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Diary #10:
"It's Time"
Time
for war, maybe? Time to move? Time to get my diploma and get
on with it? Time to go live next to America’s other ocean?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
The
Boudoir is going to bed for a while. Psyching myself up to
write, I found an article in The New York Times about
Salon.com’s self predicted fall within a month. Salon
is falling? Salon is falling? How could I be too surprised
that my little corner of the webzine webverse is also on hard
times? Something’s changing, and it’s not just the
rush towards war, though how can anything not be? The Twin
Towers only stood for the first two weeks I worked with WACKYJAC,
and within days of my leaving, the new WTC design finalists
are released, and they’re stunning, crystalline, hanging
gardens of new Babylon beautiful, right in America. When The
City plans to erect 140 story single terminated quartz crystals,
as its swarmed with half a million peace-loving patriots,
something is shifting.
“I
feel so guilty,” I was complaining to one of my Third
Road classmates. (Final full disclosure. I’m studying
the Third Road, a branch of Faerie Witchcraft, and began studying
the day after 09/11. Nothing comes subtle in my universe.)
“I want to do something besides hold a sign. How do I
make sure children in Iraq are fed, or have medicine, or a
safe place to sleep?” Everything feels so OVER THERE
and every minute I spend in front of a computer feels luxurious
to the point of being shamefully indulgent.
“Or,”
I thought aloud, “maybe there’s work to be done
here.”
Lately
I’ve been forced to listen to my own voice in other people
when I can’t hear it above the clamor of my Self. “Yes,
you should move.” “You aren’t allowed to leave
this coast until you graduate.”
“What
about Adam and Eve?”
“Adam
and Eve?” I wondered back to my classmate. (Typical,
I thought to myself. It all goes back that far.)
No,
Adam and Eve. They advertise “sexual aids”
in mainstream magazines, and are probably responsible for
the first sex toy ads I ever saw, in Parade Magazine when
I was just a wee perv. Turns out with the profits they turn
as the “world’s largest purveyor of sexual merchandise”
(Mother
Jones), they fund sexual health initiatives worldwide.
Company founder Phil Harvey:
| “I
was very taken with the idea that I could sell sexual
accoutrements to relatively wealthy Americans and use
the proceeds to support family planning in developing
countries. I've certainly taken a great deal of pleasure
from the sort of Robin Hood effect that's resulted.” |
In
a sense, Adam and Eve is our ally, and I never even knew it.
Wheels that had been spinning started rolling smoothly (alright,
lubed, sure!).
Adam
and Eve is filling a gap left as a result of conservative
backlash around sexual health, making ends meet where American
dollars and support just won’t anymore. Some of the lawmakers
who say that children have no right to sexual education beyond
sex-negative dogma and celibacy-pushing programs don’t
know it, but with their discreet purchase of porn out of the
Sunday papers, they’re are funding a reduction on HIV
transmission worldwide.
America,
who else are you leaving behind? On a trip to New York
last week, I spoke to the Third Wave Feminist Foundation about
sex worker organizing (my main agenda), and discovered that
the US has quietly pulled all the funding out from underneath
the worldwide sex worker organizing efforts it had previously
supported. Did you know that our government had been helping
to fund prostitutes unions in India and Mexico City, organizations
in South Africa and Nepal, among others, to provide harm reduction
services to sex worker communities? Not now. I thought about
programs that support queer youth that had begun to emerge
under Clinton, after the release of a study on suicide among
gay and lesbian youth that had been suppressed under Bush
I. Where will those programs go? Never mind funding and support
for safer sex education (gone, unless you count abstinence
as “safer sex”), contraception and abortion, rape
crisis centers, programs for low-income women and families...
 The
war that supposedly hasn’t even started yet has already
come home.
Sex
as war, it always seems to come down to that. And still, I
have to believe that no one, deep down, wants to be ashamed
of their sexuality. To do so is to damn one’s own humanity!
There are days when it seems otherwise, that the war-death-empire
has a stranglehold, that there really is a two-sided battle
being waged over our very dignity and liberty as human beings,
and that I’m on the losing side.
And
suddenly, I realized, I’ve been sitting on my own Adam
and Eve. Taking this strategy to heart, I started thinking,
well, fine, if the neo-cons won’t give money to sex through
the government, how can I get it out of their pockets more
directly? “Come here, boys. Nice apple. Nice shiny. Don’t
you want a taste?” How can I put the apple of sexual
justice and sexual human rights out there without looking
so serpentine, really? That apple is a long time coming back
to the garden, and now more than ever, we need to be affirming
life out of the same mouth that we condemn war with. (And
oh what that mouth can do besides...)
That’s
why I’m packing it up and headed to Babylon on the Bay
to find something I’ve been looking for for far too long.
Even though I’ve been living in the Valley of Apples
for a long time, I’ve got a new one in my sight now.
Believe me, you’ll find me telling you how the feast
goes along the way.
Be
seeing you all soon, with hope.
xo.
undiegirl
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