Holding sex positivity to its own promise

Under Queerty's Instagram post about us in September, one comment put the case against No Sex Gay Weekend about as clearly as it can be put:

There is nothing wrong with sex. What happened to sex positivity? … gay men are not sex fiends that need to be controlled and cajoled into not having sex during a weekend.

I want to answer that properly, because the first sentence is right.

Sex is fun

There is nothing wrong with sex. As I said on Flex Your Feelings: "No, but it is fun. Sex is fun." The code of conduct every guest agrees to before they come says we believe sex can be a joyful, positive, healthy and essential part of life. I told Queerty, "This is not anti-sex." I told QX, "I have nothing against people having sex."

I'm not against hookups either. If everyone wants to do it, that's great. As I said on Friend of Dorothy, the point of the project is not to reduce the amount of sex in the world. The point is to let the people who want to connect differently do that, and to make it easier. "And then I hope they have loads of sex after."

And nobody is being controlled. Nobody's taking a vow. It's a weekend that people choose, with one rule they read before they book.

Context

Sex positivity was a necessary corrective. It pushed back against shame, and it was right to. What I'd add is the part that tends to get left out:

With sex positivity, sex is good, but the context in which it happens is not always good.

I said that on Flex Your Feelings, and then I said this, which I stand by:

I'm cake positive, right? Okay. Well, sure, cake is enjoyable, but if you're eating cake for 10 years only and gorging on it, that is not a good thing. So, shame bad. Behaviours that have negative impacts on your life, bad as well. And I think we need to get a bit more nuanced and grow up a little bit.

There's a simple test, too. As I put it on Friend of Dorothy, if I actually want to talk to someone afterwards, I feel like that was probably a good person to have had sex with. If I want them to go immediately, or I want to leave immediately, I was probably just using the person. That isn't a moral position. It's just noticing.

The conversation-stopper

Somewhere along the way, sex positivity started being used to end conversations instead of open them. Any question about how gay men are actually living, the ranking, the rejection, coming home from a night out feeling worse, gets heard as anti-sex. So the questions don't get asked, and nothing gets looked at.

I said it on Flex Your Feelings: we have to take responsibility for it. We go on Grindr. We treat other guys like pieces of meat, and we let them treat us like pieces of meat. Saying that out loud isn't shame. It's the opposite. It's taking the promise of sex positivity seriously: that sex should make our lives better, not leave us feeling worse about ourselves.

The joke that tells you something

The most common reply under that post, and under the one in August, was some version of: obviously they all had sex anyway. I get the joke. But as I said on Flex Your Feelings, behind it is the truth:

Many of us cannot imagine connecting with gay guys without sex being the essential part of it.

It says more when people cannot believe that it could happen for a weekend. For an hour. For a couple of hours.

Another comment in the thread read the whole thing as conservative, a "Normal Gay" respectability exercise. It isn't that either. I don't want to forbid people from cruising. I give people the option to choose a break from it for a while. It is a sex-positive project. It just isn't organised around sex.

Not everyone in the thread was against it. One person wrote that people can recognise themselves as sexual beings and also be thoughtful, and set intentions for the kinds of connection they want over a weekend. That is the whole idea, put better than I usually manage.

Sex positivity was supposed to mean something. Maybe we should hold it to that.

The rule, and why we have it, is on WTF is NSGW.