So, spent the evening with my honey listening to a Mr. Bob Hall give his lecture called “Nonviolent Sexuality”, and one that I expected to be about something in some way academic – sexual violence in literature or media and the problems therein or the inherent violence within the act of sex and societal taboos designed to down play or discourage this, etc etc etc. What did it turn out to be, you may ask – well, it turned out to be little more than a simple sexual education seminar insofar as how to say “no” and how to be comfortable with yourself in uncomfortable sexual situations. – Basically, it’s a lecture I would not have gone to hear if I’d known what it actually was because I already consider myself to be well schooled in this area, having gone through many sex education courses and seminars in my time and having thought things through for myself, and, at 21 years of age, having already had to deal with these sorts of uncomfortable situations myself. Now, if the lecture had turned into some call for education reform and how we speak about sex in the media and he’d had some interesting suggestions on what that would all entail, that would be a different story.
Really, he did speak to us as if we had no idea about these situations already – and while I recognize that some people are not as well educated on this subject or as comfortable with themselves about it as I happen to be, why advertise it the way he did if I was not his intended audience?
Granted, there were a few interesting points he hit on, such as the fact that we rarely discuss with any sincerity or frankness the connections between love/intimacy/friendship and the sexual act – which is one of those obvious things that has simply always just been so obvious that I’d never really bothered to dissect it out in my mind beyond application to myself – what this could mean for other people, what this could mean for possible sexual education programs, how we as a culture think about/market/view sex, etc.
Two other things he mentioned (but sadly did not linger on or go into too much detail about) were:
• The way we tend to discuss sex using legal vernacular – people having the right to say no at any point, threatening people against rape and violence not because of morality but because of legal repercussions, etc.
• The reason many people fear or hate pornography:
o To treat things like people is an illusion.
o To treat people like things is violence.
o To treat people like people is justice.
o To treat people as you treat yourself is love.
The pornography part actually really intrigues me – it’s been a subject of interest for me ever since I saw the documentary made over the film “Deep Throat”. Basically, I’m not a fan or buyer of porn myself, but it’s an industry of peculiar power in our culture that I just find fascinating. Marketing sex is just a weird thing, but we find it everywhere in the media, perverting what we think bodies and ages look like, perverting how we think about people, value people, how we react to them in social situations, what expectations we then put upon them – I really wish I could take that Human Sexuality class just to learn more about this. I may not need another sex ed, don’t-be-raped class, but this is certainly a heavy hitting player in the identity discussion, and that is definitely a conversation I’d like to get in on.
ciao for now neighborinos
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