[US prisons] Sean Swain: What’s the obsession with other people’s sexual behavior?

Sean Swain’s Final Straw Radio segment
aired July 2016; available on SeanSwain.org

Full transcript:

I’ve never understood the obsession of regulating other people’s sexual behavior. It sure seems like we live in a world where most people are more concerned about what other people are doing with their pants down than they are about what they themselves are going to do with their own pants down. I’ve never had that luxury, I guess. I’ve got a face for radio. I’ve always had to focus intensely on my own options for sexual activity, whenever they fall into my lap. That means two things: It’s never occurred to me that I should concern myself with the genital friction that others create or with whom they create it or by what means. So long as it’s consensual and no animals are harmed, what’s the big deal? Maybe it’s a hierarch thing; I don’t know.

Here’s what I’m thinking: Consider the person you imagine to be the most sexually active human you know. How many hours per day does that particular specimen spend in flinging DNA? If we average it out, figuring in the days with no activity over the course of a lifetime, and we average it up, does even the most active of us spend more than an hour a day creating protein puddles? I don’t think so. I would suggest to you that we spend more of our time over the course of our lifetimes eating than we spend flinging DNA.

–/–“This call is originating from an Ohio correctional facility and may be recorded and monitored.”–/–

So shouldn’t we be more concerned regulating how people eat? It seems to me that, by the logic of the sex police, we should have some strict social mores related to eating more so than sex. And we should have serious consequences for violating those mores. In a rational world, we’d care more about whether people are chewing with their mouths open or using a salad fork on their main course than we’d care about the gender of their sex partners or the placement of their bodies when knowing each other in the biblical sense. We’d stone sinners who talk with their mouths full. Eating dessert before your vegetables would be an abomination.

Since we spend more time eating than we do flinging DNA, shouldn’t we care more about regulating how people eat than how they *uck? What’s the obsession with other people’s sexual behavior? More often than not, of those two behaviors eating is done most publicly and has the greater potential impact on others. Public eaters chew with mouths open and force us to see it. Those who talk while eating sometimes get their half-chewed food on us. Very seldom do you see people going at it like spider monkeys at the mall. And even when they do, it doesn’t take long. And you shouldn’t be close enough to them that you get anything on you. And it’s still more entertaining than that idiot kid with the pizza and fries falling out of his face or the giggly girl with strawberry milkshake spraying out of her nose.

In a sane world, the vendors at the ballparks would sell condoms instead of pretzels.

In a sane world, we’d also recognize that we spend far more time sleeping than we spend creating protein puddles. So we’d exercise far more regulatory control over sleeping in bed rather that the non-sleeping behavior in bed. For instance, our social rank would be dependent upon whether we sleep on our backs, on our side or on our stomachs. Snoring could result in jail time or—in serious and repeated violations of the snoring ordinance—burning at the stake. After all, we spend hours and hours a day sleeping. If we spent the same amount of time creating friction with our genitals as we spend sleeping, it would look like we had sex with blenders. We’d all be walking funny.

We really need to get over this obsession with socially regulating others’ genital friction. Isn’t it time we stop letting the least imaginative among us decide what our sexual norms are?

See you at the mall.

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from Warren Corruptional Institution in Lebanon, Ohio. If you’re listening, you are the resistance.

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You can write to Sean at:
Sean Swain #243-205
Warren CI, P.O. Box 120, 5787 State Route 63
Lebanon, Ohio 45036 [USA]