Sex: the Taboo, the Identity, the Act

I have so much to say on this and I don't know where to start or even end this idea, and I want to work this idea and theory out better than I can in my own mind.

First, I'd like to start off with the idea that there is something about struggling with identity no matter where one comes from. Whether it's race, religion, creed, and more--it seems to be a central theme throughout most literature, films, art, and even blatant history. We have even called this feeling, "the Other" to resemble what it feels like to have a lack of identity or need to conform to a different identity when it comes to societal standards.

This is not an untouched subject. However, I've rarely seen where it all comes together.

Feminism, sexual nature, sexual identity, gender identity, and the overall oppression of such statements.

Identity is one of the most important words in the English dictionary, I'd argue. Knowing who you are is the point of almost anything. Not knowing who you are causes almost everything. Does that make sense?

We require identification for all things--passports, buying substances, living in one area, attending school, and more. We use multiple physical things to identify a person--their face, fingerprints, hair, DNA, teeth structure. These are the literal facts to identify someone.

Then we start getting heavier. How do you feel?

And it gets deeper than that.

What do you want?

We know what you need: food, shelter, water, some sort of human interaction/connection.

But as we ask more questions about the wants, the feels, and the know--it gets so much more complicated from there.

Sex is a taboo subject. Sometimes this is a need and sometimes this is a want based on who you're asking--but talking freely about sex has always been a butthole-clenching subject in any real professional or academic setting and going from there--it's uncomfortable. Yet, it's genuinely everywhere.

We had some early authors who broke through about sex and sexual identity--we see it with Virginia Woolf's Orlando (of course I had to mention Woolf). According to many queer sources, this novel is groundbreaking in the sense of talking freely about gender identity and expression.

Charlotte Bronte wrote about one of her sexual struggles turned into a passionate novel titled The Professor.

I talked about it in my brief analysis of "The Substance" (yes, that was only brief compared to what I want to say) where I talked about how much it was a shock to the United States culture that The Dick Van Dyke Show included scenes in the bedroom where we actually see adult beds and adults in the room (despite the beds being separate). This was another cultural shock when the beds turned into one bed and the couples were actually in it like in The Brady Bunch.

Then there are novels that dive deeper. Judith Butler is a well-known theorist and philosopher that talks about sex, gender identity, and feminism at the same time. There's also Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity ed. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, an essay collection attacking societal views on gender and gender identity.

This is something that has me wanting to talk more and more and more about--and it's inspired by writing about women. Assault and abuse is not just limited to women--but that's another judgement made.

Apparently, according to most assumptions, men can't be assaulted or abused or part of long-term abuse and that's where I started thinking more, again, on gender/sex discrimination. Woolf is known as abused. Poe is not listed as an abuse victim on mainly anything I read. However, what he want through was abuse by definition.

Why is it easy to name one as abused and not the other? We can argue the time: Woolf was about eighty years after Poe, maybe the idea of abuse was being centralized and information was actually being provided (however it's mainly 20th century and up that has cast the diagnosis of abuse in most psychology papers), or maybe we can argue that Woolf had sexual abuse and Poe had emotional abuse, a much harder abuse to identify.

Regardless of those points, however, we still don't see psychology papers analyzing Poe's potential abuse the same way that they analyze Woolf or even Charlotte Bronte. A quick google search confirmed this when I type in, "what 19th century writers were emotionally abused" and multiple pages and articles about women's abuse shows up.

I was surprised to find that there is a couple diving into Charles Dickens' emotional trauma and that may be another post.

Abuse is highly important to recognize and discuss, as I have been advocating publicly on this blog for two months now--regardless of gender identity.

It is important to note that our society is built to allow it to happen--to women, specifically. This happens often and women suffer a higher statistic then men, that is true; but this is not just one gender or the other. It's a people issue against other people.

And that made me start thinking again about how and why we must always divide statistics in terms of sex--what about gender identity and sexual identity and what that may mean? There's a high amount of assumptions that men who assault younger men (children) are gay--they're usually not.

Assault is about power. Not about sex.

But society makes it about sex--and why?

This seems to be a broad post so I will try to start breaking this down to be more concise here over the next few weeks. This will more than likely be what my essay is about next, as well. Sources (some used for this article, some used for reference for later posts) Woolf's novel Orlando: https://www.bibliovault.org/BV.titles.epl?tquery=Sex%2520in%2520literature (also included Bronte's The Professor information)

Reference to essay collection confronting gender norms: https://bookriot.com/books-about-gender-identity/ (there's also a lot of books on here referring to gender identity and issues).

Judith Butler: https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/judith-butler

(Later reference) authors that wrote about sex when it was "taboo": https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/58433-8-authors-who-crossed-the-gender-line.html

(Later reference) Older novels (18th century) talking about sex, sexual identity, and history: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/18th-century-sexual-revolution/