There isn’t anything earth shattering about the excellent anthology of feminist sex essays “Yes Means Yes”. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the twisted and illogical ways our society handles sex isn’t going to find too many new ideas here. The pernicious virgin/whore double standard comes in for a lot of well justified criticism. The more or less global obsession with the almost meaningless concept of “virginity” is held up to the complete ridicule it deserves. The dizzying array of problems faced by transgender people are once again shown to be motivated by little more than ignorance and fear. But where the book undeniably triumphs is in relating complicated concepts in simple human terms and outlining a vision of what life could be like if we let our crusty old assumptions and prejudices fall away.
Conservative opposition to what used to simply be called the “sexual revolution” can be distilled into two fundamentals. First, that women cannot be trusted to look after themselves and therefore must be watched over by good, moral men. (That this comes with self serving bonuses like laundry service is often unspoken.) And second, that allowing strict gender roles to dissolve will result in chaos and anarchy of Biblical proportions. (Again, the self interested bonus, that the old system may be orderly but it certainly isn’t fair, is not usually voiced aloud.) Feminist rejoinders more often focus on the first one (like this famous bumper sticker); “Yes Means Yes” takes square aim at the second by positing what things could be like (hint: it isn’t chaos and anarchy).
All of the essays function from a shared assumption: that sex, in all its varieties, should be fun, pleasurable and enthusiastic for everyone involved. None of those are radical concepts (at least outside of very conservative circles), but they fly in the face of a lot of, often unspoken, conventional wisdom. One need look no further than the local googolplex, dating books or magazine racks to see plenty of examples of this but, as is often the case, comedy does the best explaining:
(found via)
What’s so encouraging about “Yes Means Yes” is the completeness of the worldview it describes, a worldview largely in opposition to the things the above video lampoons. The authors are male, female and transgender and they come from an enormous variety of situations and backgrounds. This is as diverse a group of people as one is likely to find, worlds away from a top down monochrome where no one is allowed to fuck until they’re properly wed and even then it’s kinda frowned upon. But all their differences don’t preclude them from agreeing on a fundamental conception of sex (though, of course, the details are a little hazy) that looks nothing like, say, the cover of Cosmo.
Like all anthologies by many different writers, “Yes Means Yes” is uneven. One high point is a round table discussion between three women who’ve done various kinds of sex work:
Because I was a stripper, and was one for so long, you learn men: You learn their mentality, their ways, and their motives. And when you know this stuff, you negotiate so much better for yourself in the civilian world, because you no longer fear the unknown: men.
That statement is a devastating indictment of the shame we frequently cast not only on sex work, but on sex in general. A culture in which it takes years of stripping for a woman to feel she understands male sexuality in general (as opposed to the sexuality of a specific man) can only be described as “fucked up”. But it makes perfect sense when you think about it because, really, where else is that kind of knowledge and experience safely available? That information shouldn’t be difficult to obtain, but it is, and there’s really no good reason why.
Perhaps the best piece in the book, though there are several contenders, comes at the very end with co-editor Jaclyn Friedman’s essay, “In Defense of Going Wild”. It is the most cogent, honest and utterly bullshit-less explanation I’ve ever encountered about what it takes and what it means for a female to embrace sex in our sexist culture. It ought to be enthusiastically recommended to every fourteen year old, male and female. Without pulling any punches or papering over any dangers it embraces all the best parts about fucking and states, without equivocation, that it’s worth it.
Low points include Kate Harding’s “How Do You Fuck a Fat Woman?. . .” and Cristina Meztli Tzintzún’s “Killing Misogyny”. Both are extremely admirable in their willingness to disclose personally painful events in order to advance an understanding of subjects which are often ignored (that is brave and honest and shouldn’t be minimized). Unfortunately, neither gives as much care and attention to using their stories to illuminate their larger point as they do to the blow-by-blow recounting. Personal accounts like these are, of course, important and informational (and the book is rightly full of them), but some of the essays are better than others at using them to illustrate greater things.
Those relatively small criticisms aside, the book is remarkable. It amounts to a simple and easily grasped conception of what our lives would be like if there was less stigma and more orgasms. Which is to say, a place that’d be a hell of a lot more fun and free than the current one. It’s a simple idea: drop the pettiness, the competitiveness and, above all, the fear, and get it on. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
End Note: “Yes Means Yes” has a lot of authors who are also bloggers and the official website is, in fact, a blog. This hyperlink mentality can be seen in an attempt to make the book itself a little more information age friendly. Primarily this consists of tagging each piece with a few themes (e.g. “Electric Youth”, “Is Consent Complicated?”, “Fight the Power”) and then suggesting related articles at the end of each piece. This “Choose Your Own Adventure” ethic falls a little flat in execution because the related articles aren’t accompanied by page or chapter numbers. Counting the introduction there are 28 chapters in the book and the table of contents is five pages long. (At the back there’s a second table of contents, this one by theme, that’s even longer.) So if you’ve just completed an essay, and you see a related one you want to skip to, you need to flip to the front or back and find the chapter and page number. You don’t have the information to just go directly to the page you want. It’s a minor complaint, but the simple addition of page numbers would’ve made the book much easier to read thematically.
