NEENER-NEENER

Both Laurie and myself are good friends of the Daily Cal's new Sex On Tuesday girl, Andrea Demaray. And you're not*.

This week's edition is of an introductory manner, as Andrea promotes the idea of sex-positivity:

What I'm promoting here is sex-positivity. This is a term that is already becoming problematic, despite its tender young age. I've met entirely too many "sex-positive" people who ignore their partners' discomfort with polyamory or insist that all heterosexuals are repressed bisexuals or generally try to force their brand of open-mindedness on everyone else.

Space confines me to brutal oversimplification, but here's the gist. Mainstream society frequently tells us that sexual organs and most forms of sexual expression are dirty, bad and not appropriate topics of polite conversation. This message manifests itself in many ways, from Pat Robertson claiming that homosexuality will unleash the wrath of god in the form of terrorist bombs and natural disasters, to the use of words such as "cock" or "cunt" as insults, or complaining about being deeply "fucked" by your final. This quietly shared belief keeps effective sex-education out of our schools, pushes folk with "untraditional" sexual tastes into fringe groups and makes people ashamed of enjoying the occasional rim-job.

Sex-positivity can be seen as the process of recognizing and resisting sex-negative messages. This occurs when you stop using terms like "cock-sucker" as insults, when you turn off your knee-jerk "eww" response to unfamiliar sexual practices and when you honestly evaluate your own feelings about sex. One ideal vision is a world where talking about sexual preference is as acceptable as talking about musical preference, and where the erotic tastes of another person are as relevant as their taste in food. It may be a distant day in which we can bring up our most recent threesome as casually as our latest road trip, but we've got to start somewhere. As far as this column is concerned, know that whenever I refer to any sexual act, I am talking about girls with girls, boys with boys, heterosexual group marriages, whatever. But we'll get into all that later.

Reading this, I find myself considering where I fit in as a sexually-positive person. (Wait a second, you're a blogger! How could you possibly be sexually active, let alone positive? -ed. Har-dee-har.) I am a well-liberated, sexually positive person, but I am also a traditionalist to the extent that I prefer to link sexuality with romance and love (though honestly, I don't give much of a hoot about marriage at this point). On the other hand, while I currently have no desire to do so, I find it very possible to enjoy sexual activity, or discussion, outside of the context of love, romance, etc.

Andrea brings up Pat Robertson, and this is very fitting, but for other reasons. The connection I would draw lies between sexual positivity and religious positivity. To be religiously positive means that while you believe strongly in your own spiritual/moral/metaphysical/supernatural convictions, whatever they may be, you are also aware, tolerant and in celebration of the beliefs, activities and faiths of others, growing beyond close-minded bigotry. Jesse Jackson and, say, Richard Gere, are much more religiously positive than Robertson, Jerry Falwell, John Ashcroft or Osama Bin Laden. If I were a married Christian man who had mechanical, missionary sex with my wife 4 nights a week at 11pm with the lights out, but after completion she and I would watch a rerun of Sex & the City while in bed, then I would at least have taken the first step towards sexual positivity.

In short, my personal choice regarding sex is not to classify it as a hobby, as Andrea states, but each viewpoint is unique and beautiful, as is the ability to openly and freely discuss sexuality itself in all its many forms.

Okay, this is all starting to read a bit 2AM-ish on my part, so I'll wrap it up. There.

* - statement does not apply to 3 or 4 of my regular readers