Sexunlust als modernes Phänomen? (English)

[Aoife]

How Sex Becomes Passé

By Cory Silverberg, About.com Guide July 15, 2011

I've had an opinion piece by Erica Jong published last Sunday in the New York Times sitting as a tab in my browser all week. Often when an Important Media Outlet publishes something about sex I read it, find it either boring or angering, feel unsatisfied, left out, talked down to, or all of the above. If it's particularly narrow minded or mean I consciously choose not to share it, and I put it aside and move on.

This piece though felt sad more than anything else, so I wanted to hold on to it and think about it some more. Reading it reminded me of how, as a pre-teen, I read my mother's copy of Fear of Flying, Jong's first book and the one for which she is most famous. It was one of the many books I snuck off of the bookshelf in our den, books like Liberating Masturbation and The Women's Room which were part of what I know understand as my socialization as a girl. These books felt revelatory and hopeful, in many ways they kept me alive, although I couldn't have known at the time the extent to which they were very particular stories told from a particular perspective, presented as a truth long untold.

Telling Other Sexual Stories

The Times piece asks a question: is sex passé? Unfortunately, unlike my previous encounters with Jong, the picture she paints of contemporary sexuality and contemporary life feels like the opposite of a revelation. Two lines in particular stand out.

In describing a series of essays by younger women about how they aren't interested in sex, Jong wonders,

"Is sex less piquant when it is not forbidden?"

Implied in this, of course, is the idea that sex is no longer forbidden. But for whom is it no longer forbidden? Certainly for folks who are queer in all sorts of ways, it's forbidden. For those of us who don't fit neatly into a gender binary it's forbidden. For folks whose bodies aren't symmetrical, who are open about the support they need (as opposed to the rest of us who hide and deny the everyday ways we rely on others) sex is absolutely forbidden.

I spend all day every day listening to other people tell stories about sex, and while most stories begin with something "socially acceptable" as the defenses go down they all end up talking about the things they want or think or do that they experience as forbidden. I think of people who have shared stories about loving others they are told have the wrong bodies, the wrong gender, the wrong color of skin, wrong job, or wrong smell. I think of people who I've met who want to have sex but can't because other people decide for them that they are unable to ever consent to sex (and therefore anyone who has consensual sex with them is committed a sexual assault). I think of people who are creating stories of their own, in words and pictures, about what sexy looks and feels and tastes like when it resists the endless stream of images and messages that encourage us to be thin and white and young and clean and bouncy (as if we can't have good sex unless we are some or all of these things). I see none of this in the picture of life and sex Jong describes, and I wonder where it went.

Jong continues, writing,

"Clearly the lure of Internet sex is the lack of involvement. We want to keep the chaos of sex trapped in a device we think we can control."

After years of having sex online, writing and thinking about sex online, and talking to people on and offline about the sex they are having online, one of the few constants I've noticed is that most people say that what gets them hottest about cybersex is the idea that someone is on the other end. Internet sex isn't anything without people having it, and while the lack of commitment may be appealing, and the ease of access (for some), the idea that our online lives are anything but an exact replication of the messiness of our offline lives is a useful editorial fiction, but nothing else.

One of the first stories I thought of after reading this line is the one that Sarah Dopp tells in a post that begins "My longest romantic relationship is with the Internet." Sarah's experience of life and community online isn't unusual (even if her ability to write about it in funny and engaging ways is).

I think the reason I held onto the article all week was because I'm not interested in just dismissing Jong. Aside from the fact that her work had an enormous and positive impact on my development and my life, I don't want to live in a world where we completely set aside things that no longer resonate with us. Considering her article as a piece of cultural or sexual commentary it may seem stuck in a simpler (and by no means better) time. And in that context the idea that sex is passé makes sense. After all if your idea of sex never changes, but the world does, it's a logical conclusion.

But thinking about her work from a certain educational perspective you could say that I learned from her before and I'm learning from her now, it's just that both the world and I have changed, and it's a good thing, since the ways that sex and more broadly sexuality is being done and talked about and performed and transgressed is anything but passé. You only have to engage.

Source (w/ clickable links): http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/28YX8V/se ... -passe.htm