‘It’s Not About Sex, It’s About Power’ And Other Lies
by Natalie Adler
Sex isn’t necessarily the chaotic good to power’s lawful evil at all.
“Sexual violence isn’t about sex; it’s about power.” This phrase has been repeated againand again and again and has recently resurfaced in conversations, public and private, throughout rape culture’s arguable year of reckoning.
This statement is at once a reassurance and a protest: the aim of sexual violence (including harassment and assault) is not the act of sex itself, but the power one asserts through the act. But the more we pass this phrase around, the more we establish a false binary wherein there is such a thing as sex untouched by power dynamics, a “pure” sex that is safe from the threat of power.
What’s insidious about this phrase is that it assumes we have stable and agreed upon definitions of fraught terms like “sex” and “power.” The phrase ushers us past the physicality of sex and violence all together in favor of an abstraction.
Power remains diffuse in this formulation, only showing its “true colors” in the faces of the bad people who abuse it and the institutions (the fast food industry, Hollywood, academia, the District Attorney’s office…) that enable it. The conventional wisdom demurs: sexual mores may…
