I Just Realized: It’s All About Sex. Duh.

So I’ve been sitting out here forfuckingever, ranting and sweating and gnashing my teeth—see:  I TOLD y’all there’s a good reason I stay clear of the news—and I go in to get ready to take a walk, still wondering about all this stuff and trying to figure out people’s opinions, and it hits me (and this probably isn’t the first time I’ve had this particular revelation, but it’s the first time I REMEBER it, OK?):  this—the thing with same-sex marriage and the other thing with abortion—is All About Sex.
It’s about our up-tight, Puritanical, twisted ideas about sex. We love it. We hate it. We hate ourselves for loving it. (Well, some people do.) We want to know what other people are doing. We say we don’t want to know what other people are doing. We want to know how we stack up to what other people are doing.
We sit in our dingy little rooms and try to imagine what other people are doing.
Here’s the good news:  over time, most of us become less interested in what other people are doing and just hope we can keep on doing what we’re doing for as long as possible. Pretty much.
It’s Those Other People, the ones who somehow reach middle age and still can’t quit spending large chunks of their time wondering what exactly it is that Those People do in the bedroom (or the car or the hot tub or their box seat at the opera) that are causing the problems. I think that they secretly imagine that other people are having way, way more fun than they are, and it makes them very grumpy. Also apt to pass bad laws.
They deal with it by making everyone else miserable.
And by killing people. A bad sex life can do that to you.
Here’s what I would do if I were in charge of the world:
Everyone could do whatever it was they wanted if they did it in the privacy of their own homes as long as it didn’t involve children or animals.
[If you’re having sex with children or animals, please go away right now. And find help.]
Everything else? Just go for it. I, personally, have absolutely no desire to engage in sexual activity with all the members of my bowling league.
I, personally, have no desire to belong to a bowling league, so the idea of getting nekkid with them is kind of moot, really, but still. If you and the other members of Wally’s Plumbing Wildcats want to dance around your den in nothing but your bowling shoes, go for it. You might want to leave the actual bowling balls out of it, but who knows?
I would ask that everyone remain pretty much clothed in public, OK? While I don’t mind kissing and mild fondling on the benches by the fountain in front of the library, we are a nation of people with some serious body issues, OK? And I don’t think we really want to be forced to see each other strip naked and go at it on the bus.
Of course, it would be delightful if we’d get over those issues and declare places in every town and city Skin Zones, so people could go there and disrobe and be naked and get used to the idea that Being Naked Does Not Equal Sex, and that Bodies Are Not Nasty (well, not if they’re bathed regularly), and then we could kind of go on from there to work in the idea that maybe, just maybe, sex is not bad, and passion is not sinful, and gee, our bodies are kind of designed for it, you know?
As long as we can’t do this, though—as long as sex is everywhere on tv and the movies and in music and books and blah, blah, blah, but alwaysalwaysalways treated as something scandalous, something secretive, something shameful—we’ll always have trouble. And we’ll always have trouble with the things that result from sex:  pregnancy and love, marriage and relationships.
If we could all grow up and realize sex is an OK part of life, one that we don’t need to spend a lot of time thinking about but just embrace and get on with it, we could quit obsessing about everything else, too.
And wouldn’t that be nice?
[And,please, will someone come help me before I rant again? I’m beginning to wonder if it’s ever going to stop. My poor little brain is so, so tired.]