I’m sad to see that free-spirited Lena Chen has concluded that “sexual freedom is a sham.” She slept with 30 men while attending Harvard and she wrote all about it on her blog, becoming something of a sensation, not to mention a controversial figure. In this essay, she discusses how she learned shame after it was imposed on her through derision, mockery, and cruelty. It’s not pleasant to see such a free-spirit crushed.
I don’t write about my fear that I am not good enough for the man I love or my concerns about what his family thinks of me or my suspicion that I am not, after all, a good writer despite my chosen career path. In reality, I’m actually kind of emotionally fragile and insecure. But because I’m not interested in spending more of my young adulthood deflecting misogynistic slurs and shielding loved ones from incrimination by association, I’ve simply stopped writing about the many things that continue to scare and confuse me. I’ve long believed that there is nothing embarrassing about admitting human frailty, but when I try to write about college nowadays, I catch myself pulling back from every little unflattering anecdote, rewriting the circumstances and characters, and wanting to put forth a more attractive version of who I am. Though I am never overtly disingenuous, I occasionally feel like I’m living a lie of omission by not owning up to being constantly plagued by the same doubts that haunted me at Harvard: that I am not merely unworthy of a school but that I am too damaged to be worthy of love.
Among the arsenal of insults flung at me, that particular put-down has always been the most hurtful, and it was that put-down that I anticipated when I told Marie Claire that I slept with 30 men and that, yes, they could put that in print, along with my name and my photo. Given all that I’d previously shared, this particular fact seemed rather innocuous, even downright trivial, in comparison to tales of lost condoms and the morning-after pill. Still, I couldn’t help feeling queasy that this would be the final nail in the coffin of my sexual allure. At the same time, by participating in the interview and shoot, I was afraid of threatening the entire image I worked to build over the past three years: one of a confident broad who’d been around the block and had a few things to teach the world about sticking it to the Man. So I found myself in a situation that was oddly foreign: I felt self-protective.
This instinctive desire was oddly missing through most of college. I learned it slowly as a result of being gawked at and bullied online. My 19-year-old self would have scoffed at my hesitation to tell it like it is. The same person who now questions her tendency to share too much was once surprised that her writing was put in the category of “confessional.” Because doesn’t that suggest that I felt like I was doing something dirty or wrong? It’s not confessional, after all, if you don’t feel a tad guilty about what or whom you’ve done. And if I’m honest, I never did feel bad for writing Sex And The Ivy and I never once felt the need to apologize. Shame wasn’t something that came naturally to me. It was something that I learned against my will, and now that I know it inside and out, I don’t know how one can possibly unlearn it. Sexual freedom is a sham.
I can confirm for Ms. Chen that she is a very talented writer. And, whatever her doubts, she’s more honest than most.
::YAWN::
I don’t care about her issues. She slept with a bunch of people, wrote about it, and them. And things did not turn out how she felt they should. So? Yes, society has a double standard. Where has she been? On the moon?
She strikes me, and struck me at the time of the writting, as someone that was writing the articles for the noteriety, to bring attention to herself, so she could piggy back that into a career as an ‘edgy’ writer. It was a ‘look at me’ enterprise. IMHO, her long term issues probably will not be because she slept around and somehow made herself ‘not worth having’, but because she documented it, thought of pithy comments, all in real time. A man who showed such selfishness would be just as shallow. So her issue is not that society makes her a slut, it’s that she appears to be shallow, selfish, and self regarding.
Just like a man who pulled the same stunt.
nalbar
Well, I don’t at all get the impression that her blogging was merely a publicity stunt. The problem is that we have in this society two choices for our sexual being: inhibition or exhibition. It’s not that people can’t be socially healthy, but to be so requires that one step outside of our social pattern, which is very tricky.
From what she writes she sought freedom from a repressive upbringing by inverting it. This inversion merely solidifies the discourse, and it seems clear that she is developing an understanding of this. That she is doing so publicly is surely messy but is also a real service.
I don’t know how she understands the statement that “sexual freedom is a sham.” I would tend to agree with it but would want to explain it. A craving cannot free a person. Sex is predicated on a lacking in a person, and is passing. That won’t deliver freedom. Repressing it is the worst, though. That causes intense suffering. One shouldn’t repress sex, but if one seeks freedom in it one will ultimately be disappointed.
Repressing sex is like repressing hunger. But there is also the sexual analog of “pigging out”.
USA-ians have a huge issue with sex. They have trouble accepting it as a given biological function. They attach too much aesthetic, moral and emotional importance to it. This woman failed to take into account the possible reactions of others when she published her experiences, for whatever reason. Sexual freedom exists, social freedom exists to a much lesser extent. People will always have an opinion about such matters—sex, money marriage, whatever. The news corporations eat it up, the people mimic their betters. Ever heard of Hollywood?
How can you have sexual freedom without social freedom? I ask this not to suggest you can’t but because I don’t know myself how it would be.
Booman Tribune ~ Comments ~ Double Standards and Free Spirits
interesting question!
well, in the USA sexual freedom is quite liberal, compared to say, Saudi. there is porn, there are titty bars, much infidelity, and efforts to ‘democratise’ sexuality, laws on sex discrimination etc.
what lingers still, concurrently with this freedom, is the prurience and repression of which you speak, so much so that young chinese feel more sexually free of hangups, perhaps because they threw religion under the bus for so long, (though it seems to be resurging there, dunno if prurience will come back with it).
so that’s how i see the two interacting in uneasy equilibrium. america is quite extreme in both, less than germany perhaps, where socially, the tv shows are very frank and candid, way more than US or UK, fr’example, but there is still a moralistic hangover that causes an equal reaction in sexual liberty run amok, huge s’n’m community, giant sex fairs etc.
there’s an earnestly hysterical subtone, an assumption that sexual attitudes are somewhat unbalanced, changing and still polarised, which of course gives them lots to chat about on tv!
most of our issues are still socially repressed enough to still make that kind of frank public dialogue not quite decorous…
latin countries tend to be naturally passionate, lotsa social repression, and lotsa sneaky petey on the side.
the northern mentality would like to sort out the contradictions in a linear manner, rationally aiming for more philosophical coherence.
the asians have the most mature approach, pragmatic, yet still open to sexuality as a potent force for personal growth, see tao of sex, kama sutra etc.
But a relative permissiveness is very different than freedom. I’m not interested in a freedom from. That we already have (in possibly diminishing measure). Freedom from search without warrant, freedom from overt political oppression. I’m interested in freedom as conscious self-actualization, which as far as I am concerned can only take place socially. For this, I can’t imagine a sexual freedom that manifests independently from freedom of other sorts.
I don’t normally critique your writing, BooMan, but this woman isn’t what I’d call a free spirit. As far as I can tell, she’s a mess.
She was a free spirit.
Once.
That motion in the background was me rolling my eyes.
nalbar
BooMan, she was free in the sense that I was in college, admittedly in a different way. She followed herself but without much broader understanding of what it means to be in social context. Social context as it stands is largely repressive. I’d chalk this up fundamentally to capitalism, but there’s all kinds of socio-psychological elements to it as well. She found this out and is now dealing with it. She is knocked down, which is what inevitably happens. Now she has to figure out how to be a free spirit in this social context, which ultimately promises a lot more than adolescent freedom.
I don’t dismiss her project at all as merely the work of a mess or attention-seeker, but it was the work of a seeking adolescent.
I don’t really know how to respond.
Basically, you had a person who lacked sexual shame and had it imposed on her.
Yes, she was insecure and immature and that helps explain why she sought out lots of sexual encounters. But she was made to feel more insecure and in new and unwelcome ways.
It saddens me to see this.
What it has to do with capital markets completely escapes me.
It has nothing to do with capital markets. The point was that the most broadly repressive social context we deal with is capitalism. Then I said, apropos of Ms. Chen, that there are other ways social context can be repressive.
To me ‘capitalism’ is synonymous with ‘capital markets.’
It’s nothing more than a system to allocate capital to where it is needed at any given time. When it fails to allocate that capital then people don’t get paid and they lose their jobs. Companies cannot attract investment to start or expand their businesses and create new jobs.
In itself, there is nothing repressive about capitalism.
There are other factors in our political and economic systems that lead to income inequality (the nature of compound interest alone contributes to income inequality) and that can apply incentives to open new markets, perhaps forcefully and on unfavorable terms. That can lead to economic exploitation or political repression (familiar in the Third World). It can also lead to job loss in the First World.
But capitalism isn’t anything more or less than a series of institutions for putting money where it’s needed. It’s up to politicians to supplement that system to care for concerns that are not profitable.
Well, I’m not writing too clearly I think. I meant that the repressive social context Ms. Chen came up against has nothing to do with capitalism. I didn’t mean that capital markets have nothing to do with it.
Your points are worthwhile, but here’s where I diverge a bit. Capital markets are the mechanism, which to me is part of the issue but not all of it. Capitalism simply put is the economic system which takes capital accumulation as its fundamental purpose. Our economy doesn’t exist by its own logic to feed people, it exists to accumulate capital. Compound interest is the specific form of accumulation in the aggregate. Capital markets are a mechanism of accumulation. The repression is that human existence is, in the functioning of the system as the system, subordinate to accumulation. All kinds of nonsense happens as a result.
My Internet is down, so I’m reduced to iPHone.
No, the purpose is not accumulation but allocation. Look up Gosbank to see how allocation worked in USSR. It did not work well.