Member Review
Review by
Andrew S, Reviewer
Smith Galer is a self-confessed storyteller. In Losing It, a cacophony of voices relate experiences around having, deferring, avoiding, anticipating, and regretting first sex. These are mainly tales of error, pain, misjudgement, and mystification. Perhaps usurpingly, pleasure doesn’t get much of a look in; it’s too complicated, compromised by miscommunication, misalignment, paralysis, or worse, botched surgical procedures.
The research sources bridge a dizzying range of virtual and real-world platforms, showing how difficult it is to know where to direct demand for change, better relationship education and information.
There are a couple of elephants eying each other in the book. In my view significant polarities in considering Losing Its information landscape. One is culture, in the form of representations of first love and lust, coming of age, and rites of passage. The other is masturbation. The latter gets mentioned, but its obfuscation from the central discourse indicates that this beginner’s pleasuring is inconvenient. Private, it remains taboo excluded from the public myths and regimes of disinformation and power.
It hadn’t occurred to me before reading that in recent talk of consent, harassment, abuse and rape culture, fantasy is never mentioned as part of human sexuality. Smith Galer points out learning about sex today requires a legal mindset. I guess no one needs fantasy now with so much shown on the internet. The pornography industry engaged in a campaign of fetishizing power imbalances.
It’s appropriate that Smith Galer rounds up this collection of incorrect beliefs about first-time sex with a misattributed quotation. In her view, Oscar Wilde said, “Everything is about sex, except sex itself; sex, instead, is about power.” It’s unlikely that this was Wilde because, in his era, the word sex had not yet started to be used to denote coitus (or cunnilingus, or whatever); it referred to biology, gender. Ironically it makes sense in a different way. Patriarchy is sex invested in power, and it doesn’t benefit anyone. It divides, coming between what you think you want and need and what you will get. I hope Smith Galer will produce a companion volume on the “triumph and virility” demanded of men.
The research sources bridge a dizzying range of virtual and real-world platforms, showing how difficult it is to know where to direct demand for change, better relationship education and information.
There are a couple of elephants eying each other in the book. In my view significant polarities in considering Losing Its information landscape. One is culture, in the form of representations of first love and lust, coming of age, and rites of passage. The other is masturbation. The latter gets mentioned, but its obfuscation from the central discourse indicates that this beginner’s pleasuring is inconvenient. Private, it remains taboo excluded from the public myths and regimes of disinformation and power.
It hadn’t occurred to me before reading that in recent talk of consent, harassment, abuse and rape culture, fantasy is never mentioned as part of human sexuality. Smith Galer points out learning about sex today requires a legal mindset. I guess no one needs fantasy now with so much shown on the internet. The pornography industry engaged in a campaign of fetishizing power imbalances.
It’s appropriate that Smith Galer rounds up this collection of incorrect beliefs about first-time sex with a misattributed quotation. In her view, Oscar Wilde said, “Everything is about sex, except sex itself; sex, instead, is about power.” It’s unlikely that this was Wilde because, in his era, the word sex had not yet started to be used to denote coitus (or cunnilingus, or whatever); it referred to biology, gender. Ironically it makes sense in a different way. Patriarchy is sex invested in power, and it doesn’t benefit anyone. It divides, coming between what you think you want and need and what you will get. I hope Smith Galer will produce a companion volume on the “triumph and virility” demanded of men.
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