The TGIF Sex Blog [Sexuality]

¡Hola! Everybody…
Like most people (I guess) I abhor moving. If everything goes as planned, I will be moving to my new apartment tomorrow. I can’t wait until it’s all over. I’m still packing. This is stressful… LOL

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-=[ Sexuality ]=-

Every once in a while, I’ll get an email from someone who admits to reading my blog more often than not, they usually have something nice to say, or an interesting question to ask. One common question regards my motivation for the Friday “Sex Blog.” So, here goes…

Some of my sex blogs are meant to be comedic. But the sex posts started off with a few posts I did on Christianity and anti-sex values and the consequences of that history, so part of my blog is somewhat serious. My sex blog is also full of a lot of information. But…

Sex is everywhere. We are deluged by advice columns, celebrities, talk shows, TV evangelists, therapists, women’s and men’s magazines, and self-help books all of which attempt to tell us how to conduct our intimate relationships. Sexual images are used to sell us everything such as cars and clothes, or to sell sex itself, while sex aids, porn, and potential sex partners -- real or virtual -- are just a click away on the internet. Our postmodern world is populated by people who define themselves as gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, bi-curious, exhibitionists, submissives, dominatrixes, swingers, polyamorous, switchers, traders, born-again virgins, acrotomophiliacs, furverts, or feeders. The important point here is that we use these categories in order to make sense of who we are: we define ourselves in through our sexuality.

My interest is exploring the reasons behind how we have come to believe that sex is so important to who we are. This connective sexuality -- which I understand as the ways in which people experience their bodies, pleasures, and desires -- with sexual identity is in fact a fairly recent development. This is not to say that people didn’t engage in sexual activities before (obviously). Rather, the way in which people made sense of their erotic experiences was completely different from the way we understand sexuality today.

Sex is a cultural construct. What I mean by that is that sex is created by the cultural values of a given society or group. Just as the differences between men and women cannot be reduced to biology alone, but are more adequately understood in terms of gender which considers the social meanings that different societies attach to “masculinity” and “femininity,” sexuality is not a natural, biological, universal experience. The ways in which different cultures during different time periods have made sense of their erotic experiences very widely.

Sexuality is shaped by social and political forces and connects in very important ways to relations of power around class, race, and most importantly, gender. In fact, there are some of the issues I try to explore -- showing how sex, gender, and sexuality are closely related. Cultural understandings of sexuality have been based by ideas of what is “normal” about masculinity and femininity. In other words, sexuality is defined by what a culture considers the “proper” ways men and women behave.

In this way, I try to explore the social and political meanings and struggles of what it means to be sexual in a postmodern world. Besides, it’s fun.

Love,

Eddie