The Individual, Interpersonal, and Collective Normalization of "Bad Sex"

• In Event: Gender, Desire, and Freedom

Abstract

In this paper, I offer a political theorization of the concept of what I call “bad sex”. Through the legal system and academic scholarship, feminist activists and academics have theorized sex as either a liberating practice or as assault. Here, I look to sex that lies somewhere between liberating and assault. I call this experience “bad sex”, and originally define it as sex that is legally permissible, yet morally harmful. Interviews and ethnographies of young people show that experiences of this type of sex are extremely common, but because it has not had a name and definition, it is difficult to understand as a source of structural harm, which in turn leads to an inability to fully understand and remedy instances of it. I argue that without a comprehensive political theory of “bad sex”, the harms that come with it– demoralization, degradation of agency, and demobilization – remain invisible.

I frame the entire phenomenon of “bad sex” as an urgent issue of what feminist political philosopher Miranda Fricker terms hermeneutic injustice, or the injustice that results from not being able to understand one’s own experiences, and/or having one’s experiences unable to be understood properly by others. This paper asks the question of how and why experiences of bad sex have become so difficult to make legible to oneself and to others? Here, I argue, that experiences of bad sex are so difficult to understand because of how normalized these experiences have become. By engaging with Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality vol. 1, I argue that bad sex becomes normalized on the individual, interpersonal, political, institutional and collective levels. I expand on Foucault’s concept of the confession to posit that both one’s friends and one’s governing institutional authorities reinforce each other in normalizing bad sex, such that even one’s trusted friends and confidants become sites of normalization of this sexual harm. By identifying where and how bad sex becomes normalized, I begin to make the harms associated with bad sex comprehensible, and consequently ripe for political actions that can facilitate a collective reimagination of how we understand sex and what it can and ought to be.

Author

• Zoe Moss, Southwestern University