I’ve been thinking about sex.

Hey. You were too, so just keep that judgment in check.

[Note: if you are my mother, you should probably stop reading right about now. Two lines ago would have been even better.]

I’ve been thinking about feminism, the sexual revolution, rainbow parties, love, Girls Gone Wild, sexual empowerment, and who I am, really.

It suddenly occurred to me – and pardon me if this should have been patently obvious by now – that an important part of being a sexually liberated, empowered woman who truly owns her sexuality is the freedom to be non-sexual. I’m not talking about the right not to be raped. That’s a given and it is HIGHLY obvious to me. I’m talking about adult women refusing to market their sexuality and/or choosing to not be sexually active.

Stay with me. There’s more.

I wrote in a previous post that the feminist revolution has been far and away outshadowed by the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution, I argue, tells women that you can do what you want with your sexuality – have orgasms, kiss girls, give head, have threesomes – as long as the male gaze finds it pleasing. This is not a new idea or even a terribly unique one – Rebecca Traister writes about it in several pieces at Salon, and since we’re talking about sex, lots more people write about it, too.

Still, this academic point became stunningly real to me during a frank discussion during a girls night. (Alcohol may have been involved, but I refuse to confirm those rumours.) There were five heterosexual women in the room, all in our late twenties/early thirties, and we were discussing blow jobs. Naturally. In this admittedly small scientific sample, the women who did not give head, did not like giving it, or gave it reluctantly and in return for the performance of large household chores or significant expenditures, were in the majority.

I was shocked. I mean really and truly shocked. I thought women gave head because they liked it. I had some airy-fairy notion that sexually empowered women didn’t do things they didn’t want to do – and that we certainly didn’t perform sex acts in return for favours around the house. I actually joke about that equation – sexual favours for favours, because it seems to me to be so antiquated a concept that it is actually funny. So yes, I was shocked.

So shocked that I kept thinking about it, and brought it up a few nights later with a woman whom I think is sassy, strong and sexually empowered. She became a young adult in the late sixties/early seventies, and she was stunned by my report, too. She said “I didn’t think it was an option not to…!” She also said that she grew up in the thick of the sexual revolution which meant that it seemed mandatory to be promiscuous. Everybody was sleeping with everybody.

I also remember a few months back that this same woman announced that she was planning to be celibate. I was really uncomfortable with that. It felt, to me, that renouncing sex was renouncing being a woman and renouncing power. This conclusion also made me uncomfortable: to be a sexually empowered woman meant that you had to be having sex. Why is that?

I’m not sure that it is mandatory to be promiscuous, now, (it might be) but I do think that our culture makes it mandatory for women to be perceived as sexual. If you’re not signalling sexuality or that you are sexually available or sexually desirable (to men), then you are pretty much The Invisible Woman. Even the ordinary girls have to have a wild side – hence the popularity of “Girls Gone Wild”. At the same time, there’s much hand-wringing and anguish over the sexual activities of very young girls and women, who, according to O magazine, are apparently helping teen boys collect multi-coloured rings of lipstick on their penises at ‘rainbow parties’.

This may be a new iteration of an old trend. In my high school, there was a thing called ‘Sauce Points’. I don’t remember how the points broke down – which acts scored which points – but in essence, it was a tally and the guys were in it to win it. I still remember hearing how one girl, who had a crush on a particular guy, approached him and offered him x number of points. She wanted his attention and she was willing to pay for it. That saddens me. It saddens me that I am writing about sex in this way – that we’re still using it as currency, which, frankly cheapens and degrades it. I’m not going to get all soft and sentimental and try and link sex and love – because I think we all know it doesn’t have to work like that – but wow, sex is such a divine wild beast. I’m so sorry that some people aren’t having that experience and have to perform activities they don’t really enjoy to get something they need or want. Like attention. Or a new ceiling fan.

So I’ve been thinking about sex, and women, and social expectations. And it seems to me that we still have the good girl/bad girl, madonna/whore divide, except now all women are expected to be both. Both the good girl and the bad girl, both the madonna and the whore. Would we have the acronym MILF if this wasn’t the case?

On the one hand, this is great. It acknowledges the fullness and the complexity of women’s identities. We can be respectable business women, loving mothers, and inherently and expressively sexual creatures, all at the same time. I mean, that’s just a fact. We were madonnas and whores all along.

And yet.

I would argue that it is not really acceptable for an adult woman not to broadcast her sexuality or her desirability. I honestly think that there is a thread woven into the current Obesity! Crisis!* that is essentially saying to women, ‘How dare you, Fat Girl! You are supposed to be sexy! How dare you fail to have a waist-to-hip ratio that signals availability!’

I was applying these wonderings to my own life…because in high school, I was the good girl. I didn’t have sex until I was eighteen. I wanted to be in love. I wanted it to mean something. It did not. To be honest, I shied away from any boy who might dare to like me so I just never had the opportunity to have sex. Nobody was asking.

When I finally starting having sex, I remember thinking, This is so amazing, how do adults ever get anything done? I want to do this all the time! And I marvelled at how much easier it was to say yes to things – not just sex – rather than to say no. “No” involved elaborate justifications and moral arguments. Yes just meant doing what you wanted. It seemed easier and more authentic.

So then I ditched the good girl. Because you can’t be a good girl and a sex goddess at the same time, right?

This shift coincided with studying politics from a feminist perspective. I wanted to be a go-go career girl. I wanted to be the opposite of all the conventional female stereotypes. So embracing sexuality, and embracing feminism, meant – to me – that I should reject the common narrative about women and sex. That women only want loving sex. That they want sex in the context of a committed relationship. That they can’t have sex without feelings. Instead, I embraced an ethos that said a strong, brave, sexually empowered and assertive woman slept with who she wanted, whenever she wanted, however she wanted, without apology, and it would be great.

I abandoned one stereotype for another
. I tried to silence that soft, shy, sentimental ‘good girl’ because she was everything I didn’t want to be. Quiet. Invisible. Emotional. Feminine.

I tried. I really did. Honestly, to some extent, I am still trying. I still put on a brassy, sassy persona; and it still doesn’t fit me. I was the wallflower for so long that I just want someone to notice my petals. On some level I am not sure that I am ‘sexy’, even though I am sure that I am sexual. So I’m out there talking about sex just to get my sexuality noticed. I can argue against judging women by their sexuality, argue for women to embrace their sexuality, joke about sex, and do that pretty well (if I do say so myself), and I can try to be all easy-breezy casual about the emotional consequences of sex, but that is exactly the problem for me: sex has emotional consequences.

I am, at heart, all that I tried to run away from. I am soft-hearted. I am emotional. I am nurturing. I attach. I crave connection. I love to talk, endlessly. My life revolves around my children. I value my relationships more than I do my career. Good sex, even if we pretend it is casual, will make me love you, even if you are a wildly inappropriate and substandard partner. Frickin’ frick, I am a 1950s housewife disguised as a working single mom.

Fuck it. I admit it. I’m a good girl.

* I totally ripped this phrasing off Kate Harding.