I may have coined a term on Twitter the other day.

I tried Googling it and came up with no hits, so maybe I'm the first (in spaces privileged enough to be cataloged on the internet). And now, like any good academic, I am going to define it.

sex subject (n.) a person enthusiastically engaged in the attainment of their own sexual pleasure, with or without the involvement and pleasuring of another person(s). Viewing yourself and others as sex subjects entails the recognition of sexual partners as whole persons with valid sexual desires and the right to choose whether or not to act on them at any particular time rather than just sources of sexual pleasure, as well as an awareness that your partner(s)' body and company are privileges that your partner(s) choose(s) to share with you, not rights or de-personified items to which you are entitled. Ant: sex object

(Now you have something to cite, ChoosingPancakes.)

I welcome commenters with ideas to flesh this term out a little.      

Questions Raised at the Black Solidarity Conference

(by myself and others)

1. What does it mean to be a Black sexual being? 
2. How are people given the opportunity to be engaged in their sexuality?
3. Do people engage in sexuality differently according to access to various resources?
4. Why are today's young people, especially young women, being so miseducated about their own bodies?
5. Why is abortion what we leap to when talking about sexuality? Why single-motherhood? Why monogamy and marriage? What narratives are being ignored when our conversation centers itself around these topics? How can we refrain from institutionalizing sexuality?  
6. What is the difference between talking about sexual practices and talking about sexuality?
7. What are the everyday ethics of Blackness that determine who can or can not be in the community?
8. What is the impact of geographic region on gender presentation?
9. How do we work against the sociohistorical pathologization of Black bodies?
10. If Black women have never really fit into the definition of womanhood presented by dominant (White) society, what are our goals in the redefining of gender roles? What does that redefinition mean for us?
11. Why can't Brothers see themselves in women the way Sisters can see themselves in men?
12. How do we disaggregate criticism from "haterism"?
13. Why is the "walk of shame" a female-specific term?
14. Why are Black communities so obsessed with "presentability"? Why is who we are not enough? What are we overcompensating for?
15. How much experimentation with gender presentation is internal, having fun, and expressing ourselves, and how much is in response to our expectations of others' reactions to our presented selves?
16. How do we get rid of the idea that to participate in Blackness, we have to debase ourselves?
17. How do we reconcile promoting cultural criticism with promoting solidarity and/or the presentation of a unified front?
18. How does harkening back to our African past influence, isolate, and/or negate the experiences of people living in Africa today or who came to America from Africa recently? 
19. What does the phrase "I see you" signify in Black communities?
20. When can we, as Black peoples, OWN our sexuality?

 Despite all the "rachetness" and the existence of Travis Porter in my personal space and the heteronormativity I had to deal with and the freshwomen crashing in my room and not letting an old person like me sleep and all the other minor annoyances, this is why I go to the Black Solidarity Conference every year. Questions like this. The conference makes me think. The things I don't like about the conference make me think even harder. 

...New Haven also has some great places to shop. I'm not gonna lie. 

Contrary to what I said a few days ago,

sex is evidently NOT the one thing I really wanted for my birthday, because a somewhere-between-acquaintance-and-friend of mine came to celebrate my birthday with me, proceeded to finish the last few shots of a bottle of cake vodka straight from the bottle after he was already drunk because we'd just won two games of three-on-three beirut (which some of you may inaccurately refer to as "beer pong"), walked me home, and then asked if I wanted him to come in, and I sent him home. He's slightly taller than me, not unattractive, and I've known him since I was a freshman. But as soon as he started getting flirty last night, I started repeating a little mantra in my head: 'Do not sleep with ****.' 

The question is, why? 

1. Okay, well, he used to date a friend of mine. And before you say that that obviously hasn't stood in my way before, I mean with a good friend of mine, and it ended badly, rather than with an acquaintance who later became a friend and after a situation that ended at least somewhat harmoniously. And he had a weird interaction with the good friend of mine whom he used to date once last year after getting similarly drunk at an open bar at Quad and from what she told me was kind of harassing her. And he may have been in a relationship then, because he was dating a girl seriously enough to be sharing a car with her when I ran into him on the train like a month later. (Hmm. There may not need to be more reasons after this, but I will continue anyway.)
2. I once hooked up (though only 2 bases worth) with his current roommate, who had also been at my little birthday celebration, but left before he started getting all touchy-feely. But feelings had actually been involved in that hookup, and I wouldn't want the guy I didn't do anything with to brag to the guy I did stuff with, because though we were never anything but friends, guy-I-did-stuff-with matters to me.  Though attractive somewhere-between-friend-and-acquaintance is like, the perfect level of knowing someone to develop a buddy, which is not unappealing to me at this time, I'm just uncomfortable at the idea of becoming involved in any way with roommates, particularly roommates for whom my level-of-caring-about differs so greatly.
3. There was neither pretense of romance or lust. In the past, I have been fine with one or the other leading to sex, but just we're both drunk and we're both single is insufficient reasoning. I'm not necessarily against doing something just because it's there, but...idk. It just didn't feel right in this case (though this was heavily influenced by reasons 1 and 2). Changing the terms of a relationship is a tricky situation, and I felt no need to introduce sex into ours, I suppose. I have learned that I can be physically intimate with people I am emotionally intimate with, either in the course of romantic relationships or friendships that won't be complicated by seeing the person often, and that I can be physically intimate with someone with whom I have no emotional connection at all, but anywhere between these sections of the spectrum is dangerous territory, it seems. In retrospect, it almost seems like he felt entitled to hooking up with me because I have established a capacity for casual sex, and no one is entitled to the wonder that is me but me. Forever fact. 

Anyway, five minutes after I'd sent him home, I was opening YouPorn and preparing for a little private birthday fun with The Conqueror and wondering why I didn't let him stick around to be part of it...but when I put it like this, that wondering ceases and I'm glad I don't lose my ability to be rational and make smart decisions when I've been drinking for hours. Important life skills ftw.

Question for furthering pondering that this analysis prompts: I have firm beliefs about which practices constitute safe sex from a physical standpoint. Should I establish a similar set list of situations/things that constitute safe sex from a personal (or even emotional) standpoint? I conceptualize overall safety in more ways than just physical...thus it seems like I should conceptualize other things for which I have developed specific ways of being safe in terms of more things than just the physical too. Does that make sense? This was a situation in which I was uncomfortable hooking up, and I want to think more about other such situations. To a hypothetical better understanding of safe sex! 

I, for one, am not (particularly) mad at VSB.

I want to come out and say that, loud and clear, for everyone who happens across this little slice of the internet to hear. I'm uncomfortable with responses I've read that suggest that, as a man, all he is allowed to say about the subject of rape is "it's bad. Don't do it." I will say that people who have little to no background in a particular subject should do their homework very thoroughly before talking about the subject at length, which is why I hate when dominant groups try to wax poetic on the experiences of marginalized populations, but in this particular case I feel like that mindset suggests that the only people allowed to talk substantively about rape are rapists and rape victims, which doesn't seem healthy for the overall development of our society. I don't think I've ever been involved in a sexual act that was not enthusiastically consented to by both parties (though I occasionally wonder about the first time with my ex, because in the last seconds before we crossed that line, he asked me if I was sure I was ready, and I told him I was positive, and I didn't ask him in return before we continued), but I don't think that invalidates my opinions about rape and rape culture. And I don't think my opinions are any MORE valid than The Champ's just because I'm a woman.


Now he could have approached the subject more delicately, I'll give you that. Saying that the tone of Zerlina Maxwell's article:

seems to shift from “men need to take full responsibility for their actions” to “men need to take full responsibility for their actions…and women have carte blance to act as recklessly and stupidly around men as possible without any trace of accountability.” and I just can’t agree anymore.

[And] why can’t both genders be educated on how to act responsibility around each other? What’s stopping us from steadfastly instilling “No always means no!” in the minds of all men and boys and educating women how not to put themselves in certain situations? Of course men shouldn’t attempt to have sex with a woman who’s too drunk to say no, but what’s wrong with reminding women that if you’re 5’1 and 110 pounds, it’s probably not the best idea to take eight shots of Patron while on the first, second, or thirteenth date? Yes, sober women definitely get raped too, but being sober and aware does decrease the likelihood that harm may come your way, and that’s true for each gender. (emphasis added) (source)

is  decidedly insensitive, but as I understand it, he was never trying to say that women who get themselves into less-than-safe situations deserve to be taken advantage of. THAT is victim-blaming, and I didn’t see any of it in his post. All I saw was the same advice my momma gives me whenever I’m going out: be smart, and be careful. Know your limits. We obviously need to switch from being a culture that teaches “don’t get raped” to being a culture that teaches “don’t rape,” but I don’t think that promoting safety amongst women is necessarily antithetical to that endeavor, ESPECIALLY when we take non-forcible rape into consideration. (By that I mean, like, A and B meet at a bar, get drunk, go home together, and shit goes down without enthusiastic consent and neither A or B know what to think about the situation in the morning.) I think that suggesting that the entire onus of responsibility for that situation falls onto the responsibility of the man (if we assume this is a heterosexual encounter) is JUST as dangerous as the female-blaming society we’re trying to grow out of. 

I think that the most productive step our society could take towards rape prevention and overall healthy sexual living would be to promote responsible sexual conduct for people of all genders: that means more than just drilling into people’s heads that “No means no,” but rather introducing more nuanced understandings of consent, and the ability of persons in various conditions to give consent. If, for example, due to excessive amounts of alcohol consumption, neither party remembers what happened after a night of sexual activity in which enthusiastic consent wasn’t given (because enthusiastic consent can’t really be given if you’re blacked out), why is one party any more responsible for the night’s events than the other? OBVIOUSLY when one party forces him/herself onto another party, the victim bears zero responsibility for the situation, but there’s a lot of grey area between forcible rape and consensual sex. I think it’s perfectly healthy to suggest that, if it takes two informed persons to have consensual sex, all persons should assume at least a little bit of responsibility for making sure they can make informed decisions regarding sex.


So yes, his article is far from delicately written. Yes it presents a heteronormative, cisgendered, and somewhat sexist (in his presentation of men as aggressors and women as victims, because women can rape men too; an erection is not consent) understanding of rape and rape culture, and I wish the post had taken more nuance into account along those lines, BUT I don't think his basic premise of promoting sexual responsibility for ALL people is off the mark. 

Feel free to fight with me in the comments. I don't mean to have offended anyone, so if I have, please enlighten me as to alternative viewpoints/understandings and I'll take them into consideration and we can all learn and grow, okay?