Sex as Resistance: How Nonconformity Challenges Systems of Control
How the radical act of pleasure should be — and can be — reimagined

One of my clearest memories of school was being taken out of sex education classes. I remember feeling … relieved? Relieved I didn’t have to address the sick feeling that crept into the pit of my gut and my tight chest whenever sex was mentioned.
Sex was never mentioned at home. Worse, it was an insult to speak of it. Laced with all the shame of repressed Muslim adult fear, it would be as if you personally attacked my parents’ conscience, or their physical body, causing them to shrink away and return with greater anger. Sex wasn’t just forgotten about, it was never approached, and all possibilities of approaching it were cut away in the process. It was burned from my kid peripherals.
Search the word “sex,” and you’ll receive everything. The definition of biological sex, attached as it is to traits, identifiers and body structures. Positions, activities, descriptions, types of sex. Anthologies on histories of sexuality, sexual health, medical records, etymology of the word and on and on.
Ultimately, I’d say sex is undefinable. Because it is so redefinable and regenerative. It is gorgeously fluid as a mechanism and word.
What we have done is create an umbrella. This umbrella that we call “sex” is filled with so much it overflows, and one of those things is something so incredibly powerful, to even utilize it would — and does — topple realities.
It's called self.
Self is another huge term. It’s important because it pins itself to questioning.
Perhaps it was so disliked in my early household because an allowance of discussion and understanding of it is a pathway into the exploration of self. If molded however you wish, it can be a powerful form of expression, as it insists on a deeper understanding of yourself than what you are told — it reattaches “pleasure” to the idea of being alive, not just as a luxury, but inherently as a right.
It can cause you to question. And that isn’t something that systemic and religious control can healthily deal with.
Stop.
It’s not that easy.
Because if sex just did all of that by existing, we wouldn’t have sexual abuse or reproductive rights influencing the very existence of folks, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
The sad truth is that sex is so ultimately regenerative, undefinable and personal-interaction constructed, it can’t be absolutely liberational or absolutely toxic. It is both and much, much more.
We need to go back to “molded in the way you wish” and the experiences I had growing up. What you’ve been reading about here is a general statement on sex, and framing it as general is also dangerous.
I am south Asian, and I grew up in a strict Muslim household. Today, I freely dissect my own queerness whenever I wish. As a child, though, the concept of queerness was constricted and framed as perversion. One of the reasons for it being a perversion was that it permitted more free experience of sex. To justify the “danger” — of being queer, and of queer persons — there needed to be a vilification, and reinforced defining, of sex itself, because then that backs up the vilification, and redefining, of queer persons.
That vilification was built by the emphasis of “duty.” Reproduction was said to be a key part of being alive. If the reason for being alive is to reproduce, then your duty is to have sex for this outcome alone — not as a form of expression or self-reflection. Sex then becomes a powerful form of societal conformity.
Sex is still as heteronormative in the white mainstream, just as patriarchal and even more damaging because it erases questioning of itself as anything other than a good thing.
Societies that dictate the "proper" way to have sex and discourage open discussion about it (including the disinterest in sex) are deeply rooted in colonialism and capitalism.
They embody the idea that pleasure is an “extra,” and push back against the idea that sex is something you can choose or decide not to be interested in at all. If people reimagined themselves based on what they wanted, as opposed to what is expected of them, sex could be a form of liberation, not control. Sex is dangerously weaponized. That’s perhaps also a reason my parents were scared of it, even if they didn’t realize it.
I believe my parents didn’t teach me about sex because they were never taught about it, and when they experienced it, it was through the lens of duty and heteronormative, patriarchal discussion. Even more so, sex as a form of liberation was seen as a “white” thing.
So, sex doesn’t just equal freedom. And it doesn’t equal control either. Like much of anything else, it is more about the personal interaction than the defining terminology.
My own sexual experiences are signposted with trauma. I was forced to learn about sex through the lens of white, heteronormative society, and through that I would learn about what beauty, pleasure and communication meant…no, sorry, I would learn about what was expected of me from those.
If there is no facilitation of true autonomy or agency amongst the most vulnerable of folks, then even acts that are seen as “liberational” can be filtered to control you more still.
Sex is still as heteronormative in the white mainstream, just as patriarchal and even more damaging because it erases questioning of itself as anything other than a good thing.
I had to break these barriers to learn who I am. The only way I was able to re-evaluate my own standards of beauty, the love I have for my trans, brown body, and even the discussions I now have around social justice was through a lot of re-evaluation of what I consider sex and sexuality.
Now, I don’t think of sex as one thing. The erasure of it, the forced understanding, the limitations, the beauty, the freedom to reject it as something I need. I now deal with interaction, and not blanket definition. I can now talk about sex without pushing every iteration and experience into three letters, and I can move outside of its confines. The dissection of sex itself can be a powerful tool of liberation. But even that must be “queered” because the tools we think are so powerful to us as liberators have their toxicities too, and when formed in this white, old society, it is even more powerful to ask yourself what exactly it is you think about sex, and why.