Basic Sexual Rights

Come Hither : A Commonsense Guide To Kinky Sex
by Gloria G. Brame

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1. The freedom of any sexual thought, fantasy, or desire.
   Everyone is entitled to his or her private thoughts, no matter how bizarre they may seem to someone else.

2. The right to sexual entertainment, freely available in the marketplace, including sexually explicit materials dealing with the full range of sexual behavior.
   If you want to watch pornography, read smutty magazines, or patronize sex-workers (strippers, prostitutes, etc.), you can do so without stigma.

3. The right not to be exposed to sexual material or behavior.
   If you do not want to be exposed to pornography or sex-workers, you should not be forced to come in contact with them.

4. The right to sexual self-determination.
   This means you may do as you wish with your body, sexually speaking. You can be celibate if you choose; you can sleep around; you may masturbate or you may abstain from all gratification. In other words, it is up to you to make the choices that feel morally right for you, without persecution from others.

5. The right to seek out and engage in consensual sexual activity.
   This means you can sleep with consenting partners.

6. The right to engage in sexual acts or activities of any kind whatsoever, providing they do not involve nonconsensual acts, violence, constraint, coercion, or fraud.
   All types of sex are acceptable as long as both people involved give their informed mutual consent. Using force or lying to get sex is wrong.

7. The right to be free of persecution, condemnation, discrimination, or social intervention in private sexual behavior.
   Gays, lesbians, sadomasochists, fetishists, swingers, transgenderists, bisexuals, polyamorists, and all other sexual minorities should be free to pursue their sexual needs without being hassled or shut out of society.

8. The recognition by society that every person, partnered or unpartnered, has the right to the pursuit of a satisfying consensual sociosexual life free from political, legal, or religious interference and that there need to be mechanisms in society where the opportunities of sociosexual activities are available to the following: disabled persons; chronically ill persons; those incarcerated in prisons, hospitals, or institutions; those disadvantaged because of age, lack of physical attractiveness, or lack of social skills; the poor and the lonely.

Every adult, no matter their abilities or age, or their social or health status, is entitled to the comfort and pleasure of sexual contact with a consenting partner.

The basic right of all persons who are sexually dysfunctional to have available nonjudgmental sexual healthcare.
People with sexual problems are entitled to sympathetic counseling.

The right to control conception.
It's up to each individual to decide whether they wish to use birth control.

Did you find these sexual rights controversial? Whatever your own feelings about the list of rights, I hope you will think them over. They lay the groundwork for you to see beyond the misconceptions and prejudices that our culture imposes on us all. If you can accept, for example, that every human being is entitled to his own thoughts, no matter how strange, and that some of those thoughts are likely to be sexual, then it will not be a big leap for you to accept that everyone has a right to have strange sexual thoughts.

In this book, all sexual behaviors that occur by consent among mentally competent adults are seen as acceptable, valid, and normal expressions of adult sexuality.

You may not approve of them, you may not want to act on them, but being able to accept that they are a normal phenomenon, and not something to fear, is a great first step. That's why I describe them as acceptable sexual variations. I use "acceptable" instead of "right" or "wrong," "sick" or "healthy," because those terms all carry moral or medical judgments.

I'll leave moral doctrine to spiritual leaders. As a sexologist, my point of view is that a kind of sex is right when it feels good to the adults having it and wrong when it creates upset and unhappiness. Meanwhile, classifying sexual behaviors as diseases is a concept that has long outlived its usefulness, except as ways for lawyers to get clients acquitted and for quacks to profit by falsely promising cures.

I believe sexual behaviors should be viewed the same way we view all human behaviors. Some sexual behaviors — rape, for example — are criminal, because they are acts of violence against a victim. Some are pathological (e.g., compulsive self-mutilation) and generally indicate a much larger mental disorder (such as schizophrenia). But, by far, the majority of sexual behaviors are neither.

Now I'd like you to consider "The Five Fallacies of Kinky Sex." It addresses the biggest misconceptions about kink, so we can get those out of the way right up front.

THE FIVE FALLACIES OF KINKY SEX

1. Kinkiness Can Be Cured

FALSE.

There is no scientific evidence of any kind that people can be cured of their kinks.

The fact is that attempts at cures have universally failed. Those who offer to cure someone's sexual nature generally do more harm than good. Some clients report feeling emotionally devastated, others betrayed, because they were given false hope. Some blame themselves for the failure and feel even guiltier than before.

Distressingly few helping or medical professionals receive adequate training in sex issues. Only a small handful of graduate programs even offer comprehensive curricula on sex. So, although they may be sincere and persuasive, people who offer cures are just as misinformed as the people who come to them.

At best, they may teach you to hate your own needs (through aversion therapy, where you learn to associate hateful things with the things that turn you on) or to sublimate your desires. But bottling up sexual feelings or punishing yourself for having them does not cure you of those feelings. Instead, it usually creates deeper conflicts.

Competent sex counselors do not advertise cures. Instead, they work with clients to find morally acceptable, socially responsible, and emotionally positive ways of dealing with their clients' sexual identity.

2. Perversions Are Caused by Trauma in Childhood

FALSE.

Despite the strides we've made in some areas of the medical sciences, there has been little forward progress in sexuality research. To date, there has been neither organic nor genetic proof to explain fetishes or sadomasochism. Nor is there any proof that childhood traumas produce the same results in different people or that trauma must always be present for someone to grow up with a love of pain or a fetish for high heels.

The soundest theory, basically unchanged since the late nineteenth century, is that our sexual identities are formed through a combination of genetic predisposition (meaning that our DNA comes encoded with sexual quirks) and life experiences. In other words, the best guess is that nature and nurture combine to shape our sexual identity.

Recent advances in genetic research open the door to finally finding out whether body chemistry or brain structure can explain things such as homosexuality or transgenderism; perhaps, one day, it will reveal facts about sadomasochism and fetishism too. I also hope there will be more studies on the cause-and-effect relationships between early childhood development and sexual orientation. But for now, all data are inconclusive.

3. People with Kinky Desires Have Psychological Problems

A TRICK FALLACY!

The answers to this are true and false.

First: False. There is no proof that people with unusual sexual fetishes or desires are any less functional than other people. Instead, there is considerable evidence that, as a group, kinky people are in the mainstream: stable, middle-class family people who maintain careers and participate in their communities. In other words, they are socially functional, which is a standard of psychological normalcy.

Second: True. People with sexual kinks do tend to seek out counseling. But one must consider why they do. Generally, it's because their feelings conflict with the feelings they are told they should have. For example, if the world tells you the most sexually appealing part of a woman's body is her breasts, and you find breasts boring but feet to be an instant turn-on, you are going to feel confused. If someone you love rejects you because of it, you're going to feel even worse.

Like anyone else, a kinky person doesn't want to feel as if she or he is alone in the world. No one wants to be rejected; no one wants to feel unlovable. In the face of the criticism kinky people face from families and lovers, often on a daily basis, it is not suprising that they turn to professionals for support.

4. Kinky People Can't Form Good Relationships

FALSE.

As noted above, kinky people do tend to seek out counseling, particularly when they are having conflicts with partners about their sexual needs. But sex and relationship problems are what motivates most people to go into therapy. The difference is that when "vanilla" (non-kinky or straight) relationships fail, people accept it as a common problem of modern life. When kinky relationships fail, however, people automatically assume that the blame rests on the partner with unusual sexual desires.

But as Mom always said, "It takes two to tango." In other words, it's a question of compatibility. Kinky people are bad partners with people who cannot accept their kinks (or have other incompatabilities). Otherwise, they are as likely as anyone else to form lasting, committed relationships.

5. Kinky People Can't Get Aroused by "Regular" Sex

FALSE.

Not only can they get aroused by it, many of them never have anything but regular sex.

Although we tend to think of kinky people as the leatherclad denizens of underground clubs, most people who are aroused by kinky things never have contact with that world. For any one of a number of reasons (social position, career, marital status, children, religious beliefs), they remain closeted, enjoying ordinary, productive sex lives with straight partners — even though they may fantasize about their fetishes during sex.

Millions more adults regularly indulge in bondage, spanking, role-play, and so on as foreplay. For them, these are erotic games that add spice to monogamous relationships, extend the arousal period, and enhance orgasms.

There are indeed fetishists who are only aroused when the object of their fetish is present, and hard-core SMers who have little or no interest in intercourse. However, the vast majority of kinky couples include oral, anal, or vaginal sex as a regular part of their intimacy.

Copyright © 2000 by Gloria G. Brame

About the Author

Dr. Gloria G. Brame is the lead author of Different Loving. A poet, journalist, and novelist, Brame has contributed articles to Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Working Woman, and Maxim.