Prairie sex

One of my first memories of sexual pleasure was when I was in kindergarten and I insisted on “staying at home” in my kindergarten boyfriend’s bed, while his brother, my sister and he went out to explore the wild frontier. The babysitter said “Rebeccah, are you sure you don’t want to go exploring with everyone else?” Maybe it was all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder I was reading, but I was perfectly contented to stay in bed in my white flannel nightgown. Perhaps I planned to do some metaphorical bed sweeping. 

Since then, I’ve moved away from the frontier paradigm in my sexual partnerships. But there are times, with certain people, when it all seems so pleasurably familiar to return to. I remember lying in bed in college with one particularly outdoorsy, old-fashioned woodsman type, when he mentioned that one of the tutor couples in our dorm were getting married. It was a simple enough comment. But as I lay my head on his shoulder and glanced contentedly at our hardy, wholesome bodies, I realized that he was telling me this because he was imagining us as a couple. As if we were sitting around the wood stove, as the wind and snow swirled outside the log cabin window, talking of marriage, the price of the new oxen, and the muslin I would buy to make a dress. It was both disturbing and kinky. New roles entered into my roleplay lexicon: lumberjack and buxom wife.

Funny how something that seems so modern can actually be a re-enactment of hot, hot, hot retrogression. People thought it was so liberated and hip that I didn’t want a relationship with my dorky mountain man. Little did they know that we were getting together and reenacting Little House on the Prairie.

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It’s a shame to continue this post by theorizing, but I will anyway. I just want to add, ahem, that it’s really too bad how difficult it is these days to talk about sex that could in anyway be deemed retrogressive. It seems that the whole point of queer theory is that it’s OK if your sex or gender seems somehow derivative of traditional sex or gender, because in making it your own you’re actually co-opting the tradition and inverting it. But that’s not really what’s happening. Instead, anyone who’s doing anything traditional or vanilla are considered totally uncool and unrealized. Like how Judith Halberstam made fun of birkenstock lesbians who barbeque.

To take a page from Linda Hirshman’s fingerwagging, we can’t just say that ‘it’s all good’ and that people can do whatever they want. And I do think that generally people are sexually limited and don’t really get what they want out of sex. But when it comes down to it, all of those above people, and then all of the people like me who get turned on by Little House on the Prairie (among other things), end up exploring their ‘conventional’ desires even less. That’s boring! So much for liberation.

 

Comments

[Julia]

I've been remiss--I meant to shower accolades upon this post weeks ago. Genius, Airplane. There's nothing hotter than taking all the paradigms the feminists have dismissed, stuffing them with desire, and then having your way with them. Prarie sex and housedresses, I salute you.

[ilana]

i will never stop loving this post.