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roanoke9 wrote

I had a long reply but it did not satisfy me. I like this post a lot. It seems similar to some of my thoughts on sex and societal preconditioning. Though I agree with atopos that attaching binary roles to penetrative sex is simply another aspect of that conditioning. Even the division we customarily assign between sex and all other nonsex activities is a societal constraint and creates an artificial binary. And, I will add that breaking this preconditioning is fun? exhilerating? the opposite of deja vu? Whenever language seems at a loss, I use it as a clue that something very interesting is being approached, attempted? grasped for?

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wednesday wrote

is this related to the transactional nature of sex? if it's a transaction then it needs to be a thing with a defined start and end so we can say it happened.

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roanoke9 wrote (edited )

That's definitely a facet of what I was talking about. Forcing something ineffable into an arbitrary box can take many forms and of those transactions is one. Pics or it didn't happen is another facet: if it wasn't recorded it didn't count. The arbitrary division between sexual and platonic interactions is another: kiss on the lips: sexual, kiss on the cheek: platonic (using US norms). It reminds me metaphorically of an early point in my art study (grade-school) when I was obsessed with the idea that drawings have outlines but the world as I see it does not. Outlines in a drawing are a shortcut, a visual heuristic, but they don't actually exist. Once we extract the outlines from a thing and pretend the outline is that thing, we have lost nearly all of that thing. Preconditioned sex-roles are even worse though, because they aren't even an outline, more of a stick-figure bathroom door label simplification with only a tangential relation to any individual person.

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