No Country for Horny Women

On the sex forever-war.

No matter when you’re reading this—June 2025, later this year, 1 decade from now, a century—there will be an ongoing moral panic about a woman doing sexuality wrong. From the first erotic novels to the feminist sex wars of the 70s and 80s to the hot girls of today, progressives (and people using the signal words of progressives) have long been in debate on the subject sex: is it good? should we do it? with who? what kinds are okay? why do we have the desires that we have; are they natural or due to patriarchy? and how can we stop sexual violence while also ensuring that all consensual sex is good sex? is consent the only value we should strive for or should we demand more? or should we all just become celibate lesbians?

I find it hard to describe myself as someone with their finger on the pulse of the culture, but from where I’m sitting, sex negativity is somewhat in vogue right now, insofar as a monoculture exists (it doesn’t anymore). Call it a sex war, call it lingering resentment, either way people are always mad at people who are horny in public, and I guess we’re talking about it.

In this month’s sex battle, we have Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover…

The cover to Sabrina Carpenter’s upcoming album, “Man’s Best Friend” (Instagram)

For the un-initiated: the cover depicts Carpenter in a semi-kinky pose. On her knees, mouth agape, in all black, wearing heels, with what appears to be a man (face not shown) pulling her hair. The album title “Man’s Best Friend” alludes to her being a dog (or a bitch) in (presumably sexual) service to said man. This is not Carpenter’s first time publicly flaunting her sexuality; she sings about being “so fucking horny” and mimics sex positions on stage at her concerts. People were already mad about this level of flagrant sex-positivity, but for many, this album cover was a step too far, particularly in the new era of conservative American politics (see: rights such as abortion being taken away, sex trafficker Andrew Tate being every teenage boy’s idol, etc.)

This is part of a rising backlash from women against the “sexual liberation” of the 90s and 2000s, activating a latent sense of dissatisfaction with the new sexual landscape. Women have more control over who they have sex with than ever, hookup culture is (was?) a thing, and yet women are still unhappy. More women than ever are stepping away from the dating scene entirely, for all intents and purposes taking a vow of celibacy in an act of protest against the general state of…well, men. (Almost a year ago to the day, dating app Bumble released an ad with the text “A VOW OF CELIBACY IS NOT THE ANSWER”, for which they received major criticism.) The most extreme among this crowd name the Korean 4B movement as an inspiration, itself a fringe, extremist group that doesn’t represent the whole of Korean feminism (more on that later).

Let’s focus on the positives. The fact that millions of women now agree with the statement “I would rather be single than be in an unsatisfying relationship”, and that they now have the financial means to live that reality, is a generational victory for feminism, perhaps as impactful to our species as the invention of fire. For most of human history up until just a few decades ago, it was assumed default that women would marry a man or be a lonely old spinster. That’s still true in many households across the world, so rest assured that there is more work to be done, but this new life is working out for lots of women, and that’s significant progress.

Beyond that though, we’re far from consensus. On one hand, we seem to be slightly retreating from one form of sexlessness—famously catalogued in Raquel S Benedict’s 2021 essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny”—into a distinctly hornier era of Hawk Tuahs, Babygirls, and Eusexuas (see this Dazed piece for more). On the other hand, every time a woman publicly states her horniness, there’s a contingent of Twitter users ready to push back against them in the name of feminism. How are we to make sense of all of this? In this strange era of social media division and inverted politics, I would forgive a non-political, uninformed person for buying into the right-wing propaganda that leftists are now categorically anti-sex while conservatives are now pro-sex as they tweet incomprehensibly about how “leftists don’t want you to see Sidney Sweeney’s boobs”.

It’s far more complicated than that, though (it always is). In her essay on the subject of sexy celebrities, sex worker Marina Dove names SWERFs and TERFs as the perpetrators of online vitriol towards the likes of Sweeney and Carpenter. With humor and wit, she rightfully contextualizes this discussion within the attacks on sex workers’ rights…

What so called feminists lament over is that Sweeney is engaging in fetish play for financial gain. The root of their disgust specifically originates with hatred of sex work and the whorephobia that fuels continued stigma and harm against us. They don’t care that it’s going to be just fine for Sydney Sweeney to pull this stunt while the rest of the fetish models and artisans are being digitally erased like in Sweden where Onlyfans models can no longer provide commissions or cam shows. This is the result of radical liberal feminism, the kind Kamala Harris implemented in FOSTA-SESTA which harms providers more often than it punishes the purchaser.

Of course, a mainstream celebrity profiting off kink and sex work aesthetics is not the same as an actual sex worker doing their work, which is perhaps how we ought to be critiquing the two. She describes the state of sexual politics in 2025 pretty bluntly…

We are in a new era of the American Girl Next Door. She’s still blonde and thin-but-curvy in all the right places, but unlike the topless sex icons of the 90s, she cannot be too frivolous with her sexuality because it would give off the suggestion she has an Onlyfans. Like shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave she still loves to fuck, maybe she kisses girls, but she is never fully naked never fully obscene. Men desire to satisfy their ego with a partner hot enough to be a sex worker without her actually being tainted by the full exposure of her pussy being fucked by another man’s cock. Women desire the sexual freedom and power over men without the stigma, but even these safe for marketing icons are still too horny for some. In the whittling of women’s autonomy by the right, the beauty standard of women they carve out will always cause the entirety of feminized people to suffer.

The simple fact that these images—album covers, bath soap ads—are indeed marketing material is a worthwhile reminder. While some may claim that Carpenter is “unknowingly” playing into sexist stereotypes about women or is perhaps too dumb to realize how this may be perceived by the wider culture, Black feminist Kimberly Nicole Foster rightly points out that she knows exactly what she’s doing. When we’re discussing whether Sabrina Carpenter is being feminist or whether Sabrina Carpenter is being un-feminist, what we are doing is discussing Sabrina Carpenter, which is the real goal here. That may seem like a cop-out answer to this whole conversation, but it’s true; this is an ad for a product (the album) and we are helping raise awareness of the product. Foster doesn’t expect pop stars to be feminist, she expects them to respond to what the market wants, as they’ve done for a long time…

But before we start handing out medals, let’s be honest: every pop star has to walk a tightrope between agency and coercion. Any representation of sexual liberation we see in mass media should be met with skepticism. Carpenter is a beautiful, careful student of pop music. She knows what the market wants from her. That’s why I cringe when these kinds of displays get described as “liberatory.”

What Sabrina Carpenter is doing right now is ripped from the Madonna playbook. In 1984, as Ronald Reagan tightened the screws of the “traditional values” vice on the nation, Madonna jumped feet first into the Unruly Woman Business.

…

The backlash was immediate. Moralists called it sacrilegious. Journalists were scandalized. Madonna, they said, was mocking the sanctity of marriage. Mocking the Virgin Mary. Encouraging promiscuity.

She accomplished what only the great cultural provocateurs can: piss off reactionaries and progressives at the same time.

As I’ve written about before, celebrities can’t save us from the ills of the world. They exist to entertain. It used to be the leftist position that celebrities were mere distractions, tools of the state/elites, the “circus” part of “bread and circuses”. Somewhere in the past couple of decades, however, we started expecting musicians and actors to hold public policy positions, as though Ja Rule’s take on the Middle East should concern us at all. It makes sense to critique art that is actively anti-feminist, especially when that art is popular, but it’s hard to take such criticism seriously when it comes with a Twitter thread-level understanding of “the male gaze”. Besides, over-focusing on popular media makes us forget that public policy is to blame for women’s current position in society…

Personally, I couldn’t care less about any "male gaze" debates. BOR-ING. Self-objectification is not real.

I do, however, want to know why we are still so susceptible to provocation?

One comment said: “This just set us back 50 years.” No, baby—the ballot box, wealth inequality, and algorithmically mediated content did that. I’ll say it until they put me in the grave: We cannot expect art to solve problems only public policy can fix.

And then, there’s the simple reality that people want sex but face barriers in getting it. In an incredibly frank conversation about the history and current state of sex in video games, games being an under-discussed subject in the realm of media criticism, lewd game developer Hot Pink shares how he has to navigate a realm where credit card and games platforms put restrictions on the purchasing of adult materials. (This discussion starts ~54 minutes into the episode if you’re curious.) Platforms like Steam, Itch.io, and Patreon have final say on whether games that feature sex content on the fringe of societal acceptance (e.g. kink, BDSM, non-consent fantasies) get taken off their platforms, cutting off the developers’ income. This gets even more frustrating when platforms apply rules inconsistently (the host remarks with an analogy: “We have rules, there’s a way for you to obey them, but we can’t write them down for you. So good luck, your entire financial model depends on it, and we’ll see you on the other side!”) Additionally, the gaming industry is already facing an economic crisis, and sex game producers have an even bigger challenge since no investor wants to touch them with a ten-foot pole. This ends up being a microcosm of the real problems with porn creation and distribution, that being workers’ ability to earn a fair wage in our current system. SWERFs say the problem with porn is that sex workers are getting exploited (and thus need to be “saved”), yet even when no humans are on set filming a sex scene, the mechanisms of capital still find a way to screw over both the producers and enjoyers of sexual content.

To get meta for a moment: You may have noticed that I spent this essay quoting other writers. That’s mostly because I can’t seem to make up my own mind about this issue, aside from being viciously pro-sex worker and cognizant of algorithmically-driven media (is there a real “Sex War Part 2” occurring, or are there just a few mad Twitter users driving engagement with rage bait?) I think I’m just bored of this conversation. I quite literally drafted a version of this essay a year ago when Haliey Welch, aka Hawk Tuah Girl, was being claimed by conservatives (working title: “Are You Not Having Sex in a Feminist Way, or Not Having Sex in a Conservative Way?”) We keep having conversations like this over and over, and nothing ever gets resolved. (Overall, I mostly agree with Kim Foster on this one, we should probably stop expecting lefty policy positions from people whose purpose is to entertain the most people possible.)

The iconic tweet by @negaversace: “Is [pop star] a feminist? Is MasterCard a queer ally? Is this tv show my friend?” (Incidentally, we now have the answer to one of those questions.)

For transparency, I’m on the asexual spectrum. While asking an ace person for their opinion on sex seems like asking someone who’s allergic to dairy where to get the best tres leches in town, I promise we’re worth checking in with about such things. In her book “Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture”, Sherronda J. Brown incisively points out that hypersexualization hasn’t liberated us. In particular, for Black women, hypersexualization is akin to animalization. And yet, being asexual in such a culture doesn’t help either, since under conservative ideology, ALL non-normative sexual behaviors and family dynamics are shamed.

So, the pro-sex folks were wrong. But I’m also a lesbian who’s in an excellent relationship with a non-man. I did the exact thing the sex-negative feminists wanted me to do: I’ve decentered men! Am I any more “free” now? Well, the Supreme Court just gave states the green light to pass sweeping trans health care bans, so not really. Once again, I feel like we’re focusing on the wrong things here. (Besides, for all the noise being made by the sex-negative folks, I doubt they’ll get very far. Pro-sex worker sentiments are on the rise, and as E. Tammy Kim points out, even in Korea, the 4B movement is “more of a vibe” than an influential group.)

Neither the pro-sex or anti-sex feminists were totally right. So, am I “sex-neutral”? I reject that concept since it’s placed within a neoliberal framework where the goal is callous libertarianism, the choice-feminist, individualistic attitude of “sex is just whatever man, as long as everyone consents then it’s all good!!” Clearly, we need to think this through a little bit further. I just don’t want to be the one to lead this conversation; I already have my amazing partner, I’m all set, thanks.

In that Dazed piece I referenced before, author Emma Garland points out that while some recent works (Ethel Cain’s Perverts and FKA Twigs’ Eusexua) “dive head first into the erotic”, just as many are sexual without being “disruptive”…

For all the charged glances across the office, there is no danger in Babygirl. … Romy (Nicole Kidman) is a woman with it all: a wife who fucks her husband, packs her kids’ school bags and gets Botox before clocking in for a long shift running a corporation in a pussy bow blouse. If the one thing she lacks doesn’t change anything when it presents itself, then what’s the point? If her secret desire is unleashed without reconfiguring her life into something new, it can’t be as strong as the film wants us to believe it is. “Something has to be at stake,” Romy says repeatedly, and yet nothing is.

The proposed solution is to “get uglier”, to not assuage our negative feelings toward sex but to sit in those feeling. Maybe this is related to a similar urge I’ve seen bubbling up online. On the topic of trans health care, historian Jules Gill-Peterson now openly rejects the safe, inoffensive, euphemistic term “gender-affirming care”, preferring the term “sex change” (literal, brutal, classic, and crucially, accurate). She similarly prefers “transsexual” to “transgender”, and even the neoliberal concept of “trans joy” as a driving value of our movement is within her crosshairs…

“We don’t need any more disgusting ‘trans joy,’” Gill-Peterson says. “We don’t need any more ‘gender euphoria.’ Let’s just get rid of all that and spend our time delivering real things that matter to people, things like hormones and sex changes and surgeries.”

There is a third way out of this. It’s real, and it involves getting messy, being impolite, and not allowing the system as it exists to appropriate sexual liberation for its own goals, whether that’s selling us a dating app or an album. May the women “going their own way” find peace, and may the future be deliciously ugly for the rest of us.

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Currently Reading

• An open call in the journal Science to protect transgender scientists.

• A newly-published article on detransition from experts in the subject.

• A connection between ads featuring people eating alone in cars and the ongoing loneliness epidemic.

Watch History

• Elliot Sang on the usefulness of nuance.

• CitiesByDiana on the variety of intersecting reasons why nothing stays open late anymore.

• Linus Sebastian on the accuracy of Wikipedia as a source (and why AI is still worse).

Bops, Vibes, & Jams

• My favorite rapper, Little Simz, finally released her new album “Lotus” and I’m loving it!! Fav tracks: “Free”, “Young”, “Peace”, “Lion”.

And now, your weekly Koko.

Koko the cat, curled up in a ball, sleeping on a shirt.

That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.

In solidarity,

-Anna