Keeping Up

"In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, Heaven knows,
Anything Goes."



I'll be honest: It's hard to keep up. Every time I look around the cultural jungle, I've learned that I am once again sexually out-of-step and out-of-date. It began as an uncomfortable feeling when irritated students would approach me between class and point out that I was a bit too judgmental about SM/BD (Sadomasochism/Bondage & Discipline). Then others, with slight agitation, would ask when I was going to start talking about the interesting sexual stuff. Others would refer to television shows I never heard of and had trouble believing existed on HBO.

Just today, while researching a weblink to a campy article on Nymphomania, I came across just how dated I really am. August was Anal Sex Month, and I missed it. May was National Masturbation Month, sponsoring the famous Masturbate-a-Thon 2005 - Come for a Cause and not only did I not contribute some friction, I didn't even know about it. The proceeds go to The Center for Sex and Culture, co-founded by Carol Queen, but of course most of you knew that already. I thought I was well-read about sex until I clicked on Dr. Queen's Recommended Reading List and recognized very few of the books listed.

I will admit to being a bit shocked seeing "Real Sex" on HBO, mostly because I had no idea how graphic it was. I watched the relaxed faces of sex workshop leaders and their eager groups, naked and waiting for the next instruction on how to get the most our of the sex practice they were demonstrating. One segment after another presented slices of "sex" that were new to me, at least when taken to this extreme. I know about silicone implants but what about an entire silicone Real Doll, a Barbie doll crafted to your specifications? Yes, I know about a variety of dildos, but what about whale phallus scaled down to human size? What about one like Audi Oh that rocks your vulva along with your ipod? Or huge machines with mechanical parts with names like The PussyCam, The Intruder, The Annihilator or Fuck Rogers that promises to do The Humanly Impossible? Or smaller devices that use electrial impulses and frequencies, instead of piston force, to create orgasms with or without torture chamber pain? Some have bi-polar rods and elaborate hook-ups. None are cheap.

Even watchers of Sex and the City know that Rabbit Habit is a bestseller in Babeland.
And if you think vibrators are just for woman, you haven't talked to the Chief.

The Suicide Girls are turning the notion of 'pin-up girl' on its head. They are described by my 20-something daughter as "goth, hipster, nouveau burlesque." They are very chic. They are making a profit.

I know that David Reimer committed suicide after a failed social experiment that proved that the brain itself is gendered, not just the genitals. However, I just learned from a colleague--who worries about the long-term impact--that college students are using 'fashionable' sex hormones, not as a resolution to life-long gender-dissatisfaction, but because testosterone in one's veins makes one trangendered and 'in.' The students at Smith College calls their institution "a school of one sex but many genders." Is the ultimate rejection of the 'White Male Power Structure' to go to a woman's college and become one?

My daughter told me to about a friend of hers who was necking in the car with two gay males (and this was not the point of her story), and I interrupted her to say:

"You mean bisexual men?"

"No," she said, slightly annoyed. "They were gay."

"If they were gay..." I asked naively, "why were they making out with a girl?"

"Because it's cool making out with girls!" she said, and I was speechless.

I told this story to a group of students, and later I repeated the story to the young woman, herself, as an example of the changing times. "It wasn't in a car." she said matter-of-factly, “it was at a party. And it wasn't two. It was four." She laughed good-naturedly, and was flattered that I had talked about her in my classroom. She told me I could use her name, too, but I declined.

Now before you start pointing the 'moral finger' at this young woman, I'd like to tell you that she is a fine upstanding citizen, a college graduate from a prestigious institution. She is getting married soon in a religious ceremony to a sensible young man. She isn't embarrassed about the story, and neither is she proud of it. It just happened.

Another young woman, a sex worker by trade, and activist by avocation, met me in a cafe for lunch one afternoon. After grilling me quite rigorously on my position about psychiatry and patients rights, (and apparently I passed), she paused and asked:

"Do sex therapists look down on sex workers? See them as competition?"

Again I was speechless by a 20-something.

"Competition? Sex Therapists and the whole sexology community have been so beaten down by the extreme right, I doubt they would put down anyone’s sexually" was all that I could reply.

Here was a woman voted as one of the most successful young political advocates of her time, and I, the sex therapist, was seen as part of the "problem" and not part of the "solution."

And, in the midst of this watershed, there is the other side. There are powerful loonie-tunes like Judith Reisman creating new and exotic names for non-existent neuro-chemicals called "erototoxins" that "prove" that porn causes a measurable change in viewers of pornography, so eloquently outlined in Annalee Newitz witty article "Your Brain on Porn."

There are endless stories of sex educators who have to keep their phone numbers unlisted and get home alarms because of the constant verbal harassment by unnamed callers, right here in the "liberal" part of the country.

While some of my students ask "When are we going to talk about the hot stuff," I realize that even careful faculty members who give students every opportunity to "opt out" of sexually explicit segments will get fired by extremists with an ax to grind and a sympathetic administrator. At a moment's notice one's school can become flooded with "concerned citizens" who "object" to the "smut" taught by G-dless sex fiends.

I know. Having gotten fair warning from the faculty member at Keene State who was fired from her human sexuality class, I made sure that the movies I showed were "R" rated in my human sexuality and sex therapy course and that no one was required to sit through the genital slides that I carefully introduced.

Nevertheless, one year the administrator of the university I taught at was petitioned by former students for my dismissal because I didn't buy their political position "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." They were also upset that I mentioned once having cybersex, as part of a much larger story in which my sex life was not the punch line. They also complained that the story my guest speaker told--of his early sexual abuse and the later consequence on his lovemap as a "sex addict"--was disturbing. They wanted a world in which sexual fantasies led to infidelities and therefore were forbidden, where sex education that wasn’t punitive, led to immorality.

Amidst these two extremes I stand, barely 50, from a different generation where people were allowed to have genital hair in pornography, anal sex was an exotic sexual practice, and being “kinky” was a big deal. While I can feel out of step with the bombardment of commercial sex, it’s hard to imagine this not happening in a world with increasing internet access. Some of these changes are positive and have dramatically improved our sensitivity to uses and abuses of sex and gender roles.

My most religiously conservative students can point to these examples as a sign of impending cultural debauchery brought on sexuality courses like mine, but I don’t think so. It is the very attempt to keep sex as separate and removed from ourselves that creates the excesses that so frightens them. The good and bad news that I teach is that the very essence of our sexual selves are deeply rooted and inextricably bound to our family and developmental dramas. We were taught how to love ourselves and our world by interacting with those who loved us, and those who didn’t. We can’t pull out or isolate that golden thread without unraveling the entire tapestry.

Somehow, through it all, the twenty-somethings I know have continued to craft a sexuality which reflects their own world view and personal taste. If the world-wide-web offers us an enormous candy store to walk through and taste at our leisure, these young women have been taught the importance of proper nutrition in childhood. At various points, they might make choices I wouldn’t, but these are their choices to make. They still have a grounding that stabilizes them in a fundamental way, so I say, taste away.

My daughter and her friends have sexual experiences, but these experiences don’t have them, and that’s the point, I guess. They know about the dolls and the dildos, laugh about them and pass them around to their friends. Sex, for them, truly isn’t a topic to be ashamed of, or celebrated, for that matter. It just is. And from this perspective, I guess I don’t have to keep up with anything. Not as long as they keep me in their email groups...