Sex-Positivity versus Sex-Coercion: Selling Sex, Iconoclasm, and TERFs

22 min readJul 22, 2022

This shorter writing sample comes from my book chapter, “Sex-Positivity versus Sex-Coercion,” a Marxist-feminist critique that examines differences between sex-positivity and sex-compulsion in sexualized media. Specifically, it examines how corporations and TERFs use canonical imagery to create sexist arguments, while simultaneously condemning sex-positive artists and their own iconoclastic output.

Read the entire chapter on my blog: https://www.nicksmovieinsights.com/2022/07/sex-positivity-versus-sex-coercion.html

Note: Currently intended as a chapter within, this longread (which I am editing on a daily basis) touches on notions of body representation that I analyze in my upcoming book, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes. If you’re curious, the first chapter of the book can also be viewed on my blog.

Trigger Warning: This post discusses transphobia, homophobia, racism, hate crimes, misogyny and fascism.

Introduction: Glossary and Summary

Humans are complicated. Our bodies have ambiguously gendered and sexual components that can be expressed in a variety of self-potentiating ways, including art. Alas, sexual expression under Capitalism has long been colonized, transformed by the status quo into something to sell. This includes the turning of sexual language (specifically the language of bodies) into prescriptive, coercive icons; as well as groups who confusingly uphold the status quo while posing as liberators: TERFs

“If you scratch a transphobe, a fascist bleeds.” TERFs are Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Or, as I call them, fascist “feminists.” To be fair, they can be neoliberal, operating through national exceptionalism obscured by a polite veneer of Capitalistic facades (centrist media). However, I prefer the label “fascist” because neoliberals invariably lead to Capitalism-in-crisis, aka fascism. In crisis, centrists drop the mask and become outright fascist, adopting racist/sexist dogma in more overtly hierarchal ways.

Moving forward, I want to expose this relationship through the canonical sexual imagery on display and how it serves as a kind of visual rhetoric that reinforces the status quo on a material level. This becomes something to defend from iconoclasts, precisely because those individuals are seeking equal treatment from the powers that be — i.e., their basic human rights as executed through actual material change, not high-minded ideas that never come to fruition. Above all else, if we are to argue for the basic human rights of workers, we must enact serious material change in the systemic arrangement of material conditions between workers and the elite.

Note: Seeing as this piece deals with groups who frequently employ obscurantism (and other deliberately ambiguous, bad faith tactics) to control others through sexual and gendered language, I want provide some definitions before moving forward. If you’re already a Marxist gigachad, feel free to skip ahead.

Glossary

Sexualized media: Media that contains sexual and gendered components. Media of cis-het men and women, but also queer persons. However, the treatment of sexuality and gender — how it is sexualized by media — depends on if it is sex-positive or sex-coercive.

Sex-positivity: Sexual expression that enables individual self-expression (thus self-empowerment) by relatively ethical means. In other words, it is a positive freedom, specifically “the possession of the power and resources [material conditions] to act in the context of the structural limitations of the broader society which impacts a person’s ability to act.” Apart from being morally good and materially beneficial, sex-positivity empowers marginalized communities (who, amongst other things, are generally exploited for sex as a form of labor); it does so by arguing for mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation using historically regulated language: bodies, gender identity/performance and sexual orientation.

Cultural appropriation: Taking one (or more) aspect(s) of a culture, identity or group that is not your own and using it for your own personal interest. Although this can occur individually for reasons unrelated to profit, Capitalism deliberately appropriates marginalized groups for profit.

Cultural appreciation: Attempting to understand and learn about another culture in an effort to broaden one’s perspective and connect with others cross-culturally.

Prescriptive sexuality: Sexuality and gender as prescribed according to various explicit or tacit mandates: Sex and gender are not separate and exist within a cis-gendered binary. This can come from corporations or groups that produce media on a wide scale, or from individual artists/thinkers who uphold the status quo (TERFs, for example). Generally illustrated through propaganda that appropriates marginalized groups.

Descriptive sexuality: Sexuality and gender as describing actual persons. This includes their bodies, orientations, and identities, etc as things to appreciate, not appropriate.

Sex-coercion: Sexist argumentation that enforces sexual and gendered norms by abolishing others through various unethical means. This includes corporations downplaying their harmful actions as benign, or fascists framing their openly harmful actions as justified. This freedom to act is a negative freedom; i.e., freedom from external restraint on one’s actions. It is generally repressive towards marginalized communities, exploiting them on a material level while also denying them their basic human rights.

Material conditions: The factors that determine quality of life from a material standpoint; e.g., not a moral argument (“this is right/wrong”), but one that deals with access to various materials that reliably improve one’s living conditions: housing, food, electricity, clothing, water, education, employment, loans/credit, transportation, internet, etc. The status quo reliably constricts material conditions to benefit the elite; this occurs within a societal hierarchy that structurally privileges marginalized groups from least to most marginalized — along systemically coercive (personal responsibility, billionaire worship, heroic propaganda) and phobic (racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia) lines.

Canon: Official icons and material accepted as genuine, legitimate and sacred. Typically produced by anyone who upholds the status quo, including corporations, but also individual authors like J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter), Scott Adams (Dilbert) or Doug TenNapel (Earthworm Jim). American consumerism generally frames canon as “neutral,” despite hiding sexist attitudes in plain sight.

Iconoclast/-clasm: An agent or image that attacks established images, generally with the intent of transforming them in a deconstructive manner. Deconstruction, aka Postmodernism, seeks to move beyond Modernism, or the Enlightenment (whose high-minded principles are really just excuses to enslave and control people, re: negative freedom). Enlightenment ideas typically present things in binaries: civilization/nature, white/black, man/woman, mind/body, etc.

Fetishization: A fetish, or the act of making something into a fetish, is “a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body.” Generally fetishes are pre-existing social-sexual trends that people either embrace or reject. They aren’t explicitly sexist (mutually consenting to show feet), but become sexist when used in exploitative ways (sex workers forced to show their feet to generate profit for someone else).

Kink: Nontraditional forms of sexual activity that don’t necessarily involve forms of power exchange between partners.

BDSM: Nontraditional forms of sexual activity that involve unequal power exchange: bondage, domination, sadism, masochism. These can be consensual or non-consensual.

SWERF: Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminist. A feminist who hates sex workers. Not at TERFs are SWERFs (or vice versa) but there’s generally overlap. Both are unethical.

Neoliberalism: The ideology of American exceptionalism (which extends to allies of America like Great Britain) that enforces global US hegemony through Capitalism. Neoliberalism seeks to foster a centrist attitude, preaching false hope* while keeping things the same; it also disguises the inner workings of Capitalism — how Capitalism is inherently unethical and unstable: It inherently exploits nearly everyone (workers) to benefit the few (the elite), a framework that eventually decays and leads to societal collapse.

*For a quick-and-dirty example of vintage American neoliberalism, consider the opening to Double Dribble (1987) for the NES: palm trees and skyscrapers in the background, a bare concrete lot and tight, manicured lawns in the foreground — where hordes of consumers flock to a giant stadium to “the Star Spangled Banner” while a Konami blimp emblazoned with an American flag soars overheard.

Fascism: Capitalism in decay. When Capitalism starts to fail (which it does by design), it creates power vacuums. These allow populist strongmen (an unintended side effect) to foster unusual sympathies within the working class: the installation of a dogmatic (sexist, racist, transphobic) hierarchy that intentionally abuses a designated underclass, promising social and material elevation for those following the leader.

Heteronormative compulsion: The idea that heterosexuality and its relative gender norms are prescribed/enforced to normalized extremes (or hypernormality) by those in power — i.e., the Patriarchy. In Marxist terms, capitalists and state agents own, thus control, the media, using it to enforce heterosexuality and the colonial (cis-)gender binary through advertisement on a grand scale (what Marxists call the Superstructure). This influence reliably affects how people respond, helping them recognize “the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law,” aka the Symbolic Order. Acceptance of this Order when it is decidedly harmful is called manufactured consent.

Manufactured consent: The theory that advertisers are beholden to their shareholders, aiming consumers towards a position of mass tolerance — tacitly accepting “negative freedom” as exclusively enjoyed by the elite exploiting them: “Boundaries for me, but not for thee.” In Marxist terms, this amounts to the privatization of the media (and its associate labor) as part of the means of production.

The means of production: The ability to produce material goods within a living market. This operates on a mass-manufactured scale, but also through work performed at the individual level — what Marx would call labor. Workers seize the means of production by attempting to own the value of their own labor. Conversely, Capitalists exploit workers by stealing their labor. Billionaires privatize labor through unethical means, “earning” their billions through wage theft/slavery.

Privatization/private property: Private property is property that is privately owned; privatization is the process that enables private ownership at a systemic, bourgeois level. Under Capitalism, the elite own means of production by encouraging negative freedom to “liberalize” the market. They do so by removing restrictions, allowing the owner class to privatize their assets. In class warfare, capitalists disguise this fact by deliberately conflating bourgeois ownership with “bougie” (middle-class) ownership:

Owners, in the academic, bourgeois sense, own the means of mass production, thus individual production. They privatize factories, territory, industrial sectors, the military, paramilitary (cops), and the means to print money. As a consequence, they also own people, albeit by proxy (wage slavery).
Middle-class ownership is merely an exchange of wages — direct purchases or taxes — for material goods. These goods become something to defend, resulting in a great deal of punching down.

Punching down: The act of aggression against a lower class by a higher class. For our purposes, middle class people are afforded less total oppression through better material conditions (wages, but also healthcare, promotions, etc) by the elite — a divide-and-conquer strategy that renders them dependent on the status quo. This dependency allows the elite to demonize the poor in the eyes of the middle class, the poor being framed as a threat. This reliably engenders prejudice against them as a target, often to violent extremes, especially in popular media that popularizes the idea:

Bad-faith: The act of presenting a willingness to discuss ideas openly while deliberately seeking to cause harm to the opposite party.

Dogwhistles: Coded language, generally presented as innocuous or unrelated to those using it, meant to disguise the user’s true ideology or political identity. A popular tactic amongst cryptofascists, but also TERFS.

Cryptofascists: Nazis by any other name. These fascists deliberately mislabel themselves to avoid the Nazis label, thus preserve their negative freedom by normalizing themselves. This includes white nationalists, Western Chauvinists, and pro-Europeans; it also includes TERFs, who have gone as far as spuriously decrying the label as “hate speech.” I write “spurious” because hate speech is committed by groups in power, or sanctioned by those in power, against systemically marginalized targets. Please note: TERFs claiming self-persecution in bad faith (a standard fascist tactic) does not make them a legitimate target for systemic violence; it just makes them dishonest.

Obscurantism: The act of deliberately concealing one’s true self (usually an ideology or political stance) through deliberate ambiguity. The Nazis called themselves national-socialists, intentionally disguising their true motives behind stolen, deliberately inaccurate language. For example, sex-coercion frequently employs concealment as a means of negative freedom. Corporations are allowed to frame themselves as “neutral,” and fascists will celebrate dogwhistles (sans admitting to them as bad-faith) but condemn whistle-blowing as “censorship.” Again, “boundaries for me, not for thee.”

Girl boss: A neoliberal symbol of “equality,” a girl boss is a strong woman of authority who defends the status quo: a female “suit,” in corporation language, but also amazons or orcs. Suits present Capitalism as neutral, but also ubiquitous; amazons and orcs (and all of their gradients) centralize the perceived order of good-versus-evil language in mass-media entertainment.

Abjection: The process by which a state of normality — the status quo — is forcefully generated by throwing off everything that isn’t normal. Through the status quo, normal examples are defined by their opposites, the latter held at a distance but frequently announced; the iconoclast, often in Gothic fiction, will force a confrontation, exposing the viewer (often vicariously) to the same process in reverse. Facing the abjected material reliably leads to a state of horror, exposing the normal as false and monstrous, and the so-called “monsters” as victimized and human.

Gender trouble: Coined by Judith Butler, gender trouble is the social tension and reactions that result when the binary view of sex, gender, and sexuality is disrupted.

Summary

Before we move onto the main section, let’s combine these ideas to summarize the larger argument: Sex-positive artists use sexualized artwork in iconoclastic ways to achieve social activism; TERFs and SWERFs perform social activism in bad faith, upholding the status quo on an ideological and material level by pointedly attacking marginalized groups, but also activists (the focus of this chapter being trans people, sex workers and iconoclasts). This makes TERFs sexist, not sex-positive.

Though bad, TERFs function as a smaller symptom inside a bigger disease: Capitalism. While Marxism encourages self-potentiation through one’s own labor, Capitalism exploits the labor of others to empower the elite; these persons privately own the means of production — from the banks that process transactions, to the platforms on which sex workers work, to the bodies and images associated with them (or vice versa). In doing so, they seek to own that which they have neither right or ability to actually possess (at least not forever): people, as framed through a Symbolic Order whose canonical propaganda advertises the whole practice as “correct,” until one day manufactured consent is achieved.

Correctness is tricky, though. It can mean “what is right, or ethical — i.e., pertaining to basic human rights”; or it can mean “socially acceptable — i.e., correct according to the beliefs of a specific group.” As we shall see, correctness dialogically amounts to interpretations of media made by consumers towards producers, be those individual authors or giant corporations. These interpretations are not fixed and can easily change given the proper push.

For these reasons, those in power continuously manipulate the eyes of the public in ways that favor them (their image, or optics, but also their material conditions). By using canon to valorize billionaires (owners) and dehumanize workers, neoliberals stress negative freedom for the elite; they advertise sex-positive ideas in bad faith, reinforcing the status quo as something to constantly maintain.

At the elite level, the status quo can be summarized as the roomful of suits. Their “neutral” appearance belies an inherently destructive nature far more extreme (through its longevity) than any dark lord: Neoliberals outlast and outproduce fascists (whose tenure is generally short-lived). This concept is generally referred to as the banality of evil — destructive greed minus all the gaudy bells and whistles: the men (suits) behind the curtain (canon).

Relative to those in power are those who seek power. Whereas neoliberals worship Capitalism as benign and hide its true function over a long period of time, fascists seek short-lived, hierarchical power through equally unethical, media-driven means. Alternatively, sex-positive individuals are social activists who want to replace the current world order through egalitarian power, promoting basic human rights through improved material conditions for all people (not just the elite) as a permanent paradigm shift away from Capitalism.

This includes the rights of sex workers. Sex workers exploited by Capitalism seek to end exploitation, often presenting themselves as human to the middle class (re: abjection). By illustrating their basic human rights, specifically bodily autonomy and mutual consent, sex-positive artists are iconoclasts who seek to

undermine neoliberal and fascist stigmas against sex workers, including sexism and transphobia
help sex workers gain relative ownership over their own labor, thus improve their own material conditions

These artists include sex workers, themselves. Not only does sex worker labor stem from their literal bodies, which also act as conspicuous extensions of their personal identities; capitalists exploit these identities by claiming private ownership over sex worker bodies, hence their labor.

The alienation of sex workers is both a casual factor — workers are alienated from their labor — and deliberate marketing tactic: Capitalists intentionally alienate workers who seek to reclaim their labor by presenting them in progressively alienating ways (often quite literally as monsters):

One, sex workers are viewed as advertisements for corporations to sell and consumers to purchase. Human billboards.
Two, this exploitation is downplayed, while its profitability is celebrated.
Three, the exploited are generally dehumanized, portrayed as: sex objects to consume without regard for their human rights, or objects of ridicule, derision and shame (demonization, slut-shaming).
Four, it demonizes critics by framing them as standing in the way of American (thus global) consumerism — specifically social activists that seek to upset the current arrangement of power by arguing for basic human rights, including body ownership as step towards material equality.

The result are many middle class people who consume canon voraciously and think (or at least posture) themselves as not being sexist; but in truth, remain hostile towards seeking sex workers as human. This includes genuine, ethical, social-sexual activism as something to express in iconoclastic visual language.

Hostility towards sex workers generally manifests in three basic ways:

open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech.”
condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets.”
canonical indignation, using sex-coercive symbols to defend their unethical positions, aka “voting with their wallets”: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear.”

As we’ll see moving forward, TERFs fit this bill perfectly.

Main Section

The main section has nine subsections:

Illustrating Mutual Consent: Empathy
Ironic Consumption, De Facto Educators, and Descriptive Sexuality
Cultural Appreciation in Gothic Performance
Sex Sells, Fetishes and SWERFs
Trans Discrimination and Ambiguity
TERFs, or Fascism-in-Disguise
Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Natalie Wynn
Bridging Gaps
Sexist Ire: Persecuting Iconoclasts

Sex-positivity involves mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation in art. We’ll establish each of these, before moving onto SWERFs, TERFs, and other topics relevant to sex positivity and sex coercion in sexualized media.

Illustrating Mutual Consent: Empathy

Artists often depict sex. Whether through drawings, photography or performance art, showing sex is easy. Mutual consent is far harder to illustrate; it requires empathy through context and digital copies are easily divorced from context. Because we can’t usually interrogate the artist or invigilator for context, the rest of this subsection will explore illustrating mutual consent through active empathy when regarding or creating sexualized art where context isn’t a given.

“Art is love made public,” says Hernando, the queer art professor from Sense8. He’s referring specifically to mutually consensual love as something to emphasize with. Unfortunately, pushback from a homophobic student demonstrates canonical art, but also canonical attitudes, as apathetic, generally depicting sex — but especially descriptive sexuality and appreciation towards it — as wholly separate from daily existence; its sexuality is prescriptive, a means of heteronormative control regardless if you’re cis-het or not.

Iconoclastic art returns sexuality to the fore; its sexuality is descriptive and empathetic. Artists who depict sex are thereby given a choice: to describe or prescribe sex, with or without empathy as something to cultivate. Many stigmas surround the practice in either case, including the idea that sexualized artwork is inherently non-consensual. It’s not, but the abjection of sex still needs to be challenged for mutual consent — and empathy — to exist.

Mutual consent determines if artwork is sex-coercive or sex-positive. While that might sound obvious, less obvious is what actually amounts to mutual consent in visual terms — especially in sex-positive artwork whose mutual consent won’t be visually obvious short of spelling things out. In other words, mutual consent isn’t self-explanatory. It needs to be inferred through empathy towards or from the sexual content on display as inherently ambiguous.

This ambiguity is no accident. While mutual consent represents sexuality through people as beings to empathize with, canon specifically treats sexuality as taboo, prohibiting empathy at a social-sexual level. Representation is more than showing people as they actually exist; it’s showing societal gender roles that people can perform, including sex work as something heavily regulated by the powers that be. Not only does canon conflate sex and gender. Corporations use canon to visually assign human property to specific tasks, stressing their negative freedom to prescribe with impunity. This is apathetic because it devalues mutual consent over profit within employment relations more generally.

By comparison, iconoclasts appreciatively represent marginalized people generally excluded from canonical norms, implying mutual consent as a positive, egalitarian freedom. This is empathetic, insofar as it presents performative and representative options to people who are typically oppressed in the workplace, therefore the world. They can choose how to (re)present themselves, bucking systemic labor as sacrosanct (Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic).

Regarding sex work in particular, mutual consent grants the subjects on display a choice they can make if they want to, thus empathize with as fully-autonomous beings with actual human rights: “I choose to be drawn or photographed as I decide, to perform as I want, to exist for others to see as proof of my agency. I am not merely something to exploit.”

Sex-positive artwork improves sex worker conditions by denoting mutual consent. Even when the workers themselves aren’t the authors (are under someone else’s employment), mutual consent should be conveyed through a shared sense of collaboration and mutual respect by all parties involved. The drawing of the sex worker by the sex-positive artist, for example, is respectful* on both sides. Everyone approves, fostering empathy for the sex worker as someone to advertise. Sexism, by contrast, is coercive; it deprives sex workers of their rights, manufacturing consent (specifically the idea that consent in sexualized artwork is mutual between sex workers and sex owners) and enforcing apathetic heteronormativity through prescriptive, exclusive canon that dehumanizes/objectifies sex work.

*My own portfolio commonly features sex workers, the arrangement founded on a professional, informed exchange between both parties. Sometimes I do fanart (aka labor as tribute), but the general consensus is labor in exchange for payment, be that money or work. The context behind the artwork I produce is agency on behalf of sex workers negotiating for themselves, which I wholeheartedly promote (so much so that I write reviews for sex workers that I’ve drawn on my website).

I mention sex work because certain groups are systemically* coerced into positions of material disadvantage that require them to perform sex work — in particular, women or people forced to perform as women. Whether cis or trans, Capitalism exploits AFABs for their sexual labor, including their constant objectification in canonical media (doubly so for women of color, whose apathy is compounded by racial stereotypes and fetishization).

*Individual cases also happen, but the systemic coercion of sex work specifically occurs through privatization, the elite owning the means of production as a tool to marginalize and exploit target groups for efficient profit and infinite growth. By keeping people poor, they have no choice but to turn to sex work to supplement their income. This amounts to wage slavery (assuming they’re even paid, which some forms of sex work, like marriage, are not).

Let’s further examine mutual consent as it exists in sexualized artwork as a relationship between art and the viewer. The problem with mutual consent — and by extension, bodily autonomy — is that both are difficult to isolate in pin-up art or photography. It’s not like you can ask a pinup image if the girl on display agreed to be photographed. Even if she did, further context is generally not communicated by the artist. A woman wearing makeup can be wearing it as much for herself as for anyone looking at her, but don’t expect the picture to communicate that each and every time in no uncertain terms.

The simplest determining factor is function: how is the image being shown and why.

Take this picture of a pretty girl smoking a cigarette. It can be

an advertisement overtly selling the product (the cigarette, but also the girl, who is a sexual promise to consumers: “smoking makes you sexy” or “smoking gets you laid”)
product placement in a film, appropriated to boost sales
part of the story in ways that appreciate the mere existence of cigarettes (or their advertisement) as part of the world, not as something to directly sell to the audience

Three different uses of the same basic image: a girl and a prop. However, none of these functions communicate mutual consent (or its absence) regarding the girl herself. To do so requires empathy as a means of investigating the image beyond its surface-level visuals: the girl as more than an object, but someone with basic human rights, specifically her ability to consent as a worker.

Let’s re-examine the picture, this time through an empathetic lens. The actress is Sean Young playing a replicant (a robotic slave designed to look human). She’s not only smoking a cigarette in the photograph; she’s doing it while taking a test to verify that she’s human. If she fails the test, that means she isn’t human, thus open to on-the-spot execution (called “retirement” in the movie). Not only is this treatment perfectly legal; her rights and her body belong to the company that made her, the Tyrell Corporation.

The picture doesn’t say any of this by itself. Nor can it comment on how its hypercanonical* status leads to pastiche in perpetuity (the tech-noir). This endless pursuit of profit-through-pastiche demands normalized behaviors that can be repeatedly administered to audiences, the latter conditioned to recognize value in prescribed sexual roles (which tend to conflate biological sex and gender performance/identity): Marx’s Superstructure and Base. As we’ll see in just a moment, this Capitalist framework specifically discourages mutual consent in the workplace, but also empathy towards those the workplace represents: workers.

*The imagery from Blade Runner is so famous that you might recognize it without having seen the film at all.

Regardless of the image, Sean remains the central product: “More human than human,” an artificial, man-made secretary often portrayed in isolation regardless of where she is. The reoccurring problem, then, is context, but also bias: How are women viewed when context is absent? Sean Young’s treatment as an actor highlights social-sexual bias relative to her imagery in art. Since her performance is easily divorced from the text, determining if either conveys mutual consent in a sex-positive sense will require viewing Sean as a subject, not an object. She’s a someone to listen to, not dismiss, ignore or attack.

Though Sean personally recounts abysmal treatment on and off set precisely because she was a 22-year old woman working with much older, sexist men, it’s disarmingly easy to look at Sean’s character being abused onscreen and think, “It’s just a movie, right?” It becomes far more dubious when we consider both side-by-side. Not only did Ridley and company film everything without Sean’s consent — indeed, despite her active, on-set complaints about sexual harassment — they released Blade Runner without reshooting anything: a classic movie that flagrantly depicts the very abuse Sean described, only to be lauded as canon anyways.

This treatment marked an abusive trend that would haunt Sean for the rest of her career. She would go on to be ignored, distrusted precisely for speaking the truth. Empathy towards her victimized position demonstrates mutual consent was not present. This goes to show how the context highlighting mutual consent must be explained, but also believed. Alas, canon plays an disproportionate role in what goes unexplained, including what is or isn’t believed by victims trying to tell their side of things (who tend to threaten corporate profits by blowing the whistle).

This trend affects not just the character, but the actor playing them. For example, this real-life beach photograph lacks the same amount of context as Sean’s set photo. It nevertheless shows someone generally recognized for her outbursts and eventual exile from Hollywood, with empathy towards Sean generally being discouraged by official narratives that unfairly portray her as an unprofessional, lippy harridan. This stems from sexist critics who refuse to see Sean as a victim at all — not a woman abused by a sexist system until she got mad, but a crazy lady’s “comeuppance,” a criminal whose treatment is justified, legitimate, and without question.

Mutual consent is a natural right that Sean always had, and one her abusers violated on multiple levels; it goes unexplained by and to her attackers, who continually refuse to believe her as time goes on. As sex-positive feminists, we shouldn’t blame Sean for being upset, but try to understand her plight to begin with by examining her photos through an empathic lens (what Paulo Freire coined as “the pedagogy of the oppressed”); furthermore, that her complex, life-long struggles demonstrate the importance of context when interpreting something as inherently colonized as sexual imagery.

Women, whether cis or trans, are historically sexualized without their consent, denied empathy from the audience. This perennial tragedy requires an active, informed viewer — someone who doesn’t just take things at face value, but thinks about sexualized images intersectionally according to what they signify inside a larger, biased system. Empathy is only part of this equation. Informed consumption/critical awareness towards recognizing performative nuance within sexualized artwork are just as vital, and require iconoclastic artists to re-educate people through their own creative output.

We’ll examine these ideas in relation to descriptive sexuality in sexualized art, next.

The rest of the book chapter is available on my blog.

***

About me: My name is Persephone van der Waard and I’m a Gothic ludologist. I primarily write reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews. Because my main body of work is relatively vast, I’ve compiled it into a single compendium where I not only list my favorite works, I also summarize them. Check it out, here!

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