The Geek Social Fallacies of Sex.
This is a guest post by Holly Pervocracy. Holly Pervocracy is a kinky, geeky feminist sexblogger. She writes essays on her experiences as a member of the BDSM and polyamory communities, editorials from a sex-positive feminist perspective, advice on sexuality and kink, and humorous critiques of sexism online and in the media.
This post originally appeared at Holly Pervocracy’s blog.
Note from the GF mods: links from this post may lead to sexually explicit writing or images. In addition, Holly Pervocracy’s original entry has some anti-feminist comments, so ‘ware for that if you head over to her site. (Comments made here are expected to adhere to our comment policy.)
xkcd #592: Drama (by Randall Munroe, CC BY-NC)
With all apologies to the original, which all geeks should read…
I think geek sexuality is an awesome thing. God knows it’s the only sexuality I’ve ever known. Geeks are tinkerers who constantly try to improve and innovate, and geeks are not bound by many mainstream social rules, and these two things combine to create some fucking hot sex. Also for some semi-mysterious reason the overlap between “geek” and “kinkster” is, like, 90% of both groups.
But geeks also are prone to weird social thinking, some of it a reaction to the ungeeky mainstream, some of it their very own invention. Here’s some common misconceptions that can fuck up geek sex.
GSFS 1: People can voluntarily control their emotions about sex.
This manifests a couple different ways:
“We’ve agreed this is casual sex, so as long as we decide not to develop feelings, we won’t.”
“Sex is just a physical activity, so adding it to our dating/friendship won’t change our relationship.”
“My partner promised not to feel jealous because I’m not monogamous, but they’re betraying me by feeling jealousy anyway!” (Note that in this example both partners are apparently carriers of this fallacy.)
Pretending you can just decide whether you’ll feel any emotions at all is a geek fallacy stemming from the idea that you should be able to optimize your own brain to not do anything unproductive or unintended. But geeks ought to know better, because come on, you can’t even get a computer to do that. This stuff comes on you, it gets you by the heart and the gut, and it doesn’t ask you “pardon me, I’m an emotion, are you okay with experiencing me?” first.
What you can and should voluntarily control is how you express your emotions. It’s okay to feel strong emotions; it’s not okay to attack people or break promises and use “I was emotional” as an excuse. This is when it’s time to tell your partner “hey, we need to talk, I’m feeling an emotion!” Solving the problem may involve changing your relationship boundaries, it may just involve talking it out, or it may mean you have to end the relationship. But the solution is never “that is an incorrect emotion, please stop experiencing it.”
GSFS 2: The weirder your sex, the more enlightened you are.
I’ve done a whole post on this, so go there if you want extended pontification. The short of it is: geeks have a tendency to mistake “less mainstream” for “better,” and to conclude that sex that least resembles the mainstream is both the sexiest and the most virtuous. So polyamory gets seen as more enlightened than monogamy, kink gets seen as sexier than vanilla, and monogamous vanilla geeks get a big steaming pile of “I guess you’re just not very open-minded.”
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