Saturday, January 01, 2011

Why I blog about sex instead of politics, the environment, health, money, or food

While this is actually an emergency-backup for my (generally not work safe) blog Figleaf's Real Adult Sex I thought I might use this spot to answer why I blog about sex instead of politics, the environment, health, money, or food. It's like this:

In contemporary society we're expected both to praise the miracle of birth and deplore it as the wages of sin. We expect men to take cold showers if they get an erection, and to take Viagra if they can't. We encourage straight women to kiss in bars, and actual lesbians not to. We expect young men to have sex they're not ready for, and young women to decline it when they are. We're expected to say we like oral sex even when we don't, and to say we dislike anal sex even supposing we do. We're expected to buy sudoku books with bikini models on the cover and to read Playboy for the articles!

We're expected to gradually lose interest in our spouses and not to have affairs. We're expected to stress about unplanned, unwanted pregnancy and to see stopping to put on a condom as unromantic. We expect to believe men don't read romance novels and women don't watch porn, even though there's maybe a 30% crossover both directions. If you're a woman you're expected to zealously guard your hymen up to the point you get married (whether you wanted to or not), and then upon receipt of a marriage license you're expected to turn around and let some guy pound away at it whenever he wishes (whether you wanted to or not.)

Looking in another direction if you're a man you're expected to run screaming from the room if your wife puts her purse down too close to you... because your wife's purse might somehow magically "make you gay." We're supposed to pretend that women faint at the sight of blood, and ignore that men are far more inclined to. We expect women to depend financially on men and expect men to dump their wives for floozies at the drop of a thong. We're expected to think a model is sexy if she's in a Victoria's Secret poster at the mall, and we're expected to think a mom in workout pants and a sweatshirt isn't sexy if she's in the same mall pushing a stroller.

And any time we don't meet those expectations we get jumped on by everyone from Dr. Phil to Paris Hilton, not to mention thousands or millions of people who have the same issues everyone else does but are desperate to pass as what they imagine to be "normal."

In other words sex is a serious issue that's seriously messed up.

So the question shouldn't be why do I blog about sex? The real question is why on earth more serious people don't!

Update: I found that Kate of Kiss and tell Kate has found an even more economical (though perhaps more regional) quote than mine.
"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love." -Butch Hancock

She uses the quote to introduce the rest of her post here.


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Friday, December 31, 2010

About This Backup Blog and Spam Filter Fallback

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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Trigger Warning Badge

Trigger WarningFor reasons I explain in a post on my primary blog, I've decided it would be a good idea to create an icon for the canonical "****TRIGGER WARNING****" text many bloggers sensibly use to warn readers that potentially disturbing subject matter will be discussed.

I took a couple of minutes with Photoshop and, thanks to a randomly-Googled tutorial (from CSS Creme design site) I put together a colorful little badge that people can use instead. If they don't want to create their own.

Use the following HTML code to insert the image in your own posts

<img alt="Trigger Warning" title="Trigger Warning" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cDVtg63O_Jc/S8VzA5JP2pI/AAAAAAAAAHs/_HQlWsz39ro/s1600/TriggerWarning.png" style="float: left; margin: .5em;"/>

That will float the image on the left-hand side of whatever paragraph you insert it in, allowing the surrounding text to flow around it.

I do think it's a good idea to replace the text with a graphic. (The HTML title and alt-text ensure accessablity on alternative browsers.) Feel free, of course, to make and use your own instead.