Why Pleasure Activism Australia?

[flexibeast]

i founded Pleasure Activism Australia for a number of reasons:

• The apparent lack of a national sex-positive feminist group in Australia. The Australian feminist groups that i've come across seem to take it as received wisdom that porn and sex work (and probably bdsm) are inherently Evil. i want to ensure that people are aware that there are in fact many, widely varying, feminist analyses of sexuality; and more specificially, that there are many feminists who think that consenting sex between adults can be a Great Thing, whilst at the same time demanding an end to harrasment and violence - both sexual and otherwise - against women.


• Further to this, i felt that it was important to point out to people that no-one can achieve sexual freedom when women are oppressed in so many ways, but most relevantly in the area of reproductive rights: a woman who doesn't have control over her reproductive choices is obviously not in a position where she can freely express her sexual desires.


• The apparent lack of connection and/or co-ordination between sex-positive culture and sex-positive politics. The sad fact is that while many people are focussing on creating sex-positve culture - mainly through performance and social events - the political ground is being conceded to conservatives, with damaging results: net porn cannot legally be hosted on Australian servers, and Australian Women's Forum went bust because of ludicrous censorship (see the book Snatched: Sex and Censorship in Australia, by Helen Vnuk, editor of AWF). So we need a sex-positive movement which has both culture and politics. Both aspects need each other: the politics creates the space in which the culture can develop, and the culture creates a living community in which politics can develop. As far as i can tell, the most successful social movements have had both culture and politics in ample quantities.


• Further to this, a lack of discussion about sex-positive spiritualities. The Lilim Yahoo! community plays this role for the pagan community; but i feel there's a need for sex-positive strands within other spiritual communities - such as Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism etc. - to have a place where their voices can be heard, as a counterweight to the sex-negative strands within those same communities.


• The need to build alliances between the various sexual communities struggling for broad public acceptance. As far as i'm concerned, these communities face a common problem: the expectations of heteronormative patriarchal society. So i think it's ludicrous for dykes to be bagging out bisexual women, or conservative gay men bagging out leathermen, or monogamous bi men bagging out poly bi people, etc. (as described in a recent post to queer_rage) because the underlying issues for all of these people is that they don't fit the 'norms' prescribed by heteronormative patriarchal society in the area of sexual and/or relationship behaviours. Given this, i feel sexual communities based on consenting behaviour between adults should be respecting and supporting each other, not attacking each other.

Clearly, PAA is attempting to cover a lot of ground; but i feel the attempt is long since overdue.