Being way behind on LJ: Sex and Summary

[womzilla]

I'm slowly wading my way back to the present, again. Many things conspired to set me so far back--Artie's death after surgery took a lot out of me, work has again been utterly craptacular, and I lost all of this weekend just past to a double-sized NYRSF work weekend. I had a much more pleasant weekend on April 26-27, interrupted only by the misfortune of having to rush redbird to the hospital.

Anyway, one of the good things about being way way behind is that I don't feel any need to get up to my elbows in the Open Source Thing That Ate Livejournal. Almost every idea I might have contributed was already wrapped up in a superb piece on the subject, an essay by synecdochic, a writer previously unknown to me: "sex-positive". what a loaded term. (I think I found this through a link to a slightly later essay of hers, Don't Be That Guy., which was widely linked; but I found the "sex-positive" essay much more interesting.

The key sentence in "sex-positive" is a parenthetical (oh, the daring!):

(For ease of reference, let's call the two groups "sex-positive" and "getting-laid-positive".)

I might quibble with her terminology; I think "sex-positive" and "sex-for-ME-positive" gets at her point even better. But damn. that's the entire dilemma of frank sexual positivity right there. "We must all be free spirits loving like the angels . . . so make with the dry humping alreadys."

Comments

[spuffyduds.livejournal.com]

*hugs you in sympathy for general craptacularness*

*does not dry-hump you*

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a good post. It explains clearly both why the Open Source thingie worked in the limited context it was conceived in, and why it was a bad idea to try to export it.

It also brings up a lot of context - the same principles at work in other areas. Part of the difference between those two groups she mentions is similar to that between the people who are in fandom to participate and those who are just here for what they can get out of it.

Even more contextual: she writes, "There's a real problem with certain people (who identify as "sex-positive") believing that their way is the One True Way, who believe that anyone who doesn't see the complex, seething issues of sex and sexuality (in a society as damaged as ours is) in the same way they do is repressed, prudish, Part Of The Problem, or brainwashed into thinking that their way is right."

Mutatis mutandis, that's Bush on Iraq.