This is a reply to the following news article:
Danish Activist Emma Holten Is Sharing Nude Photos To Combat Revenge Porn
I actually think this is a great idea, and I'm really surprised to find someone willing to make the distinction between bad "sex" and good "sex" (by "sex" here I mean any erotic or sexually motivated activity or behavior). So many people are willing to use any evidence of bad sex in the world to criticize all sex, as if to demonstrate that sex is inherently evil, instead of pointing out the fact that some people use sex for good purposes, and others for bad. Like radfems who prop up anecdotal evidence of women being mistreated in porn or prostitution, and use it to paint entire professions as exploitative and abusive.
I can just imagine a woman being the unfortunate victim of "revenge porn", and using that evidence of the way men treat her and her images and her body as proof that men are pigs and their sexual desires predispose them to be abusive towards women (basically, your typical sex-negative feminist's point of view). But this woman recognizes that there are good and positive ways for one to display their body to others (namely, those ways that involve consent), and for men to relate sexually to women, and is willing to go to lengths to point that out instead of publicly demonizing sex because she had a bad experience with it.
Obviously, I don't want women to feel compelled to have to post naked pictures on their own terms just to combat having unscrupulous men stealing or tricking them into revealing parts of themselves they'd rather keep private. But on the other hand, there is a great demand for naked and sexy pictures of women - there's nothing wrong with that, it's just how men (if not humans in general) function. So the more women there are who are willing to put these pictures out there on their own terms, the less I think the women who'd prefer not to will have to endure the pressure to give in.
That, I think, is one of the big sex-related problems in our society. Obviously, sex is popular, and gets a lot of attention. But we're also neurotic about it, and are taught to be ashamed of it. Anyone who does "act out" sexually is going to receive negative attention (think about how the press treats Miley Cyrus). This is proportionately more true for women than it is for men. As a result, there's actually less supply of sexual expression in the world (in spite of anyone who lectures you about the "pornification" of society) than there is demand for it. The result is lots of sexual frustration, and, since people are only human (and men are statistically more aggressive than women), more men pressuring women than there should be.
Yet women who give in are shamed as sluts (by both women and men alike). For women, it's a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Many of them err on the side of "don't", which is reinforced by the fact that I imagine in a lot of cases women's ability to enjoy sex is sabotaged by all these negative attitudes, and the fact that when they do it, more often than not they're doing it because a man is pressuring them, and not because they're the ones who are interested and have initiated it (and nobody's really making female pleasure a priority). So it's this huge spiral that feeds into itself and leaves us all worse off. The solution is not more pressure on unwilling women but rather less condemnation of the women who choose to participate in the game of sex on their own terms. Which, you might notice, is also a true feminist goal.
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