating from stuff. And the stuff that’s being dissociated from, all that pain and bitterness and fury and rage and negativity.
I mean, S&M, sadomasochism, what is that expressing? Just one side of sexual acting out that’s called sex positive. For some people, it’s like it’s expressing the sadistic ways in which people were treated by their parents as children. It’s expressing and trying to take some sort of unconscious ownership for the masochist the child had to be to get loved by his sadistic parent. Or perhaps it’s acting out the acting out, expressing, re-expressing the parents’ dynamics of hating each other.
And I’m not for it. And it was actually really scary to make this video. I’ve had it on my list of videos to make for a long time. And, well, probably rightfully so, I thought I was going to get criticized for it and ripped apart and called sex negative and get judged and shamed for being accused of judging and shaming others. But I don’t think I’m judging and shaming anyone. I think I’m actually looking at people in an accurate psychological light, a compassionate light of what actually happened to them long ago that screwed them up and in some fundamental way prevented them from being able to have a healthy sexuality.
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