The Friday Sex Blog [Sexual Revolution]

¡Hola! Everybody…
It’s Friday… and it’s all about sex.

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-=[ Sexual Revolution ]=-

Revolution without fuckin’ is a revolution without a soul…

-- Me

I was attending a #OccupyWallStreet general assembly last night when I noticed a young lady with a derrière that could only be described as “magnificent.” No, I’m not there to “pick up” women and no I wasn’t objectifying her. In fact, I was so deeply engaged in a political conversation with her that I never noticed her ass, until much later when she bent over and her ass was literally inches from my face.

I’m evolved, but I’m not asexual…

Social movements, revolutions, protests, and social unrest make for sexy meetings. After all, you’re engaging like-minded people who have dared to question the status quo, who are challenging “conventional wisdom” and economic and religious dogma. This makes for stimulating, even inspirational interactions that engage your whole body/ mind, so it’s not unusual to see people forming romantic or intimate connections. This is not to say that there’s a whole lotta fuckin’ going on at OccupyWallStreet. In fact, I haven’t seen any of that going on, but I would be surprised (and frankly disappointed) if it wasn’t happening.

The massive upheavals throughout history took place on many levels: cultural, political, social, and psychological. For centuries blacks had fought for liberation and their civil rights and to transform the quality of their lives. The younger generation of blacks, Latin@s, and whites built on the changes wrought by the Civil rights movement to launch a radical political movement against the war in Vietnam and to eliminate social and economic inequalities that had existed for generations. The women’s movement emerged in the wake of civil rights and anti war movements. The gay and lesbian liberation movement emerged in the midst of this critical mass of anti war, civil rights, and women’s grassroots organizing.

The one common thread found within all these movements was the sexual revolution. All these movements generated rip tides that intersected with one another. In addition, cultural and artistic movements in music (Jazz, rock and roll, etc.), drama (theater of the absurd) art, and iconoclastic independent filmmakers (Easy Rider, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Alice’s Restaurant) were central to the creation and dissemination of a new sexual morality.

Beginning in early 1960s, Helen Gurly Brown published a series of magazines articles (later forming the basis for her book, Sex and the Single Girl) set out to attack he double standard that made acceptable for men but not women to have sex before marriage. Betty Friedan challenged the notion that the only possible way a woman could fulfillment and happiness was through the institution of marriage. In fact, the fiercest intellectual attack on the presiding patriarchal power structure was launched via the sexual revolution. Radical feminists such as Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone fired broadsides that would send the existing power structure reeling.

The sexual revolution, though never fully realized, and having some faults has actually been one of the most powerful and having the most impact. It even changed the way you perceive and engage in sex. The construction of the orgasm was changed dramatically with women now freed to express their sexual needs.

Of course, as with all major social shifts, the sexual revolution had its problems. For one, women in protest movements found themselves feeling coerced into “free love” and in the gap between the dismantling of old, irrelevant and oppressive moral standard and the creation of new social sexual mores, patriarchy reared its head. In the end, women were still being oppressed and men were acting out their alpha male bullshit. Still, one would be hard-pressed to envision a world freed of some of the worst sexual myths. On the other hand, I look at our political sphere these days and despair that the resulting counter revolution launched by the religious right has done much to erode any gains we may have made.

The one thing that’s important here, and which I find most relevant with the OccupyWallStreet movement is that, in the absence of a structure, human beings will substitute older structures. In other words, we cannot exist in a void, so when we don’t see a structure, we actually use the very same structures that we’re proposing to critique.

At this point in time the #OccuppyWallStreet movement is reaching a point in its development that crying out for the implementation of an egalitarian structure (click here to read such a proposal). The general assembly no longer works, and there is evidence of the beginning cracks resulting from the dynamics around race, class, gender, and power.

Hierarchies not necessarily evil. In fact, saying you want no hierarchy is a form of hierarchy itself. The issue is what kind of hierarchy best represents our aspiration toward genuine democratic ideals. Otherwise, as in the ongoing sexual revolution, we will begin to resemble the very tyranny we are struggling against.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…