Numerous departments and organizations on campus have gathered over the course of this semester to discuss a common topic: class. At every single gathering, the reason multiple people (myself included) gave for attending the event was that “We don’t talk about class enough on this campus.”

I consider myself someone who thinks critically about class and who strives to learn how to better talk about it. Even so, I cannot give a definite answer as to why so many people can share this common frustration other than to say that it can be intimidating. Speaking from my perspective, as someone who is working class, I find that it can be hard to talk about class because built into the backbone of decades’ worth of American economic thought is a meritocratic rhetoric. Meritocracy sounds nice, and “If you work hard enough, you can achieve anything” might seem like a great platform to foster upward mobility.

But, that same ideology can sound a lot like “you and your family haven’t worked hard enough to earn a middle class income and lifestyle” if you’re working class, whether your class is generational or situational. Identifying how working class issues affect your life can then feel like more of a personal, negative reflection on you, or at least can mark you as somehow “deviant” from the imagined norm of someone who has achieved the American Dream.

And that’s why, at least for me, it is hard to be forthright about these issues, but it still is our responsibility to keep in mind a working class-centric perspective in everything we do. It is vital in order to add depth not just to analysis, but to all advocacy. If we don’t, we risk alienating a huge population of people by creating a movement that is only accessible and relatable to the middle/owning class. I say this so confidently because, even as I identify as an advocate for the cause, I see this classism play out in the sex positive movement.

That is a big claim to make, but before I quantify why I think this, I need to talk generally again. Before writing this article, I spoke with members of Macalester’s Working Class Identity Collective about how class affects our relationship with sex. Speaking with them, I was reminded that working class people are not a monolith. What it means to live working class differs greatly across race, gender, religion, geographic region (such as Northeastern or Midwestern), the type of area you live in (urban, rural, suburban), and any complex combination therein. Even within the working class identity, annual income differences of even $5,000 could mean a great deal to how your family lives compared to someone else. This multiplicity in experience, however, does not mean you shouldn’t engage. Instead, we need to understand that while not every working class person will experience any given example, this in no way diminishes the importance of what you can find at the intersection of sex positivity and working class politics.

I do not expect anyone to have read this column every week and do not like to reference past articles; however, I believe my previous piece on bed-sharing is a good place to start talking about this intersection. I am sure I am not the only one at Macalester who, in their life, has shared a bed with a sibling, parent and/or nephew/niece because it was a good use of space or out of necessity. I have shared rooms for most of my life as well. This is a working class experience to me, if only because I was told by the media that I was “supposed” to have my own bed and room like middle class folk on the sitcoms I loved growing up.

But it is a sex positive concern as well. Countless times, I have seen sex positive advocates say that the number one way to empower yourself is through masturbation—end stop. While I agree with the premise of masturbation as important to exploring your sexuality, this is a not an apolitical statement. Masturbation as the cornerstone of sex positivity assumes a few things: that 1, you have a private space to safely masturbate; 2, when you are sexually excited or want to be, you can readily access this space; 3, you have the time in this space to masturbate without interruption; 4, you can easily clean up afterward if you need to. If you have ever shared a room on campus or back home, coordinating even these four things can be difficult. If you share a bed, it can be near impossible.

Possible alternatives to this conundrum are also ways sex positive advocates encourage learning about your body: porn, sex toys, and visiting your local sex shop. But again, each suggestion has its class Achilles Heel. Not having Internet at home easily cuts off your porn supply. Sex toys can be expensive, and to someone working class, even buying one could be an investment. There may not be an opportunity to experiment and buy around until you find the right one. And perhaps this is just my experience, but sex shops seem very class-based to me. The “nicer,” more popular ones tend to price way out of my spending range, and it can be hard to tell which of the ones that have good prices are actually seedy or just seem seedy enough to warn me off.

It may seem like I am putting together random examples to prove a point, and let me confirm that I am, and also am not. These seemingly unrelated grievances are tied together because sex positivity as a whole has largely failed to build into its rhetoric a meaningful class consciousness. There are blind spots throughout sex positivity’s entire infrastructure, and however disparate they are, we need to relate them.

At Macalester, we can do better. We can start by being more critical about the tone of our criticisms when they relate to sex and/or romance. One of the working class issues and experiences that the WCIC identity and I identified were teen pregnancy. If our Facebook feeds are starting to be flooded with news of expecting parents our age, how do you talk about it? With disgust, scorn or worry for the children? In my family, there are many women who had their children young, and they are all amazing mothers who may have struggled financially but always took care of their own. Teen pregnancy is one part of reproductive justice that, to me, is a struggle for working class issues as well. Affordable health insurance that covers contraception, abortion rights to let people choose their families, and failing sex education in a failing education system are all connected and heightened by a working class perspective, and we need to continue this focus in sex positivity.

This is a process of closing the blind spots in our class consciousness. We need to acknowledge that we don’t know everything about a given topic but it’s our responsibility to learn. We need to avoid generalizations of and value judgments on people’s decisions over their sexual and romantic lives. And we need to realize that there might be people in the room affected by the issues we talk about. I am not expecting change to happen in a day, within myself or throughout campus, but at least let’s start up this conversation and talk more—and more intentionally—about class issues.