(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.