Fo(u)nd Words

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There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools, if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if only they knew that. It is a nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.

Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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Certainly I sometimes think that transient love, the sort that is embodied in a one-night passion, or even a passing glance, is no less real than the lifelong sort. Even imagined love is true! It all comes from, and goes back to, the same illimitable reservoir that lies somewhere beyond my bedside telephone... Trieste... is a place of transience, where power and prosperity come and go...

Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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...for this is a city made for exiles. Many exiles, of course, are given no choice, but I imagine most of us sometimes tire of living in the open, where everything is plain to see and we ourselves are obvious, and for anyone with this sporadic impulse to withdraw into somewhere less transparent, Trieste offers a compelling destination - surreptitious itself, and ambiguous.

Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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...the passing of all empires, those seductive illusions of permanence...”

Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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There was no industry of dresses and gift registries for the sexuality that interested me in these years, and some part of the reason I wanted to document what free love might look like was to reveal shared experiences of the lives we were living that fell outside a happiness that could be bought or sold.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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I now understood the fabrication of my sexuality. I saw the seams of its construction and the arbitrary nature of its myths. I came to understand that sexuality had very little to do with the sex you actually had. A straight woman who hooked up with people she met online in her search for a boyfriend was not different, in behaviour, from the gay man who made a public declaration about looking for noncommittal sex. The man who cheated on his wife was no different, in action, from the polyamorist who slept with someone outside of his primary relationship. It was the ideation and expression of intent that differentiated sexualities, not the actual sex.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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Futurism, when it comes to reproduction, is not only about cryogenics. The infinite prolongation of fertility is a false future; a future that truly reconciles family and sexual freedom would be one more supportive of single parents, not just materially but ideologically. As a line of inquiry, this futurism would recognise that marriage and babies have no necessary link. It would consider how to ungender reproduction and child care but ensure that children have masculine and feminine influences in their lives; how to make workplaces and schedules more amenable to care-taking; how to legally establish co-parenting commitments outside the framework of marriage. This experiment is already underway: 40 percent of births in the United States are to unwed parents. This happened because most people have separated their sex lives from marriage, but the thinking abut about the subject has yet to flip.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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Framing birth control as a choice, and not as a human right, had caused us to settle not only for mediocre technology and poor availability, but it had encouraged us to think of our childless lives as an arrested state.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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No wonder people hate Burning Man, I thought, when I pictured it as a cynic might: rich people on vacation breaking rules that everyone else would suffer for if they didn't obey... The $400 ticket price was as much about the right to leave what happened at Burning Man behind as it was to enter in the first place.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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Having now sought to eliminate this subjugation, we now tried to convince ourselves that marriage between men and women could carry the nice parts of its history without its gendered roles. Its mystique survived its reformation, and its well-documented downsides would still ennoble us: even my most sexually adventurous friends remained willing to risk the hypocrisy, dishonesty, diminished sexual desire, or mute unhappiness of many marriages.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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In marrying each other, my friends wanted to prove they had not succumbed to institutional conformity at the very moment they asserted their institutional conformity. They didn't want to cop out entirely, they didn't want to blindly mimic a housewife-patriarch dynamic, but they wanted to move into the more stable sphere of adult existence.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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She was confronting, if not a double standard along gendered lines, at least a sort of foundational hypocrisy: where ambition, curiosity, and a willingness to take risks in one's professional life was kept separate from the mirage of propriety that governed one's personal life. Monogamy was assimilated into notions of leadership and competence; other sexual choices came with loss of authority.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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Once she saw monogamy as a choice, and not a given, it began to take on the cast of an unreasonable expectation, best suited to people who disliked experimentation - people not like her.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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She kept the two relationships separate and never saw them the men together ... The two relationships gave her two different social scenes, sentimental roles, and ways of being... With [one, she] was the innocent pilgrim. With [the other] she got to be the explorer and guide.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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He went on to describe the benefits of his vast experience in casual sex... Describing the importance of the anonymous sexual encounter, he wrote:  We do a little better when we sexualise our own manner of having sex - learn to find out own way of having sex sexy. Call it a healthy narcissism, if you like. This alone allows us to relax with our own sexuality. Paradoxically, this also allows us to vary it and accommodate it, as far as we wish, to other people. I don't see how this can be accomplished without a statistically significant variety of partners and a fair amount of communication with them...

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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...the women who saw promise in pursing sexual openness often found themselves battling their own feelings: trying to control attachment, pretending to enjoy something that hurt or annoyed them, defining sexiness by images they had seen rather than knowing what they wanted.

Emily Witt, Future Sex

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The privilege of being middle-class in America in the twenty-first century meant that most of the pressing questions in life were left to choice. Who should I have sex with when I'm single? What should I eat for dinner? What should I do to earn money? There was limited ancient guidance on such historically preposterous questions. The difficulty of actually choosing which rules to live by invited extensive self-examination.

Emily Witt, Future Sex