Sex Doesn't Need to be Empowering

"I'm horny" is a good enough reason

Perhaps it’s the last dying breaths of 2010s Jezebel-style feminism, but I’ve noticed that female sexual behavior (especially that of straight women) still gets bucketed into one of two categories: degrading and empowering.

Doing porn is empowering (or is it degrading?) Getting consensually gangbanged is degrading (or is it empowering?) It’s a very annoying duality, akin to the Reddit troll I created, the guy who categorizes everything as virgin vs. Chad.

This popped into my mind after recent controversy over Sabrina Carpenter pantomiming an “Eiffel tower” sex position at her concert in Paris. Overwhelmingly, people were mad that she was pretending such a degrading act was, in fact, empowering. Sabrina Carpenter, they insisted, was selling a faux-feminist lie to young impressionable girls about how empowering it is to get railed by two guys at once. It was even my top suggestion under “Explore.”

First of all, I have to be honest, I’ve seen enough chatter about how “Sabrina Carpenter gave a blowjob to a microphone” or “Sabrina Carpenter humped the floor” or “Sabrina Carpenter fisted the curtains” (okay, I made that one up) to get the sense that young children probably shouldn’t be at Sabrina Carpenter concerts. And as for teenagers, well, the “harm” of witnessing a blonde Betty Boop-adjacent singer pantomime some goofy sexual stuff onstage probably pales in comparison to the harm of just being on TikTok for ten minutes. Teenagers just ten years ago were spending all their time watching ISIS beheadings. So as far as “think of the children” goes, just don’t take your prepubescent kids to a Sabrina Carpenter concert and you should be fine.

But back to the “empowering” stuff. It’s not the first time that “You’re lying about this being empowering when it’s actually degrading” was hurled against female sexual behavior. For any sexual behavior in which a woman partakes, there’s some other woman complaining that she’s “lying about it being empowering” even if she never claimed it was empowering. Because—and I know this sounds crazy—sexual behavior isn’t necessarily meant to be empowering or degrading. Sometimes people are just horny.