Sex.

Now that I've got your attention...

I hardly ever post on here anymore, and I am thinking of scrapping the whole thing if/when I ever actually get a new website up, so this place has really become a place for random thoughts.  Since I didn't want to re-register at a site I browse just to leave comments that will get ridiculed, I figure I'd share some random thinkage here. 

I was reading a topic about a sexuality-related scandal and was reading the comments on it.  I came across someone's comment about how "sex is vital to a fully-lived human experience."  I suppose it was inevitable... such commentary annoys me, but it's so depressingly common - there are even TV Tropes named after people's thoughts along those lines ("Virgin on the Edge of Stupidity" and the like).  Plots of popular movies centered around people helping others to lose theirs...

... The only time I think I've ever seen a sentiment I agree with on this was that episode of Firefly in which Inara (a character who is a high-class prostitute for all zero of you who might be reading this who might be unfamiliar with the show) speaks to a young man client regarding virginity and non/virginity being "just states of being, nothing more" - not something to get excited about.  (The character's father had hired Inara to "make a man" out of his son and the young man was suprised at not feeling any different after the um... manhood ritual).  At the end of the episode, the young man did become a man by standing up to his father, but, even then, the show leaves it open as to whether the kid grew a backbone or if Sex was Magic and inspired him to do so. 

I wonder if our culture's obession with sex is the problem here.  On one hand, it creates people who are quick to condemn anyone who "steps out of line," people who've already "stepped out of line" and a WHOLE LOT of self-condmentation.

I remember the self-condemnation a friend of mine had as a teenager about getting pregnant by her boyfriend... I was really into church back then, so she kind of naturally assumed that I would condemn her.  When I found out she'd had a child I had so much emotion about it.  I felt hurt that she thought I would shun her, and the whole time she was shunning herself and turning away from former friends, I thought that she was avoidinng me because of my weirdness and my general unpopularity.  (At this point in my life, I was used to former friends "growing away from me" because of my introverted nerd-ways and the issues I had with my emotinal states that I didn't know at the time were signs of a disorder).  My friend didn't need to assume things and hide away from friends who could have supported her. 

And then you have these scandals like the one I just read about where a guy deperately tries to change himself for what he thinks is the better and is caught being a hypocrite being on services he's not "supposed" to be on, but just further condeming himself and others. 


The other side of the obession-coin, of course, is people telling the world at large and thus folks like *me* (I'm asexual and am happily, so far, an adult virgin) that I "don't live a fully-realized human existence."    Okay, so I understand the condemnation of straight up mentally-hilarious freaks like me, but what about the adult virgin who is so because they have some kind of severe learning disability? Or a physical problem with the "plumbing?"  Do *children* not live a fully-realized human existance if they happen to die before experiencing the mystical magical genital-tour? 

The time for stupid statements is over. 

Even for a freak like me (just lacking an apparently normal sex drive), I tend to persist in the folly of thinking of myself as a full-human.  (I probably ought to stop it, really.  Thanks to the Internet I've found out my "not-real-human-ness" and/or general human inferiority about a variety of issues).  Maybe the answer here is "You know, forcing or coercing someone to have sex when they don't really want to/aren't quite ready is, um... you know.. a word brought to you by the letter 'R."   

In any case, I don't think somene hasn't or doesn't live a fully-realized human life because they have yet to try sushi, or haven't stood on the shores of both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, or been to New York, or because they haven't seen the Grand Canyon.  These are all things I've done that I see, in my life, as "vital human experiences," - neat things that I've done.  Heck, the way some people are addicted to love, I've developed an addiction to salmon maki.  Brushes with death? I could say that those are a vital human experirence that makes you really feel alive and "truly human" - but I wouldn't wish my experiences with that on anyone (unless of course they were in some severe need of humbling or finding courage).   

I suppose if culture was as obessed with the consumption of raw fish, or visiting the edges of canyons, or narrowly surviving almost getting killed by the dangers of a farm, maybe people would obsess about the "exact right time and place" one is supposed to eat certain things, or people like me would be able to look down our noses at "harrowing-experience virgins," or something. 

Maybe we should all take a lesson from Inara - what goes on between your legs is just a state, nothing less and nothing more.  Even if there's a right time and place for it, it's not something that makes you less or more "human" than anyone else.  Frankly, my life is only pooer if I think it's poorer - and I don't - not for this particular reason.