Why we need to take bad sex more seriously
Sometime in the early 2010s, the porn actor James Deen made a film with a fan whom he called Girl X. He would do this now and then; fans would write to him, wanting to have sex with him, or he would put out a call to “Do a Scene with James Deen”, and the results would go up on his website.
In an interview in May 2017, only a few months before the media would be overwhelmed with discussions of assault and harassment by Harvey Weinstein and others – and only two years after Deen himself was accused of (but not charged with) multiple assaults (which he denied) – he said: “I have a ‘Do a scene with James Deen’ contest, where women can submit an application, and then, after a very long talk and months of me saying, you know, ‘Everyone’s going to find out, it’s going to affect your future’, and trying to talk them out of it kind of, then we shoot a scene.”
Little of the Girl X video actually involves sex. It is mostly a long, flirtatious, fraught conversation, which circles repeatedly back to whether or not they are in fact going to do this: have sex, film it and put it online. Girl X hesitates; she moves between playfulness and retreat; she is game, then agonised; she lurches ahead, then stalls. She is torn, reflective and self-questioning. She thinks her dilemmas out loud, and Deen tries to follow along.
She presumably wants to “do a scene with James Deen”, but when he opens the door to her, she appears to lose some nerve. She walks into the apartment, dressed in PVC leggings, a buttoned-up silk cream blouse with black detail – our gaze is behind the camera, with Deen, filming her – and paces around in agitation, laughing a high-pitched, nervous laugh, saying Oh my God, oh my God. He occasionally brings the camera up to her face; she turns away. He teases her – You’re a college girl, you’re smart and shit – as they move back and forth in the kitchen, with its gleaming central island, in the corridor with its bright white dado rails and deep red walls.
She’s skittish, nervous – I can’t even look at you – moving away, moving in. She sits down at a shiny chrome table, on a white bench. They discuss a contract; the footage fades out – we are not privy to the details. It fades back in, and she takes a selfie. She’s about to sign, but then she stops and says, What am
I doing with my life? What the fuck am I doing with my life? She can back out at any stage, he says; they can rip the contract up. More fading in and out; we see her sign. We can figure out a stage name later, he says, unless you just want to be Girl X? I don’t know, she says in a reluctant drawl, I have no idea, I’ve never done this.
When Girl X expresses her ambivalence – I want to have sex with you, she says, but I don’t know if I want to show the world – he is receptive: You don’t want to be slut-shamed, he says. She carries on: Like, she says, adopting a blokey voice, ‘I saw you fuck him, why don’t you fuck me?’ This is not an entirely paranoid thought. One of the accused in the 2018 “rugby rape trial” in Northern Ireland, on entering the room after two other men performed sex acts on the plaintiff, asked her to have sex with him, and when she said no, he allegedly replied: “You fucked the others, why can’t you fuck me?” A woman’s (presumed) desire – even just once, for one man – makes her vulnerable. Her desire disqualifies her from protection. Once a woman is thought to have said yes to something, she can say no to nothing.
We’ll probably never know what happened after Deen turned the camera off; what happened in the breaks between the filmed sections; what was edited out, what conversations we didn’t overhear, what sex we didn’t see. We’ll probably never know what Girl X made of the allegations against Deen, or whether there were things that day that made her uncomfortable, that caused her sorrow or anger. I don’t know Girl X’s story. But in the film, I see the painful – and familiar – experience of being pulled in different directions; of having to balance desire with risk; of having to pay attention to so much in the pursuit of pleasure.
Women know that their sexual desire can remove protection from them and can be invoked as proof that violence wasn’t, in fact, violence (she wanted it). Girl X shows us, then, that it is not only desire’s expression, but its very existence, that is either enabled or inhibited by the conditions in which it is met. How can we know what we want, when knowing what we want is something demanded of us and the source of punishment? No wonder Girl X has mixed feelings, is paralysed by uncertainty. Deen understands none of the melancholic weight of sex for Girl X – he doesn’t have to. Girl X, however, has grown up with impossible demands. She is living out the double bind in which women exist: that saying no may be difficult, but so, too, is saying yes.
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In 2017, the dam broke on allegations against Weinstein. Subsequently, the #MeToo hashtag – a slogan originated by Tarana Burke in 2006 to draw attention to sexual violence against young women of colour – spread on social media, galvanising women to tell their stories of sexual assault. Widespread media coverage ensued in the following months, largely about abuses of power in the workplace. And, in this environment, the act of speaking out about your experiences was taken as a self-evident and necessary good.
I was glad of the coverage, and also dreaded it, having at times to rush to turn off the news and its relentless parade of grim stories. During #MeToo’s height, it sometimes felt that we were required to tell our stories. The accumulation of stories online – on Facebook, on Twitter – as well as in person, created a sense of pressure, of expectation. When will you tell yours? It was hard not to notice the collective appetite for these stories, an appetite couched in the language of concern and outrage, one that fit neatly with the belief that speaking the truth is a foundational, axiomatic value for feminism. #MeToo not only validated women’s speech, but risked making it a duty, too; a mandatory display of one’s feminist powers of self-realisation, one’s determination to refuse shame and one’s strength in speaking back to indignity. It also gratified a salacious hunger for stories of women’s abuse and humiliation – though it did so selectively.
When do we ask women to speak, and why? Who does this speaking serve? Who is asked to speak in the first place – and whose voices are listened to? Though any woman’s allegation of sexual violence tends to encounter powerful resistance, wealthy white women’s accounts were privileged during #MeToo over those, for example, of young black women whose families had sought justice from the musician and sexual abuser R Kelly for decades (he has denied the allegations against him). Studies show that black women reporting crimes of sexual violence are less likely to be believed than their white counterparts (with black girls seen as more adultlike and sexually knowing than their white peers), and that rape convictions relating to white victims lead to more serious outcomes than those relating to black women. Not all speech is equal.
In recent years, two requirements have emerged for good sex: consent and self-knowledge. In the realm of sex, where the ideal, at least, of consent reigns supreme, women must speak out – and they must speak out about what they want. They must, then, also know what it is that they want.
In what I’ll call consent culture – the widespread rhetoric asserting that consent is the locus for transforming the ills of our sexual culture – women’s speech about their desire is demanded and idealised, touted as a marker of progressive politics. “Know what you want and learn what your partner wants,” urged a New York Times article in July 2018, promising that “good sex happens where those two agendas meet”.
This rhetoric is not entirely new; feminist campaigning has focused intensely on consent since the 90s, provoking in the process much agitated commentary. Rachel Kramer Bussel wrote more recently that “as women, it’s our duty to ourselves and our partners to get more vocal about asking for what we want in bed, as well as sharing what we don’t. Neither partner can afford to be passive and just wait to see how far the other person will go.”
This injunction to women to clearly know and speak their desire is framed as inherently liberatory, since it emphasises women’s capacity for – and right to – sexual pleasure.
Progressive thought has long cast sexuality and pleasure as stand-ins for emancipation and liberation. It was precisely this that philosopher Michel Foucault was critiquing in 1976, in The Will to Knowledge, when he wrote that “tomorrow sex will be good again”. He was paraphrasing, sardonically, the stance of the counter-cultural sexual liberationists of the 60s and 70s; the Marxists, the revolutionaries, the Freudians – all those who believed that, in order to be liberated from the past’s moralising clutches, from a repressive Victorian past, we must finally tell the truth about sexuality.
Foucault, in contrast, was sceptical of the way “we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future”, and argued that the stuffy Victorians were in fact intensely verbose about sex, even if that verbosity took the form of outlining pathologies, abnormalities and aberrations. Not only did he revise the classic take on the Victorians as prudish, repressed and wedded to silence; he also opposed the truisms that speaking out about sex amounts to liberation, and that silence amounts to repression. “We must not think,” he wrote, “that in saying yes to sex one says no to power.”
Sex has been, and still is, prohibited and regulated in myriad ways, and women’s sexuality in particular has been intensely constrained and policed. But consent, and its conceit of absolute clarity, risks placing the burden of good sexual interaction on women’s behaviour – on what they want and on what they can know and say about their wants; on their ability to perform a confident sexual self in order to ensure that sex is mutually pleasurable and