Excerpts from International Late Night Email

##Boy:
There’s a conversation in this sometime, maybe … but it’s an interesting thing to be male and decline an open offer for sex. It has sort of a twofold negative implication in that it’s slightly “un-male” (what kind of guy declines sex?) and also, it hurts feelings. Maybe I care a bit too much about the latter, but it never seems that girls take it well. Men are used to sexual rejection, Women take it a bit more personal like.

Flickr’d by photoni.

##Girl:
Ah, sex. We’re at an interesting spot, culturally.

Baby boomers won the right to have sex when they wanted to – and our generation inherited the expectation that we should have sex constantly. I think in some ways it’s similar to the restructuring of the feminist movement – women having to fight to be able to take on traditional gender roles; marry, babies, sewing, whathaves, without stigma.

Even though we’re children of AIDS, there is still the expectation that men will consistently put their penises inside all available females.

Flickr’d by YTaP.

Women have accepted this expectation as ‘human nature’ – or worse, genetic determination – and have geared their mating rituals accordingly – get him to put his penis inside of you, and then somehow entrap him into doing it over and over again until you can secure a legal arrangement that allows you to stop. Shuush, not tonight, dear. The children will hear.

So when did we get sold the idea that sex was best enjoyed sans emotion? Who told us that sex – like food – was best when it was cheap and easy and readily available? And why did we believe them?

I brought a bulb of garlic to my parents house a few years back. My youngest sister didn’t recognize it. To her, garlic was a kind of bread flavor – at best, a powder. I think a lot of people live like this – cheap, easy food; cheap, boring sex – stuffing themselves with chips, ogling fake breasts, constantly grazing, never full or satisfied, never knowing anything real.

Flickr’d by gLiTTeRbOi®.

##Boy:
I feel like this is about to enter the popular consciousness in the next little while … If people like ourselves are feeling this way, it’s only a matter of time before there is some kind of trickle-down and this sentiment gets expressed in various forms of media. I think I have already said that I feel as though the only thing left is a return (or some return) to morality and restraint.

There is another interesting dimension to this as well. I’ve always found it interesting how the things that brought the Communist system to its knees are manifest in our own financial and political systems — controlling interests in media and corruption and the like. Any good movement that is striving for control over a body of people will first rein in sex — Catholicism is a great example there. It’s odd that by the hyper-commoditization of sex the same result may have been achieved. The act has become meaningless and empty. At best a tool for control (to snag your man) — at worst a fundamental need that you are due (the Maxim crowd) — anything but something with meaning.

Flickr’d by chatirygirl.

##Girl:
A return to restraint? A return to morality?

That’s not what the Slow Food movement is about. Slow Food is succeeding because it taps into our deepest desires; authenticity, enjoyment, pleasure. Take the tomato – the mealy, pale-fleshed mass produced tomato. Lecture all you want about GMOs, pesticides, corporate farms and monoculture crop dangers. Lecture to deaf ears.

But speak to taste buds – speak of juicy summer bites, slippery tomato-jelly seeds, the too-ripe smell of sun and dirt and fresh tomato leaves – sing of blood red, firm flesh; the snap of the skin as the knife slices through, the way they pair, simply, beautifully, with sharp basil on warm garlic-rubbed crostini, just fluid with the sheen of olive oil.

Speak to the senses, speak to discrimination, speak to simple pleasures we once took as our birthright. There is no morality, and no restraint, in the pursuit of real pleasure.