How safe is the longform blogging I do? I expressed worries to a friend about the consequences of speaking frankly about sex, particularly the new understanding of fluid and culturally redefined physical relationships, nudists existing in the media alongside Sharia law that permits only eyes to be visible.
She responded in terms of literary censorship, “dirty books.” And claimed she had not heard of persons or organizations that would censor an old woman’s writing. (She’s Catholic, but kind of independent-minded. I wonder what her sister the nun would say.)
But I was thinking more about social safety where I live in small town Montana, where legislators physically throttle journalists. I wonder about my status in the contexts where I sometimes speak politically, which are indigenous people, environmental organizations, the UUA, and so on. The possible consequences would vary from one context to another.
The UUA offends me with their looseness and “anything goes” tolerance. Part of the reason I became disillusioned with the ministry was that some “LAY” people assumed I was available to them sexually. A reverse Harvey Weinstein, it was the losers who felt their need should be honored. Some even offered rewards. Some ministers accepted, usually powerful men needing energy and reassurance from aspiring women young enough to be freeform in today’s hook-up way.
In my seminary years I was challenged because I was interpreted as resisting intimacy. There was some truth to it. I hoped to get rid of the issue, the way a priest might. Having been married to a famous man made some curious about what one frankly called “what you’ve got.” They seemed to consider women a “plug-and-play” accessory to their hard drive.
The indigenous people can be far more strict, but in a New Age sort of way, esp the ones who are a little more mixed than they would like to admit. Twilight wolves and eagles, talk of honor and floating love for the world and so on. Underneath that runs the constant dark awareness that indigenous women are murdered, often in connection to sex and jealousy, and no one prosecutes or even investigates. There are no means, no budgets, and the culture is too undefined and mobile to make much progress. In the US there’s not much concern off the rez, though some note that over time hundreds disappear mysteriously ON the rez. In Canada there’s growing outrage and increasing demonstrations. As a white woman, I’m not in this story. But I am.
Sex is pretty irrelevant to the environmentalists, unless the subject is endangered species — grizzlies and all that. They go for abstract reproduction and habitat.
Over-incarceration, minority stigma, drugs, and deportation are all highly relevant to discussions of sex, since they provide so many opportunities for the strong on both sides of the bars to victimize the weaker or younger. I’m outside those worlds. But I’m not.
This weekend I went to the laundromat and found there a local tribal man drunk and inflated with big ideas about the pay-out he thinks he’ll get from the Eloise Cobell lawsuit. The laundromat is for sale and he claimed he was going to buy it, had millions of dollars coming, and was swaggering with the thought of his new importance and entitlement to what he thought white people have — which from his dizzy penniless point of view seemed like only a lot of money. The know-how and dependability necessary to run a laundromat was invisible to him. In fact, lately we’ve all been having trouble with people getting elected to jobs they cannot do, don’t know where to start. I’m talking about locally as well as Washington, DC.
In fact, this is relevant to discussion of sex. Too many simply don’t know how to manage a sex life, how to respectfully begin the necessary prelude, have no grasp of etiquette in the actual events except what they see on television. Do you think that big shots who impose what amounts to obscene violence know anything about sex? I include demands that someone watch them practice frottage on their private parts, offending the eye of another in clinging invasion. How does one get rid of the image? Such moguls know a lot about power, how to reduce intimacy to prostitution without cash money, except the promise of future payouts.
In the past the defense for unwanted sex has been a kind of obliviousness, virginity, childhood, angelic absence of desire. So my worry, which I will insist is not frivolous, is that some leftover from the 19th century will decide that since I talk about sex, I must want it. Or at least I can’t pretend I don’t know it exists. So therefore he will "school" me.
Being old and tubby is not a protection because for those obsolete men sex is in large part connected to rage, and rage will get your wonderstick inflated faster than Viagra. “I have needs!” they explain, without separating need from entitlement or from anyone else’s need to NOT be invaded. Men and boys deserve to belong to themselves as much as women do. I worry about encountering some guy, probably drunk or high, who is “up” for assault, and has read this blog, taking it for at least permission and maybe invitation.
I once stood in a library, waiting for something, and happened to be where I could see a very fat, creatively whiskered man in a police uniform. He was cruising singles websites. If late at night he stopped a car with a woman in it . . .
The point of the sexual revolution made possible by contraception was to let us leave behind the worries — as long as antibiotics and latex keep working — so we could explore true relationship and the joyful skills of the erotic. There has been some protection — really more detection — in DNA evidence, but there is no vaccine against violence. For some, violence has become connection.
So the pressing question is whether my blogging about sex, or even porn, puts me in danger? And if it does, whether I should censor myself. If I were to censor myself, what would that mean? Could I discuss women’s bodies in terms of health, say breast cancer? Could I discuss how to make love? Could I speak only of female issues and then only CIS females?
If I am rethinking many categories so that they are not based on boundaries, but rather on vital centers with radiating connections that have no distance limits, what would that vital center be in the case of sex? And if I accept the formal ideas of "embodied thought" -- which I do -- what are the salient metaphors for sex? I mean, besides power and force?
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