How does our understanding of sex inform our relationship to the earth? Sallie Tisdale brilliantly explores this question (and more) in the following excerpt from Talk Dirty To Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex. For the 10th anniversary of the publication of this controversial book, Isotope sought responses from scientists, poets and writers to Tisdale’s words. The responses to the right contain their provocative responses.
From Talk Dirty to Me
Sallie Tisdale
The planet itself is laden with sex, marbled with my physical and psychic responses to its parts, made out of my relationship with its skin. How we are rooted to the earth through our bodies determines how we see other bodies, and ultimately the earth itself. This seems obvious, and yet we don’t call this sex. To do so makes sex awfully big, but big is exactly what sex is. Freud was never more right than when he called the human animal “polymorphously perverse.” To the unschooled body there are no good or bad sexual objects, no right or wrong responses. (Even the schooled body gets confused.) Sexual acts are one of the primary means by which we can act out our inarticulated inner lives.
The Latin root for pudenda, our genitals, means “to be ashamed.” We are twisted between this and the body’s blessed pleasures, living among a proliferation of sexual images even as we live in shame. The sex that is presented to us in everyday culture feels strange to me; its images are fragments, lifeless, removed from normal experience. Real sex, the sex in our cells and in the space between our neurons, leaks out and gets into things and stains our vision and colors our lives. This is what we can’t see. This is what we never say.
Responses from:
Tim Birkhead | Paisley Rekdal | Bruce Bagemihl | Melanie Domenech Rodriguez | Dorianne Laux | David Shields | Gary Paul Nabhan