I wish I knew!

My best analysis at the moment is: Sex Positivity I was fighting against the idea that non-normative sex is sinful and people who do it are harming the public decency. Sex Positivity II needs to contend with the idea that non-normative sex is dangerous--that by opening up sexual boundaries for negotiation instead of standing by societal universals, it sets the stage for people (particularly women and young people) to be exploited and traumatized.

(Obviously this is a huge simplification and both ideas have existed in some form in both eras and there's overlap and other critiques, etc etc etc.)

So the problem to be solved now, and I don't think it's a trivial thing that can be brushed off with "oh my gosh you guys we talk about consent more than anyone, did you stop reading at the name," is how demystifying and destigmatizing sexuality can make us safer, how it can enable us to defend our boundaries as well as our desires.

But I also don't want to end up talking about only safety. Sometimes conversations about consent are only conversations about consent violations, and even if they're good conversations that's not a complete sexual philosophy, it's all helmet and no bike. Call me fancy but I like to think there's more to good sex than not raping your partner.

I guess that's the way forward for sex positivity, as vague as it is--synthesizing sexual freedom with sexual safety. Taking in critiques about unwanted sexualization and pressure without going abstinence-only (or "keep it in the bedroom"-only, which isn't even safer, you just are less likely to hear about it).

There's so much more I want to say here. About how badly I feel like I've internalized this and taken on a kind of embarrassment I didn't have back in the day, like I could stand up to "you are promoting promiscuity" but not to "you're being gross and no one wants to hear it." And how this ties into body positivity and queerness and gender, none of which are "sex" but they're very linked to how open you're allowed to be about sex before it gets gross and no one wants to hear it. About the current turn towards fascism and how that feeds into and off of superficially milder criticisms of sexuality. About how sex-positive communities don't disintegrate because abuse occurs, they disintegrate because nobody knows what to do afterwards. About the way "protecting the children" can cross over into repression. About credit card processors. About fandom "anti" wars and "movies have too many sex scenes" and Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny. About the way that "destigmatizing" sexuality too often means cleaning up the sexuality until it meets the fundamentally unchanged standards of the stigma. God. Someone should start a blog about this.

Consent was not a well known thing in the 90s when I was first learning about sex. Now popular comedy bits include references to continuous enthusiastic consent, and ok maybe loading ready run are better known for their magic the gathering channel then their original comedy channel but they're projecting the same "it's good to be horny just make sure you're not pushing it at anyone who didn't want it" energy on all channels. Anyway the crapshots sketch with the floating fuck skull has a few views, at least.

I've seen popular queer rep (in cartoons) move from "basically none" to "popular anime imports with all the baggage of otokonoko unexamined in the corner" to Korrasami holding hands (with post show kiss in the comics) to She-Ra and Kipo (on screen girl-girl and boy-boy kisses) to fucking feature length adaptation of intensely queer webcomic Nimona with not only a gay power couple as protag and antagonist, but a non-binary transmonster as titular and central character, by a queer creator. Let alone the dawning realization by the world that the Matrix always was a trans story at every level. (We couldn't be told, we had to see it for ourselves.)

Without going into a deep exploration of more examples of the positive trends, I'd like to pivot to the explanation I see for the reaction @pervocracy outlined in the "sexual negotiation is dangerous" narrative. I think it's evidence of the changing ground that, as formerly entirely suppressed groups gain a public foothold and traditional forms of socially accepted exploitation are more subject to question, the language of protecting vulnerable groups has been weaponized to try to reverse the gains made by those groups. This is at root the same divide and rule strategy the USA is founded on and which has kept the neoliberal capitalist patriarchal racial sexual necropolitical hierarchy chugging along for 80 years as it has cannibalized the bones of the Keynesian bargain and redoubled extraction from the global South while shrinking the property circle domestically. Women, queer folk, Black folk, etc have more voice, and so the language we use for safety is made as confused as possible by the ruling minority whose power rests on keeping precisely these groups separated and thus not mutually strengthened.

Naturally the center of the reaction is any excuse to cling to their one true way of purity. Remember always that, for the base, participating in conservative reaction is vibes based. It's been compared to a toxic abusive relationship writ large, and I think the likeness is obviously there. A base of support keeps coming back to figureheads who give them the kind of belonging and simple solutions vibes that soothe or inflame them by turns. They keep doing it despite suffering at the hands of these very politicians themselves, just as an abused partner will tend to stick with the abuser.

I think continuing to form intersectional connections is important to the way forward. Black bodies are commodified, and so are women's. Trans bodies are instrumentalized. Male privilege is attached to self destructive expected behavior. All us poor and queer and nonwhite and disabled and so on, we are dehumanized, so we need to come together as humans. And what's more human than sex? Enacting healthy sexual ethics is inseparable from liberating all of us, because the power structures are intertwined. Teaching consent and practicing it in our lives remain revolutionary acts, as does going out of our ways to make friends in marginalized communities we aren't part of and understanding their cares better by knowing real people. Which is to say, I agree with the stated future for sex positivity: it's got to be about showing who's really hurt and at risk. And our voices grow stronger when united across boundaries that were invented to keep those voices weak.

"it's good to be horny just make sure you're not pushing it at anyone who didn't want it"

I increasingly think one of the cores of the problem is actually this, because the sentiment has been extrapolated in the precise way that conservatives use it: being horny visibly anywhere in media is "pushing it on people", and that attitude seems as prevalent amongst the ostensibly left as it is among any more conservative set, we just act like we're better because we allow a little chaste gayness once in a while.

Conservatives know this too, they love the idea of "consent", and have seized on our own language with gusto in the last few years. The same tell-tale playbook of absolute dilution to the point of farcical, in order to push the window of acceptability such that you're considered "progressive" just for thinking "maybe two girls can kiss and it's not the end of the world" is radical, but somehow so is "wearing leather at pride should be an arrestable offense."

The whole point of sex positivity, of destigmatizing and normalizing sexuality, has been fed into itself so far that now somehow "this character has too much cleavage" is a complaint I have to probe extensively in order to even understand which end of the spectrum the speaker is coming from.

I'm very tired, and very tired of censoring myself in all the same ways I've always felt pressured to. It doesn't really feel like anything has actually changed, in the long run. I'm still bombarded with shame about every part of my sexuality, it's just that now it's as likely to be friendly fire as not, and that just makes it even harder to accept myself.