Reflecting upon the some of the Rubin concepts and thinking about what Professor Halberstram discussed in lecture I wanted to use this blog to consider the fear and taboo surrounding sex.
What about it makes people so scared?
We go to extremely contradictory measures to sell everything using sex but actively sweep it under the rug in the rest of our lives. It's become the elephant in the room that never leaves. Yet I must contextualize this as a characteristic of the West and America particularly is more squeamish than it's European counterparts. Why?
I am also reading the novel 1984 now and its representation of sex and how it's controlled illustrates Professors point that examining how sex functions within a society says a lot about the quality of life. In the book's totalitarian dystopian future, the citizens have been conditioned to find no pleasure in sex and only commit the act as "duty" to the country so that they can reproduce more workers. The main character Winston describes any form of intimacy with his wife as completely devoid of any form of pleasure. There are also youth groups that promote female chastity and celibacy for life. It's just interesting to think about the lengths taken to control female sexuality in different cultures and eras and then to imagine it to the extreme. Its also intriguing yet scary to think that something as natural as sexual desires being avoided at all costs. It all corresponds to what I see as one of the main underlying theses of the class: what you thought was inevitable and fixed is truly arbitrary and deeply malleable.
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