Sex, Truth and Audio Tape: Shifting identities on a changing sexual landscape

Provocative intellectual Camille Paglia believes transgender groups helped get Donald Trump elected because of their activism on bathroom access.  A Brazilian judge sparks outrage when he approves gay conversion therapy. An Australian group calling itself, "Straight Lives Matter" rallies against same-sex marriage. In Ontario some parents bitterly fought an updated sex education curriculum that included information on gender fluidity and sexting. Developmental psychologist and sex educator Liz Powell says, "if we're being real with ourselves, the sexual landscape has always, to some degree, been a public battleground."  

Currently we are living through the greatest public expression of sexual diversity in our history. "When you think of the acronym LGBT, now it's grown to LGBTQ PLUS — the acronym is growing longer to accommodate so many varied types, and this creates strain and push-back", says Cambridge-based sex empowerment coach, Leslie Waye. What is the source of this push-back? Liz Powell thinks we are witnessing a new kind of civil rights movement and just like in previous times, when that happens, social anxieties grow. "What we tend to see when there's progress forward is a back-lash against it — blame is a difficult question here. Economically there's a lot of anxiety and when we zoom way out people realize that the game is one that is rigged against all of us except for those who are the very richest ... and the way that our societies are structured creates an utterly unattainable ideal for the vast majority of people, and on this new frontier where what it means to be a man or a woman or a person or queer ... all of these things are shifting and changing ... that produces anxiety."  

Traditionally, sexuality research has been viewed as "less than" according to Jessica Wood. She's a Ph.D candidate at the University of Guelph and is studying sexual minorities, like consensual non-monogamy. She says the subject can be very threatening to people. "When I've presented research on consensual non-monogamy, people raise their hand and ask me, are you an activist? Do you partake in consensual non-monogamy? Very personal questions that wouldn't be asked if you were studying monogamous or romantic heterosexual relationships".  

It's been said that everything in the world is about sex except for sex. Sex is about power. Toronto-based sex educator Heather Elizabeth likes to quote Michel Foucault: "We see power and we see control and this manipulation of how we ought to be. Foucault talked about the idea of biopolitics, all the invisible things that direct us into what we should be doing and how our bodies ought to be behaving. And I think we see a lot of this in sexuality." Heather Elizabeth says in some ways we're deeply messed up about sex — sort of. "Sexuality becomes messy when we don't have the language and nuances to talk about it. We want to solve sexual assault but it's complicated and we're not good at complexity." 


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