Sex Tips for Restless Youth
CrimethInc.
Do you experience sexual problems? Do you have trouble getting aroused, or having sex that is fulfilling, or simply meeting the right partners to share that aspect of your life? Chances are you do—just have a look at the magazine rack in any grocery store, and it's clear from all the advice columns and feature articles just how sexually lost and frustrated modern men and women are. Unfortunately, these magazines only offer symptomatic treatment (otherwise, they wouldn't have to run the same articles over and over every month!), no real, radical solutions. And to date, few people have really dared to be open about their troubles, thanks to the social pressures to be "successful" in all affairs. So, in keeping with our general program of providing aid wherever it is needed, we offer some tips:
--Stop trying to make your sexuality serve in your efforts to be a good citizen (responsive lover, macho man, etc.)—it won't, it will just go on strike. Better to serve it, if serving must be done.
--Stop trying to make your sex life (or romance, or anything else, for that matter), by itself, provide you with qualities that should be intrinsic to every moment of your life. It is not the role of your sexuality to be your sole source of excitement, or intimacy, or pleasure—it is the role of sex to be just that, to be sex. If you feel trapped or insecure or bored everywhere else, you will probably have a hard time shaking off those feelings in bed.
--If your idea of seventh heaven is having perfect sex with a beautiful partner, dispel it. Heaven cannot be an isolated moment of life; it has to be a complete way of living, or else it will be just another barren myth to denigrate and impoverish the moments of our real experience. Better that we find ways to make every moment of life as exciting as great sex can be (and believe me, it can be done!), considering that we can't have sex all the time—such a thing would get boring, anyway, since living has so many facets we must not neglect! You can feel and share passion as deeply while building puppets for street demonstrations together, sneaking onto rooftops for late night conversations, or stowing away on ferryboats. Most people just haven't had the chance to be free and wild together anywhere outside the bedroom yet—and consequently, it hardly comes naturally between the sheets.
--Rescue your sexuality from the definitions and delineations slipped around it like a noose by external forces: the leering billboards and romantic comedies, the expectations of your friends and parents and paramours, the television programs and other social programming devices that would dictate desire and limit the erotic to the strictly sexual. The powers that be have everything at stake in keeping your sexuality emaciated and confined to the specific act of physical intercourse, to one routine and one partner and one ghettoized category, so you won't discover in it the freedom that you could be living around the clock, outside their control, beyond their target markets. But one step outside the lines, and the world is yours.
--And that means throwing out your pornography. Pornography isn't obscene because it's sexual, but because it's not—replace the representation with the real, in every instance, for maximum possibility. Masturbation is a beautiful thing, but don't let the pornography industry buy out your libido. A two-dimensional woman, no matter how trangressively posed, will do exactly what you command her and no more: that means she can never challenge you with her own needs or perspectives, never open new doors to you, never assert her selfhood. That refusal to be challenged is a rejection of the vast expanses of freedom that can only be reached with others. We should be wary of giving our fantasies such slaves to rule over, lest we learn to fetishize the violence of domination implied by such one-sided sex—and end up living in the sterile, determinist world of control mania. Do you want to explore, to reach unimaginable climaxes, to try out things you've never seen in movies? Do it with other people—they are out there. Let them know you're ready.
Sexuality as art—now there's a start. But more art "about" sexuality? It's doubtful that the world of images will ever belong to us again . . . that's just another diversion of our attention to that domain from this world, where we should be practicing doing, being, feeling with one another, not with the dangerous safety of an object. Make love and speak about your best kept secrets, your blackest needs, the demands the culture of fear places on your sexuality, held hostage as it is (never fear, you're not the only one who thinks you have things to hide—your secret's safe with all of us!) . . . We can get out of here, together, but first we have to be honest to figure out where the fuck we are!
To find indulgences that simultaneously satisfy and subvert our programmed, poisonous desires, and thus remake ourselves—that is the key.
Link to the Text
Showing posts with label Romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romance. Show all posts
Monday, February 07, 2011
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Barbara Koziak: Shepherding Romance -- Reviving the Politics of Romantic Love in Brokeback Mountain
Shepherding Romance: Reviving the Politics of Romantic Love in Brokeback Mountain
By BARBARA KOZIAK
Genders
[1] The recent film, Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee and based on Annie Proulx’s short story, received an overwhelmingly admiring response from newspaper and magazine film critics, won a series of prominent film awards, and roused a large, fervent fan base. Several large on-line discussion forums created in the months following the film’s release analyze every scene, symbol, and character, and remain to this day communities with interests that have expanded beyond the film. Coinciding with the emergence of You Tube and a new amateur video culture, fan enthusiasm created both lyrical tributes and hilarious parodies on video websites. A mini-Brokeback tourist industry emerged, with one website devoting itself to mapping and photographing every shooting location for every scene. These web-based responses culminated in net-generated cultural activism and even the popular naming of a new syndrome, “Brokeback Mountain Fever.”
[2] Such exuberant responses to the film appeared in the midst of a politically treacherous period for sexuality in public life. In the years before the film’s appearance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional in their 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, five U.S. states enacted civil union or domestic partnership legislation while a handful of others recognized some spousal rights, and Massachusetts legalized gay marriage. On the other hand, during the 2004 election season, eleven states passed amendments or laws effectively barring same-sex marriage, and the red and blue state divide has largely formed around such prominent issues of sexuality and marriage. Political events after the appearance of the film were similarly ambivalent: Connecticut legalized same-sex marriage in 2008, four other states enacted some form of civil union or domestic partnership laws, and New York now recognizes all marriages contracted in other states. Pulling in the opposite direction, the rush to exclude gays and lesbians from marrying continued with eight more states in 2006 and three in 2008. The last group included the stunning reversal through popular ballot of the California Supreme Court’s approval of gay marriage. Remarkably, although politics have been dominated by a sharp backlash against the early victories for gay rights, over the same period, popular support nationwide for gay marriage has been slowly increasing (Campo-Flores 38). Just this year, in the space of a week, legislators in Vermont and the courts in Iowa legalized same-sex marriage.
[3] To explain this growing support, cultural studies scholar David Shumway has argued that we should understand the changing social and narrative context for heterosexual relationships. In particular, Shumway claims that a new class of intimacy narratives in literature and film, in which people expect multiple relationships requiring intensive communicative work, has prepared the straight world to accept gay unions. However, unlike the intimacy narratives Shumway discusses, no single narrative work in the late twentieth century has so broadly appealed to both gays and straights. Although the approval has hardly been universal, popular gay websites and magazines were enthusiastic. For example, AfterElton.com’s list of 50 greatest gay movies begins with Brokeback as number one, and The Advocate featured several Brokeback themed covers. In addition, the film won numerous awards, including MTV’s Best Kiss award and the Academy Award for Best Director (if not for Best Picture), and it continues to appear in popular newspaper and magazine lists of the most romantic movies. The studio, Focus Features, understood these possibilities and worked to broaden the film’s appeal beyond GLBT and art house audiences principally by marketing the film to women, and particularly by branding it as romance (Lippman). This wide embrace is significant since Brokeback Mountain encompasses a classical romantic love narrative, not an intimacy narrative.
[4] In fact, the film arrived at a particularly strange, uncertain moment in the cultural course of love. Some have argued that romantic love emerged in the West in the milieu surrounding the production of French troubadour poetry of the twelfth century, gained widespread popularization in the nineteenth and twentieth century, but lately has been successfully challenged by new modes of heterosexual relations (Shumway, Modern Love; Bloch). In response to this historical thesis, a new debate has emerged on the cultural universality of such a love (Cheung; Janowiak; Gottschall and Nordlund). Others argue that romantic love as currently practiced has undergone a dangerous intensification (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim), while others examine how it has been infiltrated by consumerist desires (Illouz). More recently, some sociologists and historians have reemphasized the historical and psychic disjunction of love and marriage (Coontz), how marriage was traditionally not based on love, and how the effort to link the two has destabilized marriage. Feminist conversations, which in the second wave often critiqued both marriage and love (Beauvoir; Firestone), more recently turned to examining sexual desire and marriage in the midst of the politics surrounding gay and lesbian unions. This new conversation in feminist theory has been relatively silent on romantic love (Card; Josephson; Ferguson; Shanley). Those early second generation feminists had often seen romantic love as a velvet trap for women, but their analysis was rightly devoted to this trap, and they often ended on a utopian hope for a transformed love. It is time to reconsider the socio-political effect of romantic love narratives, particularly because Brokeback and the emergence of online communities enable us to reexamine both a new iteration of this orthodox tale and its contemporary reception.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
By BARBARA KOZIAK
Genders
[1] The recent film, Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee and based on Annie Proulx’s short story, received an overwhelmingly admiring response from newspaper and magazine film critics, won a series of prominent film awards, and roused a large, fervent fan base. Several large on-line discussion forums created in the months following the film’s release analyze every scene, symbol, and character, and remain to this day communities with interests that have expanded beyond the film. Coinciding with the emergence of You Tube and a new amateur video culture, fan enthusiasm created both lyrical tributes and hilarious parodies on video websites. A mini-Brokeback tourist industry emerged, with one website devoting itself to mapping and photographing every shooting location for every scene. These web-based responses culminated in net-generated cultural activism and even the popular naming of a new syndrome, “Brokeback Mountain Fever.”
[2] Such exuberant responses to the film appeared in the midst of a politically treacherous period for sexuality in public life. In the years before the film’s appearance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional in their 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, five U.S. states enacted civil union or domestic partnership legislation while a handful of others recognized some spousal rights, and Massachusetts legalized gay marriage. On the other hand, during the 2004 election season, eleven states passed amendments or laws effectively barring same-sex marriage, and the red and blue state divide has largely formed around such prominent issues of sexuality and marriage. Political events after the appearance of the film were similarly ambivalent: Connecticut legalized same-sex marriage in 2008, four other states enacted some form of civil union or domestic partnership laws, and New York now recognizes all marriages contracted in other states. Pulling in the opposite direction, the rush to exclude gays and lesbians from marrying continued with eight more states in 2006 and three in 2008. The last group included the stunning reversal through popular ballot of the California Supreme Court’s approval of gay marriage. Remarkably, although politics have been dominated by a sharp backlash against the early victories for gay rights, over the same period, popular support nationwide for gay marriage has been slowly increasing (Campo-Flores 38). Just this year, in the space of a week, legislators in Vermont and the courts in Iowa legalized same-sex marriage.
[3] To explain this growing support, cultural studies scholar David Shumway has argued that we should understand the changing social and narrative context for heterosexual relationships. In particular, Shumway claims that a new class of intimacy narratives in literature and film, in which people expect multiple relationships requiring intensive communicative work, has prepared the straight world to accept gay unions. However, unlike the intimacy narratives Shumway discusses, no single narrative work in the late twentieth century has so broadly appealed to both gays and straights. Although the approval has hardly been universal, popular gay websites and magazines were enthusiastic. For example, AfterElton.com’s list of 50 greatest gay movies begins with Brokeback as number one, and The Advocate featured several Brokeback themed covers. In addition, the film won numerous awards, including MTV’s Best Kiss award and the Academy Award for Best Director (if not for Best Picture), and it continues to appear in popular newspaper and magazine lists of the most romantic movies. The studio, Focus Features, understood these possibilities and worked to broaden the film’s appeal beyond GLBT and art house audiences principally by marketing the film to women, and particularly by branding it as romance (Lippman). This wide embrace is significant since Brokeback Mountain encompasses a classical romantic love narrative, not an intimacy narrative.
[4] In fact, the film arrived at a particularly strange, uncertain moment in the cultural course of love. Some have argued that romantic love emerged in the West in the milieu surrounding the production of French troubadour poetry of the twelfth century, gained widespread popularization in the nineteenth and twentieth century, but lately has been successfully challenged by new modes of heterosexual relations (Shumway, Modern Love; Bloch). In response to this historical thesis, a new debate has emerged on the cultural universality of such a love (Cheung; Janowiak; Gottschall and Nordlund). Others argue that romantic love as currently practiced has undergone a dangerous intensification (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim), while others examine how it has been infiltrated by consumerist desires (Illouz). More recently, some sociologists and historians have reemphasized the historical and psychic disjunction of love and marriage (Coontz), how marriage was traditionally not based on love, and how the effort to link the two has destabilized marriage. Feminist conversations, which in the second wave often critiqued both marriage and love (Beauvoir; Firestone), more recently turned to examining sexual desire and marriage in the midst of the politics surrounding gay and lesbian unions. This new conversation in feminist theory has been relatively silent on romantic love (Card; Josephson; Ferguson; Shanley). Those early second generation feminists had often seen romantic love as a velvet trap for women, but their analysis was rightly devoted to this trap, and they often ended on a utopian hope for a transformed love. It is time to reconsider the socio-political effect of romantic love narratives, particularly because Brokeback and the emergence of online communities enable us to reexamine both a new iteration of this orthodox tale and its contemporary reception.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Monday, February 15, 2010
Greta Christina: A Skeptic's View of Love
(Courtesy of Laura W.)
A Skeptic's View of Love
Greta Christina's Blog
...
And it's gotten me thinking about the whole idea of soul-mates, and romantic destiny, and there being one perfect love for you in the whole world. All of which I think is a load of dingo's kidneys.
And I don't think I'm being unromantic.
First, obviously, I think the whole "soul-mate/ romantic destiny" thing is just wrong. Mistaken. Not true. I don't think we have souls, much less mates for them; I don't think there's an invisible hand pushing people together (and if there were, it'd have a seriously sadistic sense of humor, what with putting people's true destined loves on opposite sides of the country and whatnot).
But maybe more to the point:
The "soul-mate/ romantic destiny" vision of love puts the focus on love as something you feel -- rather than something you do.
It puts the focus on love as something that happens to you -- rather than something that you choose.
And I find it much more romantic, and much more loving, to see love as something we do, and something we choose.
When we see love solely as something that we feel... then what happens when those feelings change? As they inevitably do.
And when we see love solely as something that happens to us... then what happens when the going gets tough, and we have to make hard choices about the relationship? For that matter, what happens when something else happens to us -- something that conflicts with the love? What happens when we get job offers in other cities... or when other romantic prospects appear on the horizon?
Of course a huge part of love is the way we feel about our beloved. The feelings of tenderness and passion that well up in me when I look at Ingrid, the feelings of anxious excitement that I had when we were first starting out...that's an enormous part of what we have between us. And of course a huge part of love is the feeling that something has hit you out of the clear blue sky. When Ingrid and I were first going out, I used to say that I felt like I'd been conked on the head with a giant vaudeville rubber mallet. If love didn't have the power to knock us out of our tracks and into a whole new life, it wouldn't be what it is.
But I don't think that's enough. It's enough to get love started -- but it's not enough to sustain it.
I think what sustains love is doing the dishes when you promised to. Remembering the book they said they wanted, and getting it for their birthday. Skipping the movie you wanted to see, to go with them to a party of their friends who you don't know very well. Remembering which kind of seltzer water they like when you go shopping; remembering how they like their burgers cooked when you're making dinner. Sitting with them when they're grieving... and restraining your impulse to always try to fix things and give advice and make things better, and instead being willing to just sit still and be with them in their pain. Asking if there's anything they need from the kitchen while you're up. Wearing the stupid sticky breathing strip on your nose at night so your snoring doesn't keep them awake. Bringing them endless cups of tea when they're sick. Keeping your temper in an argument, and remembering that as angry as you might be right now, you love this person and don't want to hurt them. Saying, "I love you." Saying, "You're beautiful" -- not just when they're dolled up for a night on the town, but when they come home from work and you notice that they look particularly fetching. Noticing when they come home from work looking particularly fetching. Going to their readings, their dance performances, their office parties. Going to their family gatherings, and treating their family as your family, too. Going to the vet together. Trying out music they like, books they like, recipes they like, hobbies they like, kinds of sex they like, even if you don't think it's your thing: not just because you want to make them happy, but because it's part of who they are, and you want to find out more about them, and share the things that matter to them.
In the inimitable words of Tim Minchin, "Love is nothing to do with destined perfection/ The connection is strengthened; the affection simply grows over time... And love is made more powerful by the ongoing drama of shared experience and synergy/ And symbiotic empathy or something like that... " Sure, the feelings I have for Ingrid have a lot to do with the giant vaudeville rubber mallet I got conked on the head with when we fell in love. But they have more to do with the eleven plus years we've spent together: the meals we've eaten, the parties we've thrown, the vacations we've taken, the arguments we've had, the sex we've had, the griefs we've borne, the thousands of nights we've spent sleeping in the same bed, the long conversations we've had about politics, about religion, about books, about our friends, about our cats, about bad reality television.
And none of that has anything to do with fate.
To Read the Entire Essay
A Skeptic's View of Love
Greta Christina's Blog
...
And it's gotten me thinking about the whole idea of soul-mates, and romantic destiny, and there being one perfect love for you in the whole world. All of which I think is a load of dingo's kidneys.
And I don't think I'm being unromantic.
First, obviously, I think the whole "soul-mate/ romantic destiny" thing is just wrong. Mistaken. Not true. I don't think we have souls, much less mates for them; I don't think there's an invisible hand pushing people together (and if there were, it'd have a seriously sadistic sense of humor, what with putting people's true destined loves on opposite sides of the country and whatnot).
But maybe more to the point:
The "soul-mate/ romantic destiny" vision of love puts the focus on love as something you feel -- rather than something you do.
It puts the focus on love as something that happens to you -- rather than something that you choose.
And I find it much more romantic, and much more loving, to see love as something we do, and something we choose.
When we see love solely as something that we feel... then what happens when those feelings change? As they inevitably do.
And when we see love solely as something that happens to us... then what happens when the going gets tough, and we have to make hard choices about the relationship? For that matter, what happens when something else happens to us -- something that conflicts with the love? What happens when we get job offers in other cities... or when other romantic prospects appear on the horizon?
Of course a huge part of love is the way we feel about our beloved. The feelings of tenderness and passion that well up in me when I look at Ingrid, the feelings of anxious excitement that I had when we were first starting out...that's an enormous part of what we have between us. And of course a huge part of love is the feeling that something has hit you out of the clear blue sky. When Ingrid and I were first going out, I used to say that I felt like I'd been conked on the head with a giant vaudeville rubber mallet. If love didn't have the power to knock us out of our tracks and into a whole new life, it wouldn't be what it is.
But I don't think that's enough. It's enough to get love started -- but it's not enough to sustain it.
I think what sustains love is doing the dishes when you promised to. Remembering the book they said they wanted, and getting it for their birthday. Skipping the movie you wanted to see, to go with them to a party of their friends who you don't know very well. Remembering which kind of seltzer water they like when you go shopping; remembering how they like their burgers cooked when you're making dinner. Sitting with them when they're grieving... and restraining your impulse to always try to fix things and give advice and make things better, and instead being willing to just sit still and be with them in their pain. Asking if there's anything they need from the kitchen while you're up. Wearing the stupid sticky breathing strip on your nose at night so your snoring doesn't keep them awake. Bringing them endless cups of tea when they're sick. Keeping your temper in an argument, and remembering that as angry as you might be right now, you love this person and don't want to hurt them. Saying, "I love you." Saying, "You're beautiful" -- not just when they're dolled up for a night on the town, but when they come home from work and you notice that they look particularly fetching. Noticing when they come home from work looking particularly fetching. Going to their readings, their dance performances, their office parties. Going to their family gatherings, and treating their family as your family, too. Going to the vet together. Trying out music they like, books they like, recipes they like, hobbies they like, kinds of sex they like, even if you don't think it's your thing: not just because you want to make them happy, but because it's part of who they are, and you want to find out more about them, and share the things that matter to them.
In the inimitable words of Tim Minchin, "Love is nothing to do with destined perfection/ The connection is strengthened; the affection simply grows over time... And love is made more powerful by the ongoing drama of shared experience and synergy/ And symbiotic empathy or something like that... " Sure, the feelings I have for Ingrid have a lot to do with the giant vaudeville rubber mallet I got conked on the head with when we fell in love. But they have more to do with the eleven plus years we've spent together: the meals we've eaten, the parties we've thrown, the vacations we've taken, the arguments we've had, the sex we've had, the griefs we've borne, the thousands of nights we've spent sleeping in the same bed, the long conversations we've had about politics, about religion, about books, about our friends, about our cats, about bad reality television.
And none of that has anything to do with fate.
To Read the Entire Essay
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