Christian Gregory:
> Apologies to you and Anthony. His claim, as he puts it, was that the left
> needs more openmindedness about sex, is pretty undefined. (Does that mean I'm
> supposed to want NAMBLA to show up at gay pride events? That I shouldn't
> support most of the misinformation that goes by the name of public "safe sex"
> discourse?) I'd be curious to know why you think the body as a site of
> pleasure excludes the possibility of regimentation and what good politics
> comes of that.
>
> Opening this can of worms . . .
My impression of the discussion thus far is that, insofar as there are two "parties", one believes that sex is (1) well and easily defined, and (2) generally just one big container of vanilla ice cream; and the other party that it, whatever it is, may be much more complicated and ambiguous than that.
Thus, for the first party, sex is good, prostitution is sex, and prostitution is therefore good, and therefore anyone who sees it as problematical is a repressive, incorrectly politically correct Puritan (even if they do not suggest suppressing prostitution), and is therefore bad. Whereas the correct view is that prostitution is a happy enterprise which ought to be institutionalized socially (the usual meaning of _legalization_, i.e. not just taken off the books, decriminalized, but recognized and regulated as well). This is considered "openmindedness" about sex.
However, being of another party, I see the gallon-of-vanilla view as repressive closed-mindedness, nearly totalitarian in its insistence that sex is well-defined and can properly be understood in only one way, that is, as a uniform, unalloyed good. It also seems sort of square and passé, something from the '70s; but maybe it's a case of everything old being new again, and it's I who am out of touch.
-- Gordon