While attending
the poster sales that take place periodically at the Ferguson center, I
stumbled across a topic for this week’s gender journal. As always I browsed the large books of
posters and small bins of prints looking for images some friends or I might
want to use to decorate our apartment walls. Among the posters of famous
rappers and bottles of popular liquor brands I stumbled across a series of
posters illustrating multiple sex positions titled “101 Positions of the Day:
Sex Every Day in Every Way.” I snapped a quick picture of what I found to be a
hilariously random find (some of those positions were quite acrobatic) and
immediately left the poster sale realizing taking a picture of that poster
probably looked weird to the average passerby.
It
was only after I left the poster sale in a bit of a rush that I really thought
about what caused me to react this way. As soon as the topic of sexuality came
up and I expressed an interest or curiosity by lingering on that poster as I
flipped through the collection, or by snapping a picture, I immediately felt I
might be judged if anyone saw me. I realized that this seemed to be a bizarre overreaction
on my part and wandered back over to the poster sale to observe some other
people’s reactions and compare them to my own.
While
not many people stumbled across the same poster I did during the time I watched
from a nearby bench at the Ferg (after all there were probably hundreds of
posters at this sale), the ones who did had a notable reaction. A couple of
girls, obviously friends, found the poster after I left the booklet open to
that page. They exchanged brief glances and giggled, and quickly kept flipping
through the posters. One girl, who I could describe as similar to myself was
flipping through that same book of posters and I could note the almost exact
moment that she came across the poster of sex positions. She made a
particularly surprised and horrified face and walked away from the poster sale
all together! What ideas do we condition in to our society to make individuals
react that way? Centering sex education and abstinence only education around
ideas of shame I believe is the root cause. I think that it is probably time
that we change the way society views sexuality and sex to be more open and
realistic. An open mind about sex starts with sex education, and the shame that
was taught to me along with sex education I believe still affected my response
to this poster and (probably) the other girls’ responses as well. Conflicting
views of society make sex both a curious topic of conversation and also an inappropriate
one. With such a sex driven, media based, society we live in I think it’s time
people started being more open when it comes to the topic of sex.
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