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Dear Dolly,
Who said that there are only two items that get our full devotion and attention: sex and prayer?
Is everything else a distraction? How to manage? How do we live a good life while so totally distracted? What should I do with my divided attention? Can I be genuinely intimate with another while so distracted?
Should I have more sex or worship more, or both?
Dear Divided,
How do you worship now? A Sabbath Walk? Friday night Shabbat? Meditation daily? Do you pray five times a day and get down on your knees on your rug? Prayer in the morning and before dozing off? Singing in a community? Sending a pledge to a community? Sunday morning services at 10 or 11? Weekday vespers? Advent or Lenten observances? Only Christmas and Easter or Yom Kippur and Rosh hoshana and Passover? How would you evaluate your level of undivided attention to the Almighty? Do you think it needs a dusting? Or a make-over? Are you divided by time to pray and time you’d like to be praying? Is that the central distraction?
What is the noun sex to you now? Is it also a verb? What are your sexual habits? Do you think they need improvement? When/if you engage in sexual behavior, is it by yourself or with someone or someones, sequentially or otherwise? How undivided is your attention to your own pleasure or orgasm or touching?
How is your cat involved if you have a cat? In other words, are there erotic moments that excite you and cohere you and un-divide your attention that might not go under the label of sexual?
Have you ever read about the eroticization of everyday life, wherein you take enormous tactile pleasure in your surroundings? For example, the feel of sun on your skin. Or stars outside under a blanket with a pillow? Or weeding? Then the raking after the weeding. Or back to worship, when you do get an open afternoon, do you take a walk long enough to forget what time it is? What are the times when you are watch free, clock free, free free? Is that like worship or sex?
Have you ever heard the word liminal? Places of undivided attention are also called liminal. In sex we lose ourselves to another. The French call it the little death, le petit mors. Liminal space is sometimes also described as the thin space, where we feel at one with the cosmos while remaining the specs that we are. Specs: Very small matters in the larger scheme of things.
Intimacy is different from sex or worship. It is the sharing of the liminal with an other. In marriage, for good or ill, we hope to have a few liminal experiences. In worship, we hope to also have liminal experiences and connect with G-D.
In the liminal space, each participant is continually changed and made new in relation. Intersubjectivity is as good a name for the unconditional love of marriage as any other, even though it is a very clunky word and Dolly Parton herself would never use it.
As Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas have taught us, intersubjective space is holy. They mean it is a place where we are both subjects to each other, mutually, a place where we are not objects or objectified.
We bring all our conditionality and share it with another. We weave an honest narrative that names suffering, violation, and conflict for what they are even as this narrative articulates the grounds for our shared hope. When people marry, they have already likely told their tale of rape or incest or violation or being dumped. They have likely told their story of some lover thinking they were fat or not “good in bed.” They felt heard. They felt understood. It is not just women who have these stories to tell, by the way, but it is more often women in the relationship.
I recommend an action-reflection approach to all these matters surrounding attention and distraction. Again, Dolly Parton would never use that language I learned in school. She’d just say think first, do second. Act, then reflect on what happened. The reflection is the undivided space. Then, after you genuinely orient yourself after the disorientation of distraction, you re-rorient yourself towards a cycle of paying attention to yourself. It sounds complicated, as though it were three motions, but it is really three parts as one motion. That kind of attention is already undivided. You just don’t always know it. Prayer is reflecting on your action, in the presence of whatever you call God. It is a sigh. A breath. A give it a break moment. It is being whole, not torn apart or torn into parts or macerated.
It also feels long, even though it might just be three hours or twenty minutes. It is when you are clock and watch free. If you are always acting, try matching the amount of time you are reflecting to the time you are acting. Everything will slow down. God will appear. Love will appear. Eroticism will appear, along with some true meaning for the word orgasmic. You’ll find yourself smiling, even laughing.
Dear Dolly,
Is it true that boys are raised on pornography and its wide availability, and girls are raised to have something “kinky” in their bag of tricks in the event of a make out session after school?
I read a great article and it really got me thinking. It was titled, “Why Sex-Positive Feminism is Falling Out of Fashion” by Michelle Goldberg, The New York TImes, September 24, 2021.
In the article, philosopher Amia Srinivasan describes teaching Oxford students about second-wave, anti-porn activism. She assumes her students—for whom porn is ubiquitous—will find an anti-porn position prudish They do not. They are more like Andrea Dworkin, who famously found sex-positive sexual behavior for women highly problematic, even as much as sex negative counsel was.
The main reason the students cite for their distaste of porn, both the men and the women, is that the attention to emotion gets lost.
Her article concludes, “Old taboos have surely fallen, we need new ones. Not against sex, but against callousness and cruelty.”
So, am I still sex-positive or is that just a joke? What if I don’t like pornography and its lack of emotion or kink and its technological sounding feel? Am I a prude? It sounds like I might have some company at Oxford so now I can let my dirty little secrets out.
I do get “horny,” as though I were a large mammal. I mean the language, not the feeling. And I am multi-orgasmic till midnight with the proper partner, approach, music, perfume, sex toys and the like. The more I trust my partner, the more able I am to find the deeper pleasures of which my various private parts are capable.
Also, what is a good number of times to have sex per week when you are 20? 30? 40? 50? 90? My mother swears there is one couple in her assisted living “home” that has sex every Wednesday afternoon at 3, next door to her room. That’s when hubby visits. My mother enjoys their pleasure too, even though my father has been dead for years.
I have other questions about sex, actually a lot of them but I’ll stick to just one more.
If my husband is having an affair, and doesn’t tell me about it, is that worse than his not having the affair at all? Which is worse, lying or cheating?
Dear Large Secretive Mammal,
Is this a real problem or is it something about which you can do nothing? What if sex-positive means enjoying sex on your own terms? It sounds to me like you don’t even know your own terms.
If emotional connection and honesty are important to you, who says it is prudish not to require them, actively, sexually? Prude is an old-fashioned word. Sexual positivity is as modern as fresh bread. It is also possible due to the widespread distribution of birth control, if not abortions. Abortions will return to the women’s health care agenda. People just aren’t that stupid. For now, stick with birth control because it is the foundation of the recreational sex you want to enjoy, inside an honest marriage, with an honest partner, where both of you feel good.
When my oldest son turned twelve after having three sex-ed courses already in his public school, he famously said to me, “Mom, what’s the deal? Can you just give it to me straight, like in a sentence or two? I can’t stand learning the names for body parts any more.”
“Ok,” I said, taking a deep breath. I was a virgin parent having the “talk” for the first time.
I said, knowing my son and his common-sensical brevity if not terseness:
“Rule One: Nobody gets hurt.
Rule Two: Consensual.
Rule Three: No babies.”
He slept in a bunk bed then, on the bottom. I found these words in his terrible handwriting, scrawled next to his pillow, taped to the wall.
Rule One: Nobody gets hurt.
Rule Two: Consensual.
Rule Three: No babies.
He knew the meaning of the word consensual but hadn’t figured out how it connected to sexual experience yet.
His son, my grandson, said to me one night on a walk to get ice cream something very similar, many years later. He was 11. “Bubbe, I am in love with a them. Mom said you would understand.” Well, I did. He was so excited, he was literally jumping up and down. “Should I ask them out for a date or tell them I love them? What if they don’t love me back? Wouldn’t that be a problem?” He answered his own question. “I think I’ll just love them quietly for now.”
Next time I saw him, he had told them. They told him they don’t love him back. He said it hurt a minute but for now, he accepted their choice. “Dad said it had to be consensual.” And yes, they loved another friend, a mutual one. Ouch. This is called emotion connecting to sex.
Later that second visit, my eight-year-old granddaughter said, “Bubbe, I have to tell you something. You have to read this book (about lesbian girls). I like girls. Not boys. I like girls. Mom said you would understand. Should I tell Papa?” I don’t know why Papa got such a bad rap here, as he, like me, is sex-positive about all kinds of different kinds of sex.
Anyway, I hope you see the need for approval in emotion laden sexual activity, young and old, straight and not. Approval is a form of the unconditional love that eventually shows up in good marriages. Along with honesty and emotion, sex becomes post-prude.
Dolly
Who is the Dolly Mama?
The Dolly Mama is a spiritual version of Dear Abby. Her intention is to combine the irreverence of Dolly Parton with the surrender and non-attachment beloved by Buddhists. She wants to let go of what can’t be fixed – in either self or others – and fix what can be by applying the balm of humor.
She is a spiritual handyperson, a soul mechanic, a repairer of broken appliances. Every now and then the combination of letting go and hanging on achieves sufficient balance for an improvement in spiritual posture, stronger spine, and personal peace. The Dolly Mama is not her day job. By day, she works as an ordained United Church of Christ and American Baptist pastor of a regular, if edgy, congregation.
