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Sparkle (4)
I write because people scare me. Talking to people makes me nervous, speaking in front of thousands of people, terrified. I write about sex because it matters to me. Not the act, but the freedom. I was raised by a gay dad. I am a rape survivor. It took me well into my 30's to figure out how I like sex, and damned near 40 before I really went for it.
But talking about sex, in front of thousands, for one of the most venerable conferences there is? You have to be kidding! But I did it. And it was great. The most gratifying thing, however, was the audience response.
People I didn't know were thanking me. Not congratulating me, but thanking me. Thanking me for giving them permission to be honest about their sexuality with themselves, maybe their partners. For telling them -- and everyone -- that there is nothing to be ashamed of.
At the end of this video you'll see people participating in a survey, which was my favorite part. I'm still collecting answers, and will write up what I learn shortly. But I can tell you this: we are all a bit kinky and all a bit less than satisfied.
The following is a transcript from the video:
I have the least revolutionary idea that you're going to hear all day. That is that you and you and you and you are allowed to have sex exactly the way you want to, as often as you want to, and it's up to the rest of us to make sure that you know that. Right? That's not a bad way to end the day. And it's a perfect time in our history to have that conversation now that we finally got rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
I had to think of what the opposite of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is. It's ask and tell. So now that we understand that it's okay if the soldier fighting next to us is having gay sex, it's time to ask ourselves if it's okay that the neighbor living next door to us is getting tied up and spanked in a little girl's dress every night. And the answer is it is okay because it has no impact on you whatsoever, because what they're doing is a consensual act between adults and unless you're doing it with them, it does not matter to you.
But we have to get back to a very simple question: what is sex? Sex is a consensual act between adults. And that is all that is. If you look at this picture right here, that's a temple, like a thousand years ago in India and that is not monogamous and it's probably not heterosexual. As long as people have been having sex, they've been doing it in wild and creative ways and they often even call it art. Sex is a consensual act between adults. It is intimate, it is personal, and it is totally natural.
So why do we have all the shame around it? I think the first thing is to understand what shame is, and to do that, we need to separate it from guilt. Guilt is an internal voice inside your body that pops up when you know you have done something wrong to someone: "I told a lie -- I feel guilty about that. I did something bad."
Shame is an external force that people put on you. It tells you that you are something bad. So it's not "I told a lie and did something bad," it's "I'm gay, I am bad." That's a really debilitating idea. That takes away your autonomous control over your sexuality. And anybody who wants to take your autonomous control over your sexuality does not have your best interest at heart, whether it's your preacher, your teacher, your lover, or anyone else. That's not natural.
But what does shame do to people? Why does this even matter? If you can turn on the news and see gay kids jumping off of bridges because they're ashamed to be gay, you know that this matters. In fact, there is a lot of research about the impact of sexual shame on gay and lesbian people. Unfortunately it's all about gay and lesbian people because we don't research shame with heterosexuals too much.
If you look at the statistics, youth between the ages of 21 and 25 are eight times more likely to commit suicide if they
