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Lingerie models2/19/2023 ![]() ![]() However the ideological project must go still further - even when sex is fully contracepted and bodies safely sterilised, our sexed nature is still stubbornly pointing and gesturing towards reproduction, reciprocity and the renunciation of the self in the embrace of the other. Severing sex and reproduction have long been a liberal project, and technological progress has certainly helped accelerate that process. Nothing more expresses the teleological nature of human existence than fact of our sexed bodies - sex and reproduction are a constant drumbeat reminding us that we don’t exist for ourselves, but for the sake of our descendants. In this interior battle, it is biology itself that has become the enemy. After removing most of the outward and formal demands of law and society on the individual and their body, the individual must now be absolutely freed by purging themselves of the interior restraints they may still possess, and at the same time claim absolute possession of their own physical and psychic self. Having stripped back many prior norms about male and female roles, sexual ethics and family life in the name of a broadly conceived “freedom” for the individual, liberalism has now taken a more introspective turn. At its heart is the concept of individual autonomy - the idea that the single highest principle of our society should be the absolute power and ownership of a person over their own body and being, and a no less absolute taboo on any outside force that seeks to compromise that autonomy. If you want to understand the insanity of the past 20 years over sexuality and gender, you have to first get to grips with what liberalism is. “Sex positivity” is really an attempt not to celebrate sex, but to deconstruct it. The one thing our modern obsession with sex isn’t about is, paradoxically enough, sex itself. Sex-positivity and lingerie modelling may seem odd bed fellows for asexuality, but delve a little deeper and nothing could make more sense. What fundamentally separates a broadsheet that prints stories about the abuse, rape and murder of women alongside celebrations of their objectification from the tabloid newspapers that put rape gangs on the front page and tits on page 3? Only the length of the words involved, and increasingly, not even that. If the Guardian didn’t lead the charge on the cultural shift that saw high-brow liberal media outlets suddenly decide they adore the most overtly sexualised culture of our day, then it certainly did nothing to resist the trend. It is, after all, the Guardian that happily printed (and still does print) endless columns about how stripping, promiscuity, polyamory, prostitution (sorry, “sex work”) and pornography are empowering. It is, after all, the Guardian which has over the last twenty years gleefully catapulted the most overtly sexualised media into respectability on its pages. ![]() At the risk of criticising the fine men, women and non-binary people who write for the Guardian, dare I suggest that this is how we got here in the first place? (Here being a world of women being strangled, slapped, sworn at and spat on as a routine aspect of “casual dating”.) “Sex positivity” is really an attempt not to celebrate sex, but to deconstruct itĪpparently sex-positive feminism is over (says Gaby Hinsliff), and the way you know that is a pop star said it. I wasn’t flipping through a lingerie catalogue (assuming they still exist) - no, I was directing my male gaze to far more pornographic material: the Guardian website. ![]() I recently came across the baffling phenomenon of Yasmin Benoit, who combines the seemingly opposed vocations of lingerie model and asexual activist and yet somehow finds the time, between these duelling identities, to sound off on every woke talking point under the sun. ![]()
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