Recently the front
page of The National Post featured two headlines side by side. One said: ‘Profiting from Vice’ and the other said ‘Proud to be Gay’. (The first article was about Rogers and Vice Media, the second was
about Apple CEO Tim Cook.) Co-incidental placement? Perhaps. And yet I would
suggest that many North Americans still think sex is a vice.
It’s important to remember our ancestors. Many
of us are descended from United Empire Loyalists who migrated from the
United States. Take it from me, those guys were a bunch of crazy religious
zealots — Puritans and the like, kicked out of England because they hated
their bodies, wore hair shirts and flagellated themselves for having lewd
thoughts. Religious extremists, the lot. With our nutty ancestors, it’s no wonder we North Americans have a
little trouble being human.
Commentary
about the Jian Ghomeshi scandal has gotten out of control, and every uptight old
fart (including Noah Richler) now has an opinion. Richler (oh dear, how far the
apple has fallen from the tree!) takes Jian’s actions as an excuse to castigate young women for liking kinky
sex. He suggests it would be a good idea for every Canadian father to ask his
daughter “why she thinks being
choked, even by a celebrity, is okay.”
All
of this betrays a misunderstanding of what sex is, and that is typical of
the Puritanical hair-shirt-wearing Canadians we are.
The
misunderstanding is simply this.
Jian
Ghomeshi’s actions were not
sex.
Going
out on a date with a girl, or meeting a girl for the first time, or having a
girl over to your apartment, and then slugging her (surprise!) without
permission, is not sexy to anybody. It’s not kinky, it’s
not a turn-on, it’s not foreplay. In
fact it’s the opposite of
foreplay. What these young women experienced was abuse, pure and simple. And
abuse is not sex, period. It is the opposite of sex.
Of
course the whole issue is confused by Ghomeshi’s desperate, pathetic attempt to defend himself using Lynn Coady and
Fifty Shades of Grey. Hey, I think we should leave poor Lynn Coady out
of this. But just stop by any s/m chatroom and you will discover, in two shakes
of a lamb’s tale, that no
self-respecting kinkster likes Fifty Shades of Grey. Instead they
rightly view it as nothing more than soft core porn romance for women who like
their vanilla fantasies spiced with a little s/m, but wouldn’t dare admit to their desires or try them
in real life.
When
Jian Ghomeshi used the ‘kinkster defense’ he set sexual liberation back to the stone
age.
Sex is all about power, and naturally contains
elements of aggression. Have you ever seen an animal bite the neck of another
animal during coitus? Have you ever heard a female cat in heat? Have you ever
enjoyed your partner pressing you into the bed as he or she …..well, you know. We are animals, and that
thing that gets our genitals excited is mixed up with aggression and power,
tops and bottoms, butches and femmes, masters and slaves.
But in order for this thing that happens between human beings to be sex, both
parties must know they are having sex, and agree to it. If they do, they can do
anything they bloody well please as far as I’m concerned. One person’s
sexual treat is another person’s
nightmare (just like one person’s
favourite desert turns another’s
stomach) but that’s why there is
consent, so we can agree about what we are doing beforehand.
But
if you slug somebody or choke them —
without consent - that’s not sex, it’s
violence.
Okay?
Do you understand the difference?
I
know it’s difficult for some
to understand. But it shouldn't be, really. I mean Jian
Ghomeshi has a a very practical reason
to pretend not to know the difference between sex and violence (i.e. he wants
to keep himself out of jail).
But,
hey, what’s your excuse?
