Sexuality in America

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Frankly, the Greco-Roman model was in some ways better than what some of us seem to want to head into (and in some ways, such as the obsession with civilized/barbaric and free/slave dichotomies, either more similar than we'd like to admit or a lot worse). Shame and repression exist in sexuality for entirely legitimate reasons; they're ways of managing expectations and the effect that one's sexuality has on the people around one. In the past this has been used in obviously awful ways, such as to erect horrible double-binds for classes of people disfavored in whatever society's sexual regulatory regime was at any given moment, mostly women or people oriented to a greater or lesser extent towards their own or 'non-opposite'* genders. But at this point I would go so far as to say that society would greatly benefit from revisiting the idea of trying to suppress certain things. My close friends, a disproportionate number of whom are rather timid lesbians, may for example find their lives a lot more pleasant if we repressed the [Inks] out of certain expressions of male heterosexuality.

The absolute right to sexual expression within bounds of consent and sanity is a nice idea but it's inherently difficult to keep sexuality private. Really the most unjustly repressive aspect of it in the current state of civilization is the set of expectations surrounding gender, which ought to be if not necessarily done away with then at least made distinctly more voluntary in nature; I'm more or less fine with the idea of keeping or even strengthening everything else, for both moral and sociological reasons, particularly the connection to family or the ideal theoreticity of family.

(Disclaimer: This is coming from someone who likes his family and doesn't like sex.)

I can go on about this if someone such as Mikado would like clarification or elaboration on any of it.


*'opposite' in this context is a crock of sh**t but whatever.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I would add that the limitation implied by 'picking' a sexual identity or orientation can be helpful or useful for some people (like the lesbians I mentioned, who are greatly and manifestly helped in their lives by identifying as such but most of whom certainly don't expect everybody else to), but that isn't necessarily a reason to make talking in those terms entirely normative in the culture. Mark D. Jordan, who I think I mentioned to Mikado in a recent PM, has a wonderful essay all about this issue in a lovely little collection called Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion. Jordan teaches at Harvard Divinity School and he's written, if I recall correctly, quite a bit on the experiences of 'gay' (scare quotes because of the exact issue we're discussing) Christian men.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You might like Kajiura Yuki's music or Tsushima Yuuko's short fiction, where the sex acts are made up and gender doesn't matter.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The state adopting a market-based attitude towards regulating sexuality strikes me as the most terrible way possible to go about it, honestly.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It may be convenient, but treating sexuality as a market commodity I think is intrinsically morally suspect.