CARNAL NATION

The waning weeks and days of 2009 are upon us, and they've brought us plenty of sex news—something sexual is always going on somewhere, you know, a natural law made up of two simple constituent parts: there are 6,792,800,000 or so of us, and sex is both a powerful drive and a fascinating hobby which can be embellished in oh so many ways. It's (ideally) pleasurable, educational, distracting, and one of the best recession-busting pastimes you could ever dream of. And even when you aren't having any at the moment, you can consider, talk about, and comment on it! In some respects, culturally, the latter might be at least as important as the former. Speak up, lovely people!

Take Tiger. Please.

Oh, I forgot—if you're a cute cocktail waitress or a porn starlet, you already have! I view this latest celebrity sex scandal, as all the others which have preceded it, as an opportunity for us to reflect (if not actively fantasize) about the twin American dreams of celebrity excess-and-access and Family Values-inflected "happy-ever-aftering." We look to the famous for a large-scale mentoring about possibilities, using them as role models for what we'd do if we won the lottery, or our reality show hit big, or we married someone rich—plus when they have personal train wrecks, they are so much more awesome than our own, almost as though they were being played out for our own personal edification. Which in a sense they are, since fame turns a person into community property, and we don't use talking foxes in fables to issue a story's moral any more (unless voiced by George Clooney); we get it from blog posts and big-media commentary.

So predictably we're hearing a lot about Tiger and sex addiction these days, plus a breathless countdown: will Elin file for divorce (like Jenny Sanford, my other favorite Wronged Spouse of 2009)? I don't think Tiger has a sex addiction problem; I think sex with hot females is his hobby, one he unfortunately seems not to have shared with the hot female he married. That's his problem right there—the notion that he was sharing his life with someone, except for all the parts of his life that he didn't feel like sharing. And unlike banning your spouse from the tool bench in the garage, not letting your partner know that you're working up to a huge tabloid explosion, oh, plus you might not always use condoms... it's tacky, Tiger. It's the real reason all the businesses hurried to dump him. It's not ethical, and bottom line, the problems is not the sex but the lie it comes wrapped in and the humiliation that ensues.

Guys, listen, I know there are plenty of you out there shouldering your own smaller-scale version of Tiger's dilemma, plus plenty of women who want there to be a middle ground between playtime and monogamy. There are loads of couples whose fragile and overburdened partnerships will crack in the coming year, just as there are every year (partly because of the expectations we load upon monogamous pairing in our culture, with so little education to back it up—our failure to provide sex education is just the start). Many of them crack in the direction of infidelity, and considering the options, that might not be the worst. (I personally reserve the scorn some deploy toward fuck-around husbands for the guys who think because they're stressed out that they ought to kill their whole families. Really? Dude, take a Xanax and call a whore. Get a massage. Do some yoga. Please.) So if we learn anything at all from this, let it be the universality of desire, of sex as a charming pastime, and let us all realize that there is plenty of middle ground between lyin', cheatin', don't-ask-don't-tell marriage and straight-edged monogamy. Just for starters: there's polyamory, open marriage, swinging, and getting together with a hot female who also appreciates hot females. And many famous folks do some variation on these—they just don't talk about it on The View. My New Year's wish for 2010: somebody good and famous will come out and talk about this stuff candidly. Make a little space for all the people out there to have relationships that flex to fit the people in them. Set an example that you can have it all if you are honest about it, and can negotiate for it, out of the gate. Stop letting the dang hypocrites get all the ink.

It wasn't quite what I wished for, but this week Angelina Jolie supposedly said, in the German mag Das Neue, that infidelity wasn't the worst thing in a relationship—hey, Elin, wanna log in and comment on that? It's exactly a frisky gal like Jolie who should take this particular discussion forward. But if she were like all the other polyamorous moms, she'd have to worry about getting her kids taken away. To read the story through the eyes of an actual open relationship advocate, check out Jenny Block's take on it: her "Case Against Monogamy" appeared recently in Newsweek.

Belle de Jour Revealed

Speaking of who to call when you need sexual healing, this fall one of the world's most famous sex workers, came out after having maintained an amazing level of anonymity after her story first captured the pubic's imagination through her blog Diary of a London Call Girl and then through books, newspaper columns, and a television show Reportedly she feared an ex-boyfriend was about to out her and decided to seize the message and the timing of (as Robert Frost might have it) her avocation and her vocation. So welcome, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, to the rarified ranks of the celebrity prostitute! So far she is taking the bull by the horns; her December 2 post tackles all the haters, and shows that she has brains (she uses the word "heuristic"! That makes me want to pay her for sex right there!!) as well as politics—check it out:

When someone says:
Stories like this glamorize a trade that enslaves and kills women."

What they mean is:
"I don't actually know the difference between the separate issues affecting call girls, massage parlours, brothels, and streetwalkers, and I'm not going to bother finding out."

Huzzah, Dr. Brooke!

My New Year's wish for the sex workers: Safety first: from anti-sex, anti-woman (and -trans, and -gay) psychos; from power-trippy ex-boyfriends; and from idiots who will not give a person the space to tell her/hir/his own story without smearing it with their own lack of knowledge. The first part of this wish has gone global with the advent of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. And once we get that all taken care of? Then we move to acknowledge the ways sex workers provide both a pressure valve for a sexually squirrelly culture, and also create a repository of knowledge for our sexual secrets. Sex workers are a precious resource and should be treated as nothing but.