Birds on the Brain

What students need isn’t a lecture on abstinence. They need a community that sees sex as about mutual pleasure and intimacy, not point scoring or getting something, and that doesn’t shame or problematize female sexuality. Heterosexual women need male partners who are respectful, generous in bed and emotionally competent, and who treat women like people regardless of whether those women are girlfriends, one-night stands or friends with benefits. Sex, be it in a committed relationship or a more casual arrangement, doesn’t have to be the fraught power play or unpleasant interaction merely tolerated by young women. Sex is sex. Human beings throughout all of history have enjoyed it for very good reason. Consensual, mutually pleasurable sex is, for many people, at the top of their “favorite things” list.

Is it possible to develop a product without this stigma, or better, one that is felt to enhance pleasure? If so, would such a product lead to substantial benefits for global health, both in terms of reducing the incidence of unplanned pregnancies and in prevention of infection with HIV or other STIs?

This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without the consent of the used is abuse.

In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity - the abuse of feeling.

When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.

The unfounded fear that young children will somehow become “impure” if they learn about a dirty subject like sex is deeply rooted in American culture. Our society assumes that human sexuality is dark, dangerous, and shameful — something we need to protect teens from, rather than teach them about. Teens consistently learn that it’s not okay to talk about sex because it’s supposed to be totally off-limits to them, constrained to the bounds of a traditional marriage. But this attitude has led to disastrous consequences: damaging women and LGBT Americans’ sense of sexual self-worth, fueling the STD epidemic, and creating a moral environment where rape culture has flourished.

When you love someone… truly love them, friend or lover, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt—you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it’s crippling—like having your heart carved out. Who in their right mind would not be terrified of that?

What’s remarkable about all this is not that men and women have so much in common but that these commonalities persist despite relentless gender policing that usually involves quite a bit of shame. Men face ridicule if they’re perceived as having female-like levels of empathy and concern for their friends, and yet, according to the study, they overcome it. Women are routinely told there’s something wrong with them if they have “masculine” attitudes towards sex and men are emasculated if they aren’t horny all the time or if they desire intimacy alongside their sexual adventures, and yet both genders tend to have a mix of adventurousness and tenderness when it comes to sex. We’re constantly being put in gender silos, and yet, apparently, we keep escaping. (Go us!) With that in mind, imagine how much happier we’d be if we just gave up on all the needless gender policing! If men didn’t feel like they might lose their “man card” if they hug a friend outside of a sports context or women didn’t get labeled “bitch” for assertive behavior, the overlap in these traits would almost surely be greater. (Sure, some claim the differences that do exist are “biological,” but if that were true, there would be no need to use shame to keep people from venturing away from their assigned gender roles. Nature would do its job.) Feminists often face a wall of skepticism for suggesting simply that we relinquish our attachment to gender expectations, but this research implies that doing so would free us all up to be ourselves even more than we already are.

Industrialism has devastated our sexual lives. We complain that we treat each other’s bodies unfeelingly, as so many objects, to use and dispose of. Yet we fail to realize that we treat everything (including ourselves) as so many objects to use and dispose of. We fail to see that the total objectification of our environment and of nature is a direct effect of the power system of industrialism. If we have been conditioned throughout our lives to objectify everything, how can we fail to objectify those who excite us sexually?

The industrial system has reduced sex to a productive activity, just as it reduces all human functions to productive activities. Under industrialism, the purpose of sex has become purely economic: to breed consumers, workers, and soldiers for their proper roles in industrial and military hierarchies. Sexual relations have been reduced to productive relations. The basic unit of people-production is the monogamous heterosexual family.