America | Seeking Respectability in Sexlessness

Body|Beauty|Culture Writer Camille Paglia’s essay No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class offers up a view of American mainstream sexuality and respectability that resonates. A theme that resonates with us concerns the desexualization of gender in America, the elite notion and women and men are the same and not differences that attract. 

Anne was nearly run out of a conference a decade ago by a Berkeley women feminist cabal objecting to her position that male and female brains were different.

Our sex-saturated society suggests that time under the bed sheets is always on American minds, but that’s not so.  Camille Paglia argues that bourgeois respectability and a technocratic mentality has doused all flame of desire between the sexes in America. Only Asia’s New Age culture — think tantra — tries to keep it alive.  Read on at NYT. 

Anne is moving forward on her derailed manuscript focused on the health benefits of loving sex. Contribute to her work with your comments and thoughts: Anne’s Health Benefits of Sex Book. 

Update on Wed, June 30, 2010 by Anne

There are moments when we realize that AOC exists miles apart from the Jezebel ladies, who convert this piece into a racist tome against nonwhite women, rather than give an ounce of cred to Camille Paglia’s arguments about repressed white sexuality. Sorry — it is repressed. 

Factually-speaking, Victoria’s Secret does have a huge nonwhite customer base — just for the record. And factually-speaking, African Americans have more sex here in America.

In America, it’s unfashionable to read a piece without to see if we can learn anything from the writer. Like Glenn Beck, we just lather our own list of pet isms onto every document in sight and then we wonder why we can’t move forward as a society, in any conherent fashion.