Pardon My French

Not unsurprisingly, it really twitches my skirt when people apply generalizations to sex and relationships. It causes me physical pain when I consider the paucity of logic behind many accepted sex truisms. Why do we continue to believe that having sex on a first date is the relationship equivalent of walking under a ladder while crossing the path of a black cat? Why in the face of mounting scientific evidence to the contrary do we continue to accept that men’s sex drives are higher than women’s? Or that men can more easily have sex without emotions? Or that some sex acts are inherently degrading to women? Or that women, especially “good” ones, don’t like porn, or if they do, it’s only the kind steeped like tea in rose-colored emotion?

The perpetuation of these truisms says an awful lot about us as a culture. We are really, seriously invested in gendered ideas of sexuality wherein real men are randy, real women are reticent, and only real romantic love triumphs over beasty biology. We really, really crave rules, however craven, and however progressive we want to believe ourselves to be. Why else would people who consider themselves to be feminists worry about categorizing some sex acts, giving some the big stamp of approval, while others get marked with a big red X?

Chelsea G. Summers (pretty dumb things)