Sex Positive: What It Means, and Where Gay Men Get Stuck With It

Sex positive means treating consensual sex as a healthy part of human life, and judging any given sex life by consent, honesty and its effect on the people involved. It makes no assumption that more sex is better, or that any particular kind of sex is better. A monogamous man with a low sex drive can be thoroughly sex positive. So can a man in an open relationship who goes to sex parties.

That definition is simple. The way the phrase gets used, especially in gay men’s social life, is less simple, and some of the men I work with have ended up feeling worse about themselves in the name of it.

Sex positive meaning and history

The phrase took hold in the 1980s and 1990s among sex educators, feminist writers and activists, partly as a response to the moral panic around sex that came with the HIV crisis. The idea underneath it is older. Through much of the twentieth century, medicine and psychology treated most sex outside heterosexual marriage as a symptom. Homosexuality stayed in the American diagnostic manual until 1973, and in the World Health Organization’s classification until 1990.

Researchers now use a sex-positive framework in a more formal sense. The psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden, in a 2014 paper on adolescent sexuality, argued that research had studied sex almost entirely as a risk, and proposed measuring sexual well-being instead: pleasure and satisfaction, confidence in one’s own sexual choices, and freedom from pain and distress. The World Health Organization’s working definition of sexual health makes a similar move, describing it as well-being in relation to sexuality and calling for a positive and respectful approach, with pleasurable and safe experiences free of coercion.

That is the core of it. Sex is assessed by what it does for and to people, and the question of whether it is moral in the abstract drops out.

A position on judgement, with no quota

Sex positivity sets no standard for how much sex you should have or what kind. It asks you to stop shaming consensual sex, your own and other people’s. That includes the sex you would never want for yourself.

It also covers people who want very little sex. Asexual men, men with low desire, men who are celibate for a while and men who prefer monogamy are all included. A version of sex positivity that only celebrates the adventurous is a narrower thing, and it tends to recreate the judgement it was meant to remove, pointed in a new direction.

In practice a sex-positive person can usually talk about sex without embarrassment or contempt, respects his own limits and other people’s, and stays curious about desires different from his own. He can still dislike things, decline things and hold strong preferences.

Why it matters for gay men

Most gay men grew up with their desire treated as a problem. In England and Wales sex between men was a crime until 1967, and an unequal age of consent lasted until 2001. Men now in their fifties and sixties came of age during the HIV crisis, when gay sex was presented publicly as a cause of death. Younger men grew up with fewer laws against them and plenty of the same messages in the playground.

The result, for many, is shame that attaches to sex itself. It shows up as difficulty enjoying sex sober, as anxiety during sex, or as sex kept in a separate compartment from the rest of life. I wrote about that pattern in gay shame and about anxiety during sex in gay sex anxiety.

Sex positivity does real repair work here. It treats gay sex as ordinary and good. It makes room for honest talk about testing, PrEP and condoms, which shame tends to shut down. It makes room for non-monogamy and kink to be discussed as choices, and for a man to find out what he wants without first defending his right to want anything at all.

Where sex positivity goes wrong

Any good idea can harden into a rule, and in some gay social circles sex positivity has. The message shifts from consensual sex being fine to the expectation that you will be up for most things, and that hesitation is something to get over.

I see a few versions of this. One is the man who agrees to an open relationship he does not want because objecting feels prudish. Another is the man who goes along with group sex or drugs because declining would mark him as uptight. A third is the man who has noticed his sex life has started to feel compulsive, and whose friends tell him that worrying about it is internalised shame.

A version of sex positivity that only celebrates the adventurous is a narrower thing, and it tends to recreate the judgement it was meant to remove, pointed in a new direction.

Each of these uses the language of sex positivity to override the thing sex positivity depends on, which is a person’s own judgement about his own body. Concern about chemsex is a good example. Saying that drug-fuelled sex can be dangerous, and that some men use it to avoid feelings they cannot face sober, is a description of risk and gives no moral verdict on gay sex. I wrote about it in chemsex and gay men.

Telling curiosity from compulsion

A sex-positive approach to your own sex life asks practical questions. How do you feel the next day, about yourself and the people you were with? Did you choose what happened, or did you go along with it? Is sex one way of feeling close or wanted, or has it become the only way? Is it costing you things you value, such as sleep, money, health, work or relationships? When you try to change the pattern, can you?

None of these questions asks whether the sex was too much or too unusual. They ask whether it is working for you. A man can have a great deal of sex with strangers and answer them comfortably. A man in a long monogamous relationship can answer them badly.

Curiosity tends to feel open and chosen, and it leaves you more yourself afterwards. Compulsion tends to feel driven, with a short relief followed by a slump, and it narrows life over time. If your sex life has started to feel like the second, apps often play a part, which I covered in Grindr and compulsive app use. I wrote about the wider pattern in hypersexuality in men.

What sex-positive therapy looks like

In sex-positive therapy the therapist treats gay sex, kink and non-monogamy as healthy variation. You should not have to justify your sex life before the work can begin, and the therapist should have no preferred outcome for it: more sex, less sex, monogamy or openness.

What the work does look at is fit and freedom. Fit is whether your sex life matches what you want. Freedom is whether you are choosing it, without coercion, compulsion or shame driving the choice. Sometimes that means helping a man enjoy sex he has been ashamed of for years. Sometimes it means helping a man say no in a culture that keeps telling him yes is the healthier answer. Both are sex positive.

If sex has become tangled up with shame, anxiety or compulsion, the page on therapy for sex and intimacy describes how I work with it.