“Sex is a Right” and Other Dangerous Lies

As ever, coddling men and sacrificing women at the pyre…

TW: mention of rape, suicide, gun violence

I was recently talking to my friend, shoutout Milena, about how I want to make content in some capacity about alpha males, the manosphere, incels, but I just don’t know what the most ethical and safe way to do that is. And I would have to have a friend or family member look at the mess with me because I *would* spiral scripting that on my own. She informed me about some discourse that I would see on my own timeline not much later, and the discourse is about “the right to sex.”

The first tweet I saw was this one, and honestly? I would have agreed if it weren’t for the first sentence and a half because, aside from the language about what we have a right to, it just sounds like she’s arguing for decriminalization. But that is not the only argument being made here. Not even close.

If you scroll further up in the thread, it begins with the words, “Young men aren’t having sex.”

I *need* to rebut this point and then I promise I’m going to show the rest of the thread. It seems like a reach to me to link advertisements for sex on specific platforms with an uptick in violent crime against women. I don’t look at that statement and see causation, and a number of people have responded to this tweet in particular by pointing out that Craigslist and sites like it where sex could be advertised were a lot more reliably linked to trafficking. But even working under the assumption that the end of ads for sex on these websites is connected to violent crimes committed by men against women, the people you’re blaming in this scenario are women for not providing men whatever right amount of sex will keep them from going on violent rampages.

Let’s finish the thread.

So I agree that we are in desperate need of better sex education, I agree that there should be less stigma around doing and accessing sex work. I’ll even concede that men who aren’t having a ton of sex might, in fact, suffer in the ways she’s described. But that’s not because men aren’t physically having sex. It’s because of patriarchal standards for what men’s sexual desire and behavior should look like.

And you don’t have a right to sex! You don’t get to have sex whenever you want! If you have a 9-5, and at 2pm, you get the urge: you wanna have sex. You can’t!! Because you have a job! You signed a contract. If you watch Grey’s Anatomy, this point probably doesn’t hold all the way up, but you get what I’m trying to say. And I know I’m being literal, I’m being facetious, but I just don’t get it. “People should be able to have sex when they feel they want to.” But that isn’t how things work. We don’t even get to have health care whenever we want. Or food, clean water, shelter. And you don’t need sex to keep staying alive. So I can’t conceive of how someone thought this should be on our list of priorities as a society. *Especially* within 4 months of Roe v. Wade being overturned.

The author of this thread is Alexandra M. Hunt. She is a public health activist, grassroots organizer, and 2022 Philadelphia Congressional candidate. And as you can imagine, Hunt has come under a lot of scrutiny for her original thread. She has since done some explaining and issued a statement that I will share towards the end of the essay.

But before I share Hunt’s final thoughts, I want to read some responses to her multiple posts on this subject, and the first is from Dr. Nicole Froio, a Doctor in Women’s Studies, writer, researcher, and reporter.

Dr. Froio is exactly right. Loneliness is a huge problem for our society as a whole. Scott Galloway’s book Adrift includes a visual for the decline in friendship in the United States, using data from a 1990 Gallup survey as well as the May 2021 American Perspectives Survey. This visual shows that Americans reported having fewer close friends in 2021 than in 1990. In 2021, 15% of men and 10% of women reported having no close friends. But I don’t see politicians discussing how we can address that. We don’t take this lack of friendship as seriously as lack of sex. We treat sex like it’s this mystical thing at the core of the human experience and at the top of the hierarchy of how we relate to one another, and that dooms us all to be very lonely and probably very disappointed.

It’s also very infuriating to think about the many ways capitalism, which has gotten us to this lonely place, also tries to sell itself to us as the solution. And this applies to everyone living under capitalism, but especially women. Women are constantly sold the narrative that our loneliness is a personal failing and the answer is to conform to arbitrary standards in some way, usually involving paying for a product or service. The global beauty industry is worth half a trillion dollar s. And I think that has something to do with the fact that women who feel alone or unloved or unfulfilled are encouraged at every turn to invest in beauty and desirability. The increased focus on self-care in recent years also fits into this as it’s primarily aimed at women and tells them that the way to address all the unpleasantness of life is to buy a 12-pack of sheet masks and a jade roller and enjoy a bubble bath with the precious hours before they have to go back to work or school or their responsibilities as a parent or caregiver. No acknowledgement of any systemic reasons women might feel so exhausted and isolated. Just skincare and girlboss rhetoric.

And this, of course, isn’t to say that men’s issues related to loneliness and isolation are handled appropriately. In the United States, men are about 4 times more likely to die by suicide than women, but I only really see this talked about when there’s been another mass shooting or as a “gotcha” when women’s issues are being discussed. So if someone is talking about high rates of mental illness in women or the career and relational challenges faced by new mothers or just the fact that men have privileges that women don’t, that’s when men’s struggles with mental health or societal pressures or lack of meaningful relationships are brought up. Not in good faith, not in a constructive way, not with people who have the immediate ability to address those issues. But as a means to derail conversations about or organizing for the improvement of women’s situations. Women deserve better. And I think men deserve better than that, too.

The political nature of loneliness is something I want to talk about more in depth in the future, and I found this great article by Eleanor Wilkinson called Loneliness is a feminist issue, which I want to quote from briefly before moving on.

“Perhaps, then, at times the language of loneliness is used when we should in fact be talking about structural abandonment, precarity and alienation under late capitalism. The language of loneliness individualises these feelings of lack and longing: the problem is framed as personal rather than structural. The language of loneliness also flattens, precluding any discussion of structural inequalities: loneliness becomes seen as an individual disorder to which anyone might succumb. This framing of loneliness becomes a way to circumvent issues of state abandonment: it downplays the ways in which certain bodies are cast out, forced to endure conditions that so often condemn them to isolated lives, that make connections fragile, that grind us down. The language of the ‘loneliness crisis’ masks a series of other crises: rising economic precarity, the dismantling of the welfare state, displacement, systemic racism, the continued dominance of heteropatriarchy. My proposition, then, is that rather than seeing loneliness as a biomedical disorder or a personal failure, we can think of loneliness as a structural condition, arising from particular ‘violent conditions’ (Laurie and Shaw, 2018).”

Loneliness more broadly is a problem created by current structures, but it isn’t spoken about that way, and there aren’t a lot of politicians who name it as something to be addressed through policy. Feelings of loneliness also aren’t taken as seriously if you aren’t a man.

United Sex Workers is a branch of strippers and sex workers in the UK organizing for better conditions for those working in the sex industry, and they also had a response to what Alexandra Hunt posted.

This brings up the question of what a “right to sex” would look like. Because Hunt named things like decriminalization of sex work, more funding towards sex education, and outreach programs for young people. But the “right to sex” framing set off alarm bells. Because words mean things. When you have a right to something and someone else violates that right, you have legal recourse. There are steps you can take to see that violation redressed, including suing for damages. Opening sex workers up to potential lawsuits – or even just the inflated sense of entitlement that a codified right to sex could nurture in clients – puts this already marginalized demographic at even greater risk.

USW’s response is very important because there is so much nuance that Hunt did not account for, which makes her initial statements lacking at best, dangerous at worst.

If you’re not familiar with the difference between decriminalizing and legalizing sex work, I have a breakdown from Decriminalize Sex Work (DSW), a 501(c)(3) national nonprofit founded in 2018 which works to improve public attitudes towards sex work and its decriminalization through public education, policy research, and outreach.

“Legalizing sex work would create a set of laws, codes, and regulations specific to the sex industry. People who buy or sell sex outside of these rules would be breaking the law and subject to arrest.”

“Decriminalizing sex work means that consenting adults who buy or sell sex are not committing a crime. There would, of course, still be laws against trafficking, rape, violence, and sex work involving minors.”

While that may sound simple enough, we are not in the place to be talking about decriminalization of sex work based on how much easier it would make it for men to have sex. Criminalization vs. decriminalization vs. legalization are very complicated, which is another facet of this discourse that Milena brought to my attention. When we were in college, she wrote a paper about the complexities of legalizing sex work, and she was gracious enough to share a couple of sources she used, so big ups to my co-researcher for this video for real. One of the sources she shared with me, a 2014 article from the Harvard Law & International Development Society, cites a 2012 study called “Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?” and shares the following findings:

“Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.”

“Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization.”

“The type of legalization of prostitution does not matter — it only matters whether prostitution is legal or not. Whether third-party involvement (persons who facilitate the prostitution businesses, i.e, “pimps”) is allowed or not does not have an effect on human trafficking inflows into a country. Legalization of prostitution itself is more important in explaining human trafficking than the type of legalization.”

The researchers note that legalization can improve working conditions for sex workers substantially and that when prostitution is criminalized, sex workers are the ones who are penalized as opposed to the traffickers, so they aren’t arguing for prohibition; they’re calling for further investigation into the relationship between legalization and trafficking. But the idea that legalization might actually worsen trafficking is still so difficult to sit with.

A 2021 article I found from the Global Policy Journal called “Legalizing Prostitution: Does it Increase or Decrease Sex Trafficking?” examines large, multi-national correlational studies and in-depth case studies to come to a conclusion about legalization. The author ultimately reasons that case studies as opposed to those large-scale studies of multiple countries are a better indicator of how different policy implementations actually affect sex workers. One of the case studies he summarizes, which I’ll go over here, focuses on Australia.

“Another major study compared different regimes in three Australian cities: criminalization in Perth (Western Australia), decriminalization in Sydney (New South Wales), and legalization in Melbourne (Victoria). On all of the health and safety measures, legalization ranked superior to criminalization. It also performed better than decriminalization, because legalization implies some kind of state regulation whereas decriminalization is a non-interventionist, laissez-faire approach. Melbourne’s legalized brothels were associated with more security measures and health protections than in the other two cities, and a greater proportion of its brothels were awarded a 5-star rating by data collectors who visited each site.”

This paints a different picture, one in which legalization comes out on top. However, I want to note that sex workers themselves overwhelmingly advocate for decriminalization as the solution. On the same page of the Decriminalize Sex Work website that I read from earlier is this table that breaks down the reasoning for decriminalization over legalization, and to summarize the arguments in the table, legalization creates barriers and hoops to jump through that might make doing sex work harder for workers and fails to protect unlicensed sex workers. In the interest of ensuring that standards are met, legalization is also likely to result in more surveillance and police involvement, which I would argue might make sex workers less safe.

This is a very important and very nuanced issue, and I think it should be treated as such. With the knowledge that we have so many variables to consider in order to maximize the wellbeing of sex workers, Hunt’s inclusion of decriminalizing sex work in her thread with respect to how much sex young men are having felt too cavalier. We cannot afford to be producing these arguments that treat sex workers as if they’re meant to absorb all of the worst gender-based violence. Because that is already the status quo. If we’re gonna talk about decrim, let’s do it because of the benefits to the workers, and let’s do it in a way that makes those workers feel dignified and not thrown under the bus.

We’ve considered Hunt’s proposal from a feminist (and anti-capitalist) perspective and taken a look at how sex workers might be affected. Now, I want to examine the “right to sex” discussion through an asexual lens. Because the existence of asexuality renders the starting point of Hunt’s argument completely insignificant. “Young men aren’t having sex!” Some men are asexual. Some men are celibate for other reasons. Some men don’t think about sex that much. The graphic Hunt includes in her first tweet in the thread shows that 28% of men aged 18-30 reported not having had sex in the past year. I couldn’t find the statistic about how many young men are having less sex than they’d like, so I guess I’m taking her word for that, but what if all those young men not having sex just didn’t want to? Then what? Because of the way masculinity and manhood are constructed in our society, men who refuse sex are stigmatized. And when we survey young men about their sexual activity and look at the results and say, “That’s a problem,” we are just doing the same thing we’ve always done, continuing that cycle of stigma and harmful teachings about what it means to be a man. And we’re putting young people in a very vulnerable position. One where they think they can’t say no.

This situation is a perfect example of compulsory sexuality. For an explanation of that concept, I have an excerpt from Ace by Angela Chen, which I recommend to everyone, but especially to those who don’t know anything about asexuality. Ace is an extremely valuable introductory resource.

“If the phrase compulsory sexuality sounds familiar, that’s because it borrows from poet Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality. In her 1980 essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,’ Rich argued that heterosexuality is not merely a sexual orientation that happens to be the orientation of most people. Heterosexuality is a political institution that is taught and conditioned and reinforced…Compulsory sexuality, an idea central to ace discourse, is not the belief that most people want sex and have sex and that sex can be pleasurable. Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience.”

That passage is from Chapter 3, Compulsory Sexuality and (Male) Asexual Existence. Chapter 4, Just Let Me Liberate You, is also immensely relevant to this conversation as it talks about the limitations of sex positivity, that when women express ambivalence towards sex it is always read as repression, and that

“Conspicuous consumption of sex has become a way to perform feminist politics.”

Sherronda J. Brown, who is a Black asexual essayist, editor, and storyteller (and the author of my most anticipated book of the year), also responded to Alexandra Hunt’s thread.

In the first tweet, Brown is replying to a follow-up that Hunt posted, which says,

A tweet written by Alexandra Hunt that reads, “A right to sex isn’t forced sex - that’s rape and as a survivor, I’d never be advocating for that. It’s telling where we are that consensual sex isn’t assumed when talking about sex.”

I don’t like the “it’s telling where we are as a society that you all misinterpreted me this way” logic, not because it’s untrue, but I just think it says more about how you failed in presenting your argument if so many people had such fundamental critiques. I do agree we’re not in a place as a society to entertain this because we *do* to some extent still live under the idea that certain people have a right to sex. And if we know where that gets us, violent and often sexual crimes disproportionately against women, why would we not consider the worst case in evaluating what you’ve said? Also, if so many people responded so negatively to this argument, maybe hang it up.

Sherronda J. Brown says,

Unfortunately, in her initial thread… yeah. Alexandra Hunt was repackaging rape culture and presenting it as progressivism. And this exact weird sex-as-a-right, savior thing Hunt is doing – and how it interacts with asexuality – is discussed in Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture.

In the paragraph before, Sherronda J. Brown refers to misogynoir, patriarchy, white supremacy, and compulsory sexuality, labeling them oppressive ideas informed by other interlocking notions of power. Brown writes,

“The nexus where each of these meet is the ideology that sex is not only obligatory, but that it is a property and a ‘right’ owed, especially for those in power to use as they please. This is the same ideology that forms the bedrock for acephobia. It’s also what allows many allosexuals not only to believe that asexuals need to be ‘fixed’ or ‘realigned’ to conform with dominant social expectations, but also to appoint and empower themselves as the duty-bound authorities who must enact this repair and realignment — a delusion driven by their own entitlement and ego. It’s a dangerous and perverse savior complex that results in sexual violence against asexual people, and this fact highlights how much acephobia is deeply rooted in rape culture.”

I would definitely encourage you all to find a way to read Refusing Compulsory Sexuality. Sherronda J. Brown also wrote about this situation, about Hunt’s statements, in an article called ”There’s no such thing as a ‘right to sex,’” which I have linked here.

I have seen the counterargument (meaning defense of Hunt’s original argument) that this proposal calls not for any specific person to service you sexually but for the government to put forth the funds for you to pay a sex worker. I know there are subsidy schemes in the Netherlands, for example, that make this provision for disabled citizens. And people feel a multitude of ways about that. I think this is a better frame for this conversation and cements that what Hunt should’ve focused on was right to sexuality or sexual liberation, and that can be achieved for some with the help of professionals, whether those are sex therapists, sexologists, and/or sex workers. But ultimately, while I would like to see ideas like this discussed and developed in the U.S., I don’t want that to happen solely based on young men having less sex and being more violent. I think that’s a shaky foundation to build on.

So, like I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Hunt did issue an expanded statement. She referred to it as her “statement on the topic of young men having less sex,” and I will share that in full now.

I do believe this is a person who genuinely means well and I’m glad she introduced some of the economic drivers at play when it comes to the widespread misery in this nation. But at the same time, if you understand all of the enormous ways in which young people as a whole are struggling right now and choose to pick out how we can improve young people’s sex lives, I think you’re missing the point. Ultimately, I do agree that the government should be responsible for ensuring its citizens have received adequate sexual education and reproductive health care. But if you’re saying you want young people to have copious amounts of good sex, that is something you can’t legislate. And, to the last brief paragraph, there is not one way to be a satisfying sexual partner. The government can’t distribute a file on you to everyone you sleep with; there’s always going to be work involved for you to get what you want out of a sexual experience. I’m glad Alexandra Hunt has a class analysis and wants people to be safe and educated when it comes to sex, but it feels like the wrong conclusions are being drawn and this effort could perhaps be better used working towards other ends.

We have been told that sex is at the top of the pyramid of fulfillment and relationships. We have been told that men enjoy and *require* sex more than women inherently, biologically. And that if men don’t have their sexual needs met, they may become dangerous for that reason. (As an aside: People who don’t identify within the gender binary have long been left out of these conversations, which makes sense because they tend to be reductive and essentialist). These are lies. And we don’t do anyone any good when we reinforce those lies, even if we do so in an earnest if misguided attempt to make everyone’s lives better.

AND. This is infantilizing to men! And this is a tear I’ve been on since high school. The conceit of arguments like these is that men are beasts incapable of being anything but violent and destructive if they aren’t being waited on hand and foot. It doesn’t give men enough credit. Men can control themselves and regulate their emotions. And we need not blame sexual frustration – and, indirectly, women – when a man chooses to carry out an act of violence. Personally, if I were a man, I would feel insulted by the way we talk about men and sex. And what does it say to women? Are we to pretend the logical conclusion of this line of thinking is not state-sanctioned sexual servitude? It definitely sends the message that men’s problems are our collective responsibility. But women? If you’re having problems, you figure that out on your own. Oh, and you’re like the main source of labor for fixing those men problems we were just talking about. And again, a lot of these “problems” aren’t even problems for some men because people are different. For this specific case, SOME MEN DON’T WANNA HAVE SEX!

There are a lot of uncharitable readings of and responses to her, but I am under no illusions that Alexandra Hunt is the biggest political threat to women or workers. Notably, she is now posting more about the state of housing and the dangers of Airbnb, eliminating the tipped minimum wage, and election-related things. But I do believe this is worth discussing so that we can all better understand and support one another. It’s great that Alexandra Hunt has so much compassion for men who aren’t getting any. However, her missteps in suggesting how best to “solve” that illustrate that even self-proclaimed feminists can slip up and prioritize the desires (or perceived desires) of men above all else. But the response also shows that there are individuals and organizations who will call out harmful rhetoric like this from a number of different perspectives. And that gives me hope.

Watch the video version here: