the drift

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Thursday, January 28, 2010

it's almost embarrassing to post after this long

but i was having a great convo about this school that banned merriam-webster for having 'oral sex' defined in it. and i was discussing it with my favorite new convert to christianity light/neo-conservatism. he's a bright man and he's learning how to think for himself in these two areas and i love to follow his progress. since i did this kind of stuff many moons ago, it's nice to get into those same old topics and discover those values i aligned in myself growing up and in college still hold water.

I would wager that any kid who actually knows how to spell and look-up the word probably a) has cursory knowledge of it already and isn’t that the issue? this mythos of children being asexual b) as others have stated, doesn’t have Internet access.
An earlier commenter stated that sex is powerful and is to be respected as an emotional act, not one of the body. If we spent more time worrying about how to instill that value instead of trying to protect children from knowledge of various sex acts, we’d be better off in general. For controlling, fearful parents, the emphasis is on the forbidden in life, the dangerous — and all the fascination that comes along with those two labels in life. They are emphasizing that knowledge is to be feared instead of encountered then critiqued. And I would actually agree with it on some level if that approach worked. It simply doesn’t.
How should we establish our values?
We should establish our values by synthesizing our spiritual knowledge, our intellect and our experience. The value above is a great one that only a contrarian could take issue with. And my point here is that the emphasis is on the wrong thing here – by emphasizing protection from sexual knowledge you overdetermine the importance of the bodily act and you UNDERdetermine the spirituality/emotionality of it. Which to me, is completely the wrong message. My parents did not do this with me and I was never for a minute a whore – even though I learned about bj’s from Scarface. When I would fixate on the bodily functions involved in sexuality they would change the conversation to make it about ‘true’ meaning of sex. That did a couple of things. It framed sex as something a lot more complex than taking a shit. It made me fear the emotional implications of sex. I didn’t fear God’s wrath or pregnancy as much as feared losing my identity or sense of self. Of course, it didn’t hurt that every discussion of sin in our house was almost always accompanied by a reverent discussion of the Gift of Freewill. I wouldn’t jeopardize my freewill for any moral being. I think in that area of my upbringing (clearly not their choices in movies), my parents did it right.

1 Comments:

At 12:23 AM, March 26, 2010 , Blogger javagirl said...

Glad you posted. I miss your writing.

 

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