You Don't Have to be a Sexpert to Think Meaningfully about Sex

You don't have to try every kind of alcoholic beverage to know that people who drive under the influence tend to cause accidents in which other people die.

You don't have to try every kind of tobacco to understand that second-hand smoke is harmful to yourself. Nor do you have to have first-hand smoking experience to watch the effects of tobacco on your coworkers.

I personally can tell you a lot about that. It's one of the reasons I left the software industry. Watched too many companies get dragged to the ground because management and the board of directors had the engineers so focused on getting the job done that they failed to make sure that the job should even be done, much less that it was being done correctly. (Witness Bruce Schneier waxing eloquent on Crowdstrike.) 

And one of the tools engineers use to focus themselves on deadlines instead of safety is tobacco. Coffee is another. And pornography.

You don't have to experience every possible sexual position to understand that sexual position is not what sex is all about.

And you don't have to have sex with every person on the planet, or even just every attractive person you meet, to understand that quantity is not better than quality. Neither do you need to have sex with a whole lot of people to understand that carefully sculpted and painted-on beauty can hide some serious hideousness behind the endomorphin-induced haze.

Sometimes it's easy to see a whole lot of trees and miss the forest.

I'm not an expert on sex like Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny. But I have observed people getting hung up on sex and gender for over half a century, and with so much public focus on the topic these days, I'm re-exploring my previous analysis and understanding of sex.

Sex is an especially difficult topic, since even talking about it seems to make those endogenous (naturally-produced) opiates flow, and the flow alters the brain processes.

Even a single can of beer is said to be enough to cause professional drivers to become sloppy in the places they need to be not sloppy, and yet make them feel that their driving improves under the influence of just that little beer.

In much the same way that it's probably not wise to try to evaluate your ability to drive under the influence when you are under the influence, it's probably not wise to evaluate the effects of sex on you while you are under the influence of those natural peptides.

Unfortunately, being human, living in bodies that naturally produce those peptides, it can be nigh impossible to escape their influence.

Maybe it's best to admit up front that our perceptions on sex are going to be bent.

Since it's probable that the cold light of morning never really comes, maybe it's best to try to reexamine our impressions, logic, and conclusions under the influence of different groups of those naturally produced peptides.

This may turn into a short series of blog entries behind my modesty barrier. If so, I'm inviting everyone along for the ride.