Cory Silverberg will join Esther Perel, Amy Sohn, Leonore Tiefer and Ian Kerner for a conversation called "Sex in America: Can The Conversation Change?" The symposium is co-sponsored by the Huffington Post and Open Center and will take place in New York City on Friday, February 20th. Click here to register.
Inspired in no small part by the inauguration of President Obama, the upcoming panel, Sex in America: Can the Conversation Change? is predicated on the idea that we're entering a time when greater change may be possible, and people are more hopeful for the future.
What I like about the Obama school of hope is that it evokes change without denying the things that keep us down. But since Obama is unlikely to ever give a sexuality speech in the spirit of, say, his instantaneously famous speech on race, it's left to us to think about how this applies to sexuality.
When I think of articulating a new sexual hope, what I imagine is us working together not just for healthier personal sexual expression. I imagine us as a society taking care of each other, sexually speaking.
The truth is we don't all have the same rights to sexual expression. Nor do we all have the same freedom to experiment sexually without fear of physical harm or social marginalization. While the rights to privacy and to liberty might be as fundamentally American as the right to justice free of discrimination, those rights look very different to the middle class Virginia couple who are into BDSM than they do for a young woman living with Down syndrome in a group home. Both may feel threatened at times, but to ignore the differences isn't just to ignore privilege, it's to miss out on the amazing diversity of experience and expression. After all, regardless of what TV talk show ratings and self-help book sales suggest, not all of us aspire to be sexually normal.
So perhaps the lesson the Obama school of hope has to offer the arena of sexuality is that we can see strength in an empathetic recognition of sexual diversity and that addressing structural inequalities--in access to resources material and ethereal alike--is not a source of shame, but a path to a more perfect sexual union. It's like the political equivalent of a happy ending.