Sex, Celebs And Bitches

People ridicule what they don’t understand and are afraid of things about which they have no experience. It’s the root of much of the prejudice in the world and the origin of many unkind jibes.

I’m thinking here of one particularly caustic ex-colleague whose usual mode of communication was to criticise about and pass judgement on everyone. Often she would attempt to cover up her more extreme comments as her version of humour, but it didn’t work. How she arrived at this state, where she only seemed capable of rubbing people up the wrong way is not relevant, maybe her upbringing, the friends she kept … who knows. What it did do was to amplify the problems she had because when you act like that to others they tend to avoid communicating with you in anything but the most superficial of ways. Would you tell someone who was capable of originating the cruellest of gossip your inner most feelings?

All that I seem to be able to recall of her conversation was that gossip, often based around the sexual conduct of others and always couched in her ignorant attitudes about sex and sexuality. I was reminded of her by an episode of celebrity wife swap last night. The wife of a minor celeb went to live with the female partner of a stand-up comedian, also female. It was obvious that she knew nothing about non-heterosexual lifestyles, painfully obvious. At one point likening lesbian couples having kids as like allowing paedophiles to adopt. Stunningly ignorant.

Regarding anything but your own sexuality as deviant or worthy of ridicule is indicative of a severely limited experience of the world, but that’s exactly what my ex-colleague would do.

I think it derived from her life experience to that point and her jealousy of others in equal measure. Imagine never experiencing anything but a monogamous heterosexual relationship your whole life. Not only for you, but seeing your parents in that situation too. I don’t want to knock stable, heterosexual, faithful relationships, far from it. But if all you’ve ever known is missionary on a Sunday morning then everything else is unusual, doggy style becomes exotic, oral sex is positively depraved and anal is the work of Satan.

Someone needed to teach her about sex, properly. She should have been told about and experienced the wonder of a sexual relationship that involved experimentation, mutual trust and respect. The sort of fulfilling relationship that many people enjoy and even more aspire towards.