Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Really nice writeup of Sex 2.0 by Miriam Perez at Feministing. She concluded with

One of my favorite quotes from the weekend:

Ricci Levy, Woodhull Freedom Foundation Executive Director

“Imagine a country where you are just as comfortable talking to people about sex and what you like as you are talking about chocolate. That would be what sexual freedom would look like.”

Miriam said it here.

The quote caused a bit of a ruckus among commenters. Some said Ricci was trying to sexualize everything. Others complained chocolate has become a plaything of the rich.

I thought a post from Lisa KS from Punkassblog.com, who also attended, might put the Levy quote in a more affirmative perspective.

“I didn’t notice for quite a while that I wasn’t being stared at like usual. Not til I went outside briefly and found myself being whistled at and ogled by two men walking past me on the street. That woke me up, as it usually does, and when I went back inside the hotel where the conference was being held, when I looked around, I found that really nobody was looking at me much at all. ... It was pretty awesome.”

Lisa said it here.

The point being Ricci wasn’t saying “ooh wouldn’t it be cool if everybody could just talk about acculturated obsessions with dessert 24 hours a day.”

And not to sound nettled but to have jumped to that conclusion is to be no different from the two cat-calling passers by outside the conference site: so indoctrinated by the culture of sexualization they can’t tell they’re being rude.

For the record I was reminded by another commenter, Miriam, that food and sex are such excellent joint metaphors that they tend to produce “gotchas” when used as analogies for each other.

So had it been me I might have instead said “Imagine a country where you are just as comfortable talking to people about sex and what you like as you are talking about bicycles.”

Because whether one has one bike, or many, or none it’s unremarkable! And thus not likely to draw judgmental, uninvited, unwelcome, out of context, and/or appropriating remarks from passers by on sidewalks or online. Which was, of course, Ricci Levy’s point.