(Re)thinking about Sexuality

Since today is Valentine's day, I think it would be a perfect time to (re)think about our love, sex, and sexuality. For the numerous individuals who held privileged identities living under the heteronormative world, good for you. You are lucky that you did not get bashed solely because your gender, sex, and sexual orientation fit under the general public and the legal structure's moral acceptance. However there are many others who are not as privileged. Those individuals are oppressed through various moral and legal systems, and quite possibly you might be contributing to the cause without realizing by complying to heteronormativity.

So I decided to include an excerpt below, from Gayle Rubin's article on Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, for you to pleasure your mind intellectually, but also to ponder on sex.

In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a show? It may even be non-consensual, but since we do not ask permission of our shoes to wear them, it hardly seems necessary to obtain dispensation to come on them.

If sex is taken too seriously, sexual persecution is not taken seriously enough. There is systematic mistreatment of individuals and communities on the basis of erotic taste or behaviour. There are serious penalties for belonging to the various sexual occupational castes. The sexuality of the young is denied, adult sexuality is often treated like a variety of nuclear waste, and the graphic representation of sex takes place in a mire of legal and social circumlocution. Specific populations bear the brunt of the current system of erotic power, but their persecution upholds a system that affects everyone.

Did the excerpt from Thinking Sex change your mind or view on certain sexual 'taboos'? Please (re)think about it.

Quote + Art of the Day

My dream isn't to become the 'best', it's to be someone who I'm not ashamed to be.

- Key, SHINee

Quote of the Day

I found this quote somewhere online - it's so true. Just try your best and give things a shot. Don't let other things stop you from achieving your goal.

想太多只會壞了事情

決定了便去做，成日怕這樣怕那樣到頭來便甚麼也做不成，太多不利因素也要盡情一試。明明積極地向著目標進發，卻因為想太多顧慮太多而窒礙人的進度。只要有心理準備最壞的結果是甚樣便行了。

Quote of the Day

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.

- John Lennon

Quote + Art of the Day

Quote of the Day

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal, and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

- Audre Lorde

Quote of the Day

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Quote of the Day

Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.

- Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day

When you take charge of your life, there is no longer need to ask permission of other people or society at large. When you ask permission, you give someone veto power over your life.

- Geoffrey F. Abert

Quote of the Day

Mind and matter are essentially the same. The field experiences subjectively is the mind, objectively it is the world of material objects.

- Yoga Vasistha

Quote of the Day

The value of a personal relationship to things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

- Anaïs Nin

Quote of the Day

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to."

- Jim Jarmusch

Quote of the Day

Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.

- Dorothy Parker

Quote of the Day

When we investigate the invisible mechanics of nature, we find that everything in the universe is directly connected with everything else. Everything is constantly being influences by everything else. No wave of the ocean is independent of any other.

- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Quote of the Day

Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the whole world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.

- Ramana Maharishi

Quote of the Day

Drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to be to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women will actually want to be. Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection.

- Andy Warhol

Quote of the Day

It doesn’t really matter what a person decides to do, or how radically a person plays with gender. What matters, I think, is how aware a person is of the options. How sad for a person to be missing out on some expression of identity, just for not knowing there are options.

- Kate Bornstein

Quote of the Day

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

- Charles Darwin

Quote of the Day

[Transformation] is not the willful attempt to change who and what we are, but the art of becoming who we are.

- Jeffrey Maitland

Quote + Art of the Day

Quote from Craig Thompson's Blankets. (No, I haven't read the the book. I just found the quote from somewhere.)