Casual Sex
I'm reading a book called Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl. It's a seemingly honest and unflinching account -- though it's written by "Anonymous," so how honest is that, right off the bat? -- not only of working in the sex trade but of the author's sex life outside of work, both of which are presented with a kind of detached wit and irony. I don't buy it. I think sex is far too intimate and emotionally charged to coexist breezily with casualness and dry wit. Or I could be a fuddy duddy. (The more compassionate interpretation would probably be that finding oneself in the position of having to have sex for money is in all likelihood quite upsetting, so to write about it one could go the route of oh god why does my life have to suck so bad, which wouldn't make for a very fun read, or use one's wit and sophistication to create an entertaining book, which Anonymous has skillfully done.)
Here's an example: "In love: a momentary instance of being almost as interested in someone else as in oneself. Loving: capable of untold amounts of suffocation. Lovable: cuddly. In the pejorative sense (similar to the concept of 'shapely legs,' which is code for chubby)." Are we bitter? In need of a suffocating hug?
Public statements made by individuals about their own sex life are necessarily suspect because, first of all, why would you talk about it at all? Sex is inherently intimate, and when it loses its intimacy it becomes crass, or disturbingly raw. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of crude jokes about sex, but when you're joking you're not pretending to be seriously laying yourself bare, so to speak.) So unless someone wants to expose their most private self to a public audience, and give up the intimacy, all that's left is insincere bravado and boasting. Which is why, it seems to me, Anonymous wrote about how much fun it was to be a call girl, and how sophisticated and urbane her sexual experiences were. The alternative would be to tell millions of strangers how saddened she may have felt at times, or how cheapened and used. And who would want to boast about that?
Then, while I was muttering to myself about this, I came across an article (via Arts and Letters Daily) called "Casual sex is a con: women just aren't like men," by Dawn Eden. First off, I suspect that men aren't like men either. The ones I've known personally and well are not eager for casual sex (I was going to qualify this, but I honestly can't think of a single one), nor do real-life men seem to be these kind of iron-clad automatons that have emotions bounce off them without leaving so much as a scuff, like popular culture would seem to have you believe.
Popular culture is just a very bad source of notions or prescriptions about something so personal as sex. Societal trends and attitudes don't translate well into individual choices, and it's usually a mistake to think that they could or should. Eden writes: "Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that." I don't know what Germaine Greer said because I've never read her, but whatever was written by her or any others who wrote about the sexual revolution is a philosophy -- ideas! -- not a prescription for how to live, and especially not for how to make excruciatingly private choices.
I'm not discounting the importance of the sexual revolution and the liberation that came out of learning that there are other ways to think about sex besides those preached by the church, the patriarchy, or other self appointed guardians of morality. But ideas that are bandied about publicly about such a personal subject are necessarily broad and generalized, and are not literally or individually applicable to one's private life.
But Eden, and probably many others, took in the public attitudes of her era about sex and sexuality and instead of filing them away as food for thought actually applied them to her own life. And, no surprise, found them unsuitable: "Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead."
When I first read that, I didn't take the "chaste" comment literally, until I got to the end of the article, where Eden says she has adopted Christian values. Which are just another con. The choice is not between accepting one public assumption about sex over another. You're not either a whore or a nun. Your sexuality is whatever you choose to share between yourself and your partner(s). Leave the public and its attitudes out of it: what do the strangers who write treatises or magazine copy, create advertising campaigns, or preach from a pulpit know? They don't know you.
Here's an example: "In love: a momentary instance of being almost as interested in someone else as in oneself. Loving: capable of untold amounts of suffocation. Lovable: cuddly. In the pejorative sense (similar to the concept of 'shapely legs,' which is code for chubby)." Are we bitter? In need of a suffocating hug?
Public statements made by individuals about their own sex life are necessarily suspect because, first of all, why would you talk about it at all? Sex is inherently intimate, and when it loses its intimacy it becomes crass, or disturbingly raw. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of crude jokes about sex, but when you're joking you're not pretending to be seriously laying yourself bare, so to speak.) So unless someone wants to expose their most private self to a public audience, and give up the intimacy, all that's left is insincere bravado and boasting. Which is why, it seems to me, Anonymous wrote about how much fun it was to be a call girl, and how sophisticated and urbane her sexual experiences were. The alternative would be to tell millions of strangers how saddened she may have felt at times, or how cheapened and used. And who would want to boast about that?
Then, while I was muttering to myself about this, I came across an article (via Arts and Letters Daily) called "Casual sex is a con: women just aren't like men," by Dawn Eden. First off, I suspect that men aren't like men either. The ones I've known personally and well are not eager for casual sex (I was going to qualify this, but I honestly can't think of a single one), nor do real-life men seem to be these kind of iron-clad automatons that have emotions bounce off them without leaving so much as a scuff, like popular culture would seem to have you believe.
Popular culture is just a very bad source of notions or prescriptions about something so personal as sex. Societal trends and attitudes don't translate well into individual choices, and it's usually a mistake to think that they could or should. Eden writes: "Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that." I don't know what Germaine Greer said because I've never read her, but whatever was written by her or any others who wrote about the sexual revolution is a philosophy -- ideas! -- not a prescription for how to live, and especially not for how to make excruciatingly private choices.
I'm not discounting the importance of the sexual revolution and the liberation that came out of learning that there are other ways to think about sex besides those preached by the church, the patriarchy, or other self appointed guardians of morality. But ideas that are bandied about publicly about such a personal subject are necessarily broad and generalized, and are not literally or individually applicable to one's private life.
But Eden, and probably many others, took in the public attitudes of her era about sex and sexuality and instead of filing them away as food for thought actually applied them to her own life. And, no surprise, found them unsuitable: "Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead."
When I first read that, I didn't take the "chaste" comment literally, until I got to the end of the article, where Eden says she has adopted Christian values. Which are just another con. The choice is not between accepting one public assumption about sex over another. You're not either a whore or a nun. Your sexuality is whatever you choose to share between yourself and your partner(s). Leave the public and its attitudes out of it: what do the strangers who write treatises or magazine copy, create advertising campaigns, or preach from a pulpit know? They don't know you.
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