When Kelly Rose Pflug-Black wrote ‘Why Sex-Positive Feminism Is Negative For Me,’ she didn’t just challenge a movement-she pulled back the curtain on a deeply personal rupture between identity and ideology. Her essay isn’t a broadside against feminism; it’s a quiet, aching confession from someone who felt abandoned by the very movement that promised liberation. She describes feeling pressured to embrace sexual freedom as a political act, even when her own body, history, and boundaries told her otherwise. That tension-between collective empowerment and individual discomfort-is what makes her critique resonate far beyond academic circles. It’s the same tension that surfaces when someone scrolls through ads for escorts dubai and wonders how much of that performance is freedom, and how much is survival dressed up as choice.
Pflug-Black’s argument hinges on a simple but radical idea: not all women experience sexual liberation the same way. For her, sex-positive feminism didn’t feel like empowerment-it felt like coercion. She recalls being told that refusing casual sex made her ‘complicit in patriarchy,’ that her discomfort was ‘internalized misogyny.’ But discomfort isn’t always oppression. Sometimes, it’s just the sound of a person saying no-not to sex, but to being told what their no should look like. This isn’t anti-feminist. It’s human.
The Myth of the Uniformly Empowered Woman
Sex-positive feminism, in its popular form, often paints a picture of women who are unapologetically sexual, confidently promiscuous, and liberated from shame. But that image isn’t universal. It’s a performance. And like any performance, it requires an audience. Many women who don’t fit that mold-those who are asexual, survivors of trauma, religious, or simply private-find themselves labeled as ‘regressive’ or ‘self-hating.’ The movement’s language, meant to be inclusive, often ends up excluding those who don’t perform sexuality on demand. This isn’t feminism. It’s a new kind of policing.
Think about the way women are encouraged to post selfies, share bedroom stories, or join ‘slut walks’ as proof of their liberation. What happens when you don’t want to? When you feel sick at the thought of being objectified, even if it’s ‘by choice’? The movement doesn’t have space for that silence. And that silence isn’t weakness-it’s integrity.
When Liberation Becomes a Requirement
Real liberation means having the right to say no to the things others say you should say yes to. That includes saying no to sex, no to sharing your body online, no to being called a prude for not wanting to be part of the sexual spectacle. But sex-positive feminism, as it’s often practiced, turns consent into a checklist: ‘You consented, so you’re free.’ That ignores the layers of pressure-social, economic, cultural-that make consent feel less like choice and more like obligation.
There’s a reason why the phrase ‘sex work is work’ is so polarizing. For some, it’s a demand for dignity. For others, it’s a grim reminder that in a world without safety nets, survival often looks like selling what you were taught to hide. The women who become dubai call girl aren’t necessarily liberated-they’re desperate. And when we celebrate their existence as feminist triumphs without addressing why they’re there in the first place, we’re not helping. We’re sanitizing exploitation.
The Erasure of Trauma and Complexity
Pflug-Black doesn’t dismiss sex. She doesn’t call for abstinence. She’s asking for nuance. She’s asking that we stop treating every woman’s sexual history as a political statement. Trauma doesn’t vanish because you’re told to ‘own your sexuality.’ A woman who was raped doesn’t become ‘empowered’ by having sex with a stranger the next week. She’s still healing. And forcing her to perform confidence in that moment isn’t solidarity-it’s violence.
The same goes for women raised in conservative homes, or those who grew up hearing that their bodies were sinful. Telling them to ‘just get over it’ and ‘have fun’ doesn’t liberate them. It invalidates the years they spent learning to fear their own skin. Real feminism should make space for that pain-not demand it be erased for the sake of a movement’s image.
What’s Missing From the Conversation
Sex-positive feminism often ignores class, race, and migration. A woman in New York who chooses to be a cam girl has different resources than a woman in Dubai who becomes a call girls dubai because her husband left her with no income and no family support. One has legal protections, healthcare, and a safety net. The other has none. Yet both are lumped into the same category: ‘empowered sex worker.’ That’s not inclusion. That’s erasure.
Even the language of ‘choice’ is flawed when it ignores systemic power. If you’re a single mother with no childcare, no government aid, and rent due next week, your ‘choice’ to enter sex work isn’t freedom-it’s necessity. And pretending otherwise doesn’t empower anyone. It just makes the privileged feel better about their own privilege.
A Better Way Forward
What if feminism stopped trying to define what liberation looks like-and started asking women what they need instead? What if we stopped celebrating sexual performance and started protecting bodily autonomy in all its forms: the choice to have sex, the choice to refuse it, the choice to be celibate, the choice to be private, the choice to heal in silence?
That’s not a rejection of sex-positivity. It’s its truest form. Liberation isn’t about how many partners you have or how openly you talk about them. It’s about having the space to decide, without judgment, without pressure, without fear of being called backward.
Pflug-Black’s essay isn’t a step backward. It’s a necessary correction. Feminism doesn’t need more slogans. It needs more listening. It needs to stop assuming that what feels freeing to one woman feels freeing to all. And it needs to stop using the language of empowerment to silence those who don’t fit the script.
The Real Cost of a Movement Without Mercy
When a movement demands that you perform your identity to be accepted, it stops being a movement for liberation. It becomes a cult of conformity. And the people who suffer most aren’t the ones who refuse to participate. They’re the ones who try, and break trying.
There’s a quiet crisis happening in the name of feminism: women are leaving it because they feel more judged than supported. They’re not leaving because they hate women. They’re leaving because they were told their pain wasn’t political enough, their silence wasn’t revolutionary enough, their boundaries weren’t feminist enough.
Maybe the next chapter of feminism isn’t about how loud we are. Maybe it’s about how well we listen.