Sexuality.

Here we go. I've spent outrageous amounts of time talking about sexuality these past few days. People come home from college with stories about random hook-ups, or random friends with random hook-ups.

It bothers me to no end that I'm bothered by these tales, that I get squeamish when close friends give me detailed accounts of their sexual exploits, even though (or especially because?) I ask them for all the grimy specifics. It feels illicit somehow, to sit in a park where I've attended high school English class--to sit there and discuss such obviously "grown-up" things. I push myself to reveal information that I know I would have taken to my grave a year ago. The words seem strange coming out of my mouth, I feign nonchalance, I grit my teeth and tell myself it's important to shed such moral pretensions.

This is related, I guess, to D.H. Lawrence's conception of pornography and obscenity as "the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it" (quoted from his 1929 essay on the topic--always a good read, and very telling of Lawrence's general outlook). Anything "dirty" is only so because of the way we approach it, because we want to hate it and hide it behind closed doors. It's shameful only because we're ashamed, because we force an element of impropriety onto it, not because it's inherently disgraceful.

Definitely, of course, in high school, sexuality was a horrible, horrible desire that we avoided in discussion. Or rather, we avoided discussing it until the lights were out and we were in someone's bedroom telling secrets. In the dark, we could say things we wouldn't have said during the day -- but isn't that what Lawrence was talking about? Hiding, secrecy, not admitting to certain parts of ourselves. . . . Now it all seems so sadly tragic, the fact that we were too repressed to recognize our own dishonesty.

Anyway, we're all older now, more "liberated," staunch about our acceptance of physical desires. And yet I still find myself cringing when I realize how incredibly fast these "mature" relationships move. I can't help but have a very visceral reaction to promiscuity. Why, why, why? How could my socially-imposed morality have become such an instinct? --How do I make it go away? Ideally, I would actually be casual about all of it; realistically, part of me still wonders if maybe I wasn't better off innocent and prepubescent. It's cognitive dissonance at its best, I guess. I just wish I didn't feel so awkward about both perspectives.