{"id":14797,"date":"2014-01-11T12:02:10","date_gmt":"2014-01-11T20:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2014\/01\/11\/14797.html"},"modified":"2014-01-11T12:02:10","modified_gmt":"2014-01-11T20:02:10","slug":"two-views-of-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2014\/01\/11\/two-views-of-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"Two views of sex"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 1990, poet Mark O'Brien<\/a> (who had polio) published an essay titled “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate<\/a>.” I just read it, after seeing a preview for the 2012 movie The Sessions<\/cite>, which is fiction based on the article. I found some aspects of the article a little offputting (not the disability parts; mostly just some aspects of the way he talks about the surrogate, whose permission to publish this I hope he had), but overall I found it interesting and worth reading.<\/p>\n

Which is fairly similar to the reaction I had to an otherwise unrelated article in the Awl<\/cite> the other day misleadingly titled “Maybe Sex Is the Least Fun Thing Two People Can Do<\/a>,” about a woman who doesn't “experience a lot of extreme physical pleasure”; she enjoys flirting and more or less enjoys sex, but sex isn't a big deal for her, and that doesn't bother her. I suspect that that's more common than this interview makes it sound. I was a little put off by some of the overgeneralizations and odd remarks about various groups of people and approaches (asexuals, “Eastern sexuality,” etc), but I nonetheless found the discussion interesting.<\/p>\n

And the reason I'm putting these two links in a single post is that I think they make interesting data points in a broad constellation of approaches to sexuality; I think the thing that I see in their juxtaposition is yet more evidence that sexuality is varied and complicated, that people have a lot of different things they want and ways of wanting those things. I dunno, maybe that isn't entirely relevant to these pieces, but it made sense in my head.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1990, poet Mark O’Brien (who had polio) published an essay titled “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate.” I just read…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}