By M.D.A. Routledge (She/they)
PhD Anthropology Candidate, Goldsmiths College, London.
mrout001@gold.ac.uk
Paper originally delivered at EASA2020, Post-love Intimacies Panel.
Anthways, 2021 © M.D.A. Routledge
DOI: 10.5281/5515590
Abstract
With increasing platform given to demi, grey and asexual people, those with short-term loss of sex-drive, and growing numbers of non-monogamous/ non-exclusive sexual relationships, is it time to divorce the acts and concepts sex, sensuality, romance, and exclusivity from each other? In compulsory monogamy, sexual and sensual bodily contact is expected to be present and exclusively within sexual-romantic relationships, whose aim is to travel the ‘relationship escalator’ towards a narrowly defined category of commitment. When this sexual and sensual bodily contact is not present, there is judged to be a problem with that relationship: its compatibility, its health, its potential for longevity, and often its reproductive potential. However, not only does sexual and sensual bodily contact not have to be present within a lifelong romantic connection but it can also thrive and be healthy outside of it. The current framework of sexual contact leaves those without sexual desire or those against sexual exclusivity within realms of shame or oddity, even in spaces of sex positivity, which re-ingrain the connection between sex and commitment. How can we begin to separate these concepts and take seriously the experiences of these ‘others’? And what other practices or concepts are brought into question?
Keywords: romance, sex, non-monogamy, BDSM, LGBTQIA*
I am a Bisexual, Panromantic, Queer, Kinky, Polyamorous/ Relationship Anarchist. You?: Is it time to turn the idea of sex = romance on its head?
This paper comes from a point of enquiry (and data) brought to focus and provoked through my previous BA research, current MRes and upcoming PhD research around institutional compulsory monogamy and queer polyamory. I will open with a quote and details of a recent TV show (Sex Education, 2020) exploring asexuality, then I will go onto looking at the intersectional nature of sex, romance, and the body through the lens of trans women’s post-gender confirming surgery experiences. Then I will move to non-normative relationships and sensual lives of polyamory, Bondage, Dominance & Sado-Masocism (BDSM), and the wider LGBTQIA* communities to start investigating the elements of social institutions and conceptualisations needing to be addressed in order to divorce sex, sensuality, and romance from one another. The concept of divorce here is employed purposefully due to marriage being at the centre of conceptions of intimate acceptability.
‘Sex doesn’t make us whole. And so, how could you ever be broken?’
(Sex Education: Season 2 Episode 4. Netflix. 17th January 2020)
The Netflix series, Sex Education (2020), has made discussions of sex more candid in a number of ways. From discussions of sexual practice, sexuality and sexual orientation of early adolescence (a group considered by law to not have maturity to think of sex in safe and consensual ways) to questions of kink and lack of sexual desire. For the teenager, Florence, the character’s opening quote is directed towards their lack of sexual desire, which had left them feeling confused, left out, and ‘broken’. Their initial conversation with the show’s main protagonist, Otis, had left them feeling no better due to Otis’s verdict that Florence had yet to find that desire. However, after speaking to Jean (Otis’s mother) who is a sex educator and psychologist, Florence knows that they are entirely normal because not having sexual desire does not make them lacking as a person. They simply may be asexual and that does not make them broken. And just to throw a spanner in the works straight off… not all asexual people are sex avoidant.
With increasing platform given to demi, grey and asexual people, those with short-term loss of sex-drive, the inner working of kink communities and growing numbers of non-monogamous/ non-exclusive sexual relationships, is it time to entirely divorce the acts and of concepts sex, sensuality, romance, and exclusivity from each other?
Within Season 2 of Sex Education (2020) there is seemingly a contradiction to the advice given to Florence. When the Headteacher’s wife, Maureen, comes to Jean for advice on their marriage, and its’ lack of sexual fulfilment, the initial advice is to take her sexual enjoyment into her own hands. However, this leads to Maureen asking for a divorce without much interrogation into what that implies in long-term monogamous sexual-romantic relationships. Once again, seeming to reinforce the idea that sex is required to keep a romantic relationship going. There are numerous reasons sex can leave a person and a connection with stress, including many medications that have a significant effect on sex-drive, desire and enjoyment, rather than solely experiencing the loss of a romantic connection (NHS, 2020).
How can we begin to separate these concepts and take seriously the experiences of these non-normative sexual ‘others’? What other practices or concepts are brought into question through this separation?
I have opened this paper with a short overview from a television series. Fiction tells much about real life experiences and the kinds of conversations that are going on in at least some sections of societies. It has the power to show alternative histories, presents, and futures to those that would never have seen them otherwise. Margot Weiss (2006) gave us a great investigation of normative structures and processes through BDSM romance film ‘Secretary’, which was so well and widely received. The cis-hetero-monogamous mainstream will accept what looks most like themselves even if it deviates in some ways. For example, with kink, it must adhere to the foundational elements of society: binary gender determined at birth and the reproductive nuclear family. Popular culture takes the pulse of social thinking, but it also reinforces the normative structures. Giving attention to asexuality is not mainstream but when characterised by a white, cisgender, teenage girl with good academic achievement, it adheres enough to acceptability for it to be heard. However, these characters can also give understanding and hope to those that exist far outside of those structures. These stories can help those growing up to know they are not alone and can start to change those structures themselves.
So, if work is perpetually done to maintain the secure place of normative structures in society, what will it take to undo such fundamental concepts that weave together sex, sexuality, sensuality and romance?
At this point, I will note that this paper is predominantly a series of questions, queries, and enquiries. In many ways, for many people, this is untrodden territory at least in its explicit form. I do not have answers and every time I discover another experience shared by another it is more questions that come rather than answers. My current MRes and fast approaching PhD research oscillates around the question: How do Queer Polyamorous People understand and produce ‘liveable lives’ (Butler, 2004) and imagined futures? It is this question and research that has spurred the enquiry of this paper, no less than my own experience of working through conflicting needs and desires that do not fit into the frameworks of society.
In the institution of compulsory monogamy, which predominates across the West (Willey, 2016), sexual and sensual bodily contact is assumed to be present and exclusively within the ‘relationship’, whose aim is to travel up the ‘relationship escalator’ towards a narrowly defined category of commitment. When this sexual and sensual bodily contact is not present, there is judged to be a problem with that relationship: its compatibility, its health, its potential for longevity, and often its potential to produce children (Edelman, 2004). It is blamed for infidelity, unhappiness and failure. However, not only does sexual and sensual bodily contact not have to be present within a lifelong romantic connection but it can also thrive and be healthy outside of it for a multitude of people, without that person being damaged or perverted as dictated by normative moralising.
The current framework of sexual contact leaves those without sexual desire within realms of shame or oddity, much like those that do not feel the need for sexual exclusivity even in spaces of sex positivity, which re-enforce the uninterrogated connection between sex and commitment (Winston et al, 2019). Even for those that experience sexual desire in some way and are monogamous, the pressure (explicit or implied) of the integrated nature of sexual acts from sexuality, romance, sex, and gender to body confidence can have a damaging effect on the self, in terms of confidence and acceptance, as well as their connections with others.
In Juno Roche’s (2018) search and discovery for connection to her neovagina, she moves through these kinds of connections, though not in such an explicit argument as I am making here. Gender performativity, the body, the mind, sexual desire, and performance are inextricably linked and act upon each other resulting in often mixed emotions and experiences for the person. The lack of a body inclusive of desired genitals, and therefore, the specific sexual sensation and enjoyment that connect gender and physiological characteristics, requires a journey of discovery and acceptance that is different for each person. For many trans and non-binary people, body dysphoria is either not present or is not connected to gender performativity, therefore, the complex and confusing playing field of sex is brought into focus through these social constructs and physical manifestations. Roche goes on to question their own sexual identity, romanticism, and community engagement through the discovery that their neovagina in a way that fullfils the desires that they had previously fantasised about for years. Whilst she still experiences sexual desire, it does not flow forth from or upwards from her created vagina as she had been told it does from ones received from birth.
Once discovering the reality of her neovagina, it seemed obvious to Roche that she would function differently to the stories she had heard and her own imaginings. Coming to terms with what that meant for herself and her potential relationships, there was a road ahead filled with decisions and exploration. Within normative terms, some of these decisions would foreclose others. Herein lies the issue at the foundation of my query. All aspects of social life and physical experience are interwoven and intersecting, however, the way in which sexual , sensual, and romantic experiences have been condensed, creates and requires a limiting of options and ways of being in the self and in the world. This control has much to do with the strict moralising of sex and family, created through Christian heritage that naturalises and normalises monogamy, heterosexuality, cis-gender persons and reproductive sexual engagement (Carter, 2008).
People outside of this norm have always existed. Through the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the huge amount of work from the LGBTQIA* communities, some of these norms have been extended. Although, they have been extended more for those that continue to follow the standard expectations and structures of society through gender, monogamy and reproductivity that reinforce the condensed categorisation and implicit connection of sex, sensuality and romance (Duggan, 2003).
One of the common refrains for those that identify with or practice polyamory is that ‘it is not about sex’ regardless of whether or not they experience a desire for sex or engage in sexual activity. This usually comes in response to others probing into their sex lives as a result of finding out they are not sexually or romantically exclusive. With the exception of The Ethical Slut (2009), most polyamory books follow the ‘not about sex’ trope if they bring it up at all. There has been discussions on podcasts like Multiamory and from academics such as Kim TallBear as to whether this position continues the Western Christian sex-negative and moralistic pattern (2018). However, this would not explain how sex is widely spoken about freely (either with regards to engaging with or discussing the lack of desire and sharing personal boundaries around it) and shared within many non-monogamous communities. It is instead predominantly a position taken toward those on the outside to avoid the prurient and often demeaning nature of sexual inquiry within the mainstream that constructs actions as good or bad.
It will not come as news that most if not all discussions within a Western context come within the form of a binary. Sex is no different (Braidotti, 1994). Poles have been created between the sex-negative and positive which requires that if you are not one you must be the other (Winston et al, 2019). However, for those that do not experience sexual desire or engage in sexual experiences, within frames recognised by biological or psychological studies, surely this binary is not relevant? This question no less comes to the fore with those that do experience sexual desire and engage in sexual activity.
BDSM sensuality is a perfect example of this. It is portrayed in the film Secretary (2002), just as it is in BDSM ethnography, such as Beckmann’s The Social Construction of Sexuality and Perversion (2009). Kink and BDSM, for many, is predominantly separated from sexual acts: it is sensuality. Not only are there asexual people that are not sex avoidant, as I mentioned earlier, but there are those that are still and engage in kink and BDSM. Although as Weiss begins to show, BDSM in the mainstream becomes acceptable within a reproductive monogamous relationship that includes sex. When each aspect of a person’s intimate or family life is spoken, there are normative assumptions that must be present for them to avoid discrimination or even dehumanisation; to gain acceptance as a person and member of society. These assumptions create miscommunication, expectations and obligations that are not consented to.
Many, if not all of us, will have heard the phrase ‘Assumptions make an Ass out of you and me’. Whilst this is a fairly widely used phrase, it does not stop the huge amount of assumptions made from a social structure. Regardless of what polyamory book you pick up, there will be a section about analysing specifically what you want from a connection and then how to communicate that to others: Do you want sexual connection? Romantic ones? What do you need from them? What does sex look like to you? What can you compromise on and what are deal-breakers? How do you want to live in your home? Who is there with you, if anyone? Those that exist within marginalised communities such as LGBTQIA* have had cause to work through confusion and similar questions created by their self being in conflict with society, with what they are taught from birth.
From these journeys, self-discoveries, and through community, numerous identities have been formed: a/grey/demi-sexual, a/grey/demi/bi/pan/hetero-romantic, kinky and vanilla, Trans, Non-binary, Queer, Androgyne, genderqueer/fluid/non-conforming, polyamorous, ambiamorous, etc., and within those, numerous designations for kinds of practice that make explicit demands for how to live and to be recognised. No longer does saying ‘I am gay’ disclose much about how a person lives in their intimate lives any more so that saying ‘I am in a relationship’.
So, is it time for these divorce proceedings to come to a close, and for everyone to make explicit their list of ‘selves’ relevant to connection and community engagement? To bring explicit agreement and consent into all connections? And bring into focus the integral position of sex, sexuality, sensuality and romance in all aspects of society in order to thoroughly interrogate the control and limitation to liveable lives from the family, benefits systems, housing, architechture, border control, asylum systems, healthcare, education to name only a few.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the numerous groups of polyamorous people that have engaged in my research since BA, all of which have helped shape this paper and elicit these important questions and concerns.
Additionally, I would like to thank all those that gave feed back on this work not only during EASA but also in preparation for this publication.
Bibliography
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