Why Don't We Talk About Sex the Way We Talk About Food?

On Monday night, the Sexual Awareness Center office will be showing the documentary Let's Talk About Sex. While I urge anyone reading this to go to that film showing at 6pm in VU 522, I am not writing this blog post as a representative of that office. Considering we live in a culture that inundates itself with sex, where “sex sells” and “everybody's doing it,” we're awfully reticent to having frank and open discussions about sex and sexuality.

For eight years, we had a Presidential administration that almost exclusively advocated abstinence only sex education,which given rates of sexual abuse, unplanned pregnancy, sexual violence, and sexually transmitted infections (STI), completely ignores the fact that young people are having sex and under an abstinence-only model are having sex unprepared for the consequences of their actions.

The problem though is not merely systemic, it's cultural as well. We don't allow ourselves a space to healthily discuss sex. Within the public domain, we rarely hear about condoms until at least puberty, and even then the focus is on preventing pregnancy with little to no mention of STI prevention. Few parents would be able to overcome their embarrassment to bring up condom use to a teenager beyond surreptitiously leaving a pack bedside and assuming they'll know what to do with it.

Even this discourse completely ignores the range of emotional and social pressures that come along with sex.

About six months ago, I purchased a copy of the Guide to Getting It On by Paul Joannides, an irreverent, comprehensive sex manual that with glossary covers 982 pages. At times it exhibits language that makes me uncomfortable for its misogynistic, heteronormative or culturally-incompetent connotations, but it attempts to be inclusive and is reflective of the idiomatic culture that spawned it, so I would still recommend it for anyone interested about sex.

My favorite part about this guide is not its wide range of sexual positions and detailed descriptions of what to do in bed, for that kind of information I would actually recommend you to a copy of the Kama Sutra or Cosmo, but the way in which this book emphasizes the connection and communication between partners.

Most sex ed that I've encountered deals almost exclusively with the mechanics of conception and rarely STI prevention. This is your basic anatomy. This is how it functions to make a baby. This is everything that can go wrong. If you're going to have sex, use protection or die. What's missing from this approach is pleasure. It tells you nothing about how to make sex better, which comes most strongly from responding to what you and your partner want.

Now, I've been an advocate for good communication skills probably since about the time I became literate. Sexual literacy and communication is no different. A sexual relationship is still, first and foremost, a relationship. Even if it's casual hook-up sex, if only one partner thinks of it that way, problems will occur.

Having sex with another person is intimate. We're trained to keep it behind closed doors both physically and mentally. So acknowledging that you're with another person who has wants and needs and boundaries is the first thing we should be teaching youth.

If your brain is the most important sexual organ, your ears are the second.

Part of what will help make this process of education easier is changing the way we talk about sex. The other day I was at a presentation by Cynthia Morrison from the Washington State Department of Health and a question she asked our scant audience of eight was why do we not talk about sex the way we talk about eating.

The question was mostly meant to address language use in a sex positive culture. Consider for a moment the slang used for masturbation. Jacking off, beating one out, spanking the monkey, choking the chicken, ad nauseum, I would go on, but doesn't this list seem rather violent, and it only really talks about male masturbation. Or for another matter, what does it mean that some of the worst insults are related to body parts?

I like to eat standing in the kitchen as I'm making food for other people. Sitting down is a rarity.

I like to fuck in bed, being penetrated while on top, riding my partner.

Okay, so you wouldn't exactly talk about sex the way you talk about eating and I apologize if that last sentence gave any of you far too graphic mental images of me, but the language we use is important. I would rather hear about spicy, succulent, delicate, aromatic, tasty things in bed than I would this pseudo-violent harder, faster, aren't-I-such-a-good-little-bitch, use me, rhetoric we most often ascribe to sex. 


Can you imagine if it were the other way around? You're a bad apple, I'm going to have to take a bite out of you and swallow you whole. 


Yeah... this is still a developing series of thoughts.