Is Feminism Starting To Resemble the Religious Right?
Currents
Nike's new 2024 Paris Olympic track and field uniforms came out earlier this year, and the Internet collectively lost its mind. The company told Reuters that the uniforms are “the most athlete-informed, data-driven, and visually unified the company has ever produced”, and draw inspiration from the “distinct identities and diverse communities each country and sport represent.”
The women’s uniforms do include rather skimpy, bikini-style bottoms compared to the men’s shorts, which is why some people want to know if the outfit comes with a bikini waxer — a funny, fair, and valid question. Former US track and field athlete Lauren Fleshman wrote on Instagram that "Professional athletes should be able to compete without dedicating brain space to constant pube vigilance or the mental gymnastics of having every vulnerable piece of your body on display." Running comedian Laura Green posted a reel in which she joked about it coming with a waxing kit and that they'd be covering hysterectomies as "heaven forbid" someone gets a period. Another commentator asked, in one of many related viral dunks: “Did a porn addict design this?”
Bringing porn and, in particular, the debunked narrative of porn addiction into the conversation honestly seems par for the course, given the sex-negativity and anti-porn attitudes brewing in public discourse — even within progressive circles. As The Guardian reported, there’s an increasing alliance between the #MeToo movement and anti-porn feminism. Many Gen Xers and Millennials feel like their feminism fought hard to include sex workers and destigmatize porn. But there’s a growing cohort of women, many of them younger, who marched wearing pussy hats while insisting that porn, and even sex-positivity itself, are inherently and inarguably bad for women.
For me, this raises the question: Is feminism becoming increasingly conservative, anti-porn, and perhaps even starting to look like the religious right? Or are the kids today just rebelling against the previous generation and our porn-saturated culture?
“Orthodox rabbis are against porn just as much as antisemitic white supremacists,” Dr. Eric Sprankle, a clinical psychology professor at Minnesota State University, and the author of DIY: The Wonderfully Weird History and Science of Masturbation (2024), told me. “Catholic tradwives despise porn with equal fervor as radical feminist academics. Interestingly, they all rely on each other because their single argument isn’t convincing and is a minority. But collectively, they hold more power and sway.”
Dr. Holly Richmond, Associate Director at the Modern Sex Therapy Institute, told me such anti-porn sentiments come up regularly with clients in her work as a sex therapist. “They always say, ‘Those poor women in the porn films, I can only imagine what happened to them.’ That’s the story I get at least once a week.” In response, Richmond reminds them that not all women in porn are mistreated or on drugs, two common yet unfair assumptions. “There’s feminist porn that does a really good job of making sure the performers are taken care of,” Richmond says. “And even in traditional mainstream porn, not all of them are there out of desperation.” Just a few of the plethora of feminist porn sites include Bellesa, Make Love Not Porn, XConfessions, Pink Label TV, and The Crash Pad.
Steph, an online content creator and sex worker known as “tattooedyogafeet”, told me some of this concern may actually be fear in disguise, which, along with sexual repression, can be one of the most powerful emotions. “I do think that when [some women] see another woman who is confident in her own sexual energy and sexual power, and even generating her income off of it, it makes other women feel intimidated or less than,” she said, “like they aren’t sexy.” For a mainstream cultural example, she points to “people like Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, and Pamela Anderson, the holy trinity of bimbo culture empowered by their sex instead of shrouding it.” Anderson famously said that the true meaning of feminism is to use your strong womanly image to gain strong results in society.
Given the Christian right’s far-reaching win in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, not to mention banning discussions of LGBT issues with “Don’t Say Gay” bills in states such as Florida, it’s unsurprising that social conservatives are weaving anti-porn narratives into their fights to “protect women” (despite watching a ton of porn themselves). Walmart banned Cosmo, for Christ’s sake. But it’s not just Trump voters (whose presidential candidate is ironically entangled in a porn star trial at the moment) protesting smut, or even sex on screen.
“One area in which I’ve seen a rise in sex negativity within progressive circles, whether it’s rooted in feminism or not, is with a lack of critical thinking relating to consent and depictions of sex in the media,” Sprankle told me. “A move toward a greater focus and emphasis on consent within sex education is certainly warranted and long overdue, but some people are arguing that they are not consenting to seeing sex scenes in movies and treating it as a violation of sexual autonomy,” he said, noting the similarities between this trend and the Christian conservative mom’s groups in the ’80s who tried to get Married…With Children (1987–1997) taken off the air.
We need more sex education, and some of this sex negativity is obviously coming from the religious right. But some of it is also coming from younger generations, generations who identify as both progressive and LGBT much more than their older counterparts. According to a recent report by PRRI, a nonprofit organization focused on research related to religion, values, and public policy, nearly a third (28%) of Gen Z adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Conversely, the report found that about 16% of Millennials and only 7% of Baby Boomers identify as LGBT. But Gen Z also grew up with internet access and social media in a way that older generations didn’t. Beloved 22-year-old Billie Eilish (who recently came out as bisexual, stating, “I like boys and girls” and “I didn’t realize people didn’t know”) also said in an interview with Howard Stern, “As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace.” She went on to say that it “really destroyed my brain” and that she felt exposure to violent porn led to sleep paralysis, night terrors, and distorted her view of sex. Are reactions like Eilish’s a simple case of young people rebelling against the generation before them? Or should progressives accept that some of these kids are honestly over-exposed to porn? It’s also worth considering the ways in which coming of age through the #MeToo era might affect a generation.
Attitudes around porn have improved, but society remains outwardly divided. Source: Gallup.
“I’ve seen some narratives about how Gen Z, more than any other generation, has had chronic exposure to porn, and that it’s not that they’re sex-negative, it’s that they feel too inundated with sexuality,” Jesse Kahn, director of the Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in New York, told me. Kahn notes that we should caution against the word “negativity”, and instead use words like “shift” and “evolution” in sexual norms. “I think intergenerationally, there are issues related to language and how we understand each other. I don’t think we need to perceive a change as a threat or as negative until we understand it more.” Khan doesn’t think that the religious right and this rise are particularly connected, citing different motivations. “Generally speaking, it’s very common for generations to respond to other generations, either in opposing directions or pushing the agenda farther.”
While it’s tempting to say that, yes, Gen Z grew up in a sex-positive world colored by the previous generation’s hard work, we must keep in mind that they’re also growing up in an America without Roe and with bans on books discussing or even mentioning LGBT-related themes. If such policies can teach liberals anything, it’s that broad and sometimes decisive swaths of the US are not actually all that liberal (in both the American and international sense of the word). Getting comfy in our echo chamber is what lets such laws sneak up on us. I have spent the last two years writing a book about abortion, and after doing the journalistic duty of reading stacks of anti-choice literature, I realized just how ignorant I was to have been surprised when Roe was overturned. Might folks over 35 also be trapped in their own bubbles with respect to what’s going on with Gen Z and sex? Are Zoomers the only ones too busy fighting their own battles to obsess about sex? There have been several studies over the past two decades showing that everyone, but in particular teenagers, are having less sex than people used to.
“Maybe I’m just cynical, but I don’t think Gen Z is growing up in a sex-positive climate,” Sprankle says. “More positive than previous generations on some metrics, sure, but a far cry from a sex utopia that would result in generation-wide reactionary politics. I have noticed, though, an intellectualizing of sexuality among young people, particularly with identity. Binaries and rigid gender norms should be deconstructed, and I applaud Gen Z for really breaking barriers with reimagining what sexual identity can be. However, I wonder if sexual behavior, in practice and in conversation, has taken a back seat during this deconstruction.”
It’s impossible to go anywhere near the conversation of changing feminism without broaching the #tradwife movement. The “tradwife” subculture promotes traditional patriarchal values, often emphasizing a “traditional” role for wives (and in some cases, girlfriends), as mothers and homemakers. Despite these shared ideals, the group is diverse in terms of both demographics and political ideology. And there are lots of women who don’t identify as tradwives, and certainly not as conservative, but who opt for a cozier life as a rejection of capitalism and “girlboss” culture.
Kelsey, a retired nurse, and current happy stay-at-home mom told me that for her, “the choice to leave the professional world wasn’t easy, be a nurse or allow myself a chance to explore myself and chase dreams I had always been told I wasn’t ‘worthy’ of.’ But when it came down to it, the question really was, ‘Do I want to be who people want me to be or who I want to be?’ It really is that simple. For some of us, happiness doesn’t come from paychecks; it comes from connection to oneself and the world around us.”
Sex workers like Steph also acknowledge the role of capitalism in their decision of how to live and make money. “Sex work is work,” she says, noting that while some are “a whore for your corporate 9 to 5 job,” she’s “a whore on the internet sucking my feet. We both make money. It’s the same. Except at the end of the day, I don’t make some deplorable CEO’s sizable bank account even bigger.”
Feminism is allowed to evolve, critiques of Olympic uniforms are fair game, and there’s nothing wrong with people enjoying their own points of view when it comes to porn. While there’s always been anti-porn sentiment, there seems to be a troubling rise in relying on pseudoscience to justify banning it. “Objections to porn are no longer reliant on religious morality or feminist ideology arguments, but anti-porn crusaders now make bold claims about how porn causes brain damage and will break your penis,” Sprankle says. “The problem is the research that is cited to support these claims actually don’t reach these conclusions. So, either these crusaders are scientifically illiterate and are ignorantly misinterpreting the data, or they are maliciously and intentionally disinforming the public of the believed harms of watching people fuck on a screen. Maybe it’s a little of both.”
There are certainly some people who mistreat sex workers or let porn get in the way of enjoying a healthy relationship, but in discussing the ways in which anxiety or depression can lead to compulsive sexual behavior, one must balance the scales by noting all the lovely things that porn can do. It can give you a nice orgasm to help you sleep better. And it can help you explore and enjoy parts of sex that you might not be ready for or want to try IRL. “Porn is just a really easy scapegoat,” Richmond says, for all the ills of society or problems that exist within relationships. “To me, it’s a boring one.” At the end of the day, there need not be any conflict between sex-positivity and feminism. We can find a way to enjoy healthy sex, porn, and the human body without regressing back to the repressive anti-sex attitudes of the past, and without taking the accomplishments of the feminist movement for granted. Whatever happened to live and let live? Overbearing paternalism isn’t how we smash the patriarchy. In fact, it feels a little too much like patriarchy.
Published May 17, 2024
