I’m tempted to share more of my story now… Later, I guess. I’m off to my Speculative Fiction class for introspection, reflection and creativity of a different (or maybe not so different?) kind.

I’d had sex with two boyfriends and a couple of hook-ups before I finally learned how to make myself climax. It was revelatory. I cried the first time I came. Because I found out how to make myself come, I was able eventually to come with a boyfriend. Even now, in and out of relationships, I find Sex for One to be, as you said, light-bringing and liberating. The idea that people consider this sinful or damaging makes me so furious.

I’m furious that I didn’t start getting off earlier!

Here’s to private pleasure that makes us better public people. Thanks Xena and Hugo.

Thank you for this. Amen!

“He created me, and my wife, and you who are reading this for the purpose of Tikkun Olam: healing the world. None of us is insignificant, none of us is without a potentially vital role to play in redeeming the world.”

While I can agree in theory, I don’t feel this means that every action we take needs to revolve around our “mission” on this earth.

All of the above is my own opinion (not trying to tell you yours is wrong), and all questions are honest (asked out of curiosity), not rhetorical.

Peace.

I appreciate your response, however, as it reminds me how I need to work on making a case that is more compelling, more winsome, and more galvanizing. If this is thin gruel, I need to make it more stout.

While we disagree, I have to admit you do trigger an urgent need for inner reflection, which is an exceedingly good thing.

I do, however, have to report that my initial reaction to this second part is one of great disappointment – that the promise of “doing someone” justly now seems to seems little more than a means of supporting a mutual commitment to progressive street politics. I had hoped for a more demanding, and more exacting, standard for “doing” your lover justly. Absent is any understanding that your primary and irrevocable role on this earth is to love, support and care for God’s gift to you – your spouse, your partner, your lover, your baby-mama or your Craigsliat hookup….whatever Whoever God’s gift to you might be, and whoever you happen to be worshiping any particular night, it sounds like they’re on a short leash until they demonstrate that they won’t whine too much about their own feelings and needs, lest they inhibit enthusiastic participation in that evening’s party caucus, and the quest for global justice.

I think that, most of the time, mass consumption of people of the gender you’re attracted to is more about self esteem deficiencies than anything else – every person I know in the real world who dates or sleeps with an unending revolving door of people and obsessively focuses on it to the point where I just don’t feel like talking to them at the moment is attaching his or her self worth to the number of people who “want” them (“want” because it’s obvious that random sexual partners really could care less who YOU are).

You vision of sex definitely has more potential for creating fulfillment in a person’s life. And as you said, sex is important in our lives – but it’s not the end-all-be-all of our existance, and I always want to yell at my friends who fall prey to the idea that it is, “THERE IS MORE OUT THERE THAN THIS!” (In case anyone thinks I’m terribly rude, I always fall to a kinder way of suggesting that their endless persuits appear to be making them miserable and that maybe finding some other hobbies and concerns will lighten their life)