Category Archives: AMS

Dan Savage writes a sex advice column that appears in The Georgia Straight among a tonne of other places, and visited UBC’s Chan Centre tonight through an AMS event.  So, I got a free ticket at the last minute and decided to go.  Not because I want sex advice, but because he seemed funny on youtube, and I needed a break from my essay.

Okay, I laughed a bit, he’s a pretty funny guy.  But overall, I didn’t like it that much.  I knew what I was getting into, and I knew it wouldn’t all be pretty, and yet it made me more serious and reflective (and admittedly, slightly disgusted) than it should have.

For example, it raised some recurring morality questions as to…well, quite simply put, the purpose of life.  Not only was pleasure in general indicated here, but physical pleasure.  How could a rush of blood, the physical pleasures of sex, be so important to all those people in the Centre that they would read a weekly column, come to this event, and require discovery to the furthest boundaries to find it (I will spare you by not repeating exactly what boundaries were mentioned.) I realize people find pleasure essential to a maintaining a relationship, but going the extent to fulfill every fetish just shows me that pleasure is too much of an important goal here.

One particular topic made me think again about whether or not thoughts of Evil are as morally wrong as actions of Evil.  Savage concluded that it doesn’t matter if you fantasize raping someone, or are a pedophiliac, as long as you don’t act on it.  Obviously there is a difference in terms of who gets hurt, but somehow I think thoughts count too.  It says something about the way your perceive women, children, and these are problems in my view, simple fetishes in other people’s.

Having said all that that, I don’t think sex is something that should be shushed away in a free society.  I just don’t think so much time and devotion should be spent on it.