What Makes Sex “Good”?—And Why Porn Is NOT

by Sunsara Taylor | May 23, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Break ALL the Chains!
Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution

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As communist revolutionaries, we are fighting for a world in which all relations between people are based on mutual respect, mutual equality, and mutual flourishing. This includes the way that people of different nationalities, genders, and sexualities relate to each other throughout society and the world. And this includes the way that people relate in their intimate and romantic lives, as well as in their friendships and family relations. Liberating all these relations from thousands of years of oppressive traditions requires an actual revolution—overthrowing the system of capitalism-imperialism that rules over us and enforces these oppressive relations, and going on to build a radically new economy and culture in the new revolutionary society. Our goal is a world where people are no longer divided into masters and slaves, oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited—not in the way the society is organized, not in the culture, and not in the bedroom.

So, what exactly does this mean in terms of sex?

In the view of communists, good sex is about connecting intimately with someone else’s full humanity—it is not about owning or dehumanizing someone else. Good sex—like any other form of intimacy—must be based on mutual respect, genuine caring, and equality between people. Good sex includes physical pleasure and closeness, but also can be part of communicating and sharing affection as well as love, joy as well as sorrow, comfort as well as vulnerability, and a great deal more. Good sex is based on people recognizing—and deriving pleasure from—connecting with and exploring each other’s full humanity and it is as potentially varied and rich as the people involved.
All this is in direct contrast to the kind of sex—and of intimate relations—that are promoted in society today, especially through pornography. Pornography is, in fact, a perfect concentration of the putrid, vicious, and woman-hating culture of capitalism.
Pornography is not “just sex.” It is the sexualized degradation of women. Porn reduces women to sexual objects to be used, abused, hurt, and humiliated by men for sexual pleasure. Women are tricked, punched, kicked, gagged, choked, and insulted—and then shown to “love” this abuse. Millions and millions of men are trained through this not to see women as full human beings—and to find the torture and dehumanization of women sexually “titillating.” All this fuels and reinforces a world where millions and millions of women are raped, beaten, sold into sexual slavery, harassed, and stalked from one corner of the globe to the other.

You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can't say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution.

Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:22

Further, pornography expresses an impoverished view of sex—it is a reflection of a callous, woman-hating, and viciously inhumane world. While the physical positions, “races,” ages, and levels of violence may vary, the sex in porn is always the same. It portrays “I-own-you” sex. Overwhelmingly this is men dehumanizing and degrading women, but it also gets mirrored in gay porn and other porn. This is a truly impoverished view of sex and intimacy. It is a reflection in the intimate sphere of the larger relations in the world today where the U.S. invades and viciously exploits countries in the Third World, where men brutalize and dominate women, where human beings are treated like commodities, and where people are pitted against each other in a desperate scramble to get ahead—or just to survive. Porn reflects—and contributes to—not only the brutal enslavement of women, but also the widespread social isolation, human callousness, and hollow use-or-be-used culture that destroys so many lives under this system. Porn not only never portrays any of the humanity and richness that can be shared through genuinely good sex as described above, porn actually works to coarsen people and make it more difficult for them to connect in this way.

What does this mean now?

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While fully liberating all relations between people from thousands of years of oppressive relations requires making an actual revolution, this will not happen if we just sit around and wait. Right now, we need to be carrying out the strategy for revolution—fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution. This must include not only rejecting, but fighting to END pornography and patriarchy and all forms of enslavement and degradation of women. And this must include forging a culture that is in revolt against the current revolting culture—in our communities of resistance and revolution, and in our intimate relations.