I Fuck While Feminist by making decisions about who I won’t fuck. If I’m going to support the right of women to control their own bodies, their own lives, and be equal partners in their relationships, I need to respect myself enough to label some men as unfuckable. For me, this starts with a recognition of the ways in which problematic narratives about sex, race, and gender permeate gay culture.

Looking at a M4M personals section, you’ll see a few recurring requests made of potential partners. Men want men who are HWP, Height/Weight Proportional, men who are of a certain race, usually white, and men who are masculine. Or butch. Or “straight-acting.” Shockingly, thin masculine white men seem to be a hot commodity in the gay community! As someone who has had sex with a wide variety of dudes, fat and thin, dudes of color and white dudes, masculine and feminine, I find all of this really, really repulsive. I refuse to fuck someone who is stupid enough to think that weight or race or gender expression determines how fuckable someone is. People bristle at the suggestion that they think critically about their sexual preferences, clinging tightly to the old “the heart wants what it wants” narrative, hoping to be allowed to discriminate with impunity. If it were up to me, those people would fall victim to a lifelong fuck drought as the rest of us resolve to avoid their hegemonic genitals.

When I first started fucking dudes, my criteria was simply mutual attraction. If I thought he was hot, and he thought I was hot, THUNDERCATS WERE GO. As a result, I ended up having my fair share of unsatisfying sex. Guys who wouldn’t kiss. Guys who refused to let me fuck them. Guys so deep in the closet their jizz tasted like mothballs. They lived in a constant state of bargaining, never fully able to accept their queer identity. They thought that if they were “masculine,” if they never bottomed, if they didn’t kiss, that one day they would get the homosocial validation they so desperately craved. They defined themselves by what they weren’t – they weren’t sissies, or nellies, or flamers. Over time, I realized that if I was committed to working toward a world where gender variance was celebrated, where getting fucked wasn’t viewed as something shameful or disempowering, I was going to have to start voting with my dick. This isn’t simply high-minded “the personal is political” sexual activism. If a dude thinks that he is powerful because he doesn’t get fucked, and you are weak and shameful for getting fucked, you really and truly don’t want to let him fuck you. Sex is about respect, and letting someone inside you without respect is a bad idea. No matter what position I am in, I follow this cardinal rule: If someone needs to be in control, it should be the person getting fucked. I fuck while feminist by insisting that there is nothing submissive about getting fucked. Accepting the standard bullshit narrative of “penetration as dominance” or “penetration as corruption” is ridiculous and arbitrary. It is just as easy to see penetration as submission. A part of your body is inside of me. If you don’t play by my rules, I MIGHT NOT GIVE IT BACK.

This is just a partial list of men I respect myself too much to fuck. It is nowhere near complete, but it is a beginning. I suggest you start your own.