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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Once, Before Sex Was Post-Anything

filed under: Pomoerotic by Melissa Gira

Sexerati has been on summer vacation. Or, maybe, having a summer love affair. Since we aren’t Julia Allison, speculation of said possible affair won’t surface at Valleywag, though it’s not out of the question. For a few reasons. But actually, a Gawker property is partially to blame for our absence, though only barely. Writing or travel or sex are rarely enough reason for a blog slow-up. It’s drowning in theory that does it, every damn time.

So, for the meta-curious, what did we learn on our summer vacation, then? Here you are.

She said he could have a mistress, so long as she was brunette and postmodern.

Why on earth someone would privilege theoretical inclinations over beauty, availability, or even marriage is only part of the problem. The main thrust is that, does having a familiarity with Barthes make one a better lover?

A better talker, maybe.

Strangely enough, it has been by courting the idea of being a mistress, and ultimately, failing at it, that has given me a stronger need for sexual honesty, that which was supposed to be murdered by all the posts- of theory. But no — theory itself is what makes possible a truly rich, sexual honesty, that spans not just the practice of sex, but spills full into the world of ideas. The kind of sexual honesty that has me speaking to this blog like a confidante and lover.

So in the midst of this — caught between sex and theory and honesty — I picked a little fight for no sensible reason (there is no sense in an affair, even as it might be wildly methodical) with a colleague. “But does one need an understanding of Foucault to have a healthy sex life?” she asked.

(It wasn’t the first time someone had gone there.

Many years ago, at the near edge of the last boom, I acquired an investor, largely on the merits of my blog. He drove up half the country to come meet me at a cafe, sheaves of my journal under his arm — printed — to question me. Really, his funding was just a ruse for this act, I thought. He wants to know if I really believe all this critical rot.)

“I don’t know — I don’t think a healthy sex life is what I’m after here.”

Which sounds terrible, terrible — what happened to being sex-positive? — but listen.

Really, what shakes me to the core, makes me susceptible in all those ways those who once moralized against the novel pointed out, is a good story. Which is all theory is: a story to explain why things might be the way we experience them. All this fucking around in texts has only made me all the more devoted to understanding why and how this thing called “healthy sex” exists at all. Who decides what is healthy, or good, or — daresay — right? What institutions and individuals have a say in that? Who stands to profit from the constant redefinition of what “the right sex” is?

Or, rather, all this sex — theoretically - has made me certain that I do not want to be a pundit, but an intellectual.

Because truly, at the root of her discourse, what a pundit seeks from sex is profit. A pundit sees sex not as a field in itself, but a means to an end. A pundit will put herself in bed with whatever puts most spotlight on said bed.

And you know, or those of you who do know, that as a one-time whore, yes, there is a deep contradiction in my saying this — decrying sex punditry — at all.

Sexual thinking and thinking sex has existed for the past hundred years or so inside this tension: that though sex sells, rarely do people want to buy something that they don’t already believe in. That we have taken for granted that the open market is where sex is being produced, far more so than in our own bedrooms, and yet some still insist that sex is private, personal, or pure.

For now, I’m in favor of an impure, unpopular, and difficult sex.

And what I ask of you is to hold me to that.

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