“It smells like ass,” she said, staring him straight in the eyes.
“Did you have gay sex?”
Sex negative partners.
Cults and organized religions.
Governments.
What do they all have in common? A thirst to control other peoples’ sex lives.
One of the many lessons I’ve learned from sex therapy is that in almost every relationship, the person who is more prudish about sex dictates the terms of a consensual relationship. I’m not talking about domestic violence nor a power-exchange where people agree to surrender control. I’m talking about the day-to-day realities of consenting adults across all orientations and genders who live with sex-negative partners and struggle in silence.
My client Kenneth’s* wife would carefully inspect his bags whenever he traveled, looking for signs of cheating. He never did but she accused him of it almost daily, and used it as an excuse to drop by his workplace at whim to “check on him.” One time, she removed his hairbrush from his bag after a fishing trip with his buddies and smelled the handle. She wrinkled her nose and confronted him. “It smells like ass,” she said, staring him straight in the eyes. “Did you have gay sex?” That was not, by any means, the meanest thing she’d done to him — she shamed him about his penis size. She shamed him about his trips to the gym. She complained about his bondage and spanking interests with their pastor who then called him in for a humiliating lecture. She secretly recorded his calls and bugged his devices. It took him a year to get up the nerve to leave her. I cried when I found out he went back to her a year later. He was one of the sweetest men I’d ever met. But you can’t always save people from the sexual shame gnawing at their souls.
In (likely) millions of homes around the world, a sex-prude has ruined the couple’s sex life. The partners with the livelier libidos get shamed for viewing porn or accused of being sex-addicts. BDSM and fetish people are shamed by straight prudes as sinners and freaks, as selfish people incapable of true intimacy. Transgendered and Bi people are rejected as having authentic identities and disrespected by gay, straight, and binary people alike. No one is immune. Even straight people get shamed, often for the size of their genitals and bodies or their performance in bed. Prudes are, in effect, sexual tyrants.
You can’t always tell who is a sexual tyrant either. They can be lovely people when you’re hanging out in their living room but, alone in the bedroom with their partner, they complain, they demean, they kvetch and they spit out snide remarks. Sometimes it drives the sex-positive partner to patronize sex-workers. Sometimes it makes them extremely vulnerable to illicit affairs. Sometimes, it just dries up their natural appetites and leaves them too wounded to try to have sex with anyone other than their hands. The sex prude becomes a sex tyrant, and the tyrant always wins.
Sex tyrants don’t just control intimate relationships. They dominate social narratives, whether in the form of governments who establish elite classes by denying rights to minority sexualities or churches who only grant access to Heaven to people who abide by strict sexual taboos. Anti-sex organizations and churches weaponize sex-negativity. They spread anti-sex propoganda to broken people who spread it to other broken people. Sex tyrants at home routinely seek out religious leaders who affirm their sense of moral superiority on the basis of their own smug sexual righteousness.
Demonizing sex is a primitive and tragically effective way to control others. The less self-confident the victims are, the more vulnerable they are to sex-control by a partner. Once a sex-controller reaches into your mind, they will persuade you that any kind of sex they disapprove personally is disgusting and immoral. They can manipulate you as easily as Marshall Applewhite manipulated his willing castrati into early graves.
Most people who are oppressed by sex-controllers have no idea they are being controlled because all the oppression has been internalized. Feeling inadequate, rejected, frustrated and sexually unhappy in a marriage is a secret social norm in the straight, binary world. At least so I’ve observed when comparing non-kinky clients to kinky ones over the years. Kinky couples simply do not have the enormity of shame-based fears and religious-based inhibitions about sex as non-kinky ones, in my experience. For a therapist, overcoming that internalized shame is the first battle to fight.
As the people go, so goes their sex culture. Sexual tyranny dominates world culture, from its highest holiest offices to its tackiest trailer parks. Until sex-positive people can muster enough consensus based on love and acceptance of ALL expressions of sex and gender, the world will stay that way, with abuse victims still kneeling in their temple of sexual unhappiness
*Client’s name anonymized for privacy.
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