Recently, a Kenyan woman was a victim of revenge porn. Her ex shared her nudity with the world and for several days, they were being distributed on the internet like confetti with no regard for her feelings. Or the harm they were causing her.
It was dehumanizing and deeply violent as is the case with all cases of revenge porn on the internet. I cannot imagine the trauma she must be going through at the moment, but the question we must ask ourselves is how did we get here? How did we get to the place where we easily forget how violent men are even after witnessing their violent ways over and over again?
I came into adulthood at a time when #HoeIsLife was the anthem on the internet. Women were reclaiming their bodies and their sexuality and for the first time in history, nudes stopped being a taboo only practised by porn stars. #TittyTuesday became a common thing and it is totally understandable why women have become quite comfortable with sharing their nudity with their romantic partners over the last few years.
That comfort was necessary for us but what sexual positivity crusaders forget to teach us is how revenge porn was going to be weaponized against us. They liberated women and men who were left in the past where women are either chaste enough to be deserving of respect, or hoes who are not deserving of any of it.
The sex positivity we grew up with did not teach us the violence we would endure by engaging in intimacy with men either. It was literally, you should be going around having fun, having sex with men, sending them nudes and no one will judge you and if they do they are the ones who suck!Liberating experience
I believe no one should judge you and if they do they actually do suck but before making sexual experiences with men out to be this liberating experience (it’s not), the crusaders of sexual positivity should have acknowledged that sexual liberation does not happen in a vacuum. It was something we were bound to experience with men and something they were ultimately going to use to punish us.
The problem with most of the sex liberation talk on the internet is that it is directed at women. It is centered around owning your body and reclaiming your sexuality but women do not exist in a bubble. They exist with men and they have sex with them.
When men have sex, they don’t necessarily worry about whether or not the women they are having sex with will respect them as human beings but when it’s women they have to worry about the politics of a man before they proceed.
Does he get advice from Amerix? Does he listen to Andrew Kibe? Is he going to kick me out at dawn? Does he think I am a slut for giving it up too soon? There are too many questions that all point to us not being any close to liberation despite the fact that we have already learnt how to own our bodies.
Sexual liberation ought to have been a collective struggle geared at reevaluating our preconceived notions about sex as a society and that means that true sexual liberty will only be possible for heterosexual women when men are on board with us.
If they aren’t willing to meet us halfway then maybe we should start telling women to replace men with battery-operated boyfriends because the cost that comes with engaging with them sexually is just too high a price to pay.
Dealing with men who are socially empowered to make your sexual expressions a source of shame does not sound liberating to me. It is just another prison we have built for ourselves in our quest for freedom and while it may work for some of us, it is working against so many of us and we need to start accepting those truths even though they threaten to make us sound like the conservatives who seek to control women’s bodies.
At the end of the day, we are all semi-liberated women trying to have liberated sexual experiences in a patriarchal world. Denying that we can be punished for our liberation is setting women up for harm.
