Objectify This

I’m writing this post with this header image in the hopes that it will not appear to be an advertisement for sex. This is not usually a problem I have; most of the things that I blog about are not nearly this much fun. That’s why I am boldly persevering, despite it all.

Being a sex-positive feminist might seem, to some, to be a contradiction- aren’t feminists supposed to hate men, not love cock? Well, that’s just another misconception about feminism that we need to break down, right up there with the idea equality is satanism.

The reality is that feminists have better sex; what’s not to love? That’s the question that Kidder Kaper, Cootchie, Laura Rad, and Gay Rick ask on their podcast, Sex Is Fun. Their information comes in a free, open-source medium that is easily downloadable to iTunes and tons of other programs, and their topics range from “How to Throw A Sex Party” to “Sex Education in Europe” and “How Lose Your Virginity.” They can tell you how to find the female g-spot and they have done their research about lots of what they call “non-vanilla” topics, such as butt sex, sex toys, bdsm, open relationships, multiple partner sex, and voyeurism. They’ve had guests like Betty Dodson, the Jill-Off Queen (who also writes for our favorite magazine, Bust) and Tristan Taormino, as well as product reviews… it’s a party in your headphones.

It’d be easy to endorse them unequivocally: they are providing free sex education to a country that badly needs it- – by Laura Rad’s report in Sex is Fun Episode #118, from last April, the current statistics are that 3 or 4 out of every 10 American girls get pregnant before they are twenty years old. That doesn’t mean that they have the baby, of course, but that is a staggering number compared to other industrialized nations– Western Europe, for example, averages 6 out of 100 girls.

Why? They have compulsory sex education. Condom advertisements are part of life. It has often been noted that the introduction of higher education for women in developing countries decreases birthrates; our culture’s discomfort with sex is doing us no favors.

We do use sex to sell everything, anyway: why do we have such a double standard about talking about how to protect ourselves and be healthy? It’s a question that remains to be answered, but as Kidder put it, the U.S. is also “the industrialized nation with the largest churchgoing population. Just sayin’.” The lack of federal funding for sex education also means that well-meaning sex educators, like the crew at Sex Is Fun, are forced to look elsewhere for funding.

Sex Is Fun was originally funded by the Smitten Kitten, a sex-toy store based in the Twin Cities, where Sex Is Fun is also based, and by a company that made a product called Boom Energy. Boom Energy was a non-prescription sexual stimulant that, in January of last year, was exposed as containing the prescription drug Viagra. Although the distributor plead ignorance, claiming that the product was not supposed to contain the drug, Kidder reported that the manufacturers “faced sentences of up to 20 years.”

It’s ironic that our cultural ignorance has left the best and most comprehensive sexual educational material — material that should made these four part of the academe of sex practice — dependent on deceptive products for funding. Maybe we could just admit that Sex is Fun?