It occurs to me America is deeply closeted. Forgive me for the following ill-defined argument, but we'll see what happens. Walk down any street or turn to any television channel and you'll see sex. It's everywhere, from billboards to fashion to art and everything in between.



Anti-fur, Hamburgers, and Toilet Paper, yes Toilet paper.

Sex sells sure. But do we ever talk about it? We paste it on every open wallspace and speak to it in layered metaphors and undecipherable parables, but still it's something for closed doors. What does this do to a society? It conflicts us. At once we are flashed with images of sex constantly at all times, but when we make references to it in a public forum in whatever way we are made to be the pervert. In the sexual openness of today we have somehow become less open and ashamed. In making everything everywhere sexual we have added a stigma to our actual sexual relationships. We have turned them into something they are not, standardized.

Maybe the issue is that we have simplified sex and the feelings that go with it. We say something is either sexual or not sexual. Has that ever been true? It's dangerous to think that way because it will put you into a cage of action (or nonaction). The lessons we learned from the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s have somehow been bastardized and prostituted and erased of all effect. That generation said "Fuck. I'm not ashamed of this." And maybe we're not ashamed of sex today, but we're not proud either. We've turned it into the mundane and the meaningless on the larger scale. This isn't to say it doesn't hold meaning to us who take part, but in the public sphere it has become something less than it is.

What's going on and how do we change this?