Sunday, July 23, 2017

I Have A (Wet) Dream

                There had been some discovered sexual impropriety by a member of the extended family, and as you may imagine, it came up as a topic of conversation.  She turned to me and said didn’t you work with sexual offenders for seven years?  Yes, I affirmed that I had.  Well what do you think about this behavior and what can be done about it?  Not much was the short answer. 
                First, infidelity is not illegal and extremely common.  His sexual choices were with women over 18 and there was no perversion that would be defined as illegal, or even risqué. 
So, she lamented, there is really nothing that can be done for a person who constantly cheats on his wife?  There is no way to change him? 
The changes regarding sexual attitudes in this country aren’t going to be made by changing one man.  They must be made on a societal level.  That conversation is not a short one.
                Why not, she wanted to know?  I thought that you would have some answers since you worked with sexual offenders for several years.  What did you do to cure them? 
Nothing cures a person’s sexual preferences and that is my point.  There will always be people with deviant sexual attractions, just as there will always be people who own guns who shoot other people.  Prevention and how, we as a society, approach the topic of sex are the only things that really make any difference.  There is no way to cure one individual sexual predator or sexual deviant because the sex drive is innate.  As it must be for the promulgation of the species, any species.  If you want to protect the innocent or affect the behavior of sexual deviants, society, as a whole, needs a different approach to the topic of sex than we currently have.  That is not going to be easy to do because there is so much information that needs to be communicated just to get a basic foundation on the topic. 
                Imagine it like this, you are an accountant and I know the basics of what an accountant does, but if I wanted you to tell me all about accounting so I could do it myself that would take a long time.  Yeah it would, she said, I would suggest that you go to school and get an accounting degree.  That’s my point exactly.  To understand what goes into changing or preventing deviant sexual choices there is a lot that needs to be covered.  But it’s easy for me to grasp that I’m not an accountant and I wouldn’t understand everything that goes into it.  Sex, however, is a different story.  Everyone in this room is sexually active and few people will admit that they are going to need years of serious academic study on the subject.  This is because we are a sex saturated society.  There are no beer commercials that state, “Sharpen your pencils, because after a few Coors lights you are going to pay much closer attention to detail and be better at math.”  Beer commercials, most commercials for that matter, know that sex sells. So, there are beer commercials in which a woman, defined as beautiful, walks into the room in her underwear/swimsuit and goes to the fridge to get a cold Coors light off the bottom self.  Bending over at the waist of course.  And she stands up and turns to the camera with hard nipples and says, “If the mountains are blue boys, your balls won’t be, because Coors light makes me so horny!” 
                That is as laughable as the accounting commercial, except nobody laughs.  Instead, lots of guys think, I’ll drink me some Coors light and then be able to have sex with an attractive stranger.  Or something along those lines, all relating (insert product here) to heightened sexual prowess. The point being that you cannot retroactively deal with someone’s sexual deviance, in other words, you cannot unfuck this situation, literally. 
                The only way to deal with the problem of sexual deviance, large or small, in our society is for society as a whole to embrace a movement that changes the way we think, talk and act as sexual beings. We need a Martin Luther King Jr. of sexual reformation to be giving a well-attended and publicized speech on the Mall in Washington D.C. that says,
                (in MLK’s speaking cadence)
                I have a dream!
                That I have a hardon,
                And it’s not as bad as it seems!
                I have a dream!
                That one day I will be judged,
                Not by the density, duration, and distance of my pecker!
                But by how I use it in a sexually appropriate context!
                I have a dream!
                That women will be judged by the beauty of their character,
                Not by the curve of their booty!
                I have a dream!                
                That we will one day peddle our products,
                Not by the pedophiliac sexualization of enteral youth!
                But by their utility for the society that utilizes them!
                I have a dream!
                That will we define what is profitable,
                Not by what elongates the shadow of our miniscule, inconsequential, individual egos!
                But by what promotes Liberty for all and does not pervert justice as a privilege for the few!
                I have a dream!
                But then I wake up and none of that shit is actually happening.  It’s going to be a long road to get there.  We are in the infantile stages of recognizing and granting all persons their inalienable rights on topics concerning sex. 
                What about the LGBTQ movement and the fact that gay marriage has been legalized?  Isn’t that a lot of progress on changing how we discuss the topic of sex in this country, she queered?
                The legalization of gay marriage and the LGBTQ movement are the embryotic stages of the reformation that needs to occur concerning how this society addresses sex.  The path that history had to take to get to MLK’s I Have a Dream speech started with the beginnings of the abolitionist movement in the 1700’s.  To get from there to the Civil Rights march on Washington in 1963 you had to have a lot of things occur throughout history. 
                You had to have the rise of the abolitionist movement that prompted the Northern states to outlaw slavery.  You had to have the Unites States pass a law outlawing the importing of newly captured Africans to be sold as slaves throughout the country.  You had to have Nat Turner’s rebellion and John Brown’s uprising.  You have to have Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad.  You had to have the Civil Fucking War.  The Emancipation Proclamation.  You had to have the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution.  You had to have Fredrick Douglas, the Dredd Scott decision, the race riots in St. Louis, Jim Crow laws.  You had to have W.E.B DuBois, Marcus Garvey and the rise of the nation of Islam.  You had to have WWI and WWII.  All of these things and many more paved the way for the march on Washington in 1963.  And the fight was far from over.
                Future generations will ask their history teachers, “Did people really discriminate because of genitals?”  That teacher will answer, “it was a backward time with a lot of backward thinking.  The high electrified dark ages.” 
                In order to get to a point where we actually address all the harm that is done in our society by the way we address the topic of sex, and there is much, will need to come to a radical new way of thinking about the topic. 
                That won’t happen in this country, she stated.  There are too many religious people who feel too strongly on the subject and they have their holy books to back them up.
                That was the same thing that was said about the abolitionist movement.  Many preachers, in fact most preachers, preached from the pulpit, quoting scriptures about the virtues and God giving blessing of own slaves.  Those holy books tell a story of time when slavery was a common practice among almost all civilized peoples.  Even Jesus said slaves should abbey their masters.  There are way more Biblical justifications in support of slavery than there are in opposition to same sex sexual acts.  Yet, no preacher I know of today stands in the pulpit and gives God’s blessing on the act of one human being owning other human beings.  The people adjusted to new way of thinking about their holy books and they will again.  And they should. 
                Well where and how does this reformation you speak of get started, she asked? 
                It already has but there will be a long fight before things are put right.
                How do we go about making a difference now?  Do we just say, fuck it, that isn’t happening yet and there is nothing we can do?

                Hell no, be part of the solution.  Examine, openly and honestly your options and beliefs about sex.  Be willing to challenge them and be willing to learn.  Don’t do this in isolation.  It doesn’t work that way.  Engage those around on the topic.  That’s how any difference, ever, has been made.  

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