Update

Hi, I'm hoping I can get around to making weekly contributions to the blog. I have a lot of topics lined up, I just need to find the time to sit down and develop them. This passed week I was especially busy with work. In the mean time, please leave a comment and participate in the poll. If you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to send me an email.

Thanks!

 

Birds and Bees

As children, we wander around our houses and backyards tasting anything small enough to fit inside our mouths; watch loads of TV; talk to adults, other kids and inanimate objects; and constantly make all kinds of observations and form ideas about the world around us in the process. We go to school and learn about how night is a result of the earth's rotation around the sun, but much of what we perceive and internalize goes without any explanation and instead finds a comfortable spot in the back of our minds, and is referenced for reactions, value judgements, and so on.

Part of maturing is, or at least should be, sorting through all these ideas you acquire growing up, the ones that sit in the back of your mind, and getting rid of those which you can no longer critically defend. When you get down to doing this, it's amazing how much sociocultural garbage exists in the deep, dark recesses of your brain. All these acquired ideas and perceptions based on limited experiences, and unchallenged reasoning can have an effect on everything from how you approach people, relationships, sex, and your boyfriend when he casually suggests one night "Hey. Why don't we try some train conductor role-play." You may laugh, and perhaps the two of you should both laugh. But what would you do if confronted with such a request? Does it fall short of your definition of what "sex" entails? Are you someone who thinks penis-in-vagina intercourse is the icing on the proverbial sex cupcake?

These moments will even challenge the now fashionable "liberal when it comes to sex" mantra adopted by the progressive young adults, often followed with "but..." And although I can't say that I've ever heard of anyone who gets off on fantasizing about train conductors, I can say with absolute certainty that there is someone out there who does. Maybe even someone I know. That person may feel ashamed, or embarrassed, or worse yet, contemplating seeing a therapist. This is not the sex they saw on TV, the sex described in magazines or talked about by classmates. But how they should feel is proud that they have a sexual quirk that could lend itself for some interesting, potentially silly, sex–beyond the conventional (i.e. boring) definitions of the act. And it is completely silly. But while things like dressing up in latex versions of daily professional attire for sexual role-play, or tying up your boyfriend and spanking him with a spatula are silly, trying to normalize sex into categories of genital friction is even more silly. Especially considering humanity's penchant for imagination and creativity in almost every other facet of our daily lives.

Depending on where, when and whether you grew up as a man, woman or anything in between, you will have limitations on how you view sex and relationships. The problems come in when some, if not most, of these limitations have no good reason to exist. It's these out-of-date definitions that make our lives more about contemplating whether we fall into the incredibly narrow scope of normality rather than indulging in our quirks and enjoying what it is that makes us come (with consent being the condition).