/master

Generation Z is the most sexually fluid generation yet – only 54% of its members define themselves as exclusively attracted to members of the opposite sex, compared with 81% of baby boomers – and is arguably the most adventurous. More than one in 10 teenagers claim to have had anal sex by the age of 18, according to the UK’s authoritative National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, which also found under-24s almost as likely as middle-aged people to have had more than 10 partners, despite being sexually active for many fewer years. But the generation most likely to have its first sexual experience via a phone screen seems increasingly willing to question what that means for individuals’ lives.

bon le truc des générations alphabétique là... néanmoins.

A third of British women under 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, spitting, choking or gagging in bed, according to research carried out for the pressure group We Can’t Consent to This, which campaigns to limit the so-called “rough sex” defence for murder (used by men who killed their partners to argue that the women died accidentally, in consensual sex games). It is one of a string of recent grassroots campaigns led by young women against tech-enabled forms of sexual aggression, from the unsolicited sending of “dick pics” to sharing intimate photos online.

While women who enjoy rough sex have an absolute right to pursue it without shame, Lala argues, the normalisation of pain in porn may provide cover for some abusive men, and make women feel prudish for refusing potentially dangerous acts like choking. “A lot of young men have co-opted BDSM [bondage, discipline or domination, sadism and masochism]. They’re not into power plays and consent. They just like hurting women.”

a movement originally meant to liberate women is being hijacked to serve men’s interests.

“I think we’re on the edge of a real anti-sex backlash,” says the activist and writer Laurie Penny, author of Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, who points out that destigmatising sex has freed women to talk about what were once taboo subjects. “A culture where sex is stigmatised is also one where we can’t talk about any of those things and I don’t believe there’s anything progressive about a society that wants to control or limit women’s sexuality.”

But Penny agrees the “sex-positive” label is becoming outdated in a culture where old constraints on sexual behaviour are gone but the threat of male violence endures. “In this apparently sexually liberated culture, women still don’t feel able to have boundaries and say what they want, and everything is dictated by what men feel they’re supposed to want . I don’t think the problem is too much sexual liberation, I think it’s not enough. You have to actually deal with sexual violence in order to create substantive sexual liberation.”

The missing element of this half-finished revolution, Lala argues, is a cultural shift in men’s attitudes. “Sex-positive feminism has laid the foundations, it’s given us a platform and a voice and a space to use our voices. But without getting men on board and proper sex education, we’re all going to be on the same old hamster wheel.”

Recently, she counselled a man who had been choking his girlfriend during sex for years. It was only when the girlfriend mustered the courage to say she didn’t like it that he admitted he didn’t like it, either. They were both, it turned out, going along with what they thought the other one wanted, and each secretly wishing the other would make it stop.

#normes

#patriarcat