Man it is so hard for me to find anything recognizeable here - this panopticon of judges who determine whether you’re ’allowed’ to experience pleasure sounds like superstition and rumor, or at the very least paranoia in the head of one slightly sexually repressed person.
> The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.
I don’t see myself in this passage at all. My husband and I had sex this morning and I didn’t waste a moment thinking about this supposed panopticon of sexual surveillance that the author casually assumes is somehow omnipresent in ‘our’ lives.
Where is she getting this from??
How do her experiences so completely fail to line up with my own? Is this her own mental health issue? Is it the friends she chooses to surround herself with, or the content she chooses to consume?
It’s all very strange and impossible to relate to. I can’t remember the last time I felt like anyone else had anything to say about my sex life, at the very least anything that wasn’t generally positive / supportive.
> The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.
I don’t see myself in this passage at all. My husband and I had sex this morning and I didn’t waste a moment thinking about this supposed panopticon of sexual surveillance that the author casually assumes is somehow omnipresent in ‘our’ lives.
Where is she getting this from??
How do her experiences so completely fail to line up with my own? Is this her own mental health issue? Is it the friends she chooses to surround herself with, or the content she chooses to consume?
It’s all very strange and impossible to relate to. I can’t remember the last time I felt like anyone else had anything to say about my sex life, at the very least anything that wasn’t generally positive / supportive.