Sex: Old News and Youthful Problems

What is who supposed to want when? That's the convoluted question the two subjects of this post are trying to answer. This holiday weekend I was [too lazy] too busy, to get much studying done, but I did read an excellent NY Times article by Daniel Bergner, author of The Other Side of Desire, and watch a video posted by Maymay, who is among other things a sex-positive activist doing a lot of good, interesting work.

In "When Desire Fades," Bergner discusses the pathology and treatment of low sex-drive in middle-aged women. As sexologist Lori Brotto demonstrates how increased mindfulness can help women feel more sexual, Bergner's intimate writing-style meanders between the growth of Brotto's own interest in sex research to the unique and often discomfiting cases of her patients. I read Bergner's book on sexuality over the summer, and likewise found the sympathy and candor with which he treated each case-study, which included a pedophile and a foot-fetishist, as much dangerous and off-putting as the stories were enlightening. Likewise in this article, I first wonder, with a little bit of embarrassment and prudishness, why he must mention a patient "who lost her virginity in her 50s" or an artist who becomes aroused from painting, before I am grateful that he takes those risks. Addressing desire is dangerous enough in an academic or journalistic setting (see this eye-opening interview with Benoit Denizet-Lewis for more on the stigma surrounding such endeavors); addressing lack of desire, and "what women want to want" should be all the more difficult, but Bergner does it with finesse.

On a different note, in the video posted below, maymay addresses the fear of youth sexuality at KinkForAll Washington DC. Though the demographic at issue for him is a far cry from the middle-aged women Bergner and Brotto interview, maymay hits upon several common themes surrounding the damaging way society presents sexuality information:

Sexual Adultism - KinkForAll Washington DC from maymay on Vimeo.

I'm interested in the ways both of these news items highlight the precarious position the idea of sex holds in today's popular imagination. Bergner's essay notes that the DSM's description of hypoactive sexual desire disorder fails to "reckon with women as complex sexual beings,"—instead using false and limiting assumptions about how women should be sexual to judge disorder—and maymay's lecture demonstrates how youth are denied access to positive cultural assumptions about sex and sexuality solely because of age and a strong culture of sexual protectionism.

Though the dichotomy between the desired and the taboo is old news, sex has only recently (slowly, over the last 40 years) become something that people young and old are expected to be having, and expected to want to be having— but not talking or thinking too hard about. We all know the script; it's supposed to be charming, breathy, seamless, steamy, and, if you talk to a rapper or the writers of Gossip Girl, there's supposed to be a lot of it. And though maymay's points are prescient, youth are not altogether restrained from information about sex. In fact, information is everywhere; it's just that the only message being consistently conveyed is, to paraphrase one particularly inappropriate grandfather of popular culture, who embodies enough social stigma against desire and age on his own: "Fuck a lot of women."

So why is it that only now (and with a lot of push-back from conservative opponents of everything from comprehensive sex-education to erotica and non-normative sexuality), that we are beginning to talk about the spectrum of issues that can constitute or deny satisfaction? Possibly because we now know that the script breaks down, and as Bergner and maymay both argue, it breaks down in the predictable places where we have a gap in collective knowledge about what we want and why. It's gap stretched even further by the willful denial that variety exists, that people's wants and needs can and should vary, and the tendency to pathologize what we are afraid to accept, and medicate what we are afraid to explain.

Cheers to the journalists and activists who want to change this culture.


UPDATE: The solutions to these problems might just be in the kitchen! ...Probably not, but just in case, here's the cover of the cutest holiday gift I bought yesterday for someone special when he gets back to the States (Shh, don't tell!)