Is sexual fascism justification for false complaints? In this series of videos Marc Gafni explores the ways in which false sexual complaints are often justified through sexual fascism.
The playlist above consists of an intro and five main videos.
You can watch them all on this page. Just click play on the video above and they will play one after the other.
If you want to skip any of the videos, click the little arrow on the videos while they are playing that looks like this:
and you will get to the next video in the playlist.
In the first of the videos, Marc Gafni explains what he means by Sexual Fascism:
One of the justifications that we offer for false complaints, false sexual complaints, is we don’t like the sexual position of the person who’s being complained against. Okay, so I want to make this very clear. It’s sexual fascism to allow for false complaints because we don’t like the person’s sexual position.
Marc elaborates how choice and freedom matter for the evolution of sexuality:
One of the characteristics of a free society is actually the evolution of sexuality, the possibility of new sexual possibility emerging, new relational possibility emerging. In fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism as a prime example but in every fundamentalism, sexuality is repressed. The repression of sexuality leads it to go underground, and then that energy reappears as fanaticism, as virulent extremism, as violence and every other form of evil.
So sexual freedom is important, but not just sexual freedom, we actually need to evolve a new sexual narrative.
Gafni then tells the story of his own position:
One of the core commitments of my life is to participate in that evolution. I’ve done it imperfectly. I began in a classical Orthodox religious context in which no contact physically of any kind was permissible before marriage, and only marriage/monogamy was the allowable context for engagement. And that was a position that didn’t work for me. If you were gay in the early fifties in America, so what do you do? You lie about sex. I was in a monogamous structure, functioning as a rabbi in a world in which monogamy was the only option, so I lied about sex, had affairs, etc. I regret that, and at the same time it was part of my emergence into new possibilities of what the future of sexuality might look like.
He then explains his current position:
Right now my position is—that I teach actively—that monogamy is gorgeous and beautiful and holy. It’s probably the best option for most people most of the time. And monogamy covers up enormous amounts of abuse, dead lives, desperation and brutality. There’s a second possibility which is much harder to enact and works for some people some of the time, which is called polyamory: to have committed relationships in this case with more than one person, sometimes with a primary partner. Now, does polyamory work for most people most of the time? No, but it can work for some of the people some of the time.
And finally, “there is a third possibility, celibacy” Marc Gafni continues.
To actually take the sexual energy and to channel it into creativity, into other forms of engagement.
And my position right now which I teach, which I’m spending a lot of time trying to work out in the deepest way so we can actually evolve love in culture, is that monogamy is enormously important, polyamory is enormously important, and so is celibacy, and sometimes they’re important options for different people at different times in their life.
If you want to just watch one of the 5 main videos on this page, you can also watch them on single pages by following the links below.
Main Video Posts with just one video:
- Marc Gafni on Sexual Fascism – Justification For False Complaints 1
- Marc Gafni on Sexual Fascism – Justification For False Complaints 2
- Marc Gafni on Sexual Fascism – Justification For False Complaints 3
- Marc Gafni on Sexual Fascism – Justification For False Complaints 4
- Marc Gafni on Sexual Fascism – Justification For False Complaints 5