Sex Positive

It wasn’t until David Bowie passed that I heard about how he had slept with an underage girl.

At the age of 15, Lori Mattix was a self-described groupie in the 70s ~ a groupie who lost her virginity to David Bowie. Last November, in an interview at the Thrillist, the adult Mattix seemed fine about it. Even when Thrillist reporter Michael Kaplan pressed her about it, she seemed dreamily happy, gushing, “Who wouldn’t want to lose their virginity to David Bowie?”

Mattix’s stories of her groupie years, deflowering, and age have varied over the years ~ which is not stated here to cast doubt on her claims, but to point out that she clearly hasn’t viewed her sexual activities with Bowie (or others) to be rape or anything remotely close to it. But, as told in the Thrillist piece, Mattix was a minor and Bowie was not. So even with Mattix agreeing and desiring to have sex with Bowie, her age removes her legal ability to consent. This would make Bowie guilty, ethically if not legally, of statutory rape.

Yes, I know; we all took David Bowie’s death pretty hard. But I’m not posting this about Bowie per se…. I mean, sure, there are definitely implications and conversations we should be having regarding celebrities and abuse. And we do have some consumer power we can wield. But the real issues I am looking at in this conversation are the rights of young people to have any sexual autonomy, who decides who is victimized, and how autonomy and victimization impact one another.

Most of the academic and popular literature on sexuality and disability focuses on how disabled people are desexualized, or seen as nonsexual. Meghann and Hailee mentioned several writers and theories; one term that was new to me (though the idea is familiar) was Harlan Hahn’s concept of “asexual objectification.” This is the idea that disabled women, disabled people of any gender really, are seen as things that don’t have a sexuality – in the most extreme cases, as things that don’t have a humanity. IN a session I went to earlier in the week, asexuality was presented as a sexual orientation, a way someone relates to their own sexuality, so I use the terms desexualization or nonsexual instead. I’m hoping Meghann and Hailee will mention this in their literature review. Maybe Hahn’s term can be updated to “nonsexual objectification.” That still contrasts attitudes towards disabled people with the ways North Ameerican cultures tend to sexually objectify people.

(here’s more information on the theory of asexual objectification.

These theories usually describe the experiences of people with visible physical disabilities.

Women diagnosed with mental illness, especially bipolar disorder, are instead seen as hypersexual. “Hypersexuality” is one of the bipolar disorder symptoms listed in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the diagnostic tool most often used by psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners in the United States. There’s no definition of “normal” sexuality to go along with that. For that matter, there’s not really a definition of hypersexuality beyond evaluating behaviours like how many partners a patient or client has had, or how frequently they’re engaging in sexual behaviours.

So, each mental health practitioner makes their own judgments about what is normal, and how or whether their patient or clients deviate f

Men and women get caught up in their own needs and then project those needs onto everyone around them. Women see men as cold and brutish because they expect them to have the same need for connection that they have. Men see women as manipulative and deceitful because they assume women use sex as a tool for self-esteem like they do. In both cases, they’re wrong and mischaracterizing the people lying naked in front of them.

A reversible polymer that blocks sperm is about to enter human trials and will be available by 2017. How will rhetoric change when male bodies are responsible for birth control?

Ten points to the person who comes up with the perfect term for female masturbation! The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education is looking to make sure that female sexuality gets the same, healthy recognition as male.

Over at Eros Blog, Bacchus has an interesting discussion about a point raised in Adrienne West's post at Thought Catalog. In West's "true sex story", she writes about her discovery that men like po...