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.

I have had sex before (sorry to brag.) I can’t say I’ve felt especially “empowered” any of these times, even when the sex was very good. Maybe if I had been raised in a particularly sexually repressed environment, where I was shamed for enjoying sex or masturbating or whatever, I might consider it “empowering” to take some kind of wacky masturbation class in San Francisco or have a one night stand, because there would be an implication of taking power back against my regressive background. I’m sure some women do feel empowered by those things, especially if their mothers told them that masturbation was DJing Satan’s vinyl. But generally, I just don’t think sexual behavior needs to be categorized as empowering or not empowering. It should simply be: do I want to do this, or do I not want to do this?

In the case of Sabrina Carpenter, I don’t even think it was a matter of her being horny. She did a silly, raunchy pose as part of a dance, and no doubt it had something to do with Paris being the location of the Eiffel Tower and her concert. I don’t think the young women watching such a performance are going to go out and start getting Eiffel Towered, as it would require three young people to meet up at the same time without anyone flaking. Even Gen Z’s “sex scandals” are just about sending nudes.

But I also feel like defenses of sexually provocative behavior from women (especially female celebrities) hinge on the sex acts or insinuations of sex acts being empowering or rebellious, which is apparently the only reason they should ever be allowed. Need I remind you all of the Miley Cyrus twerking controversy of 2014? One minute, she was degrading herself and sending a bad message to teenagers (not to mention culturally appropriating! What a time!) and the next minute, she was actually empowered and twerking away the patriarchy, feministly. It seemed like nobody was examining the obvious motivation of, “She’s performing and wants to do something entertaining.”

It’s like art. What if a piece of art isn’t meant to say something profound about the power structures of late stage capitalism, and is actually just a cool idea the artist wanted to make because it was fun? Some things are just fun.

This expectation that all sexual behavior has to be empowering or else makes me think about men’s sexuality, or the sexual performances of male singers. Men do plenty of sexual stuff onstage, and generally the only rule seems to be “don’t bring minors onstage while you’re doing it.” (That’s right, Drake.) Nobody is questioning whether Matt Healy is degrading himself or empowering himself when he makes out with his fans onstage, although they might debate if he’s being creepy. Maybe “creepy” is the male version of “degrading” for women. And if I had to choose, I’d rather people think I was degrading myself than call me a sex pest. But—perhaps because straight men aren’t seen as an oppressed class—nobody ever questions whether something they’re doing is meant to be “empowering.” At the same time, nobody ever accuses them of perpetuating a lie that doing something is empowering, just by doing that thing.

I suppose there are some exceptions. I remember seeing a Reddit post a while back where a guy nervously asked red pillers for their views on cunnilingus, and whether or not performing it made him “beta.” Even red piller Redditors told him he was overthinking it, which is really saying something. They decided he should simply do it if he wanted to, and not do it if he didn’t want to. After all, there’s nothing more beta than being a few inches away from a vagina, thinking “I wonder what my cool Internet friends would say about this.” That’s kind of how I feel about female sexuality and empowerment. I don’t really care if you find it empowering, nor do I think performing a sex act (or pretending to) is the same thing as claiming such an act is empowering. Sometimes people just do things.

Now, I am extremely vanilla. I’m not going to get into details, but whatever the kinkiest thing you think I’ve done is, it’s probably less kinky than that. But I have found myself in the crosshairs of the whole “empowering” thing before because I used to love wearing revealing clothing. (You might be thinking, used to? I’ve seen your outfits! and to you I say, they used to be worse!) I’ll write about this in more detail later, but in my late teens and early twenties, everything I wore basically revolved around how tight and revealing it could be. I had a Google document where I organized my dresses as “boobalicious” or “bootylicious.” One time I ran into another woman on the street wearing the same bebe dress, and she proceeded to turn and go into a strip club where she was working. Another time, when my husband and I were walking in Central Park late at night, a cop stopped him and asked him “how he knew me.” Yeah, it was quite something.

Other women gave me a lot of shit for this. Ironically, one of the consequences of this attire was that someone spread a rumor that I had, in fact, been Eiffel Towered. I must have really liked dressing this way, because I continued to do it despite immense social ostracization. At the time, I felt pressure to insist this practice was “empowering” because I was frequently accused of being desperate for male attention or having low self esteem (apparently if someone is insecure and feels bad about themselves, yelling at them is what you should be doing?) Because people insisted I was degrading myself, the kneejerk response was to declare, “No, it’s actually empowering!”

At the time, I probably did have low self esteem about some things (my social skills, especially) but the “insecure” accusation didn’t make much sense. Obviously I felt pretty great about my body if I wanted to show it off all the time, so perhaps my self esteem canceled itself out. And as for wanting male attention…yes? Isn’t that like, part of being a straight woman? Of course, not every straight woman wears revealing clothing, and some of them probably want to be left alone, but it seems like “wanting men to find you attractive and date you” is pretty reasonable as far as women’s desires go. And if you feel good about your body, isn’t it also pretty reasonable to want to highlight it, especially in socially appropriate places like clubs and college parties? (As for Central Park, we were on our way to a bar, we just got lost.) I understand straight men never really show off their bodies, but if a gay guy wears short shorts or a tank top, is that degrading? Is it empowering? Or is he just trying to accentuate his body and meet a cute guy?

Either way, none of my attire had to do with being degraded or empowered. I just wanted to showcase my most appealing physical features to attract the attention of a guy who might be a good partner, and after I found that guy, I continued to do it because I wanted to look hot for him, and I also just enjoyed looking hot, knowing my twenties wouldn’t last forever (I have no regrets by the way- I’m glad I dressed this way when it was somewhat socially acceptable, as opposed to, “Nurse, she’s escaped again.”) At the time, I wasn’t interested in casual sex, although again, if I were…would that need to be bucketed as empowering or degrading too? It wasn’t that my behavior wasn’t empowering, it just…existed in a different place than empowerment or degradation. I was just trying to look hot.

Some people in the radical feminist space will say that “trying to look hot” is inherently degrading because it is, admittedly, pandering to the male gaze. I once saw a radical feminist blog who insisted the only acceptable heteroexual marriage was one where the only sex act was cunnilingus (imagine what Beta Red Pill guy would have to say about that!) Spoiler alert: I’m not a radical feminist and we will probably just have to agree to disagree on a lot of things. But this is actually one of my main issues with certain types of radical feminism. Men get the freedom to be attracted to women and do things to appeal to women’s physical preferences, but women are “degrading ourselves” if we do the same. Heterosexuality certainly isn’t the only natural way of life out there, but it’s obviously the default for the majority of the population, and I don’t agree with making it needlessly fraught for half of those people.

I suppose you could argue a sex act is degrading for a woman if she doesn’t enjoy it, or if she does it because she feels pressured. And maybe it’s hard to decouple what society pressures a woman to do from what she wants to do. But who am I to wade into the waters of what women enjoy and don’t enjoy? I am fairly confident I would hate being Eiffel Towered, although perhaps having ADHD would give me a leg up on the multitasking (Nobody ever talks about the invisible labor of having ADHD and taking two dicks at once.) But either way…I don’t think I’d like that, even if it were two clones of my wonderful husband. I also don’t think I would enjoy group sex in any other configuration. And yet, every day, I hear about women enthusiastically doing sexual stuff that I would absolutely hate. I even once knew a woman whose fantasy was being Eiffel Towered (she is now an extremely normal-looking blonde forty-year-old mom.) I figure human sexuality is a fairly broad spectrum of likes and dislikes, and I just choose to believe women when they say they enjoy something, unless it’s unsweetened Greek yogurt as “dessert.”

I don’t even say any this from the angle of “liberal sex-positive feminism” per se. That’s another thing I find tiresome, actually—that everything women do has to be examined under the lens of feminism or anti-feminism. Maybe I’m being too simplistic about it, and maybe a gender studies dissertation needs to be written about every blowjob every woman gives (or pretends to give to a microphone) but I’m confident that sometimes people just do sexual things for whatever reason, and most of the time, they do it because they want to. In some people’s case, they did the thing because they were horny. In the case of Sabrina Carpenter, she did the thing because she thought it would be funny or entertaining. Many such cases.

So perhaps it doesn’t really matter if something is empowering or not, and even if it did matter, none of us would be able to tell if something was empowering unless we were inside the body of the person doing it (and no, not in a vore sense, which is another sexual thing I don’t really understand, but all the more power to you if you enjoy Charizard vore or whatever.)