sophie is home

“So I’m back home from my trip to the desert. Did you miss me?”

“I did. I realized how much I missed you after you got back. I tried not to think about it while you were gone because it would have tortured me.”

“What was it you said? ‘Absence makes the word count longer?’”

“I think it was, ‘absence makes the hard-on harder.’”

“Anyway. I missed you too. I thought about you a lot, between music and walking and art and watching people try to hook up with other people–”

“I read some coverage about that while you were gone. Women talking about how they were assaulted, groped. It bothered me.”

“I did run across a man getting yelled at by a woman wearing…not very much. He was being scolded for having looked at her fairly visible body. I kind of felt bad for him. I actually offered him a cigarette afterwards. It turns out he brushed past her body on the way to a bathroom. All I know is what he told me afterward, of course. He seemed surprised by the intensity of her reaction. I watched her yell at him for a good two minutes and he told me that had been going on for several minutes before I came across it.”

“Assuming he told you the truth, do women get to run around half naked and get angry when men notice?”

“I think that it is one hundred percent acceptable for women to run around fully naked doing whatever they want with the expectation that they won’t be physically engaged against their will.”

“I agree completely.”

“But I think the expectation that another person won’t look upon their mostly naked body without at least some degree of interest or desire is completely unrealistic and ignores a lot of what makes us human. And that’s really sad, the idea that it isn’t okay to appreciate beauty in a benign way.”

“My burner experience is similar. Freedom of expression includes everything up to total nudity, but you still want to look the other person in the eye and treat them as a fellow human.  In some ways it’s actually easier in that context.”

“What you’re saying is that consent to sexual activity isn’t implied or that it needs to be confirmed.”

“There are fun and playful ways to communicate your interest. Grabbing someone’s butt or breast or fingering them or whatever when they can’t defend themselves or can’t even tell who you are is just wrong.”

“Which is interesting to me because that’s kind of a fantasy, right? Hooking up with a stranger?”

“Stories have been written about that very thing, interesting stories, but the reason they are stories is because they can explore that fantasy safely. There are whole categories of porn based on this idea, but at the beginning of the videos you see the woman agreeing to the activity and at the end she talks about whether it met her expectations. But it’s still a fantasy on film. The topic can be explored safely on the page or screen but if acted out in reality, without consent, it’s not appropriate or acceptable. It seems ridiculous to have to say that out loud.”

“So what’s okay in art may or may not be okay in reality?”

“Honestly, I don’t know that the stories are completely appropriate – I’ve tried to write things like that but can’t finish them — but pretending that this piece of ourselves doesn’t exist is ignorant. It contributes to the problem, for both men and women.  We have to find a better way to address our shadows.”

“I feel that this is a huge sweeping topic with a million branching pathways that we could spend our entire year talking about and is insanely important, especially for us to address, since you and I have given each other blanket consent and not yet run into an issue… but not everyone is like us.”

“So maybe we should spend some time thinking about the broader picture. And then let’s get back to fucking.”

“I agree. We definitely need to get back to the porn. But first, seriousness.”

“I’m putting on my hipster glasses as we speak.”