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I started sex blogging before there were blogs. It was the early days of the Web, and I was posting about my encounters on bulletin boards and static sites. As a result of starting on platforms that either came with a like-minded audience or were islands in a vast darkness, I enjoyed a great freedom of expression. There was no battle, just story.
Had I stopped to think about it, I might have been led to believe that society was moving toward a more open mentality in regard to sexuality. This would have have been a misconception, naturally, as I was writing anonymously, gender-ambiguously, and with the awareness that my use of language made it impossible to guess that I was actually only fifteen at the time.
Online, I existed in a vacuum. In meat space, there was no such thing. The name of the battle was written on the wall –- literally and figuratively. Specifically, it was written on a bathroom stall in the girls' bathroom at school and the men's bathroom at the local movie theater: that I –- full name –- was a slut, a bitch, the antichrist, etc.
Even so, sex was not a political thing with me. The words “patriarchy” and “sex-positive” were intellectualisms with which I would have never colored what I was doing. Even a decade later, when I started to write professionally about my encounters, I remember telling people, “I don't want to be like those bloggers who are so concerned with making a political statement with sex that I doubt they still know what it's like to cum.”
While I had had my share of emotional vandalism for having the audacity to pursue my pleasures, enduring indignities of varying degrees both in meatspace and, later, in cyberspace itself, it took me a very long time to understand that it was the very freedom that enabled me to enjoy these pleasures that was at stake.
The reason for this was a combination of self-absorption, privilege and having grown up in so many different cultures that being perceived as different or even subversive was part of the norm for me. Nothing is really a battle for freedom until something is denied to you as a consequence of your behavior. By virtue of academic merit, I was never denied any opportunities. I was never silenced. I was never threatened with violence or constant harassment.
It wasn't until I moved to the continental United States that I began to understand how real and paralyzing harassment can be. The sexual revolution may have come and gone, but freedom has not yet been won.
And nowhere is this more clear than on the campus of one of the most forward-thinking institutions in the country: Harvard.
A TALE OF TWO WOMEN
Once upon a time, a Harvard freshman by the name of Lena Chen started a blog to chronicle her sexcapades. Her blog, Sex and the Ivy, became popular, and the popularity brought with it the eyes of less understanding readers. A sporadic target of ridicule on IvyGate and other college news and gossip blogs, Chen eventually had a nervous breakdown after an ex-boyfriend posted graphic images of her online, prompting a slut-shaming field day. She was an attention-whore, a slut, a tramp, an example of everything that was wrong with today's feminism, etc.
But slut-shaming isn't entirely about sex. In fact, slut-shaming isn't the right word because more than sex, it's about control. Slut-shaming is only half of the equation. To complete the tactics for control, you also need prude-shaming.
Meet Janie Fredell. At around the same time Chen was blogging about her hook-ups, another movement was gaining momentum on campus at Harvard: the abstinence movement. In 2007, Fredell wrote an essay on the Harvard Crimson about the allure of abstinence. She was a prude, a patriarchy-pleasing, gender-stereotyping, heteronormative anti-feminist.
The debate on having or not having sex reached a fever pitch on campus toward the end of the decade. However, when Harvard students gathered to hear these two women debate their views –- no doubt looking for blood –- they were were disappointed. They didn't realize the two women would find so much common ground over the harassment they'd both met for voicing their positions on sex.
That's what this is about. Not whether you're having sex or not having sex. It's about having a right to choose one or the other
