You don't have to be an expert on every kind of alcoholic beverage to know that people who drive under the influence tend to cause accidents in which other people die.
And you don't have to be an expert on every kind of tobacco to understand that second-hand smoke is harmful to yourself. Nor do you have to have first-hand smoking experience to watch the effects of tobacco on your coworkers.
I personally can tell you a lot about that. It's one of the reasons I left the software industry. Watched too many companies get dragged to the ground because management and the board of directors had the engineers so focused on getting the job done that they failed to make sure that the job should even be done, much less that it was being done correctly. (Witness Bruce Schneier waxing eloquent on Crowdstrike.)
And one of the tools engineers use to focus themselves on deadlines instead of safety is tobacco. Coffee is another. And pornography.
You don't have to experience every possible sexual position to understand that sexual position is not what sex is all about.
And you don't have to have sex with every person on the planet, or even just every attractive person you meet, to understand that quantity is not better than quality. Neither do you need to have sex with a whole lot of people to understand that carefully sculpted and painted-on beauty can hide some serious hideousness behind the endomorphin-induced haze.
And there is something about sex, drugs, and rock and roll that makes us too susceptible to society's demands about all sorts of things, just like they can be used to make employees too susceptible to managements demands.
Management and society aren't entirely evil, any more than they are entirely good.
We can't really be happy if we can't defend ourselves, and we need to understand ourselves to defend ourselves.
But being happy also requires us to be able to bring the good things we have out for the people around us, in both business and non-business relationships.
Sometimes it's easy to see a whole lot of trees and miss the forest.
I'm not an expert on sex like Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny. But I have observed people getting hung up on sex and gender for over half a
century, and with so much public focus on the topic, I'm re-exploring my previous analysis and understanding of sex -- and of how it fits into the general puzzle of social relationships.
And I'm inviting you to come along for the ride.
(But nobody's going to pay me up-front to write this, so the chapters will tend to be rather intermittent, as I have time to write. It'll be a slow ride. Take it easy, as the song goes.)
A Lay Philosphy of Sex and Gender
Joel Matthew Rees
Japan, 2024
Copyright 2024, Joel Matthew Rees, all rights reserved.
- What Is Sex, part 1
