Bad Sex and the evolution of heteropatriarchal power in the post-#MeToo era

Abstract

At the height of the #MeToo movement, a story of comedian Aziz Ansari pressuring a woman to have sex with him was released on Babe.net. Part of what this story revealed was its ubiquity; it gained traction because it resonated with many people who could relate to the experience. Close to 10 years after #MeToo, conversations about sex similar to the type described in the Babe.net story remain difficult to have. This is due to the difficulty in making this type of sexual experience legible as one of harm. This article serves two main purposes. First, I use Elise Woodard's concept of ‘Bad Sex’ to further explain a type of heterosexual sex characterized by pressure and coercion, and move to theorize it explicitly in terms of the moral harms it causes. Drawing on Linda Alcoff, Ann Cahill, Manon Garcia and Alexandra Kogl, I theorize the moral harms that I argue result from Bad Sex as dehumanization, demobilization and the experience of a lack of agency. I then use examples of heterosexual sex from Peggy Orenstein's Boys and Sex and testimony from Stormy Daniels in the trial of Donald Trump to illustrate how these three moral harms manifest in cases of Bad Sex. Second, I argue that understanding Bad Sex as a source of moral harm does not work to ameliorate it as a structural and political problem. I go further to theorize Bad Sex as an assertion of heteropatriarchal power. To do this, I look at the ways that sex is used as a means of asserting heteropatriarchal power. I conclude by calling for a collective reimagining of what sex is and can be, while underscoring the importance of avoiding using the legal system as a way to ameliorate Bad Sex.