Ethical prude

 From here

The Ethical Prude

Before I end this essay, I would like to touch as promised on the figure of the Ethical Prude.

If Easton and Hardy’s Ethical Slut is “a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice”, then the Ethical Prude lives her* life politically according to the radical feminist proposition that the thing called ‘sex’ under patriarchy is not nice. In ethics (ironically enough), we distinguish ourselves from sex moralism and in prudery, from compulsory sexuality.

(* I say “her”, as I invite men who identify with this statement to describe themselves as pro-prude, or sex-negative feminist allies, rather than taking the label for themselves. Men may support the radical feminist movement but it remains an autonomous women’s movement; sex-negativity, likewise.)

‘Prude’ is another word I would like to see reclaimed, and one I am beginning to use for myself. Reclaimed, since it is already in use, as ‘loveisinfinite’ comments on a Holly Pervocracy article about geek social fallacies of sex:

… the idea that feeling that sex actually IS a big deal makes someone a prude is far too rife in many spaces I frequent.

In our reclamatory definition, then, the Ethical Prude – from prudefemme, a wise, proud and virtuous woman – is named as such by her peers for her fearless opposition to the conflation of sex, power and violence and to compulsory sexuality. Patriarchy attempts to divide her from her friends by using her as a figure to make them feel shame, but she undermines this tactic through her fierce love for fellow women and the solidarity they have formed. Understanding sex-negativity, her friends do not allow themselves to become separated from her but recognise patriarchy in the urge they feel to turn away, and defy it.

She supports survivors who have been hurt by patriarchal sex, and other women support her, not letting any one woman buckle under the trauma of looking rape culture head-on. Spinster, feminazi, sex-negative, lesbian, witch; she is called every name but answers to only one: sister.

If you’re a fan of Terry Pratchett, you might want to consider the Ethical Prude as the Esme Weatherwax of feminism. Pratchett’s “Witches” books contain three witches: the maiden (Magrat Garlick), the mother (Gytha Ogg), and the… other one. Weatherwax is the other one. She dresses for warmth and practicality rather than to foreground sexuality. She walked away from her childhood sweetheart in order to pursue her life’s work of witchery. She’s hard-headed, has a sarcastic sense of humour and she doesn’t stand for any nonsense. (And Weatherwax as sex-negative feminist also suggests who might be a good stand-in for sex-positivity…)

I can already see the comments now – is this a demand of celibacy? Is it a return to 1981’s politically lesbian politics of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group? If you’re wondering the above, first answer this: do you think that Easton and Hardy intended the Ethical Slut to be read as a demand for every woman to commit the remainder of her life to sex and only sex? (Seriously, though, Love Your Enemy is an incredible book. You should find it and read it and then share it with all your friends. Then you should become a separatist. :))

So: who is going to organise the first PrudeWalk?

Conclusion

Under patriarchy, sex is power, power is sexy, and sex is compulsory. That is to say, the sex act is attractive in a way that is conditioned by its qualities of power and violence. And that coercion is not just a property of individual sex acts, it is a property of sexuality at a social level; we are not just coerced into sex, we are coerced into sexuality, most specifically into heterosexuality, or into reproducing subject-object dynamics within our non-hetero-sexualities.

In sharing the concept for this essay with friends, one suggested that she felt we needed to overcome the binary between sex positive/negative. I hesitantly disagree. I think that binaries (and ternaries, and other models) are useful as long as we don’t mistake them for reality. Both sex-positivity and sex-negativity, if applied correctly, are useful lenses through which we can understand different aspects of patriarchy, such as sex moralism and compulsory sexuality.

It is vital that the phrase “sex-negative” stops being an insult, or at least that more feminists develop an understanding that sex is not above criticism. Not bad sex, not sex gone wrong, not the sex that other people have. Our sex, real sex, what we call sex – it must be criticised. We can find male supremacy within it and within our own heads, and if we put it beyond reproach then we are putting aspects of patriarchy beyond reproach, beyond feminist analysis. It is not; sex-negative feminists show us how.

And last: it would be traditional to end this essay with an assurance that I do, in fact, love sex, and that all I want to do is to make it better. As an Ethical Prude, I won’t write such an assurance, even though I feel under almost overwhelming pressure to do so. We’d do well to reflect on the nature of that pressure.