Oh Mickey, You’re So Fine!

Dearest Orchid,

Well, well, well, welcome to the racy spacey! These past few weeks have really heated up. Okay, alright, onto pushing me out of my comfort zone.

How About A Little Spice With That

I’ve done a bit of pondering, and my guess is that the majority of my sex self-education occurred somewhere between grades four and eight. Now, in true Soviet style, there were a couple of (illustrated!) books about puberty and procreation available to me from a wee age. But it was sometime around fourth grade that I started exploring the YA section of the library and never looked back. The more I think about the numerous standalones and series I devoured, the more I realize that my reading list was rife with books that were très explicit (I, obviously, did not limit myself to YA fare). This is what comes of unsupervised library visits. Not to mention that no one really controlled what I watched when I was alone. And I was left to my own devices all the time.

So, nine years old, and I might be reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, or I might be perusing Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue. The latter I permanently borrowed from someone’s personal collection. To this day, I justify my actions by relying on the eye for an eye philosophy, for that someone never returned my paperback three-books-in-one compilation of The Lord of the Rings. What goes around comes around.

But Where’s The Open-Minded Filling?

What I cannot recall from that time is feeling any shame about what I was reading or watching (except when my mother would lunge in my direction to cover my eyes anytime a spicy scene was on screen — that totally kept me innocent. Not!). I don’t think I actually applied sex to me. It existed, and I existed, and never the two shall meet. It took many years for that perspective to truly dissipate, probably because the media representation of sex and real sex tend to be so freaking far from one another.

Here’s the thing — I was exposed to plenty of varied sex-related content, but all of it lacked the same thing: encouragement of safe exploration and accompanying open discussion. The closest thing I can recall is Loveline, the late-night radio show where folks would call in to discuss their relationship and sex concerns, and that had its quite limited uses. I still remember some segments fondly, but I’m sure 12-to-13-year-old me was not an excellent judge of quality content.

Honestly, it’s only in the past few years that I’ve noticed sex-positivity becoming mainstream and acceptable, and this makes me boundlessly ecstatic. Because our awkward attitude toward something so natural and important has been shooting us in the collective foot for way too fucking long. I want romance novels with explicit content to be consistently center stage; I want smut to be continuously widely discussed and lauded; I want shows like Sex, Love & Goop to be as common as police procedurals.

Missed Opportunities

We can all agree that a pretty large segment of the population (of appropriate age and deep-fried in consent) wants to have pleasurable, fulfilling sex. And that they want this experience for both themselves and their partner(s). And yet, we sure do love to fuck around when it comes to teaching people how to do that. From our lackluster sex ed classes in school (I vividly remember the screened Lifetime movies, which handily managed to simultaneously elicit shame, fear, and much suspicion), to our typically underwhelming pornography (heteronormative and overwhelmingly intended for the cisgender straight male viewer), we are not doing good.

As this world strives to be better, we can’t forget how vital sexual equity is, and how it might require even greater effort to bring about, because we’ll have to overcome our visceral, dark desire to never ever talk about sex. What happens in the figurative bedroom should not in that bedroom stay. For me, this is the deeper meaning of sex — it’s an opportunity to grow and become so much better than we are, on both a personal and societal level. It’s not a frivolous activity that happens to have biological roots and consequences. Rather, it’s so fundamentally human and offers us the possibility of connecting with others in a variety of ways, as much through the sharing of individual stories and experiences, as through the activity itself. So we really should take advantage.

Love,

Aster

P.S. Let’s flip it and reverse it! (...I don’t know.) What’s something you feel like you have a lot of knowledge about (formal, informal, or both), and yet you consider yourself a non-expert in that field? Does your approach to talking about this subject change based on your audience? What would make you feel more competent? Personally, I feel this way about pretty much everything, including fields that I have higher education in. I will hesitate to engage on a topic unless someone says something so egregiously incorrect that I can’t help but jump in. But generally, I feel like there are folks with much greater knowledge, skill, and applied experience who can contribute much more than I ever could. Fact or fiction, we’ll never know.

[Currently listening to: the riff-off scene from Pitch Perfect; talk about getting into the mood!]