Vote NEG for sexual revolution!

This book picks out the patterns in the contemporary wreckage of sex and power, seeking a map to a more life-sustaining world. It starts in the tender, vicious underbelly of political economy. It starts with sex. Sexual freedom doesn’t exist. Not yet. In most democracies, most of us are legally free to love who we want, live how we like and pursue pleasure however we choose – but only in the same way that most of us are free to buy a Maserati, or a mansion, or an election. In practice, most people cannot afford sexual freedom. Most women, and most LGBTQ people of all genders, cannot afford sexual liberation – because the social costs of simply naming their desires are still so high. Sexual liberation cannot be achieved while sexual power is unequally distributed. Today, in almost every society on earth, straight men still have far more social, political and economic agency than women, girls and LGBTQ people. Patriarchy and white supremacy are political systems that give men more power over women and white people over Black, brown and Indigenous people. This isn’t power that all white people and all men have. It’s not power that all of them asked for. But it’s power they were raised to expect, power that feels painful to lose. It is structural power, economic power, power that means that, on the whole, white people are richer, freer and more independent than women and queer people of colour, still negotiate for sexual and bodily autonomy under conditions of inequality. The best way to correct power imbalances in society is for the weaker players to organise collectively. When women come together to argue, for example, for a change in the way rape is prosecuted, that is collective bargaining. When women being to share stories of sexual harassment at work and to demand that there be stronger consequences for abusive employees, that is collective bargaining. When people who can become pregnant decide not to do so until the material conditions of parenthood improve, that too is collective bargaining. That’s what sexual revolution is all about. You can’t have a sexual revolution without addressing sexual violence for the same reason you can’t have an economic revolution without addressing workers’ rights. A sexual ‘revolution’ that simply makes sex easier to access for people who have more power is in no way radical. In fact, any sort of revolution that preaches liberation while leaving the rich and powerful free to exploit, bully and abuse will inevitably begin to rot in the damp heat of its own contradictions. This sexual revolution is different. This sexual revolution goes deeper, because it deals not just with sexual license, but with sexual liberation. It is not just about freedom from, but freedom to. It is a fundamental reimagining of gender roles and sexual rules, work and love, trauma and violence, pleasure and power. The new sexual revolution is a feminist one. And the most important thing to realise about the sexual revolution is that it is already happening. Here’s why it is happening. Not very long ago, power in most human societies were organised around a strict gender binary, based roughly on reproductive sex. There were men and women, and men were strong and powerful, and women were nurturing and powerless, and women were property of men. On the basis of bimodal sex, humans were forced to take on the roles of soldiers or victims in a strict gendered power hierarchy. Half of humanity was coralled into the political category of ‘womanhood’ – which meant that their bodies and desires were men’s to dispose of. Their role was to care for men and boys, to bear and raise children, and to take only a decorative role in public life unless they happened to be a hereditary monarch. The earliest political theorists explicitly excluded women and children from the ‘social contract’ that is the foundation of modern statehood. The economic and social structures of every modern culture were built on the bones of those assumptions. All of us were born and raised in those structures. But over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, something changed. Advances in medical science meant that, for the first time in human history, women were able to reliably control their own fertility. Safe medical abortion and advances in contraceptive technology meant that women and girls could – in theory – decide when and if they had children, which meant that the stakes of human sexuality and society changed for ever. It meant that it was no longer so easy to keep women and girls shamed into sexual compliance and dependent on marriage. The consequences of this technological shift have been profound, and we have only begun to cope with them. Today, despite the devastating impact of pandemic and recessions on women’s employment, there are more women and queer people in the traditional male workplace than there have been for centuries; more women and queer people making art, making laws, making history. Meanwhile, the once fundamental social structures of family and faith are falling apart. More and more women and girls are boycotting marriage and motherhood. In fact, women’s increasing freedom has led to a demographic time bomb, as parenthood becomes an unsustainable choice in developed nations that still refuse to pay for the work of care and childrearing. This is work that has, until now, been mostly done by women, mostly for free. But as motherhood becomes harder and less affordable, as governments refuse to pay for work of social care, and as women refuse to be bullied into making babies in impossible circumstances, birth rates are plummeting across and beyond the Global North. To put it another way, women and queer people, particularly women and queer people of colour, are simply refusing to be held hostage to male fragility. They are refusing in numbers too big to ignore. As economist and journalist Paul Mason observes his work Clear Bright Future, anti-feminism is now a key recruiting ground for the new right, a phenomenon Mason traces back to: The reversal of male biological power, through birth control and equal rights legislation, that took place during the last decades of the twentieth century… In the fifty years following the rollout of the contraceptive pill, developed world society has experiences what Federal Reverse chief Janey Yellen called ‘reproductive shock’. The results do not come anywhere close to women’s liberation… [but] the basic assumption behind misogyny, that women are destined to stick their biologically determined role as child-bearers and unpaid domestic workers, has been blown to smithereens. Alongside these shifts in power relations between men and women, the ‘basic assumptions’ of heterosexuality and gender identity have also been exploded. The gender binary itself is being superseded as a form of social control. Since the early 2010s there has been a seismic cultural shift in the cultural visibility of trans and non-binary people. A great many young people in particular are coming out en masse as transgender, genderqueer or non-binary, and that’s a positive change. It is a great deal more normal to be openly trans than it was even decades ago, but social conservatives are loudly resisting this change, as are many political-interest groups afraid of a world beyond the gender binary. In this book, when I talk about ‘men’ and ‘women’ and what they do, I am not talking about biological essentialism. This book does not subscribe to any authoritarian view of gender that divides the world into immutable biological categories, pink and blue, binary and biddable, nor does it believe in imposing political identity on diverse human bodies without their consent. Essentialism is invariably conservative. When I write about ‘men’ or ‘women’, I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories. I identify as genderqueer myself, meaning that the category of ‘women’ does not fully describe any lived experience. Gender roles and gender stereotypes are imposed on our bodies from birth, without our consent – and the process of learning to occupy the gender you have been assigned is often traumatic. A great many cis men I interviewed in the course of writing this book carry profound emotional scars from decades of savage social policing, of being punished for any deviance from perceived ‘masculine’ norms. There is no universal experience of womanhood or of manhood. Instead, this book describes many common experiences of sex, consent and power, and invites every reader of every gender to try them on for size.