About a week ago Youtube recommended something that I had actually seen a couple of years ago at an animation festival, so I decided to repost it for your enjoyment. Watching it again I almost choked to death on my tea at one point and remembered that I had, back in the day, almost choked to death on a Nib at the same point. I hope you do the same! Well, not choke, but you know what I mean. (Note: if this link doesn’t work I know who to blame. Because it doesn’t work in the preview y’all.)

So my friend LT, whom some of you know as a woman whose company you only need share for six minutes before hearing the word ‘vagina,’ just pitched a class idea to a local adult education place and was shot down with the lame excuse of it not being a ‘good fit.’ Her idea? A sex communication class. How couples can communicate about it to each other; how teachers can communicate about it to their students; how parents can communicate it to their kids. Many of us are shocked that the institute in question rejected her. I mean, they’re offering, what, sixth-sense classes, how to be more feminine classes, and they don’t want something many people actually need?

Now I’m not going to insist that everybody needs it. Case in point: a friend and I were talking today about premature ejaculation with a level of candour more usually reserved for weekly confession (“Forgive me, Father, for I have finished in fifteen seconds”), leading at one point to this exchange:

Me: (sighing happily) “And every now and then I’m so glad that I’m part of a generation that can talk about sex without totally freaking out.”
Friend: (totally freaking out) “Yeah.”

So what is it about sex, anyway? How come we’re OK with hearing about, say, child sex abuse cases from the 1930s but if a news station were to run a clip about the structure of the hymen, fifty thousand people would call in to complain? Why can’t you say ‘masturbation’ on TV? How come the mere mention of impotence makes people giggle? Why the double standard?

Here are some hymens for you:

Moving right along.

Let us never for one moment forget the noble origins of sex. Remember that you can only get so far with asexual reproduction. Because:
- Mutations in the genome accumulate very quickly in asexual reproduction, which is good for beneficial mutations, which would be awesome if they weren’t so vanishingly rare compared to deleterious ones.
- Which means that if you fuck up your DNA strand and divide, odds are you’ll both die horribly, not both become super-awesome-elite-squad mutants.
- Repair molecules can be helpful in this respect but if you happen to be a single-celled organism, there may not be room on your genome to code these.
- Especially not if you happen to not have genetic material organized into chromosomes, which of course evolved alongside sexual reproduction and have a system amongst themselves that very much resembles sex. But if you’re cloning yourself you likely don’t have them.
- So that sucks.
- For all y’all prion fans out there you can replace ‘genome’ with ‘shape’ and keep reading, I don’t want to leave you out.

Sexual reproduction is more gooder! Because you can introduce variation so fast it’s crezzy. You can swap entire traits, hell, entire genomes, and not only that, but introduce selection pressure (for both traits and mates, as they say) which further accelerates the rate of beneficial introduced variability! So who’s doing this more gooder thing, you ask?

Lots of bacteria do it with plasmids and sex pili:

Lots of fungi do it through the air:

Lots of amphibians do it through the water:

Of course, plenty of critters prefer the more personal touch, even if it involves being extremely extremely careful:

All I’m saying is, don’t let the views of your Catholic teachers, Fox News, Cosmo magazine, your maiden aunt, your favourite porn star, or that creepy guy on the corner distract you from the fact that there is genetic material lurking deep inside your items, and it evolved there for a plethora of wonderful reasons.

I think the reason nobody can talk about sex openly is because the same thing happened to sex that happened to the god in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Small Gods.’

Sex is just sex, a simple little sticky process to advance the species, but a temple builds up around it – shame, fear, pressure, condoms, hormones, medical vibrators, ‘hysteria,’ psychology, women’s studies, pony play, fetishes, paraphilias, spectrums (spectra?), lingerie, lubes, soft-core, hard-core, what on earth is my spam filter going to think about this post, domination, masochism, romance novels, social norms, viagra, ben-wa balls, everything else about sex you always wanted to know and then the intertube told you, and finally the temple gets so huge that it’s all anyone can see… and the god, deep inside, quietly dies. But no one notices; how can they, with this edifice in the way?

I think the main considerations when communicating about it are a) that we’ve forgotten about the god inside the temple, and b) our natural reticence about another deity, also known as privacy. Because sex involves bodies (no ‘Demolition Man’ references here, please), and your body is the first thing that you come to realize that you own outright and no one else has any claim on it whatsoever, the two concepts become inextricably entwined and slightly confused. Like such:

My body is mine and is my business; what I choose to share about it, or reveal about it visually, is my choice, except by accident when stuff comes flying out of stuff that’s too tight whilst in a vigorous conga line, but that’s quite another post. Just as an example, on this blog, I’ve occasionally chosen to discuss my bum, my lungs, my skull, and my heart.

Thus by extension, your body is yours and is your business, and we can talk about sex in the abstract as much as we like until you feel that it’s becoming personal, and I think for some people that line is blurrier than others. They may be asked, “So what do you think about the ages of consent in Alberta?” and hear instead “Why you godawful little spraddle-legged monstrosity, what were you thinking doing it in high school? I bet everybody in the city was laughing at you behind your back.” A clinical discussion about the effectiveness of impotence aids becomes “Oi you, Floppy McFlopperson, does your wife cry herself to sleep every night?” It is a short step from what we think about sex to what we think about ourselves, regardless of how many times LT or I tell you, with all the love in the world, “Listen to me, who you bone is not who you are.” Because, you know, it isn’t, but it is part of who you are. Part of your identity is and must be your sexual identity. And that’s why there’s a certain amount of withholdingness about sex.

Readers, thoughts? Who do you feel most comfortable talking about sex with? Did your parents give you ‘the talk’ or did they have a series of talks while you grew up? Where do you get most of your sexual information from now? Is it the internet? Is it your spouse? Fiction, non-fiction? Oprah? Do you freak out inside when you talk about it, or only certain subjects?

The other day I thought I had a PROFOUND THOUGHT about the meaning of life and the boundaries of my concept of ‘self.’ So I wrote it down, and it turned into a list (78 items and still going) of things that, through the years, I have realized about myself usually during periods of ordeal rather than reflection. I have provisionally entitled this document USEFUL AND/OR TRIVIAL THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT ME. Maybe in the future I’ll e-mail the list to blind dates so they can call things off before it gets awkward. Anyway, there you have it.

One of the items:
13. I do a lot of my thinking in movie quotes.

Another:
20. I have an awful lot of books about the Third Reich side of things and very few about the Holocaust.

And yet another:
48. I think I might have a parking phobia. Or just a parkade phobia. Or just a CONCRETE POLE PHOBIA OMFG.

For those as yet unaware, I now use my old man’s old ride, which is this:

And I also have one of these, which came with my condo:

So I have to insert a 1998 Honda Accord into a spot in an underground parkade, which sounds pretty simple and millions of people do it every day, and I’ve been doing it every now and then since November, and my nerves are SHOT PEOPLE. ABSOLUTELY SHOT. There’s a concrete pole on the right-hand side of my space that eats about six inches of my available space and I have had nightmares about it. Nightmares! I have woken up screaming apologies to my father after scraping all the paint off the passenger side, which hasn’t happened in real life, but IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. Somebody please shoot me. Or buy me a Smart Car.

Anyhoodle, the relevance of this anecdote (I’m working up to something here, I promise) is that coming home, contrary to the majority view, is actually the worst part of my day. Also turning left. Or reversing. Or when it’s dark. Or if I have to change lanes, or merge onto the highway, or pull in close enough to the pump to actually get gas. Or if there’s a large truck on any side of me. Or if I see deer on the side of the highway. Um, essentially, the only time I’m not in a cold sweat behind the wheel is when the car is pointed forwards, there’s no other traffic, and it’s broad daylight.

I’m also ridiculously distractible on the road. Like, if a car I like goes by on the other side of a divided highway, I can’t stop my head from whipping around. Same with people walking their dogs, construction sites (I love construction sites), funny-looking clouds, etc, etc. Radio ads can send me straight into the rumble strips. And I don’t even have to answer my celphone for it to nearly kill me; on Friday, it rang and I almost went into the ditch.

My main mitigation strategy is to try to make the car a distraction-free zone so I can better cope with the outside distractions, and a major part of the strategy is listening to CBC Radio. On the way home they play some terrific stuff, Rich Terfry hosts and it’s just awesome, and often very soothing. This is one they’ve had in heavy rotation over the past couple of months and it just calms me instantly. I am pretty sure it has saved my life a couple of times.

I hadn’t seen the video till tonight and I’m so glad I looked it up. Because:
1. I love it when my mental image of an artist matches what they actually look like. Isn’t Vanessa da Mata gorgeous? That’s exactly what I assumed she looked like from her voice.
2. Ben Harper is cool and a lot of his stuff really speaks to me. ‘Glory and Consequence’ is the first song that my mental radio plays whenever I’m in a tight spot.
3. It also makes me happy that the title of the song means ‘good luck.’
4. Because when I first heard the title, I assumed it was spelled ‘Boa Sortie’ and was about a group of villagers going out to hunt boa constrictors.
5. Thereby making what my ancestors did in the old country Anaconda Sorties.