Sex.
A very interesting topic.
I am interested in the science of sex - but the *history* of sex is truly an endless well of fascination to me.
How did birth control work in Ancient Egypt? What was the typical frequency of intercourse between married people in Victorian England? What is the statistical likelihood that my Czech Catholic ancestors were virgins when they married? Is it true that female orgasm is a 20th century discovery (#pffffffft)? What were medieval sexual norms? What did x civilization believe about how the science of conception worked? Most especially: *how do we know this?*
How do you learn about this?
Do you go to the library and find books? Well, most local libraries have a pretty limited selection. This is the kind of book that I would never order on interlibrary loan because of the human interaction with the librarian that would have to take place. I talk. How could I ever talk with anyone besides my spouse about "The History of Scientific Discoveries about Human Sexuality"? I would not be capable of even meeting the librarian's eye. So that's out.
Do you go online to find books? One option I've tried: use Amazon as a search engine. But the next question is important: how do I know if my search is giving me satisfactory results? The way I decide which items to purchase from Amazon is usually by reading reviews - between the lines. I usually only read the 3-4 star reviews because I don't trust either the flattering praise or disgruntled insults. And how many times have I bought an item - especially books! - in spite of negative reviews?
So, sex. An interesting topic very interwined with emotions and spirituality. I have discovered that as curious about the sex lives of other people as I may be, I can't tolerate learning about the specific sexuality - specific sexual thoughts, sexual feelings, sexual acts, obviously sexual images (!!) - of other specific people. It is damaging to my spirit to do so. I avoid such media. Even conversations with groups of my peers that turn to subjects like, "what kind of birth control do you use?" make me personally bite my lip until it bleeds, or else I just walk away. I can't ever un-know or un-remember the details. I can't un-imagine what they tell me. I see my friends' husbands in church the next day and have to try very hard to fill my thoughts with other thoughts and mental images than what their wives described.
Maybe my imagination is too vivid.
Anyway, what I really want to know about sex is *not* specific to individual people. Since Amazon reviews are created by humans who very often share too much about their own personal feelings and experiences, they are not a tolerable source of information (for me) about deciding which books are a good source about sex. #learnedthisthehardway
Typically, the most satisfying print sources I've found for the history of sex I stumbled upon completely by accident as part of a broader research quest about the history of x. I'll never forget the book I read about what the inside of a Victorian English home looked like. The chapter about bedrooms was super interesting because it had all kinds of concrete evidence for why human sexuality at that time in that place probably involved/looked like/was like x. I didn't check the book out with the intent to learn about that. It was the most interesting thing of all, second only to reading about the reality of air pollution in their world and the etymology of "spring cleaning" (and that only because it was less speculation and more believable.)
I once checked out a book that was a collection of mostly extremely dry, snooty, self-congratulatory, pedantic, incomprehensible scholarly essays about the history of the Czech lands. One of them was totally different from all the others. It was an analysis of a legal court case from Bohemia of the 1400's, complete with a translation of the transcription of the original document. The case itself was about a child rape by a nobleman. It was horribly sad to read about. He got in big trouble. It also taught me more about views on sexuality in that time and that place than any other thing I have ever read before or since.
Too bad 95% of books about Czech history are not written in English.
[This is why I am learning Czech, by the way. It's the only solution to that problem.]
In summary: books as a source for learning what I want to know about sex are difficult (though not utterly impossible) to find and they're limited to the library and online booksellers, with the most success coming from accidentally stumbling on snippets while reading about something more generally related.
It's a bad idea to turn to Google for topics about sex. Here's why:
- I don't trust that the search results will be based on relevance more than popularity
- porn is popular
- porn is a plague to be avoided at all costs, including limiting myself from learning what I'm curious about
- I don't want to be targeted with ads about sex
Why not search for sex on Wikipedia?
I have done so in the past, for example about birth control in Ancient Egypt or Victorian views on Female Sexuality.
I recognized that it was a bad source for this topic for these reasons:
- the articles I read were poorly written, as they often are. Writing clear, grammatically correct sentences that make sense and are on the reader's level - not too much over it, not too much under it - this is a learned skill. When an article is piecemeal, written by volunteers over time who only contributed small sections and did not craft the overall piece, they almost inevitably end up like this. This is the reality of what Wikipedia looks like today for most articles.
- the articles I read were not believable. The sources they chose were old. The information itself had me ask, "how do you know that?"
- and mostly: I immediately perceived a glaring male bias. I could not imagine that a woman would write about this topic in the callous, ignorant way that it was written. You'll have to just take my word for it, I guess, because I don't remember exactly what page it was or what was said (and it's probably not the same today - this must have been 6+ years ago). I remember I was in Katy. I remember what room I was in when I was reading about this on my phone. I vividly remember thinking, "this is a load of crap!" and deciding that I was never again going to search for answers to my questions about sex on Wikipedia.
Anyway, what I want to learn is original research, and Wikipedia is a poor source for that. It's a place for people to cite other people's research. There's danger in citing your own - you are biased. Wikipedia strives for neutrality.
I've used Wikipedia since...forever. I obviously know the tone that it strives for (and often misses). I know that it is not meant as a source for deep exploration of topics - it's more like the diving board into the pool of deeper research. It's a starting point, a source of sources. Everything should be taken with a bucket of salt. I have actually looked at the references to books and articles cited on Wikipedia and sought them out directly. Some now adorn bookshelves in my house somewhere.
What shocked me was not to learn that this is how Wikipedia works; I've always known this. It was, however, shocking to really see it and experience it first-hand.
My experience:
Decide to edit x topic because I know about it.
I don't actually remember how I know what I know. Therefore: failure to cite my sources correctly. It just seemed obvious.
My edits removed because they lacked citations or looked "spammy."
Intense, overwhelming anger. Livid.
Find sources to "prove" what I already know.
Re-add my edits.
Recognize I am probably not adding sources correctly and so they will be thrown out.
Anger. My own knowledge is meaningless here unless it was published in a peer-reviewed journal of medicine.
Anger. I never will be published there.
Anger. How many people who are published there have breastfed five infants? How many have experienced tandem breastfeeding? How many have been pregnant while breastfeeding? Hypothesis: a statistically insignificant number.
Anger. Worries that this is not a safe space for me as a woman.
Strange nightmares. You probably laugh that the white Wikipedia screenwith lots of blue links could possibly be the stuff of nightmares. But for the past several nights I have woken up sweating, my voice calling out for help, the image of editing something abstract in my mind, the feeling of intense terror overwhelming my emotions. It persists after the dream itself fades.
Yeah, it's the vivid imagination problem again.
I have not and probably will not muster up the courage to check what happened to those edits I made, at least not for a very, very long time.
Becoming a Wikipedia editor is like walking through an alternative universe. Every Wikipedia page has a meta-discussion going on. I had only ever looked at it one single time in my life previously, in 2015, to make a very tiny comment about my own theory on something. It was an original theory from my original research, so it didn't really belong on the front end. But I thought it was worthy enough to belong on the back end. It was difficult for me to discover how to make that tiny comment. I didn't continue to pursue exploring that world.
That is the entire world of Wikipedia editing.
It's like this: every Wikipedia page is a doorway. You can open the doorway in the normal way and walk through it to a world of knowledge and information. It's vibrant, lush, colorful, wonderful! It might need a little bit of gardening, to weed the superfluous commas and ytpos, but it's really not a scary place.
OR...
You can flip the doorway and then open it backwards and enter a dystopian world of people (mostly men) fighting about what is and isn't worthy of belonging on the other side. If this were Stranger Things, it would be the Upside Down. This place is mostly black and white and so many shades of gray - and tracks made by people so confident and cocky and sure that they know everything about x on the other side, and that their view is the only one that matters or is valid. The landscape is nasty courier font and you're always tripping over HTML tags. If you deign to mention that one reason you know x is from your own 10k+ hours of life experience with x, you're discredited as trying to contribute "original research." It feels like the only people who win this game are the ones who read the most *volume.*
But as was previously examined, reading isn't always the way to learn about the world. It's certainly no substitute to learning about the actual experience of the act of sex itself!
It wasn't new knowledge for me. It was a very poignantly new feeling, though. It was like going from mild hesitation and distrust in everything I read on Wikipedia to major apprehension and disbelief in everything written everywhere about anything at any time by anyone. Faith in knowledge of humanity, crumbling and blowing away in the wind.
Of course that'd be nightmarish to someone who literally idealizes the printed word and longs more than almost anything else to contribute to the great libraries of the world's knowledge.
But that's just feelings for you. Dramatic. Overstated. Full of senseless worries. The actual mission of Wikipedia is wonderful. The flaws in execution are compelling reasons for me to contribute *more*, not run away from it entirely (though I have noticed that my Wikipedia usage since this experience has significantly decreased. I have purposefully temporarily avoided clicking on search results that would take me there - and it's been about 15x in the last three days).
I only wish that I had been smart enough to have my first real experience with Wikipedia editing be for me to walk through an obscure door on Czech Wikipedia into a teeny tiny world, gather some baskets of information there, walk back down the hall, open a wholly new door in English Wikipedia, and there plant the seeds from my basket. I should have realized that a topic like breastfeeding would have a particularly nasty Upside Down.
It's a weird world when I can learn more about breastfeeding by sitting in a quiet place with a baby on my lap than by perusing the towering libraries of all the world's information.
But I think the problem is not that the information about breastfeeding (or sex) doesn't exist in those libraries. The problem is being able to find it.
