Sex, Defined

Whatever they pay Emily Nagoski to be a sex educator, it’s not enough.

She starts with a definition: sex is “an evolutionarily adaptive reproduction strategy involving the recombination of two individuals’ genes.”

Friends, and I’m telling you straight: present that definition to me and I WOULD NOT CLICK THE LINK. Fuck no. Boring city.

But she unpacks it, explains it, walks it through gametes and peafowl and Alfred Kinsey and busy bonobo apes and her own beloved twin sister until she’s completely explained it, not only how that dry biology definition is sex, but why it’s the definition that explains not only romantic love but also every kind of kink you ever heard of:

And thus humans come with our ball gags, golden showers, foot fetishes, Catholic school girl fantasies, whips, cages, breath play, sensation play, group sex, monogamy, polygymy, polyandry, jealousy, gays and lesbians and bisexuals and asexuals and queer folks and folks who don’t claim any identity and transfolks, and LOVE ITSELF — and also assault, abuse, rape, pedophilia, and wide and daunting array of harmful uses to which we put sex, all the dazzling and heartbreaking variety we witness in humanity — vast, limitless. As Kinsey said, “The only unnatural sex act is one you can not perform.”

It’s the joyful work of a skilled professional. You really ought to go go see.

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Condemning The Very Idea Of Sex As Sin

Sometimes I worry that the intellectual tradition of the good internet rant is falling out of favor. Oh, the stupid and noisy ranters on television will be with us always — but the finest thoughtful internet rants seem to grow increasingly rare.

A couple of weeks ago, though, Emily Nagoski delivered a barnstormer, on why it is not (and should not be) respectable to conflate sex and sin:

Believing that gay people are going to hell gives a cultural purchase to hatred and violence. Like a little bump on a rock where over years barnacles accumulate, the idea of sex as sin is a foothold for discrimination, bullying, harassment, and violence.

That’s just the tiniest taste of an epic and righteous rant. Like all good rants, it’s a one-piece; I can’t snip three paragraphs without doing horrid violence to the art form.

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