by Susannah Indigo
(9/6/00)

I am passionate about a hundred things and sex is only one of them. Honest. Only a hundred? you may ask, but all you have to do is start counting your own list to find out how challenging this idea can be. Sex; children; poetry; Hemingway; music festivals; feta cheese omelets; a certain kind of gentle, yet dominant man; red lace; baseball; meditation; aspen trees; upside-down kisses ... the list starts out easy and then becomes a challenge. It takes a lot of living and some tremendous mistakes to discover the people, places, ideas, and moments that you are truly passionate about, so passionate that you can alter your state of mind just by being near them. Try asking a friend, new or old, "What are you passionate about right now?" Most people fumble and fake a response, but to get a true answer is to crawl right inside of their soul for a moment and see them through fresh eyes.

I am not just passionate about things, I also believe in things, like a little girl waiting for Santa on a winter's eve, though I am long grown up with children of my own. And I believe that stuff matters. (I fear sometimes that this might be all it will say on my headstone some day: She thought that stuff mattered.) Finding other people with passions and strong beliefs is always intensely sexy to me, even if they conflict with my own. The eroticism of this has never been expressed better than in the famed scene from Bull Durham (a movie which I am undeniably passionate about). When asked by Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) just exactly what he does believe in, Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) replies:

Crash: Well I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self- indulgent overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, softcore pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas eve. And I believe in long slow deep soft wet kisses that last three days.

Annie: Oh my.

(Try a moment of pure sex listening to the speech from the film)

I believe that art matters. I believe that it matters what kind of stories we tell. I believe that we have to be completely responsible for the meaning of our art, and I believe that there may be no writing more powerful than that involving our sexuality.

Which brings me to Sex and the City. Yes, you know, that wildly popular show on HBO, the one with the babes in the fine clothes, the babes with professional careers who are completely neurotic and desperately seeking Mr. Right, while fucking their brains out and constantly wondering if they can "have it all." Part soap opera and part sociological study, this show disturbs me every time I watch it.

It disturbs me because there is only one question I ask after watching a TV show, or reading a story here in Clean Sheets, or seeing a film that purports to show some slice of life: "What was that all about?" It is so easy to be entertained on the surface by pretty images and funny lines and miss the underlying message that we take away with us whether we want to or not. Friends will tell me "it doesn't matter, it's just a silly TV show." Is it? It's been suggested to me that no one really identifies with the women on Sex and the City, and that it's all just exaggerated. Yet when I research it on the Web, I find that there are entire clubs of women who have chosen to identify with each of the four characters, and that the women's real lives are constantly being compared and contrasted to the "lives" of the characters, especially when it comes to men.

Does it matter if in the year 2000, professional women in their thirties are shown as being completely self-absorbed, obsessed with aging, and desperate for a man, particularly in a medium that reaches so many passive viewers and young people? Does it matter that the women are portrayed as having lots of sex but most of it means nothing? Is this sexy somehow? (I'm not even going to go near the image presented to young girls by a character like Ally McBeal.) Or is all of this just flat out demeaning to women and not worthy of our time?

But as long as I'm watching . . . why can't these women have more kinky sex?

I know I can't be the only person to watch something like Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and be appalled by such a lovely, sexual visual underpinned by a deadly, moralistic story. What was that all about? A wife has a fantasy, relates it to her husband, husband freaks out, finds an orgy and gets in all kinds of trouble, only to be saved in the end by promising to be a good boy and pay more attention to his wife. What happened to the poor wife's fantasies? All I could think was that if Tom Cruise's character was of this new century, he would listen to his wife's hot fantasy and say, "Hey baby, that's great! We should go to the bookstore, or maybe Amazon, or even Clean Sheets and read up on this. Fantasies are wonderful things for couples. Let's explore."

I am passionate about what is called "right-speech" in the practice of Zen, because "right-speech" is nothing more than a fancy phrase for my everlasting belief that stuff matters. It matters what you say; it matters how you say it; and it matters what it means. Words are priceless; ideas even more so. When you consider the effect of your words and your storytelling and take full responsibility for what it means, the idea that "it doesn't matter" simply disappears.

Do I think any of these things that bother me should be censored? Of course not. But I like when Clean Sheets' readers critique our stories and articles with some depth and consideration. And I believe that we could all benefit from practicing our own form of receiving "right-speech" by asking ourselves regularly what exactly all these sexual words and images that are being flung our way might mean.

And I definitely believe that the women on Sex And The City are quite old enough to know that, yes, women can indeed have it all, just not all at the same time. And for heaven sakes, if they can't be having it all, at least they could be having some of those long slow deep soft wet three day kisses that can bring you to your knees.