Yes!Yes!Yes!

There’s always a lot of talk in stylish circles in academia about sexual rights. These conversations generally center around individuals having a right to choose their sexual partners, the right to sexual autonomy and freedom from fear and abuse. Essentially, we as a generation and social group are very fluent in the language of “No.” No means no and that’s incredibly important; I don’t intend to diminish the vital importance of that sexual right. However, such emphasis on “No” leaves me wondering, what about “Yes”?\nNo matter how far we as Americans feel we’ve come in the fight for sexual open-mindedness, we’ve got so far still to travel. Desire is still distorted by popular culture. Men are still expected to be traditionally dominant (enter the frat boy persona and the swaggering mentality of the Colin Farrell), and female sexuality is still experiencing a major case of mixed messages. It’s been harped on time and again, but it’s still a legitimate cultural phenomenon that sexually realized women are looked down on as dirty, while being simultaneously elevated to this fantasy of desire. Who are we supposed to be? \nIt’s more than an issue of forming our sexual identities, though. This cultural conflict between the ingrained Puritan desire for girls to remain sexually tame and the idealized female sexual “freak” is indicative of a deeper issue in the American sexual perception. Both the idealization and the reviling of female sexuality takes away from the legitimacy of natural sexual desire. Making something seem infinitely better or infinitely worse than it is in truth does it the same disservice of misrepresentation. Both approaches deny the true nature of desire for the individual by prescribing false models of unreachable ideals of sexual perfection.\nBesides the exoticization of female desire and the denial of male softness, the simple fact that homosexuals and bisexuals in this country have to fight to even be considered as legitimate sexual and loving beings is proof that America has some issues with desire. (The representation of sexuality in the popular media is a whole other column.) Every individual has a unique wiring for a certain style of sexual expression, but there is a very specific outline of what is acceptable in our culture. Guys like girls and girls are submissive, right? The truth is that the majority of desire and sexual experience falls way outside the glossy portrayals of supermodel strippers and heterosexual, missionary-style relations.\nWhat I’m getting at is that every individual has the right to be a sexual being. Homosexuals, bisexuals, dominant girls, submissive boys, the physically disabled, BDSM fetishists, the elderly, those who consider themselves asexual and all those in between who don’t quite fit in the traditional concept of the American sexual identity deserve to be included in the consideration and portrayal of sexuality. Let’s just face it, the majority of us fall somewhere within those crowds. The time has come for Americans to embrace the right to say “Yes” to who we are sexually, against socially prescribed norms, just as vehemently as we have embraced our right to say “No.”