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From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Ramblings on Space
Message-ID: <1693@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Jan-84 14:04:57 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1693
Posted: Mon Jan 23 14:04:57 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Jan-84 15:31:20 EST
References: <295@houxu.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 58

Larry, I caught something creeping in there which people may not have noticed.

This is the mythical 'sex makes all the difference in the world' syndrome.
The idea is 'well friends are friends, but sex, gee, wow that's something
really different'. I think that this is a particularily crummy attitude.

Sex is nice, and friends are nice, but friends are nicer! I have some friends.
Some of them I have had sex with, some of them I might have
sex with, and a lot of them I would never have sex with. It doesn't matter
to me as far as the friendship goes. 

If you think that sex is something wonderful that ties people together and
makes them special, then I think that you are doing your friends whom you
don't have  sex with a disservice. And boy will you do awful things in the
guilt-trip department if you expect some poor friend of yours to be
'very different now' just because you have had sex with them. If they didn't
know that this was the rules, they may have just lost a friendship because
you want something else, and if you don't watch it you will give them a
guilt trip to boot -- even if they can not figure out what the heck went
wrong.

This is another variation on the "sex is a prize that i give to my one
true love" story. If you want to play this game, fine, but let us all
know so that we can avoid you if we are not interested in this game. Don't
assume that we all think that this rule is just ducky, because it isn't.

Sex is great, and I enjoy it -- but awarding myself off as a prize doesn't
sit very well with me. Nobody "gives themself" to me -- this is a mutual
enjoyment pact, not a supermarket purchase. 

*	*	*

one final note -- if you really want to discourage the trama of rape
(and if one out of every four women is going to be raped, this strikes
me as a fine ideal) then fight this attitude wherever you see it. One
of the great problems with rape is not that a person "feels defiled"
or some such. This is a manifestation of the same attitude. You want
to "give yourself away" but now you feel like "damaged goods" which
nobody in their right mind would take.

this, dear, is your problem. YOU CAN NEVER GIVE YOURSELF AWAY. Nobody
can take you! People can try, and even try to be responsible for you,
but it is a loosing proposition. Tough as it is, you are stuck with
being responsible for yourself. You can try to abdicate this responsibility,
by blaming the world, or trying to get somebody else to take responsibility,
but it isn't going to work very well.

But, if you *are* responsible, then sex can not be a shedding of
responsibilities. The best you can do is a mutual enjoyment pact. 

Let's not play the double-cheat game of handing yourself as the sacred
bottle to your lover and then bitching that men are too "dominant", okay.
If you want to be the sacred flower-pot then the domination is there because
you asked for it.


Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura