{"id":35289,"date":"2022-02-13T10:15:24","date_gmt":"2022-02-13T16:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=35289"},"modified":"2022-02-13T10:15:24","modified_gmt":"2022-02-13T16:15:24","slug":"hey-dont-let-me-stop-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2022\/02\/13\/hey-dont-let-me-stop-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Hey, Don’t Let Me Stop You"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emma Collins has some complaints<\/a> about sex during, and she fears following, the pandemic<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I want sex to feel holy again. I want kissing to feel like prayer. I want the bed to be an altar, and oral sex to become worship. I want the physical act of love to feel like what it actually is\u2014 a glimpse into the part of someone\u2019s soul that transcends their social self, a look behind the veil of their constructed personality. I want sleeping beside someone to take on the quality it had the first times I tried it\u2014 when, at seventeen, I was shocked to find that my dreams had intertwined with my lover\u2019s during the night, as though our subconscious voices had spoken to one another.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So why do I feel like Collins is implicitly demanding that I feel the same things as she? There is, perhaps unintended, a subvocalization against natural human variation. I sympathize when she says,<\/p>\n

People need a chance to embrace again, without having to fret over contracting a fatal disease or that a spontaneous kiss will be misconstrued as sexual assault. There may be value, at the right moment, in remembering a certain kind of recklessness, in ceasing to demonize our need for each other. Constraints on passion never completely prevail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But when that spontaneity is threatening or dangerous, then it’s wrong.<\/p>\n

As ever, morality is not context-free. In other cultures and other realities, sex can be a ritual, a drab requirement, even a weapon, and I cannot help but remember that when I feel she is demanding that I treat it as ‘holy.’ Sure, go ahead and do that – but, as an agnostic, I’ll take my own path, thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emma Collins has some complaints about sex during, and she fears following, the pandemic: I want sex to feel holy again. I want kissing to feel like prayer. I want the bed to be an altar, and oral sex to become worship. I want the physical act of love to \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35289"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35299,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35289\/revisions\/35299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}