The Archipelago of Desire

[vinnie_tesla]

When I first became interested in sex, I was instinctively very secretive about it. I didn't talk about it to my friends, to my parents, to anybody. I snuck into my father's Playboy collection, I hit the sexuality section of my middle school library (yay, liberal private school!), I rifled through the racier novels on my parent's bookshelves, and I

Comments

[laurenpburka]

I think maybe you don't need to over-intellectualize your own sexual preferences. I also think that most people don't 'espouse' any sexuality, they just have one and they haven't thought about it much. On the other hand, there have been Fat Fanciers clubs for ages, where fat womean and men who love them meet up and in some cases live happily ever after together. Perhaps the men went through some minor angst over preferences that were not the same as their peers', but then most of them probably got over it and got to work wooing the women they found attractive.

[vinnie_tesla]

Y'know, I went to change the wording of 'espouse,' but when I looked it up, everyone gave "to take as one's own" or "to give loyalty to" as the primary meaning. It does seem to be drifting towards 'to advocate' but for the moment I think it fits my intent all right.

The discussion of my own tastes was meant to be an example, rather than the point of the piece. In general, I think people writing about sex are way too ready to pronounce and generalize without explicitly grounding it in personal experience.

I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that people who are comfortable with their own sexualities are extraordinary, or even rare. But, to draw on the example that you gave, the fat lovers I've had have generally had stories of all the guys they're encountered who are happy to fuck a fat chick, but would never date one.

[mme_louise]

I think maybe you don't need to over-intellectualize your own sexual preferences.

Snrk. I think maybe that if you don't like reading this sort of thing, you might be in the wrong blog.

I also think that most people don't 'espouse' any sexuality, they just have one and they haven't thought about it much.I think you're wrong in the first phrase and right in the second. Most people of my acquaintance tend to claim a "type" of person they are attracted to. The type can be as broad as a sex, e.g. my sister's "I just don't do women." Or, it can be the somewhat quirkier statement made by one of my partners-once-removed: "I don't do short-haired-breeder-boys." In both cases, the statement of type is, in my opinion, as much about claiming participation in a social subgroup as it is about saying something about who they tend to be attracted to

[tomato_sutra]

I've been chewing on a similar question lately as well -- namely that of how deep the tribal instinct really runs for most people, and not just in sexuality. I wonder how significant that sort of social glue really is in this time and place, and how much it's magnified by current events and sociopolitical climate