Tristan Taormino has long been one of my favorite sex educators/writers, and pornographers. She
exemplifies -- to me, anyway -- the school of thought that the only way
to figure out our own taboos and get over ourselves is to actually
think about the things we do. And that means really think, not just react. I fell in love with her all over again after reading this multi-part interview over at Sexis.
One of my favorite responses re: the way the internet is changing the way we look at sex, in part:
We still will not talk to kids in explicit terms about sex education. There’s the sense that that’s what fucking looks like or should look like, and women still don’t know how their clitoris works. Or women are 22 years old, and have gotten to college and never had an orgasm. There is all this: image, image, image, and no information, no education. So, in some ways, it’s like we still need to sit everyone down and show them naked people and actually how their bodies work.
But, really, does this come as any surprise? In this day and age where web designers are actively discouraged from setting up flash intro pages, where people go to school to get a degree in designing layouts that scream for your attention and then keep you there, because people have the attention spans of gnats, is it any surprise that it's a challenge for us to understand ourselves when it comes to sex?
We get a brief flash of breast or two pelvises mashing themselves together and all of a sudden these unquestioned metamessages come through about how we're supposed to look, supposed to do, supposed to react, supposed to like, supposed to...
All this, anesthetizing a physical function of the body that's engineered to feel good?
Dude. Sometimes you just see somebody across the room and feel an attraction. Sometimes you have an interesting conversation with someone and you want to spend a little time alone, bonking the host of that amazing brain.
Shouldn't you be free to form your own manual to your body? And shouldn't the internet be a tool for you to get the information/stimulation you need, not lessons that'll make you feel like you're doing something wrong?
Don't even get me started on the pubic hair discussion.
It's freaking hair. Hair that no one should be made to feel disgusted about. Hair that apparently once served a vital purpose in human survival, okay? Your opinion of what public pubic hair should look like is a result of so many layers of socialization, it's ridiculous to take your own ideas for granted. It's objectively no more beautiful or ugly than a vagina or penis, and you certainly don't see anybody airbrushing those out.
I SAID, don't get me started.
In a strange and twisted way, this article related to your blog entry:
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/kids_your_mother_is_ready_to
Posted by: Lady V | January 12, 2010 at 03:04 PM