Doing It and Doing It and Doing It Well

I used to teach a health class at a small private Christian High School. That seems to almost certainly be the setting for a curriculum that could only begin with, "When a Mommy and a Daddy love each other very much..."

It was a battle absolutely worth picking, so I was not limited to such a narrow range of speaking. In fact we covered quite a bit about the ins, outs, whos, whats, wheres, whys, dos and do not dos but for all the coverage, at the end of the unit I had a student meekly raise her hand and ask, "So what's sex?"

On one hand, this was the same student who could not understand Africa was a continent, not a nation, but now I see, beyond her confusion and apart from whatever horrible things may have happened to her in the intervening years, she asked a very important question.

What is sex?

I now have an answer.

We have no idea.

Or I suppose a better answer, especially in the midst of my Recording process and all the hand-wringing about what hands may wring, my answer is:

It depends.

Unfortunately we like to pretend it does not.

You may have seen this by now. This being the article:
Sex takes 3 to 13 minutes, Study Says
"A survey of sex therapists concluded the optimal amount of time for sexual intercourse was 3 to 13 minutes. The findings, to be published in the May issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, strike at the notion that endurance is the key to a great sex life."

What are they talking about?

I'm sure others could do a much better job of decoding the gender and sexual ideology that define sex as the linear thrusting of what we clumsily call sexual intercourse, ah just kidding, I know I'd do a great job of that, but I'm too lazy. Still, good grief is that what we think sex is?

Well, yes. And that's why we're largely so stupid about so many things we think are about sex. So may "things" are about sex but because the above is what we call "sex" we are confused about how to bring these things together and when we do it's a despicable mess of worry over where we put when, with whom, and why.

Thank God for euphemisms. Seriously, pause right now and thank God, and while you're at it, irony, innuendo, jokes, sarcasm, art, prayer, and every other form of non-propositional, self-challenging speech we have as well. We know doing "it," as we do it, involves much more than the idea of sex suggested by this nonsense. But unfortunately, despite the fact that we "know" that, we allow this pretend version of sex and propositions to reign.

Ugh

You would think with how unfortunate our sexual reification makes all of these concerns surrounding sex, we would become more apt to see nonsense as nonsense rather than less. But no, we embrace the stupid. We pretend there is some thing called sex, specifically, some thing removed and independent from what people actually know as sex in their existences. By doing so, we make the thing we call sex something to talk about apart from the way sex is lived and so when we talk about sex we're not really talking about what people know and do when they are doing "it".

Sex as sexual intercourse? That should be a joke. And don't pretend the mention of foreplay is helpful. Good lord, they call it foreplay, it's merely a lead up to something else- sex the "thing".

Worse, again in light of our collective stupid, we do this with other things that seem to really matter. It seems we think because they matter the most, they must be handled the most carefully, the most seriously, and as we do that, we handle these in a way that prevents us from actually handling the "it" we need to handle.

Idiots.

So this is sex?

Oh right- Boobies Not In a Clinical or Anthropological Setting Alert

This is sex?


It's not.

As it is, sex is quite a handy thing with which to attack our sexual propositions, just as actually living with each other as decent and moral people is a wonderful way to undermine the nonsense of our codified abstractions about what it is required to be decent and moral.