Random Ramblings

I'm sitting in my office and my office hours are over. It's almost time to go home and I have gotten almost nothing done, which sucks because today was supposed to be my catch-up day. But people kept coming in to talk to me, and because it was my office hours, I couldn't close my door. Well, maybe tomorrow.... The only thing I did do was write this proposal for a workshop at the Split Rock Arts Program in Minnesota, "Between The Sheets With Your Readers: The Pain and Pleasure of Writing Autobiographically About Gender, Sex and Sexuality." It's based on the workshop I did at Fort Lewis College when I got involved in their Vagina Monologues production, but this time it will be more of a challenge. If the proposal is accepted, I will have to redesign it a bit because I will not have the controlling question that I had last time--"What will vaginas feel like in a world that is safe for vaginas?"--and I suppose I will have to think through the models I want to use. Last time, there were very few things by men in the packet, but, what can I say, I find most men's writing about this sort of stuff not exactly boring, but almost beside the point. They work very hard, it seems to me, or at least many men who choose to write about their own sexual experiences work very hard to avoid having to write anything about what the sex actually feels like to them, about their own bodies as concrete objects that were involved in the sex they are writing about. There almost always seems to be a distancing mechanism, a conceit of some sort, and I wish I could think of an example right now, but I can't. This would be an interesting essay to write, something for another time when I have time, but I think there are real differences in the ways that men and women write about their own sexual experiences, about their own bodies, and I think women do a much better job of it. And I am thinking specifically here about autobiographical writing, not fiction. I wonder if others have the same experience as I do? Ah well, it's time to go home.