Success for gay Airforce officer

Success in a federal appeals court today as Airforce Maj. Margaret Witt was given permission to continue her lawsuit against the military for discharging her, after 20 years of service, for having a relationship with another woman.

Oh sexuality, how we ignore you and use you and spit in your face!

This week’s New York Times Magazine article, “The Affairs of Men: The trouble with sex and marriage,” which, by relating to the Eliot Spitzer scandal, begins a defense of an inherent need for men to fuck lots of women, misses the mark big time.

I was actually trying to post the following as a comment on the Huffington Post’s “The Secret Lives of Married Men,” which brings together a number of other people talking about the same topic, therefore also missing the mark, but was having trouble getting into my account there.

Talking about married men’s “natural” need or undeniable urge for sex with multiple women is like talking about blood’s “need” to run out of a neglected wound. Sure, perhaps hypothetical dude #1 genuinely feels an undeniable urge to fuck a woman or two besides his wife, but I would gander that that there is a hypothetical dude #2 out there somewhere in the same situation who could stop that “bleeding” if he changed his job, spent more time relaxing, dropped his desire to become wealthier and more important, took some yoga classes, or read some Eckhart Tolle. Bad relationships and obsessions with sex are symptoms of a society that needs a lot of healing.

Sex and sexuality is rampantly used as currency, used for emotional comfort, used to gain power. The very obsession with sex and sex by men with multiple female partners is largely due to a cultural obsession with sex as a fix-all, and as something that helps us feel in control. Orgasms are like taking a drug—one that relaxes and destresses and just plain feels good.

Sex and sexuality, desire, and flirting, these are natural, they don’t have to be bad. Unfortunately the way it is expressed—from abstinence education to boys-will-be-boys—in the world today is really pathetic. How big are our brains, again? Are we this collectively out of touch with our bodies and minds?

Further, it is a shame (and almost insulting) that the Huffington Post article is called “The Secret Lives of Married Men,” because it cuts off the possibility of the conversation going into the deeper complexities of this issue—it ignores and invalidates the fact that just as many women are unhappy in their lives and marriages AND sex lives, and skips right to the assumption that the behavior of cheating or polyamorous men is justifiable because their unhappiness is more important or somehow distinctly different from women’s. It is also insulting to men because it assumes that men are one-dimensional, that more “strange” sex will actually make them happier and more content. Another commenter on the Huffington Post article made a good point:

“Men and women are attacked daily with advertizing that uses sex as a weapon to get our money. Growing up with this constant barrage of sex and the sense that sex and wealth are the end result of all great accomplishments.
At one time men and women had sex when their lifes were good and they felt good about life in general. Today sex is promoted as a cure all from depression to heart disease.

Maybe the guys are trying to heal themseves like many women!”

Phillip Weiss, the author of that NYT article, outed himself as having major emotional problems more than anything else he tried to express.

The point that Esther Perel makes (in the Huffington Post article) is a good one: that couples are unfaithful in so many other ways that are just as hurtful as sexual infidelity. This is not proof that polyamory is right, however, instead it is evidence that having a lot of sex just isn’t all that important to a healthy, full, happy relationship.

Unfortunately, we are a sex-obsessed world, so we treat sex-obsessed urges and addictions as their own rational behaviors instead of as symptoms—indicators that other things are wrong in our lives.

One gimmick at a time please

Just in case you get so drunk that the song Thriller and a platoon of dancing lizards doesn’t catch your attention, this Super Bowl ‘08 commercial for Sobe Life Water features a third gimmick——a ridiculously out-of-place leggy lady. WTF?