The Unmade Bed by Stephen Marche

Author:Stephen Marche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. Holy crap! Seriously? I’ve seen about a hundred and in the most conventional places: the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves I owned in high school, my childhood friend’s Joy of Sex, Kama Sutra postcards, stuff on art gallery walls, and bits from avant-garde French cinema. As for penises, it’s not how they look, it’s what they do that matters. Many women love porn, but I find just about anything more interesting. Sex for me has nothing to do with voyeurism and everything to do with participation.

II. At the same time that the market for pornography was expanding, there was a serious investment in sexual education and health—largely spearheaded by feminists. I don’t think the power of this massive program of education should be underrated. When I was a teenager I listened to a popular Canadian radio call-in show hosted by a straight-talking nurse named Sue Johanson. I’d listen to it before falling asleep, on headphones attached to a bright yellow Sony Walkman, learning about menstruation, ovulation, masturbation, contraception, conception, lubrication, oral sex. I knew that having agency over my body meant understanding its mechanics. And I was lucky enough to have access to Johanson’s show. Women in less permissive cultures are denied something life-alteringly big when they are denied access to sexual education.

III. Steve is, of course, speaking here about post-Enlightenment contemporary Western culture. Sex is only healthy and open when you are lucky enough to live in a culture where sex is healthy and open. In Toronto at the moment the public schools have introduced a progressive sex ed curriculum that includes homosexuality as just another way to be, and some parents—mostly Muslim and Christian—are pulling their kids out of public schools as a result. We see such culture clashes happening across the Western world. It is not clear, at least not to me, that we won’t regress.

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