Saturday, March 7, 2009

To those who question...

I’ve been getting a lot of criticism recently about the way I talk about sex here in this column. People have said that I should base my writings less on the physicality of sex and more on the feelings associated with the act of “making love.” Others have said that I am talking about things publicly that should be reserved for the bedroom or for late night conversations with girlfriends and Cosmo magazine.

When it comes to the emotions behind sex, I am neither an expert nor will I even try to understand the vast range of feelings that are associated with the act of copulation. When it comes to sex some people feel nothing. They have sex with whomever whenever and never think twice about it. For others, sex is less about the physical and more about the fact that for those few fleeting moments two people are becoming ONE. For those few moments, there is no denying that you are not alone.

I can’t even start talking about emotions because they are ambiguous, strange, strong, and no amount of science or research can give me enough data to make valid and general conclusions.

Conversely, the physical is easy. You stab someone with a knife and statistically that person is going to feel pain. You suck on the clitoral hood of a woman and statistically she is going to feel pleasure. I grace a man’s nipples and he gets hard: there, evidence, he is turned on, that felt GOOD. The physical can be studied, and with those studies data can be accumulated. The same cannot be said for feelings. I cannot tell you to experiment with feelings, but experimenting with the scrotum? Now THAT is easy to prescribe.

To the argument that these words I write (sex, cum, head, penis, perineum, etc) are vulgar and gross, I say to you get over it. For too long women and men have had to keep their sexual selves a secret. They have had to hide their relationships with their vaginas and penises and have had to learn the hard way that their bodies work.

There are children who get pregnant and do not know how it physically happened. There are women who go their ENTIRE LIVES without experiencing an orgasm just because they never had the nerve or the strength to ask for some advice. There are boys who wake up soaked in semen and feel so ashamed that they try not to sleep at night to prevent it from happening again.

I speak for the people who want to know but who are too afraid to ask. I speak for the people who write me the emails, who stop me on McAlister and whisper a question into my ear.

Women get raped and feel like they can never pleasure a man or be pleasured themselves ever again. After they deal with the trauma of being raped, they don’t know where to start again. They need a spark, a reminder that just because they were violated they aren’t dead sexually. They will feel sexual pleasure again; they just need to learn how.

If you want a reason as to why I write what I write, go see the Tulane University’s production of the Vagina Monologues this weekend. The show is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 7 pm in Freeman Auditorium. Go see it and you will understand why I cannot stop writing about vaginas. You will understand why owning your sexuality is just as important as wearing clothes that fit you right.

SO here I am, without a column in the newspaper and without anywhere to help people. So if you get this, deep down, find some questions, and email me at xxxxnoochxxxx@mac.com. I promise you that I will be there for you when no one else is, when you feel like you are strange, alone, or lost. I will help you find what you are looking for and I will answer those questions that you just can’t even begin to face. Trust me, okay? I will NEVER steer you wrong. Ever.