Recently, I got into an ill-advised conversation with some feminists at Dawn Eden’s blog…

IN WHICH, Susannah learned about sex-positive feminists, and laughed out loud at the very idea that they would feel the need to distinguish themselves by such terminology.

With all the linkage to Amanda Marcotte’s blog going around the internet lately, I think the lightbulb has finally flickered on above my naïve little head.  I figured out what feminists mean when they claim to be “sex-positive.”  (No, I’m not providing links to the Marcotte blog.  Believe me, you do *not* want to descend into that particular sewer.  FYI, she's the newly hired [possibly newly fired] blogmaster for the John Edwards '08 campaign.)

“Sex-positive” doesn’t mean “positive about sex,” as most native-born English speakers might assume.  No, because allowing the term its *obvious* meaning would render it practically unnecessary.  Most people in relative emotional health are positive about sex.  Of course, that is why I was quite amused to learn the term might not apply to some feminists.  Who in her right mind would label herself “sex-negative”?

No, as usual with feminists, the “positive” part has been co-opted and twisted to mean exactly the opposite.  Judging by Marcotte’s blogging, it actually means “is fond of obscenity,” “reserves the right to talk and dress like a prostitute,” and “views children as a punishment for sex.”

It’s sort of like the redefinition of “choice.”  You can choose anything, including killing your own offspring, with their complete approval…as long as you stay in line with feminist dogma.  The moment you repudiate the ideology by word or by deed…sorry, you are a nothing but a sex-negative misogynistic fundamentalist tool of the patriarchy, too ignorant and backward to be aware of the largesse you have already received from the Holy Feminist Movement.  (In the aforementioned conversation, I was informed in the usual roundabout way that holding to the ideals that produced the U.S. Constitution makes me a feminist by default.)

If sex-positivity means having a serious case of sailor mouth and an unladylike deportment, we can only presume that, in the feminist bizarro world at least, to keep one’s intimacies intimate, one's self-respect intact, and one’s speech clean is to be sex-negative.

Of course.

 “Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!”

--Isaiah the prophet