Are society’s ideas about sex shaping or even interfering with your sex life? Here is a podcast from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas series that explores this topic.
It is an hour long and is downloadable. It features American sexologist Leonore Tiefer talking about the medicalization of sex. (podcast here).
She suggests that sex has changed from an experience between two unique people interacting in their very own way with their very own wants and habits to a kind of urgent search for normalcy. She argues that pills like Viagra create a kind of standardization of sex even as they improve sexual function. And we know what standardization tends to bring: winners and losers. Can we increase stress in the bedroom a little more?! In my mind, is modern dating not fraught with enough room for failure and modern life not anonymous enough? In the podcast, Tiefer wisely asks: How is this stress on Performance affecting men? What does it mean to be a man in a sexual context?
I think she is onto something here. I wonder: what was sex like for people who didn’t have a lot of partners, very little access to media (perhaps even illiterate), and no real way of knowing what was ‘normal’? Probably more focused on what worked for that real partner over there instead of trying to divine what the ‘average woman’ or the ‘average man’ likes and to reshape oneself for this mythical partner.
It seems to me that even though lovemaking skills are important, we should all remember that each person is unique – male and female – and that there is no audience. It’s just you and your partner. Let’s get the notion of Performance out of the bedrooms!
No Comments Yet
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
