Willow's Sticker Set: Sexual Freedom, Purity Culture and "Male Identification"
Last summer throughout my internship at Uterish, I took the time to explore what reproductive justice meant to me. Beyond legislative barriers, inequitable resource access, and intersectional systems of oppression, I found that a prominent issue compromising reproductive rights was sexual stigma. In August of 2021, I interviewed Susan Stiritz, a sex educator at Washington University in St. Louis and a Missouri Planned Parenthood board member. Her remarks were expansive, yet tied back to a single concept: that in our society, women and people with vulvas aren’t “celebrated as erotic beings,” and are therefore stripped of reproductive healthcare, sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy.
In addition to the intellectual value of Stiritz’s words, her insights also held personal meaning. While I had already been exposed to such realities as a child, I didn’t start to feel the full weight of sexual stigma until young adulthood. This interview was timely, in that Stiritz shared her story around the time I began facing such obstacles of my own, both interpersonally and independently. Wanting to be free of purity culture while simultaneously avoid sex objectification put me in a ‘catch 22,’ which lead me to puruse this topic further with the help of Uterish.
In short, I found that the conversation surrounding sex centers cisgender, straight men. This rhetoric is present in comprehensive sex education, media, literature, and casual exchanges between friends and sexual partners. As a result, Western society fails to see women and people with vulvas as having their own sexuality, even impacting those in early adolescence. Adrienne Rich, in her piece, Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existance, references this phenomenon, stating that once girls and people with vulvas mature, their own sexuality takes on a “secondary role and [they grow] into male identification.” Not only are they tasked to serve the desires of cisgender men, but their sexual identity is built around their ability to do so. Shame women and people with vulvas experience for sexual desire is rooted in “male identification,” because the concept of seeking out pleasure for oneself does not exist under the confines of the Western patriarchay.
This viewpoint manifests in two ways. Firstly, women and girls are subject to white, Christain standards of purity, and if such embodiment is unwanted or unattainable, they are automatically categorized as sex objects. Purity standards are not solely historic, nor are they only at work in religious settings; they present themselves in the “psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris; strictures against [and shame surrounding] masturbation; denial of maternal and post menopausal sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy” and countless other social, political practices (Rich).
When “sexual purity” isn’t achieved and women and people with vulvas are placed in the sex object category, Kathleen Gough in her text, The Orgin of the Family, outlines such practices that follow, which include “forc[ing] [sex] upon them… exploit[ing] their labor to control their produce… robb[ing] them of their children… confin[ing] them physically… us[ing] them as objects in male transactions… cramp[ing] their creativeness… [and] withhold[ing] from them large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments.”
Growing up in a progressive environment, such purity expectations were less explicit, but still very much present. I recall overhearing conversations surrounding masterbation and pornography among my cis, male counterparts, thinking that my friends and I could never broach the subject without shame or embarassment; I remember seeing disapproving looks from nonfamilial adult figures regaurding the topic of casual sex; and even now, the choices I make about my body are scewed through the lens of the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy.
The presence of purity standards and sex objectification strip people with vulvas and women of their humanity, preventing them from understanding their anatomical and sexual selves. People with vulvas are discouraged from beginning to tap into their sexual beings because of the shame surrounding pleasure and the lack of education on how to achieve it. In turn, their sexuality is erased from society, and reproductive healthcare is not seen for what it is: healthcare. To achieve reproductive justice, Western culture must acknowledge that women and people with vulvas, just like their cis, male counterparts, have the human right to sexual freedom.
Sexual freedom means…
Education: People of all genders must be given the resources to understand and/or define their sexuality on their own terms (i.e. learn what pleasure looks like and how to achieve it alone and with sexual partners).
Exploration: People of all genders must have license to pursue sexual pleasure safely and concentually, without physical or societal barriers (i.e. have access to all forms of reproductive healthcare and experiance sex free of shame and judgement).
Celebration: People of all genders deserve to be “celebrated as erotic beings,” as sex is not only a human right, but also a gift that draws us closer to ourselves and others.