Scrawled in Wax

Of all the many contradictions of modern North America, few are confusing – and yet emblematic – as the double-standards that surround female sexuality. That we live in a world in which the image of sex and sexuality – gestures towards a salacious something – saturate everything is, I suppose, to be expected. If capitalism works by beckoning us not only to enjoy, but to indulge our desires – whether for an iPhone or a threesome – it’s unsurprising that bodies on display and double-entendre are to be found everywhere, particularly when we consider that the 20th century was one long, yawning awakening from the repression and misogyny of Victorianism.

So this we know. There is a reason that the newest, hottest technology is referred to as ‘sexy’. It certainly feels there is a case to be made that our big economic engine runs on libidinal desires as much as it does oil.

Less expected though – at least from my unabashedly naive perspective – are the constraints still placed around the female expression of sex. Yes I know, it seems almost cliche to complain about the ‘he’s a stud/she’s a slut’ dichotomy – but that the disparity is so entrenched in our culture does little to make it less baffling.

So, two pieces today caught my eye, largely because they seemed to challenge the hypocrisy so forcefully – because very simple expressions can, even now, seem vaguely revelatory.

The first is called “My Sluthood, Myself“, in which writer Jaclyn Friedman argues for the redemptive power of, well, sluttiness:

Because sluthood isn’t an action, it’s a state of mind.I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me. Sluthood gave me the time and space to nurse a shattered heart. It gave me a place where I could exist in pieces, some of me craving touch, some of me still too tender to even expose to the light. Sluthood healed the part of me that felt my body and my desires were grotesque after two years in a libido-mismatched partnership. Now I felt hot, wanted, powerful. My desire and enthusiasm was an asset, not an unintended weapon. Even now, with more time passed, now, when I am actually ready for and wanting a more emotional connection, sluthood keeps me centered. It keeps me from confusing desire and affection with something deeper. It means I have another choice besides celibacy and settling. It means I won’t enter another committed relationship just to satisfy my basic need for sex and affection. It gives me more choices, it makes room for relationships to evolve organically, to take the shape they will before anyone defines them.

It also contains the best Jane Eyre reference I’ve read… well, ever.

The other is Part 11 of a longer series simply called “The Whore Journals”, which recounts the experiences of a sophisticated, educated woman who decides she wants to make a living by being paid to fuck. It sounds like it would be deliberately titillating – and perhaps it is – but it’s also genuinely interesting because of what it reveals about this thing that is so often thought of as simultaneously sacred and profane: that instead, it is just as much captured by the dichotomy of the ecstatic and the mundane.