How sex positive feminism hurts feminists

I’ve been a feminist for as long as I can remember.

I hate to say it, but I’m a man-made feminist. Truth be told, we all are, which is particularly frustrating to have to admit. However, if true equity existed between the sexes, feminism would be unnecessary.

I, like so many others, am a feminist because I’ve grown up in a patriarchy — a world built by men and for men. We’ve watched men and boys have the advantage at just about every turn because they are the ones who were able to pour the foundations of our societies. And sadly, many women have also been subjected to violence, abuse and exploitation at the hands of men. For them, feminism isn’t optional, it’s survival.

So why is the feminist movement in discord? At a time when diverse groups of people who experience discrimination are joining forces, supporting each other’s causes and weaving different lived experiences together to create a stronger thread, it often feels as though many of us are lone stands, knotted up inside because of what other factions of the feminist movement are calling “liberation.”

Here’s the thing, I get it. I bought into many of these alternative and very popular versions of female empowerment myself. The moment I sneaked my first Cosmopolitan magazine, everything changed for me. I flipped through glossy pages of airbrushed images of women whom no one could ever look like (not even the women in the images themselves), and once the magazine had my dwindling self-esteem right where they wanted it, there followed pages of product advertisements promising to help the reader achieve these unachievable standards.

And then the cherry on top: Once we readers felt fully beaten down, realizing that no amount of cleansers or self-tanners or teeth whiteners or diet could make us look like those airbrushed images, they hit us with the death blow. At least 10 pages of sex tips and tricks and ways to “get your man.” The message seemed to be: If all else fails, you can find empowerment there.

However, the idea that a woman derives power in the bedroom leads to some very strange bedfellows. After the sexual revolution, feminists soon locked arms with pimps and pornographers, the very people telling women that commodifying our bodies for the male gaze was actually the pinnacle of true feminism. The argument went like this: As long as women are the ones exploiting themselves, no man could ever do the exploiting. Genius! But of course, this argument conveniently leaves out the fact that men remain the beneficiaries of such behavior.

I bought into this way of thinking. Rather than learn body literacy (all about menstruation, ovulation, gestation and lactation), I went to the doctor and simply got on birth control pills. Rather than expecting men to put any of their mental or physical health on the line for sexual “freedom,” I happily bore the brunt of managing fertility all on my own, even though as females we are, on average, only fertile 4-6 days out of every month, while men are fertile, well, you guessed it, 24/7/365.

To make matters worse, many feminists even validate men as allies by saying as long as men pay half of the abortion cost if birth control fails, we’re all still living out feminist beliefs. Or, if women chose to continue their pregnancies, like I did, these same feminists often justify men walking away because, hey, the woman had a choice after all, so true equality should give the guy the same right to opt out of parenthood.

But this type of “feminism” is merely a patriarchy wrapping itself in platitudes and prescriptions that hurt women, not men. The onus is always on us. Male allies may march beside us, but women’s bodies still make the sacrifices under the Cosmo approach to sex. So what does this form of feminism actually do for us?

I know all of this because it was my lived experience. I exploited myself before I could be exploited. I used sex as a tool or a weapon, whichever was most useful at the time. And by 16, I was pregnant and single. Cosmo feminism failed me. So it’s hard to watch the masses embracing it now.

Still, I am incredibly sex positive. I know this might sound weird, but as a mother I want my children to have the most healthy and fulfilling sex lives one day. This type of sex positivity took me decades to find because I had to undo the male-centered brainwashing of faux feminism. For me this isn’t just about personal sexual freedom, which, if we’re being honest, is still mostly performative. It’s about true sexual liberation that will impact generations to come.

I want women and nonbinary people to experience pleasure just as much as their male counterparts, and I am thankful that the sexual revolution led us to embrace and celebrate our bodies without shame. However, somewhere along the way, rather than demanding men rise up to the standard of our female power, feminists pursued equality by simply lowering ourselves to the most base level.

I call this the “new patriarchy.” It is a system upheld by the men often ignored so that feminists can claim victory. The men who often call themselves feminists too, and freely walk among our ranks. The ones passing out fliers for a “Free the Nipple” rally with glee. The ones protesting in the streets for access to birth control for you, while remaining silent on the development of male alternatives.

The new patriarchy is about the men who lament the discomforts of prophylactics, while simultaneously ignoring the very real side effects many women experience from hormonal contraceptives that we are supposed to take in order to be “responsible.” It’s the men who champion the body positivity movement, not because of the harm done to women by normalizing unattainable beauty standards, but because these men want to see a more vast variety of nude women, now that women are finally comfortable in our own skin.

And sadly, many in the feminist movement have embraced these patriarchal views over their sisters who are loudly proclaiming: This is the very type of behavior that created a need for feminism in the first place. These feminists stand with pimps and johns, sex buyers and Backpage, even though they know women are harmed by this industry.

They simply label it one of their favorite buzzwords: “choice.” This label ignores the fact that only a few privileged women actually have a choice at all when it comes to sex work. While these faux feminists might proclaim their allegiance to marginalized voices, they do nothing to fight against the push for legalized prostitution, which disproportionately harms women of color and LGBTQ people, fetishizing them and often leading to violence against these groups of people who are frequently trafficked.

On the contrary, many feminists are actually fighting alongside the patriarchy to defend the “right” of their sisters to “choose” to be commodified, to make their bodies merely products of transactions and subject to abuse.

Compounding that, a whole generation of adolescents is getting sex “education” from pornography that often features acts of violence and aggression towards the female body, and many feminists have the audacity to promote it while at the same time decrying “rape culture” from the other side of their mouths. If rape culture is the theory, then pornography and trafficking are the ultimate practices.

This is not true sex positivity at all, and I’d argue that it goes against everything our feminist foremothers stood for. We have replaced female-led feminism with a patriarchal version of it.

If your free-the-nipple rally is drawing the same crowd as a wet T-shirt contest, you’re probably being played. When Hugh Hefner was a major backer for the development of women’s birth control, but not anything equivalent for men, the picture should’ve become pretty clear. They’ve co-opted feminism.

I am sex positive. I want all adults to experience mind-blowing, body-shaking, deep and transcendental sexual pleasure. But what I see being promoted now is the exact opposite. Our culture now celebrates a kind of high-volume, low-quality sex that is still in the service of men in one way or another. And it’s time for us man-made feminists to kick these toxic bedfellows out of our sheets.

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa is the founder of New Wave Feminists. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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