Wanderlust

Love is a conflict between reflex and reflection

May 29, 2007 at 10:50 pm gvblog 1 comment

I’m back in Eastern Standard Time, having in the last four days criss-crossed the country, wiggled my toes in the Pacific and watched lightning spangle the night sky as I pressed my forehead against the thick plastic porthole of your 747.  It’s been exhausting, and my body itches to climb back on my bicycle, but I am still talking, still shocked by the ease with which conversations with the people I meet resuscitate my soul. I spent today with the researchers and curators of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington Indiana, recently flooded with media as a result of Kinsey, a movie about Dr. Alfred Kinsey (the founder of the institute) which if you haven’t seen already you should rent immediately.

 

My cousin Emily and I went on a tour of the institute led by Jennifer Bass, the Communications Director who excelled at explaining the history of the institute and why their work is so relevant today.  I learned something new from the pictures in the entryway (and how often does that happen?) – about Dr. Emily Mudd, who I had never heard of, but who was a pioneer in women’s health. She was the first to discuss sexuality as a vital factor in family life care (What, sex impacting marriage and family?) and she also worked tirelessly to distribute birth control information back when it was a crime.

Jennifer Bass, who led our tour, described Kinsey’s work as the study of the difference between individuals, what makes each of us unique. I had always thought that sexuality research was much more focused on drawing comparisons among large swaths of the population and making generalizations about behavior and beliefs, so I was intrigued to hear Kinsey’s work described this way. I think that in publishing his books on sexual behavior of the modern male and female, he allowed people to see the breadth and variety of sexual expression and practice for the first time outside of dirty magazines and "8-pagers", which were little books available from the barber that featured prominent celebrities (Marilyn Monroe, Archie, Joseph Stalin…)

Current research at the Kinsey Institute is based on the premise that love is a conflict between reflexes and reflection – that each of us has the propensity for excitation and inhibition in equal measure, and that many aspects of sexuality can be studied through the lens of these opposing forces. In their current research, they’re measuring not how we behave sexually but why. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be "political". The Kinsey Institute, along with a lot of the places I’ve visited so far, was insistent that their work is not political.  As Jennifer Bass put it, "Information is not political".  While I certainly agree that information in and of itself isn’t political, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and there are certainly political forces who strongly oppose research, study, and even conversation about sexuality. I’ve run into this determinedly apolitical stance all over, from health care providers and from sex store operators.  It seems  to me that, at least in our country, information about sexuality is clearly politicized whether we like it or not. What do we gain from denying that our work is political?  What does it mean to be political?

We also had a chance to see the research lab at the institute, where they conduct numerous studies on sexuality and behavior.  One of the things they do is measure arousal, which has presented some interesting findings.  Women of all sexual orientations exhibited the bodily symptoms of arousal when shown images of both men and women, but some heterosexual women, when asked if they were aroused after being shown images of women, said no.  Were they lying? How do you measure desire? 

The Kinsey Institute also has a HUGE collection of art collected over the last 50 odd years – from African fertility goddesses to 18th century photographs of naked women to contemporary art.  I’m always amused by our unending fascination with sex.  I bet the first thing the inventor of the camera did after he figured out how it worked was to pull down his pants.  I’m equally amused by the way each new generation feels like we invented sex – when you see the unending variety of salacious materials at Kinsey, it seems absurd that we esteem past generations as paragons of virtue.  Just because they kept their porn well hidden doesn’t mean they didn’t like it.

I got a chance to talk to Debby Herbenick, who does fascinating research on sexuality, about my questions around positive sexuality and medicine – specifically, the lack of training in how to talk about sex in a positive way for health care providers and the lack of conversation about pleasure ANYWHERE, even in reproductive health clinics.  Debby had a really interesting perspective on it – there are lots and lots of people who want different things more comprehensively incorporated into medical care – the nutrition advocates want more talk about diet, the mental health advocates want more talk about stress, etc, and if the doctors tried to incorporate EVERYTHING people want them to talk about, they’d never get anything done.  She definitely has a valid point, although I have seen some holistic health care providers that ARE able to do all those things. Would it work on the scale of the American health care system? What is the role of health care providers? 

At Planned Parenthood, educators often hang out in the waiting rooms during teen-only hours and are available to talk with teens about sexuality and answer any questions they might have. This certainly always seemed useful to me – what if that existed all the time, for all patients?

Debby is also doing some really interesting research into in-home pleasure parties – typically hosted by women and featuring a representative from either an online company or a retail store who comes armed with a variety of sex toys, books, and information that the party attendees can learn and ask questions about in a safe and nonjudgmental environment.  

In my experience, there are so few places that adults can go to talk about sex openly, and we talked about the amazing potential of these parties to give women a space to ask questions and practice talking about sexuality. Is there a way to harness the awesome potential of these parties and extend them, turn them into miniature Femsex classes? 

Wheels are spinning, up there in my brain.   

Entry filed under: On the Road. Tags: .