Celebrating Life Choices While 20-Something

Has anyone noticed that everyone in the world is getting engaged? It's like in the last six months, the rest of the 20-somethings got a memo that I somehow totally missed. I think it's so wonderful that people are choosing to celebrate their love and share their lives together, and also every time I see a new engagement on Facebook (thanks for those adorable popup notifications, Zuck), I want to pull my hair out and scream. Just a little bit.

So why does it stress me out when other people get engaged? Is it because I feel like I'm losing the rat race? Is it because I'm frustrated with the current state of my life? It's certainly not that I want to be engaged - I'm actually very happily single at the moment. When people get engaged, it seems like they have their lives together and are focused and successful. However, I've learned from talking with these crazy engaged folk that, generally speaking, they feel just as lost as I do being 20-somethings and trying to figure out this crazy little thing called life. So if we're all really lost little lambs in the woods together, why the unease on my part?

I was thinking about my strangely unreasonable engagement woes, and suddenly my mind started wandering and thinking about the things that I've committed myself to over the last few years. No commitments to people, pets, apartments, etc., but commitments to ideas. Like sex-positivity. And body-positivity. And feminism.

Which is when I came up with the radical notion of...(drum roll please)...LIFE POSITIVITY! Okay, I looked it up and it's definitely a term that's been used by all sorts of holistic living organizations, and I think that's awesome. But that's not quite how I'm using it.

Sex-positivity, to me, means keeping an open mind about sexuality and celebrating every person's choices (as long as they're consensual), even if they're not necessarily what I would choose. Body-positivity is about keeping an open mind about the diversity of the human body - celebrating people's choices to love their bodies at any size. So life-positivity would mean keeping an open mind about life decisions.

I don't want to be engaged right now. And that's okay. And it's also okay that friends of mine feel differently. And I don't need to feel pressured by that, because I can celebrate their choices WHILE also celebrating my own choices. Unlike in college, where everyone was pretty much at the same stage in their lives, now 20-somethings are all over the place. Some of us are in grad school. Some of us are getting married and having babies. Some of us are traveling the world. Some of us are earning millions. Some of us are living paycheck to paycheck. And that's all okay. I don't think any of these choices are inherently better or worse than any other. Also, each person needs different things in their lives at different times.

So gosh Amy, wouldn't it be way easier for you to be life-positive and celebrate people's choices without getting strange feelings when people who you knew as 5-year-olds are getting married? Yes, yes it would be easier. And I'm working on it one day at a time. I encourage you to do the same and embrace life-positivity in your own life! Let me know how it goes! Any stories about successes/failures/epiphanies?

Kink and Gender

I've been having lots of thoughts about gender lately. A lot of these thoughts came up a few weeks ago, when I had the AMAZING experience of touring Kink.com headquarters at the San Francisco Armory (this was so great - if you're ever in SF, do it!). For such a sex-positive, inclusive, really wonderful space, I was really surprised at the gender-normativity of a lot of their work. Just a few examples:

• They have two separate wrestling themed sites, one with male wrestlers and one with female wrestlers. Occasionally, they'll film with a live audience - the female wrestlers' audience is mixed-gender, but the male wrestlers' audience is exclusively male. The reason? Gay men watching the male wrestling site don't want to see women in their porn.
• The fourth floor of Kink.com is called The Upper Floor, which is a breathtakingly gorgeous, elegant space that is home to play parties open to the San Francisco kink community. There are a special group of slaves (BDSM submissive - it's a totally consensual arrangement that brings pleasure to all parties, so please don't be offended by the term) who are the slaves of The Upper Floor - it's the ultimate goal for slaves at Kink.com, and it's a very special honor to be in that group. Which is all women. Because that's what their online audience responds to.
• I attended a rope bondage class while at Kink.com. It was SO AWESOME and fun and fabulous and totally different from anything I'd ever done before! Also, all of the people who attended the class were in couples that were male-dominant, female-submissive. All of them. One of the women actually got annoyed with me when I suggested that some people might be turned on by switching power roles once in a while.

Okay, so here's my analysis. I totally get that Kink.com is a business, and as a business, they need to cater to their customers' preferences in order to be profitable. So I am completely sympathetic to their situation. I guess I'm just surprised, since a kinky porn site is already so far from mainstream, that their customers would be so very mainstream in their desires. I know that there's a market for gender-bending porn and porn that is inclusive to women and porn that promotes gender equality - I know because I work with that market every day. Unfortunately, it seems that those are not the people (or at least not the majority of the people) who pay for porn site access.

In my ideal world, a porn company would hear from their customers that they prefer seeing only female slaves on The Upper Floor, and they would say, "Too bad for you! We don't want to prevent our male slaves from being able to achieve the highest level of slavedom." Or if online subscribers preferred to only see male audience members at a gay male pornographic wrestling match, they would say, "Sorry! Sometimes women get off by watching men have sex, just like how some men get off by watching women have sex, and all of that is okay!"

The problem is, we are all socialized to see gender constructs as necessary and true. It's so deeply ingrained in us that even those of us who have rejected all sorts of other societal norms still get off on seeing men in dominant roles and women in submissive roles (and for many of us, participating in those roles as well!). It doesn't even mean that's necessarily what we like in life outside the bedroom - it means that these roles are so deeply embedded in our psyches that our minds interpret this kind of power dynamic as pleasurable. I don't even see this as an inherently good or bad thing - I just find it fascinating. The human mind - wow! And its effects on the economics of running a porn company. And how that can unwittingly contribute to reinforcing gender stereotypes in our society. I love how it's all connected. In a way, it's kind of brilliant to see the whole system and how it works through us. Thoughts?