Surrounded By Naked Flesh

It’s difficult to take a step back sometimes and get perspective on sexuality when most of your life seems to revolve around thinking about sex or writing about it. Or both. And when you’re not doing either of those you’re doing it … well, except for that rather annoying section of the day where you’re actually having to work for a living.

Getting those sides of your life mixed up would be a big mistake.

The reason I mention this lack of perspective is that I started reading what might be termed one of the more traditional agony columns on the website of one of our national newspapers last night. I was all ready to write a sarcastic and derisory post about it when I realised that I didn’t have the right to do so. Not that I don’t have the right to express my opinion, but when I considered what I disliked about the way the column was written I realised I was looking at it from the position of someone with considerable experience in the adult world.

That doesn’t mean I know everything. As in all aspects of my life I’m constantly learning new things about my own sexuality and that of others. And there’s the point. We all learn about sexuality at different speed, in different ways and from different mediums. Some people will never be able to accept what we do – write as adult bloggers. Nor would they countenance some of the sexual practices that we view as acceptable, or even indulge in.

We all have to feel happy in our sexuality and that applies if you’re a in a once a week on Sunday mornings type of relationship or swingers.

It’s difficult for the print media to keep up with the web, but they are spending a great deal of time and effort incorporating the new medium into their portfolio of content. The particular agony column I was reading had an email address and I happen to know that they now receive the vast majority of their letters via that email address rather than by paper letters.

In updating their output they have created a slightly odd looking column with increasingly non-vanilla topics dealt with by a woman who looks like your grandma and her faithful support team.

Although the writing style and tone of answers seemed at first inappropriate and strangely out of place I realised that it forms part of the adult information online. It’s the sort of accessible advice that people who would never dream of reading a blog like this can access without feeling they have somehow dirtied themselves. If it educates, informs and therefore increases the understanding of the whole panoply of sexuality within the general population then I’m all for it.