He blogs, he cross-posts, he scores!

So in my previous post on entrepreneurial city I talked about softness and blurring boundaries, but I just realized, after a particularly bad fallout with a friend (although in his new world view, we were never friends to begin with - somewhat reminiscent of judges who, in engaging in a novel reading of a law, say that it was always this way), that I am mister compartmentalizing.

By that I mean that I have certain roles that I want people to play and that I play in return, and in those roles I feel quite safe. For example, I think that when I have straight male friends, I feel freer to admit to myself my emotional attachment to them, because I’ve ruled out the possibility of sexual contact, and thus the possibility of sexual rejection (a big source of anxiety for me, apparently). Conversely, with some friends that I have sex with, I don’t feel free to admit to emotional attachment, or the mixture of shame, pride, joy, despair and desire that such arrangements often entail for me. This means that I have a script for those arrangements too. That script is "It’s Just Sex, And That’s Okay." As if anything could ever justify sticking a "just" in front of a complex social interaction like sex. It would be like saying "It’s Just Rocket Science" or "It’s Just Hegel." One could imagine a rocket scientist or Hegel scholar maybe saying such things, but to say "it’s just sex" brings a whole new level of arrogance to the table.

Compartmentalizing is a reaction to totalizing worldviews (like "all sex is bad except within a monogamous heterosexual non-transgendered marriage," or even "sex without love is bad" - which just sort of shifts the question to "what is love?"), but I think it’s time my pendulum started to swing back. No penis jokes please.