Sexual Freedom Is Not Sexual Entitlement

Tamnica

 Why Sexual Liberation 

Needs Relational Maturity

Sexual liberation has been one of the great social achievements of the modern era. But I feel it’s time for a more sophisticated understanding of what sexual freedom actually means. Because knowing who you are, what you want and how you wish to express yourself is only half the story. The other half begins when you encounter another human being.

And that’s where I think we have some evolving to do.

When Liberation Becomes Entitlement

We’ve come a long way from the days when sexuality was governed by rigid social expectations, moral prohibitions and shame. We’ve challenged restrictive gender roles, celebrated sexual diversity, embraced pleasure and affirmed people’s right to explore and express their sexuality in ways that feel authentic to them.

This is important progress. But I’m increasingly troubled by a particular strand of contemporary sex positivity that seems to have confused sexual freedom with sexual entitlement.

The message has shifted, in some quarters, from I have the right to be myself to I have the right to expect others to accommodate who I am. And even more troubling is the suggestion that if they don’t, they’re doing something morally wrong.

I’ve seen this play out in all sorts of ways. Here are four examples:

I once worked with a couple whose sexual relationship had revolved around a dominant–submissive dynamic. After having a baby, the woman no longer wanted to engage in those roles. Her husband was incensed. Dominance was his sexual identity, he insisted, something another therapist had apparently affirmed. He felt she was breaking a covenant, denying an essential part of who he was. But what about her? Wasn’t she equally entitled to discover that her sexuality had changed? His identity was his to understand, not hers to maintain. (Happily, they did eventually move beyond those labels and discovered a deeper way of meeting one another.)

I’ve worked with people who have adopted the label asexual, only for us to discover through further exploration that, in their specific circumstances, it wasn’t that they didn’t like or want sex, but that they didn’t enjoy the particular kind of sex they’d been having, or what they thought they should be having. The label had become an explanation that closed down curiosity rather than opening up new possibilities.

I’ve also encountered many people who discover an interest in polyamory, adopt it as an identity and then expect their long-term monogamous partners to embrace it simply because it’s ‘who they are’. When their partners are reluctant, they’re accused of being possessive, insecure or insufficiently evolved.

But wanting to fuck other people is a perfectly normal human desire. It doesn’t necessarily make you polyamorous any more than enjoying being dominant in bed necessarily makes you a Dom. These are desires and preferences, not necessarily immutable identities. And we humans routinely choose not to indulge our every impulse, whether that’s eating another slice of cake, telling our boss exactly what we think of them, or finally telling our overbearing mother-in-law where to go.

The interesting question isn’t what label we give a desire, but what it means to us, why it matters, and how we choose to express it in relationship (which can, of course, include polyamory, or any other sexual expression, if that works for both of you).

And consider the controversy over lesbians who are criticised for excluding people with penises who identify as women from their sexual lives. A penis doesn’t cease to be a penis because its owner gives it a different name. And if a lesbian isn’t interested in cock, that’s entirely her prerogative. Nobody has the right to demand her attraction, become aggressive about her refusal, or automatically characterise her sexual boundaries as discrimination.

Sexual freedom includes the freedom not to desire someone, without having to defend or apologise for it.

These are four different situations, but all with a common thread: 

Your identity may explain your experience. 

It does not give you moral authority over mine.

And What Does Any of It Actually Mean?

We’re living in an age of proliferating sexual identities. 

We’ve got pansexual, asexual, polyamorous, queer, transgender, kinky, demisexual, heteroflexible, and on and on and on. 

1. But what do these labels actually tell us about a person? 
2. What does asexual mean? 
3. What does kinky mean? 
4. What does transgender tell us about someone’s erotic experience? 
5. What does straight mean, for that matter?

Some of these terms describe patterns of attraction, others gender identity, relationship preferences or erotic practices. They’re not even describing the same dimensions of human experience. And within each category, there’s enormous variation.

And then there’s that ubiquitous term queer. 

Once largely used as a derogatory term for gay people, it’s since been reclaimed and expanded into an extraordinarily broad umbrella. But what does it actually tell us? Sometimes I wonder whether it has become less a description of sexuality and more a declaration of being different from all those supposedly straight people with their boring monogamy and vanilla sex. 

It’s as though sexual sophistication were something conferred by a label rather than cultivated through curiosity and engagement.

Now I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t use labels. 

Language helps us understand ourselves and communicate with others, and sometimes finding the right word can be wonderfully liberating. But a label is only a starting point. It should invite questions.

• What does that mean to you? 
• How do you experience it? 
• What do you enjoy? 
• What matters to you? 
• How does it shape the way you want to relate? 

A label should open a conversation, not end one.

And here’s the thing: there are over eight billion people on this planet. So there are actually eight billion sexualities. Every single one of us has a unique erotic landscape. There’s not an homogeneous mass of straight people on one side and a fascinating assortment of queer people on the other.

A label tells us remarkably little about the richness, depth, creativity or sophistication of someone’s sexual life. We’d have actual sex positivity if we spent less time categorising our sexuality and more time exploring what it actually means to us.

The Moral High Ground

There’s another aspect of contemporary identity culture that troubles me: the tendency to turn subjective experience into moral authority.

I am being authentic. I am embracing my truth. I am liberated.

And if someone questions, disagrees or declines to participate?

You are repressed. You are intolerant. You are invalidating me. You are a bigot.

The misuse of the language of safety, harm and victimhood is particularly insidious. These are, of course, vitally important concepts. People experience genuine discrimination, coercion, intimidation and abuse, and we need language to recognise and address those experiences. But feeling something doesn’t automatically establish that another person has done something wrong.

I feel unsafe, therefore you have made me unsafe.

I feel invalidated, therefore you have harmed me.

I feel rejected, therefore you are discriminating against me.

Our feelings are real experiences, deserving of acknowledgement and exploration. But they aren’t necessarily objective descriptions of someone else’s behaviour. Sometimes these feelings do point to genuine mistreatment. 

But they can also arise from misunderstandings, differences in perspective, past experiences or conflicting needs.

There’s also a troubling tendency towards what we might call category creep: using increasingly extreme language to describe relatively ordinary interpersonal difficulties. 

Disagreement becomes invalidation, discomfort becomes unsafety, hurt feelings become trauma, and an unwelcome boundary becomes oppression.

This matters because words have meaning. 

When we appropriate the language of serious harm to describe every disappointment, disagreement or uncomfortable encounter, we risk diminishing its significance for people who have experienced genuine abuse, coercion or discrimination. And we can turn the ordinary challenges of relating to other human beings into narratives of victimhood, rather than opportunities for understanding, negotiation and growth.

Relational maturity requires us to explore those possibilities rather than automatically appointing one person the victim and the other the perpetrator.

And it requires us to notice our own behaviour. Without that awareness it is sadly possible to speak passionately about inclusion while dismissing another person’s perspective, to demand respect while behaving contemptuously, or even to accuse someone of making us feel unsafe while confronting them in an intimidating manner.

The language of ‘inclusion’ actually becomes exclusionary when it leaves no room for someone else’s reality.

Growing Into Sexual Liberation

I don’t want us to retreat from sexual liberation. I want us to grow into it.

I want a sex-positive culture that celebrates sexual autonomy without confusing it with entitlement. 

One that encourages self-discovery without turning identity into moral superiority, and which recognises that another person’s refusal to share our desires or participate in our sexual expression doesn’t invalidate who we are.

But more than that, I want us to recognise the extraordinary possibilities that open up when we bring two whole human beings into genuine engagement.

When we’re curious about one another rather than simply demanding to be understood, and we encounter difference as an invitation to exploration rather than a threat to our identity, we can create something dynamic, playful, responsive and potentially transformative. Something neither of us could create alone.

This isn’t a restriction upon sexual freedom. It’s an expansion of it.

It’s time to stop asking only, 

Who am I, and what do I want? 

And start asking, 

Who are we, and what might we create together?

Sexual maturity isn’t just knowing who you are. 

It’s knowing who you are while remaining genuinely interested in who someone else is.

The Provocation

• If your sexual identity limits curiosity, is it really freedom?

• And if your sexual freedom depends upon someone else surrendering theirs, how free is it really?

• What might become possible if we dropped the limitations of labels and met one another as unique human beings?

 Jacqueline Hellyer