Writing sex and parenting - dangerous but essential
There are few places where our public and private lives become blended into such ugly displays as they do in custody and divorce proceedings. The current controversy surrounding Jefferson's appeal for support because of a custody challenge that is, at least partly, based on his blogging about his sex life demonstrates that better than almost anything could. The details have been documented over the past week in several other places, and I am coming late to the story having just returned to town.
Briefly, Jefferson is the pen name of a NYC sex blogger, author of One Life Take Two, and member of the community to which we all here at SITPS belong, to greater or lesser degrees.* He is currently being sued by his ex-wife for full custody of their children whose custody they had shared since divorcing, and it appears that information he revealed in his blog is being used against him in court. That information includes his bisexuality, his hosting of sex parties, his drinking, and his having sex with lots of different people, many of them women much younger than he. Some of his friends have set up a legal fund - the Friends of Jefferson Legal Defense Fund while others of his friends and some of his former lovers are advising caution about contributing.** This conflict started an online public debate about Jefferson's life, his writing, and the current custody dispute that has quickly spread throughout the sex blogosphere and has been occasionally ugly but also very thoughtful.
To echo Audacia Ray in her very honest and thoughtful post on the situation, even for those of us who radically support freedom of expression, there is acknowledgment of the dangers involved in claiming those freedoms and it is horrifying to watch the destruction that is unfolding right now. It is those issues of sexual expression that I want to focus on here.
It is both courageous and necessary that people blog about their sex lives and their parenting under the same identity and in the same space. We need to continually work at breaking down the walls of stigma that make sex somehow different from all the rest of human activity. That stigma is responsible for a great many harms to contemporary U.S. society. From the denial of comprehensive sex education to teens, to the refusal of contraception by conservative pharmacists or drug stores, to the tolerance of homophobia and heterosexism, to the refusal to welcome sex workers and their knowledge and expertise into the fight against HIV/AIDS, stigmatization harms individuals, their families, and their communities.
That such work is dangerous, and strongly resisted, is a sign of how important it is. That danger is an indicator of how much courage it takes to do the kind of writing we're talking about, and it is part of what forces so many writers to adopt a veil of anonymity. I have said before that I think sex blogs do a tremendous service by exposing the complexity of sex as it is woven through the rest of our lives. At the amazing Sex 2.0 conference I discussed the importance of sharing sexual knowledge in a time when information about sexuality is increasingly privatized and controlled by corporations. At that session we also discussed the personal risks people take in engaging in this work, and one way to manage those risks was to adopt as much anonymity as possible, which is experienced by many as a capitulation to the stigma they are trying to fight. I have even argued (see the forthcoming issue of Feminism and Psychology) that the continued expansion and maintenance of a 'sex commons' where people can exchange information about their sexual experiences, desires and fantasies should be taken on as a necessary feminist project. Jefferson's blog, like other controversial sex blogs, are an important part of that project. When they also make clear that those desires, fantasies or experiences fit into lives that include jobs and children and other mundane elements of everyday life they do an even greater service. (A blog that does this beautifully and in a very different way is Tess's Urban Gypsy. A glance through our links page shows there are many others.)
An example of the level to which Jefferson blended his openness about his sex life with his openness about his parenting comes from a Time Out New York piece on "secret lives" in which he narrated his negotiation of parenting and sex-party hosting. He explained that he did not host parties during the weeks he had his children, and he discussed the logistics of managing space in a relatively small NYC apartment. While the details might make some people queasy it is important to remember that for most of human history children and parents have lived in much smaller dwellings and the degree of privacy and separation between spheres of life we have come to take as "natural" in contemporary American society is not something that has been common historically. We need to examine the source of our own queasiness about sexual space not being clearly segregated from all the other spaces of our lives. Sex bloggers write about this tension all the time, of course, and Jefferson's case raises the issue in a way that is hyper-charged because of our difficulty talking about kids and sexuality as much as because of our difficulty talking about parenting and sexuality.
It is a mistake to think that children intrinsically need protection from knowledge about sex or exposure to sexual expression. Children need to be protected from sexual assault. It is only the social stigma around sex in this society that makes parents' sex lives something we need to protect children from knowing about. The concerns about Jefferson's kids, or any kinky parents' kids, in terms of exposure to ridicule based on public knowledge of parents' kinkiness would not be a concern at all if sexual behavior were understood to be part of everyday human life. Other commenters have pointed out, of course, that we don't live in that perfect world, but I would ask whether we get ourselves any closer by caving to the pressures of this imperfect one.
The current discussion of Jefferson's situation raises several important issues, though one is not something that can be discussed here:
- How should a person's private troubles be portrayed publicly in order to generate support, and how should those claims be evaluated by readers?
- When, if ever, should sexuality, sexual expression figure in to custody cases?
- How do we make it safer for people to openly discuss their whole lives, including their sexuality and their parenting?
- Given the stigmatization of sex how do we manage the difficulties (logistical, personal) of balancing risk of exposure with need to live openly and honestly or the need to express ourselves fully? How should we address the injustice of our kinks should be considered ammunition when they do not interfere with our work or our parenting.
- How can a community like this manage conflict and disagreement between its members while retaining the strength and vibrancy of the community? (Conflict management has also been a significant issue in the University of New Mexico crisis.)
- Is Jefferson a fit parent - i.e., can he support his kids, does he drink too much, has he been irresponsible, etc.
I suggest that in this thread, anyway, we bracket the last issue considering that the pool of people who have direct knowledge of Jefferson's parenting is relatively small, and speculation can only be harmful not only to his kids but also to our community. I don't point this out to silence those who do have such personal knowledge. Instead I want to emphasize those issues that affect all of us and that we can all benefit from discussing.
They're big issues. Where should we start?
~~
*A few caveats: I am personally acquainted with Jefferson though I do not know him well. I have met him on several occasions, and have been a regular reader of his blog for the past two years. I have no direct exposure to his parenting or his sex life so cannot comment on them other than commenting on his narrating of them. Since it is unwise to assume that everything one reads on an anonymous blog (or any blog for that matter) is true without corroborating evidence, I can only make very guarded statements about anything connected to Jefferson's sex life or parenting in themselves. I can say that I found his accounts of his parenting to be endearing and to demonstrate an openness that could only be good for his children. In addition, I have no knowledge of the documents or the proceedings in the custody case itself and so cannot comment on those at all.
**Without spending too much time on questions about the fund itself, let me just say that decisions about contributing to a legal fund should be made using the same kinds of tools you'd use to make any decisions about contributions: do you feel like you identify with the cause, do you trust the keepers of the money, do you feel like you have the info you need to make those decisions? Most of us do not have a lot of direct personal knowledge about the organizations to which we contribute. In this case there are individuals who have been providing information gathered from their own experience of Jefferson that may, for some, raise caution flags about contributing. Others are suggesting that the information being provided by Friends of Jefferson is, of course, skewed to only reveal the positive aspects of Jefferson's case, and that in that sense they are deceptive. Without seeing the court documents it is hard to gauge these claims.
Technorati Tags: Jefferson, free speech, One Life Take Two, sex, law
Since so much has already
Since so much has already been said about this case on the blogs you mentioned, and in their respective comments, I am leaving all that alone and focusing on the fact that you make me think out of the box a bit and for that I thank you and this blog.
I don't think children need to be protected from the knowledge that their parents are sexual beings. My daughter sees that I get packages that arrive in the mail and disappear directly into my room. She isn't stupid, she doesn't question, just merely rolls her eyes in that exaggerated way only a teenager can, and goes about her business. I think it is important that children of all ages know that sexuality isn't bad or wrong but natural and wonderful. Be that just simply saying that mommy and daddy need private time sometimes or more frank discussions as are age appropriate. And yet, I can't think of a child who needs to know the details. Would I want or allow my child to read my blog? Absolutely not and I take every precaution so that doesn't happen. Hell, even now, please spare me the details of my parents sex life.
As to conflict management within the community, that's a big one. I know I have lost friendships due to my airing my personal thoughts about this situation and I think that is a pity but given what I knew keeping my mouth shut just wasn't an option I could live with. People will accuse those who speak against him of kicking him when he's down, of gossip mongering, or of a gleeful schadenfreude. I think we should all be more tolerant of the opposing views instead of thinking the worst of the dissenters. I think we should realize we can't ever truly be aware of a person's motivations and to automatically assume, as I'm sure some do, we are miserable shrews or exes with grudges out to destroy a wonderful man's life is extremely unfair. In the end, if custody is lost by Jefferson, by a court with a lot more details than any one of us is privy to, I think we need to consider that perhaps he alone is the person responsible for that event.
Private and Public
Perhaps some ground rules (given what has happened to date): I would like to make sure that any dialogue here stays away from the particular circumstances of the case in question and the individuals concerned and deals solely with the issues.
We have commented here before about the individual's right to privacy, but at the same time acknowledge that circumstances may well make that privacy public property. Furthermore privacy does not mean silence, nor should it. There are those who write - columnists, novelists, autobiographers, actors in films and documentaries - are they obliged, because they are parents, to abstain from any material that is personal? Clearly the answer is no, and many children know far more about their parents than others. Then there are those whose position in society, or lifestyle, makes everything they do potentially public property. We do not question the right of politicians or entertainers to parenthood, no matter what might emerge in the public arena, unless it is directly adressing their interaction with their children. Sometimes that is just a price to pay.
Parenting is not easy, and it has been said that children grow up despite their parents. One's sexuality should not be a factor in gauging fitness to parent. If it did, how many parents would there be left?
Parenting, boundaries, conflict, discussion
Tess, thank you for starting the discussion. The question of boundaries between parents and kids really is an interesting issue raised by this situation. I expect that boundary expectations vary in broad terms from culture to culture but also in particular configurations from one family to another.
Michael, thanks for your good intentions regarding restating my call for a focus on the issues that we can all meaningfully discuss. I do think it should be up to the author of a post to lay out any specific ground rules for discussion (though I do think that participants should be encouraged to suggest a revisiting of ground rules where needed). In that sense, I would not ask for a total avoidance of the particular circumstances that raised these issues in the first place, but rather a focus on the broader issues with only those references to the original circumstances as serve to advance the discussion. I don't want this thread to become a referendum on Jefferson's case itself, but rather a place to talk about the issues that case raises. We probably can't talk about those issues without sometimes referring back to the circumstances that raised them in the first place.
Thinking about these questions of conflict management (Tess's comment) and privacy (Michael's comment) makes me think about the University of New Mexico case we've been following here. There, too, a person's sexual expression became a matter of public controversy. There, too, conflict was allowed to escalate rather than being mediated. There, too, deep personal harm was unavoidable. And just as in this case there are two separate kinds of conflict to be managed: the initial conflict (the question of professor's fitness to teach in the UNM case and a father's fitness to retain joint custody in this case) and the conflict that arises as a community gets involved and finds itself divided and with a variety of different interests.
Of course the details of each case are entirely different and it is impossible to generalize from one to the other. And in both cases there was more involved than the individual acts of sexual expression. But I keep coming back to this question: How much, if at all, should our individual sexual expression - regardless how extreme so long as it is legal - be taken into account when we are evaluated as workers or as parents?
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
It is important to remember
It is important to remember that for most of human history children and parents have lived in much smaller dwellings
Not a compelling argument. It's also true that for most of human history starvation has been a constant threat and life has been nasty, brutish and short-- but that doesn't mean that's desireable. I'm willing to bet the courts care far more about the living conditions "we have come to take as 'natural' in contemporary American society" when it comes to determining what's best for kids, and I think that's both appropriate and fair to them.
Oversimplification
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
Wow
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