A while ago I wrote an article about how perplexed I was by strong reactions to Aella, an online personality and sex worker who evokes disgust from many conservatives through her open discussions of sexuality and her sex life.
No game of soccer ever resulted in a brand new, helpless, dependent human. Soccer between adults and minors is unobjectionable. Badgering someone into a game of soccer with you is annoying, but not damaging. If an invading army herded us into camps and forced us to play soccer, we’d count ourselves lucky. We have no evolved set of behaviors to protect us from the disease risks of unprotected soccer.
If soccer lacks most of the morally and emotionally relevant features of sex, how can the analogy help us reason about sex?
I came here to say this. It's impossible to understand conservative moral objections to Aella's conduct without understanding that the people making them view the ultimate purpose of sex as the generation of new human lives. With a view of sex as consenting-adult-recreation, of course it won't make sense.
You don't even have to be a conservative to find the soccer analogy misleading and unhelpful. There are plenty of feminist objections as well.
Could food be a better analogy than soccer? Hunger is a primal drive, and food perpetuates life. We have evolved behaviors to protect us from spoiled or poisonous foods. There is extreme cultural variation in foodways, which we learn at mama's knee. Foreign or taboo behavior around food triggers our disgust reaction, even when it has no obvious moral dimension.
I think we can understand the disgust even without procreation as part of it.
Sex for most people is an act of intimacy, it's a way to become emotionally closer to someone. Sex with multiple random strangers doesn't do that. It's the difference between a gourmet dinner with your spouse and greasy takeout when you're drunk at 3am.
To the extent that soccer is a casual fun pickup game in the park with no strong emotional salience, it’s not very much like sex. To the extent that soccer is a risky, high-stakes activity of such emotional salience that it may cause riots - more like sex - we have many social and legal guard rails in place to regulate it.
It’s unobjectionable, in and of itself, for kids to play soccer with adults. But it is, as you point out, risky for larger, stronger people to play against smaller, weaker people who may get injured. So most kids play in leagues that sort them into age or ability groups to ensure they’re evenly matched.
We used to formally organize sockhops and mixers and such to ensure that dating also happened in this lightly supervised way, but then people said to stop being so uptight because sex is no big deal.
Hmm. Practically every social activity results in risks and harms. Soccer certainly does. Just off the top of my head: injuries, both acute and chronic; alcohol abuse; betting abuse; domestic violence; sexual violence (eg by players on fans and WAGs etc); riots and violence before, during and after games; soccer is used to shame and belittle others, for playing it and not playing it, for playing it poorly; etc. And adults playing soccer with minors can absolutely be objectionable, not least because if a 25 year old tackles into a 12 year old too hard, the 12 year is at great risk of being seriously injured. The analogy is by no means exact, but it’s not so bad as you make out.
Aella is totally right to enjoy sex in whatever way she pleases. She also seems to have found a way to play the social media engagement game, by making "outrageous and controversial posts" that drive engagement, while at the same time actually being in the right, and not needing to make up lies to get clicks. Seems like a win win (assuming the constant negativity doesn't get her down).
Perhaps the soccer analogy holds well enough for gay men, who are having exclusively non-reproductive sex with their physical equals. However, 98% of the world is straight and that makes sex an entirely different ballgame. We have evolved behaviors and developed social norms to address the risks inherent to heterosexual sex. For most of human history, women who had sex with men were, at best, going to be unable to procure resources unassisted, run, or defend themselves for about two years, and at worst, risked death. Women being more selective about the circumstances under which they will take these risks is not a problem to be solved or a product of Puritanism, it’s extremely adaptive behavior. 70 years of the Pill doesn’t undo it, nor is it clear to me that it would be to anyone’s benefit to do so. It’s actually good and fine to not potentially have a baby with anyone with whom you’d play a pickup game of soccer. We certainly shouldn’t stone Aella in the town square, but it’s normal to have a disgust response to an objectively maladaptive behavior.
I think I am understanding your views in the ways you mean them. I am not shocked, horrified or disgusted by what you wrote. It is simply that in my life I think, feel and act differently than what you describe. I am fine being me and you being you. Daniel
I can't remember where I first learned about this, but the idea is that straight people tend to think of sex as a a sort of object that a woman has. She is lesser for having given her sex to a man, who is the greater for having taken it from her. It frames sex as a zero sum game where a woman always loses, and thus should be ashamed for broadcasting her trauma, which could be the only possible reason she'd be willing to give it up so shamefully. For a man, he is getting a lesser object if it has been used before and certainly if it's being shared among several men in the same situation.
I've come to see that sex is something that is located between the man and the woman, and is something they create together. It's artwork she and I can enjoy creating together, and can appreciate afterward. However, if we want to go create with someone else that's totally fine because the joy is in the creation of the art itself, rather than the need to overvalue a single art piece as the only art piece either of us can ever make, which wouldn't make for an exciting monogamous relationship, and neither of us are necessarily lesser for having created together or with other people, whether that is monogamous or non-monogamous (whichever you prefer).
Unfortunately I don't think so, but it is very kind of you to think of me and I appreciate it :-). You could sign up and then unsubscribe I believe, though I've never unsubscribed to a Susbstack before so I'm not sure how easy or difficult it is.
Mr Bear - do you think it's just a coincidence that at exactly the same time society decided sex was "just another fun activity", western society fell into a "sex recession"?
Aella is free to do what she wants, of course, and doesn't deserve to be the focal point blamed for a much broader social change. But I do sympathise with the point that a society that demystifies sex, commercialises it, and in particular decouples it from love (which is the more important thing which sex supports), is going to end up sexless and loveless.
I didn't know you were a gay man, but it figures - the gay (male) community has always had different sexual mores - for many gay men sex really is a fun hobby, unencumbered by women with their far lower-on-average sociosexuality. I think that the demystification of sex has been great for gay men! But I think it's been much more dubious for straight people, and straight women in particular, who are now playing in the sexual marketplace with rules drawn up seemingly to stop them ever finding love, and to be paranoid about being traded in for a younger model if they do.
I think it probably is a coincidence and here's why- There was a slice of time in which the sexual revolution was more or less complete and people were having a lot of sex- it was only after quite a lag that the sex recession began. I believe the sex recession is largely caused by the unhealthy psychological effects of phones, with generalised atomisation a secondary cause. The former is unrelated to sexual freedom, the question of whether the latter is related is trickier, but I do believe there could be a society that endorsed both sexual liberation and community spirit.
I disagree with contemporary sexual norms in a lot of ways. In particular, I think the drive to "score" as many "victories" as possible reflects, in a weird way reflects the very puritanism that it is supposedly rebelling against. I would prefer dating to be more embedded in a scene of social clubs and outlooks etc. than done via apps etc.
I think puritanism in a weird way prevents people finding love. In particular, even in the gay community I sometimes see this idea that you don't transition from casual hook-ups to a long-term relationship. I think that's sad! I think it reflects an unconscious sense that there is something tawdry or shameful about casual hook-ups, so you move on quickly.
At its worst you even see straight guys who see themselves having 'defeated' the women they hookup with and stole something from them. A kind of attitude that treats hookups as almost a form of soft-rape by trickery which is deeply repugnant, and which implicitly buys into the idea that something has been lost.
It may also be that if you regard sex as only for pleasure, then there's less need to involve another person - you can just masturbate. It's not as good as with another person, but set against that is the trouble of finding that other person - if you want a relationship, then that trouble is more than worth it, if you just want the momentary pleasure of sex, it's not worth the bother. Have a wank, roll over and go to sleep.
Smartphones and general social atomisation are certainly part of it. But regarding sex as purely for pleasure may also be a contributor.
In my experience, sex with a person with whom there is little or no emotional connection is only barely better than masturbation. Real pleasure comes with the connection - or using sex to help build that connection.
Sex without love (or something growing towards it) is fun, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not very fulfilling, and not that fun compared to sex with love. Loveless sex is slightly better than masturbation, but not so much better that it’s worth chasing after, I think. Certainly once you consider that the person you casually bonk may be hoping for something more (whatever they say today, people do change - at some point it just gets sad, like Fonzie turning 40).
Sexual betrayal or loss of a partner/spouse is extremely painful for people with normal sexuality. Aella's attitude toward sex is therefore a direct threat to straight, married people.
I wonder sometimes why people think trivializing this pain, or making up bullshit explanations like "it's a social construct" feel that they are somehow superior for taking this position. Isn't depth of feeling a particularly human trait? Isn't it what motivates some of the greatest, most moving art ever produced?
If we just thought of sex like "playing soccer" there would be no Romeo and Juliet, no Carmen, no Giselle. What a crappy world that would be.
I think that if you think of sex as an activity where people stimulate each other in good feeling ways, yours and aellas conceptions of it make sense. If you think of it as a sacred act that creates life then the conservative perspective makes sense. I think both of those perspectives are kinda extreme, but don't act like the other perspective is completely foreign and unimaginable to you.
With apologies for the somewhat unpleasant metaphor, I think it may help you to understand if you propose that sex, in the conservative mindset, is more like, shall we say, relieving yourself (a term which can interestingly be used as a euphemism for masturbation as easily as a scatological one). It holds that sex is fundamentally gross, in the most visceral "shitting is gross" sense. It consists of sweaty masses of meat grinding wet, fleshy bits together until goo spurts out.
Thus, goes the common view of sex, we all have to do it, because we have *urges*, and the relief can be "enjoyable" to some degree… but a right-thinking person shouldn't centre their life on that enjoyment, let alone boast in public about how many times they've urinated today and how very, very liberating it felt. Even to the extent that sex is related to love, sex is at best to the "polite" pleasure of romantic love what the inevitable trip to the bathroom is to a gourmet meal.
I think that's really the core of it. There are other factors e.g. heterosexual power dynamics, yes, but if you seek to understand the knee-jerk "but libertinism is GROSS" reaction, this is what you have to think back to above all else.
(It should therefore be obvious why that sort of thinking is more common in straight people than homosexuals: to a heterosexual, their *own body* having sex is unattractive and gross. A veil of arousal can bring them to ignore it long enough to be with someone of the opposite gender whose naked parts they *do* like looking at, if guiltily; but imagining themselves having sex form a third-person perspective is, to them, a turn-*off*. A very regrettable state of affairs, but it, too, is I think fundamental and often overlooked by we whose own bodies are, at least in broad terms, attractive to ourselves.)
The comment of your edit shows the difference. Sex is not soccer. Sex may or may not have any more meaning for you than kicking a ball around, but for many hundreds of millions of people around the world it's a much, much more profound experience.
This does not mean it should be legally restricted in the ways some would like. It does mean that certain sexual behaviours will evoke pleasure, some distress, some disgust, and some will create an intimacy between people which is not easily achieveable by any means.
You say it may be because you're gay, and this may indeed be so. Sex in a heterosexual couple is an act which is in its nature procreative, unlike homosexual sex and masturbation. Given that children can appear from such a union, and that they need devoted care for some years, having feelings arise from this sort of union is an evolutionary advantage. If a straight man thinks of sex as like soccer, he's going to create a lot of fatherless children, and these too often go on to have and cause problems.
This is defect, guys. When you understand nothing of how humans work and how the dynamics between humans shape the world we live in, you get "sex is just like soccer."
Humans are obsessed with sex be they Aella or your average straight going Christian. One is just even more obsessed.
This obsession with sex is behind so many issues innate to humanity. It should just be a privately appreciated, but relatively unremarkable act that is not gone insane about. Like the baking of a festive pie or the giving of an anniversary present. But, humans have to be thoroughly rewired for this.
No. I don't think you should walking about wanting to have sex all the time and certainly not that it is something that should be had with everyone like soccer.
Clearly.
You should be a normal fucking person that has sex within the context of a fully monogamous relationship on occassion. Not something disgusting that "needs" sex and wants to have it all the time.
I’d say the outrage against aella only helps drive subscribers and raise her visibility. She seems savvy enough to capitalise on the notoriety.
I’d imagine a fair percentage of those complaining are secret subscribers in the same way that the Republican Party convention while gay-bashing from the stump managed to crash grindr from their hotel rooms.
so true. I find reading her stuff extremely painful.
with the group sex thing it’s mostly about the pain of being excluded and left out. not even from sex stuff but more from friendship, community, intellectual connection.
No game of soccer ever resulted in a brand new, helpless, dependent human. Soccer between adults and minors is unobjectionable. Badgering someone into a game of soccer with you is annoying, but not damaging. If an invading army herded us into camps and forced us to play soccer, we’d count ourselves lucky. We have no evolved set of behaviors to protect us from the disease risks of unprotected soccer.
If soccer lacks most of the morally and emotionally relevant features of sex, how can the analogy help us reason about sex?
I came here to say this. It's impossible to understand conservative moral objections to Aella's conduct without understanding that the people making them view the ultimate purpose of sex as the generation of new human lives. With a view of sex as consenting-adult-recreation, of course it won't make sense.
You don't even have to be a conservative to find the soccer analogy misleading and unhelpful. There are plenty of feminist objections as well.
Could food be a better analogy than soccer? Hunger is a primal drive, and food perpetuates life. We have evolved behaviors to protect us from spoiled or poisonous foods. There is extreme cultural variation in foodways, which we learn at mama's knee. Foreign or taboo behavior around food triggers our disgust reaction, even when it has no obvious moral dimension.
I think we can understand the disgust even without procreation as part of it.
Sex for most people is an act of intimacy, it's a way to become emotionally closer to someone. Sex with multiple random strangers doesn't do that. It's the difference between a gourmet dinner with your spouse and greasy takeout when you're drunk at 3am.
See, I don't think that's true. I've had sex with people I just met that felt close, and sex with people I've known for a while that didn't.
To the extent that soccer is a casual fun pickup game in the park with no strong emotional salience, it’s not very much like sex. To the extent that soccer is a risky, high-stakes activity of such emotional salience that it may cause riots - more like sex - we have many social and legal guard rails in place to regulate it.
It’s unobjectionable, in and of itself, for kids to play soccer with adults. But it is, as you point out, risky for larger, stronger people to play against smaller, weaker people who may get injured. So most kids play in leagues that sort them into age or ability groups to ensure they’re evenly matched.
We used to formally organize sockhops and mixers and such to ensure that dating also happened in this lightly supervised way, but then people said to stop being so uptight because sex is no big deal.
You see what I’m getting at?
Hmm. Practically every social activity results in risks and harms. Soccer certainly does. Just off the top of my head: injuries, both acute and chronic; alcohol abuse; betting abuse; domestic violence; sexual violence (eg by players on fans and WAGs etc); riots and violence before, during and after games; soccer is used to shame and belittle others, for playing it and not playing it, for playing it poorly; etc. And adults playing soccer with minors can absolutely be objectionable, not least because if a 25 year old tackles into a 12 year old too hard, the 12 year is at great risk of being seriously injured. The analogy is by no means exact, but it’s not so bad as you make out.
Aella is totally right to enjoy sex in whatever way she pleases. She also seems to have found a way to play the social media engagement game, by making "outrageous and controversial posts" that drive engagement, while at the same time actually being in the right, and not needing to make up lies to get clicks. Seems like a win win (assuming the constant negativity doesn't get her down).
Perhaps the soccer analogy holds well enough for gay men, who are having exclusively non-reproductive sex with their physical equals. However, 98% of the world is straight and that makes sex an entirely different ballgame. We have evolved behaviors and developed social norms to address the risks inherent to heterosexual sex. For most of human history, women who had sex with men were, at best, going to be unable to procure resources unassisted, run, or defend themselves for about two years, and at worst, risked death. Women being more selective about the circumstances under which they will take these risks is not a problem to be solved or a product of Puritanism, it’s extremely adaptive behavior. 70 years of the Pill doesn’t undo it, nor is it clear to me that it would be to anyone’s benefit to do so. It’s actually good and fine to not potentially have a baby with anyone with whom you’d play a pickup game of soccer. We certainly shouldn’t stone Aella in the town square, but it’s normal to have a disgust response to an objectively maladaptive behavior.
This is very well said.
I think I am understanding your views in the ways you mean them. I am not shocked, horrified or disgusted by what you wrote. It is simply that in my life I think, feel and act differently than what you describe. I am fine being me and you being you. Daniel
I can't remember where I first learned about this, but the idea is that straight people tend to think of sex as a a sort of object that a woman has. She is lesser for having given her sex to a man, who is the greater for having taken it from her. It frames sex as a zero sum game where a woman always loses, and thus should be ashamed for broadcasting her trauma, which could be the only possible reason she'd be willing to give it up so shamefully. For a man, he is getting a lesser object if it has been used before and certainly if it's being shared among several men in the same situation.
I've come to see that sex is something that is located between the man and the woman, and is something they create together. It's artwork she and I can enjoy creating together, and can appreciate afterward. However, if we want to go create with someone else that's totally fine because the joy is in the creation of the art itself, rather than the need to overvalue a single art piece as the only art piece either of us can ever make, which wouldn't make for an exciting monogamous relationship, and neither of us are necessarily lesser for having created together or with other people, whether that is monogamous or non-monogamous (whichever you prefer).
Hi, is there a way I can pay certain amount to you without upgrading? Like a one time donation thingy
Unfortunately I don't think so, but it is very kind of you to think of me and I appreciate it :-). You could sign up and then unsubscribe I believe, though I've never unsubscribed to a Susbstack before so I'm not sure how easy or difficult it is.
Hi I've tried it but I don't have a credit card due to which I can't upgrade. Can you provide ' Buy me a coffee ' links so that we can support you?
Alas no! Substack bans you for that because they don't get their cut. But it's lovely you tried- I really appreciate it.
Cool. I'll try it out.
Mr Bear - do you think it's just a coincidence that at exactly the same time society decided sex was "just another fun activity", western society fell into a "sex recession"?
Aella is free to do what she wants, of course, and doesn't deserve to be the focal point blamed for a much broader social change. But I do sympathise with the point that a society that demystifies sex, commercialises it, and in particular decouples it from love (which is the more important thing which sex supports), is going to end up sexless and loveless.
I didn't know you were a gay man, but it figures - the gay (male) community has always had different sexual mores - for many gay men sex really is a fun hobby, unencumbered by women with their far lower-on-average sociosexuality. I think that the demystification of sex has been great for gay men! But I think it's been much more dubious for straight people, and straight women in particular, who are now playing in the sexual marketplace with rules drawn up seemingly to stop them ever finding love, and to be paranoid about being traded in for a younger model if they do.
I think it probably is a coincidence and here's why- There was a slice of time in which the sexual revolution was more or less complete and people were having a lot of sex- it was only after quite a lag that the sex recession began. I believe the sex recession is largely caused by the unhealthy psychological effects of phones, with generalised atomisation a secondary cause. The former is unrelated to sexual freedom, the question of whether the latter is related is trickier, but I do believe there could be a society that endorsed both sexual liberation and community spirit.
I disagree with contemporary sexual norms in a lot of ways. In particular, I think the drive to "score" as many "victories" as possible reflects, in a weird way reflects the very puritanism that it is supposedly rebelling against. I would prefer dating to be more embedded in a scene of social clubs and outlooks etc. than done via apps etc.
I think puritanism in a weird way prevents people finding love. In particular, even in the gay community I sometimes see this idea that you don't transition from casual hook-ups to a long-term relationship. I think that's sad! I think it reflects an unconscious sense that there is something tawdry or shameful about casual hook-ups, so you move on quickly.
At its worst you even see straight guys who see themselves having 'defeated' the women they hookup with and stole something from them. A kind of attitude that treats hookups as almost a form of soft-rape by trickery which is deeply repugnant, and which implicitly buys into the idea that something has been lost.
It may also be that if you regard sex as only for pleasure, then there's less need to involve another person - you can just masturbate. It's not as good as with another person, but set against that is the trouble of finding that other person - if you want a relationship, then that trouble is more than worth it, if you just want the momentary pleasure of sex, it's not worth the bother. Have a wank, roll over and go to sleep.
Smartphones and general social atomisation are certainly part of it. But regarding sex as purely for pleasure may also be a contributor.
Masturbation doesn't do it. It's sort of like saying that if you're hungry you should just look at pictures of food and think about eating...
In my experience, sex with a person with whom there is little or no emotional connection is only barely better than masturbation. Real pleasure comes with the connection - or using sex to help build that connection.
Hmm, interesting. Are you male or female?
I agree that it's better with a connection. But for most people sex is a need that masturbation does not fulfill.
I’m male, last I checked.
Sex without love (or something growing towards it) is fun, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not very fulfilling, and not that fun compared to sex with love. Loveless sex is slightly better than masturbation, but not so much better that it’s worth chasing after, I think. Certainly once you consider that the person you casually bonk may be hoping for something more (whatever they say today, people do change - at some point it just gets sad, like Fonzie turning 40).
Ah. I thought this author was a woman for some reason. But, that it is a man makes sense.
Most men have unrestricted socio-sexuality and believe that's ok.
Sexual betrayal or loss of a partner/spouse is extremely painful for people with normal sexuality. Aella's attitude toward sex is therefore a direct threat to straight, married people.
I wonder sometimes why people think trivializing this pain, or making up bullshit explanations like "it's a social construct" feel that they are somehow superior for taking this position. Isn't depth of feeling a particularly human trait? Isn't it what motivates some of the greatest, most moving art ever produced?
If we just thought of sex like "playing soccer" there would be no Romeo and Juliet, no Carmen, no Giselle. What a crappy world that would be.
I think that if you think of sex as an activity where people stimulate each other in good feeling ways, yours and aellas conceptions of it make sense. If you think of it as a sacred act that creates life then the conservative perspective makes sense. I think both of those perspectives are kinda extreme, but don't act like the other perspective is completely foreign and unimaginable to you.
With apologies for the somewhat unpleasant metaphor, I think it may help you to understand if you propose that sex, in the conservative mindset, is more like, shall we say, relieving yourself (a term which can interestingly be used as a euphemism for masturbation as easily as a scatological one). It holds that sex is fundamentally gross, in the most visceral "shitting is gross" sense. It consists of sweaty masses of meat grinding wet, fleshy bits together until goo spurts out.
Thus, goes the common view of sex, we all have to do it, because we have *urges*, and the relief can be "enjoyable" to some degree… but a right-thinking person shouldn't centre their life on that enjoyment, let alone boast in public about how many times they've urinated today and how very, very liberating it felt. Even to the extent that sex is related to love, sex is at best to the "polite" pleasure of romantic love what the inevitable trip to the bathroom is to a gourmet meal.
I think that's really the core of it. There are other factors e.g. heterosexual power dynamics, yes, but if you seek to understand the knee-jerk "but libertinism is GROSS" reaction, this is what you have to think back to above all else.
(It should therefore be obvious why that sort of thinking is more common in straight people than homosexuals: to a heterosexual, their *own body* having sex is unattractive and gross. A veil of arousal can bring them to ignore it long enough to be with someone of the opposite gender whose naked parts they *do* like looking at, if guiltily; but imagining themselves having sex form a third-person perspective is, to them, a turn-*off*. A very regrettable state of affairs, but it, too, is I think fundamental and often overlooked by we whose own bodies are, at least in broad terms, attractive to ourselves.)
For what it's worth I have the same view of sex and I still get very sad and angry reading aella.
The comment of your edit shows the difference. Sex is not soccer. Sex may or may not have any more meaning for you than kicking a ball around, but for many hundreds of millions of people around the world it's a much, much more profound experience.
This does not mean it should be legally restricted in the ways some would like. It does mean that certain sexual behaviours will evoke pleasure, some distress, some disgust, and some will create an intimacy between people which is not easily achieveable by any means.
You say it may be because you're gay, and this may indeed be so. Sex in a heterosexual couple is an act which is in its nature procreative, unlike homosexual sex and masturbation. Given that children can appear from such a union, and that they need devoted care for some years, having feelings arise from this sort of union is an evolutionary advantage. If a straight man thinks of sex as like soccer, he's going to create a lot of fatherless children, and these too often go on to have and cause problems.
What the fuck?
This is defect, guys. When you understand nothing of how humans work and how the dynamics between humans shape the world we live in, you get "sex is just like soccer."
Humans are obsessed with sex be they Aella or your average straight going Christian. One is just even more obsessed.
This obsession with sex is behind so many issues innate to humanity. It should just be a privately appreciated, but relatively unremarkable act that is not gone insane about. Like the baking of a festive pie or the giving of an anniversary present. But, humans have to be thoroughly rewired for this.
You're saying the same thing as the author
No. I don't think you should walking about wanting to have sex all the time and certainly not that it is something that should be had with everyone like soccer.
Clearly.
You should be a normal fucking person that has sex within the context of a fully monogamous relationship on occassion. Not something disgusting that "needs" sex and wants to have it all the time.
The AI did a good job on the image !
I’d say the outrage against aella only helps drive subscribers and raise her visibility. She seems savvy enough to capitalise on the notoriety.
I’d imagine a fair percentage of those complaining are secret subscribers in the same way that the Republican Party convention while gay-bashing from the stump managed to crash grindr from their hotel rooms.
so true. I find reading her stuff extremely painful.
with the group sex thing it’s mostly about the pain of being excluded and left out. not even from sex stuff but more from friendship, community, intellectual connection.