It wasn't a choice

*Image removed*

All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air, with one enormous chair . . . lots of chocolate for me to eat . . . oh wouldn't it be lovely?

Rest and easily digested nourishment - Eliza Doolittle guiltlessly celebrates caloric accumulation. Puritanism is only necessary in a state where nourishment and rest are easy to come by. In a situation where one is starving and constantly on the run from predators (and other people), it hardly makes sense to extol the virtues of industry and abstinence. No "ought" without "can", but correspondingly, no oughtn't either.

Now what I eat is constrained partly by time, partly by money, and of course a lingering sense of guilt. Gone, however, is the literal parental control, punishing me for having chocolate, denying me the extra plate of noodles. In theory, life for me could be one long, sweet meal, punctuated by sleep, television, books and radio.

But enough about food. Let's talk about sex.

Sex continues to be an area where I dare not dream. And perhaps it is an area of life where a certain obliviousness serves us well. Dig around too much in your sexual tastes and activities, and you might uncover truths about your past and present that you'd rather not face. Colonialism, childhood fears, family violence, insecurity, economic status (or lack thereof), all affect our sexual desires, just as they do our more prosaic appetite.

The drive towards structure as we follow our appetites is ever present: eating is neatly quarantined into meals and snacks (although the new healthy way to eat is to constantly "graze," though that too implies a kind of structure: a levelling out, rather than a gathering together); sex is confined to a few or one partner, or, if not, then wrapped in a sanitizing "safe, sane and consensual"* language. But rarely do our (perhaps I am projecting. Let me just say "my") appetites run solely to monogamy, or safe, sane consensuality, or punctuated regularity. They hit us (me) as an insistent rumbling, a hunger that is larger than myself.

To have a desire - is this an act? I suppose it is merely a property in that we "have" a desire. To want, then, is the act. One may protest, and many do, that it is an act that one has no obvious hand in, at least, not without intense investigation. However, as the Oedipus myth teaches us, guilt may attach to acts which we didn't know we were committing, so why not to acts that we didn't know how to not commit?

If I trip while holding a child, and she falls and breaks her neck, does not her family feel resentment, no matter how careful I was?

By protesting our innocence, either through an appeal to genetics or even to the inscrutability of desire, queers allow our acts to be defined as criminal. Nobody is called upon to justify their taste for chocolate (although given the nature of the two cultures, Colonial European and Aztec, that are responsible for it, perhaps they could).

*Note: Just a little internet reading on this phrase reveals that slave david stein (who coined it in 1983) was/is aware of the potential for its misappropriation as yet another way for one group to define what is "good" sex and what is "bad" sex (or even "not" sex).

photo: Loving it... by barbus22