Body Freedom and Women’s Rights

📗 ‘Body freedom’- or bodily autonomy - refers to your right to make choices about your own body without pressure or threats. It means having the right to choose who you love, who you have sex with, or how you exist in the world.

Women have been a huge part of the fight for body freedom for all society. That’s because women historically, and in some places currently, have less rights around their body than men. The LGBTQIA+ community have also been an important, ongoing part of the fight for body freedom, such as in gay men’s struggles to make condoms available during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, the decriminalisation of same sex sexuality across Australia over many decades, and the ongoing struggles of trans people against discrimination.

It’s important to remember women and the LGBTQIA+ community as the people who first fought to make body freedom as a right. While the idea and practice of body freedom is now more widespread, many women and queer people continue to struggle against unfair laws or cultural stigma that limit their rights. It’s important to stand with them, and to see their rights as part of a collective fight for body freedom.

In Australia, our ability to enjoy sex for pleasure is actually a relatively recent freedom. In particular, this is because, in most parts of Australia, we have:

• Access to contraception
• Access to condoms and other STI prevention and safer sex materials
• Access to confidential sexual health services
• Access to STI treatment
• Doctor or health professional-assisted and anonymous STI contact tracing
• Legal access to abortion
• Anti-discrimination laws that protect against discrimination
• Marital rape is criminalised

There are many other factors that make body freedom possible in Australia. For example, a basic level of practical sexual health education across society has played an important role in teaching people how to use a condom and how to communicate what you want.

❓ Reflection

Can you think of some ways that your life is different from your parents' and grandparents' lives? How do you think you are different in terms of the choices you have compared to them?

Respecting and believing in body freedom means accepting our differences. Some people will enjoy things we don’t, and we may enjoy things that other people don’t. As long as everything is consensual, it’s important not to judge each other for our differences. This way, we can continue to live in a world where we can have the freedom to love who we love, be who we are, enjoy the sex we want to have and even feel like we can say “no” to sex, without fear of punishment.