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Brigette Schoenung's avatar

Walking into a millenial's home I would expect to find a stapler on a desk with a little tag that says "stapler" on it and "desk" on the desk, and a little tag on the toilet that says "toilet." You've fallen victim to your generation's manic desire to label everything. Being choosy about partners doesn't make one "sex negative"; usually it just makes one female, though plenty of men are that way too and catch hell for it. There have always been "believe everything" 19 year old girls, and 50 year old women who have been around the block with men and are sick of their shit. We don't need to label them as anything but women; we certainly never needed to in the past.

This is simply a terrible time in history to be a woman. I won't bore you with tales about why it's no shock that witch burnings happened during the Reformation, a time when people were quite literally terrified they were worshipping the wrong god and would go to hell. Or that the worst beat down of suffragettes was during the first year of the Spanish Flu Epidemic, a time when women were considered insane if they sought an orgasm. During times of social, political, and pandemic upheaval, women are blamed for everything. Everything. I've been called this "Karen" thing more times than I can count, all by white people, usually white men who didn't care for how I stood up to them. Our rights, including reproductive freedom, are fading away into the morass of women-hate. And it's going to be years before it calms down. I agree that these labels are misused, I just don't see ANY use for them that isn't bad for women. Meanwhile I'll twiddle my thumbs, and hope no one finds a match.

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Anon's avatar

I think the problem with the "sex negativity" discourse is it conflates 2 very different ideologies:

1) the social conservatives who idealize tradcath life, think feminism went too far and hurt women, are critical of sex work from a "coarsening of society" perspective, and want women to settle down into earlier marriage/childrearing and be "submissive" as a tradeoff for a non-porn-addled, breadwinner husband.

2) the FDS (Female Dating Strategy) types who blame men for the sexual revolution's failures, are critical of sex work from a feminist standpoint, see men paying for dates as a "patriarchy tax" and not something the woman needs to reciprocate emotionally, and want women to withhold sex and stay single unless they can find a man who meets specific standards of high effort in relationships and financial/mental stability.

These people are not even remotely the same. In fact, they hate each other.

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