I absolutely love this six-minute video by Karen B.K. Chan, tweeted to us by Alex Darasang. A professional sex educator, she tries to re-frame how we think about sex, and sexual consent, by offering a different metaphor. While we use metaphors to talk about sex all the time — weirdly, often related to carpentry: bang, nail, screw, etc. — she wants us to introduce an alternative metaphor: jam.
Jamming — shared musical improv — asks us to work together with others to spontaneously create a piece of art that has never quite existed before. It’s a lovely way to think about what sex should and could be. And, importantly, it utterly changes what consent looks like and its role in sexual pleasure.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 18
Tom Megginson — March 1, 2013
Hmmm... my years of playing saxophone might finally come in handy.
Marcos — March 1, 2013
Love is like jazz, Stephin Merrit said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDIt8hdr2oU
Jessica Johnson — March 1, 2013
Great joyful video for a Friday! Love this, thanks for posting.
Anna — March 1, 2013
This was really fun to watch until the confusing part where Chan says "whether you pay for [sex]...[there's] nothing wrong with it's as long as it's consensual and you keep your agreements." Twice in the video, both before and after the quote, she makes the plea to stop treating sex as a commodity. Even though she uses "commodity" as a metaphor for the workings of our inner soul, it doesn't cease to be a economic-derived concept. You can't conveniently divorce the metaphor from the economic connotation of the word.
There are many different views on prostitution**. One humanist perspective (out of several humanist perspectives) is that society must protect the rights of both the prostitutes and the people who seek out their services. From the brief quote about it being ok to pay for sex, Chan appears to champion this perspective. But if so, in urging us to not treat sex as a commodity, she implies that paying for sex is not a textbook commodification of sex. Starting from 5:10 in particular, wow, paying or being paid for sex is not like Pretty Woman, and it never will be. It reeks of hypocrisy in relation to what she is trying to convey in the video.
**Sex surrogacy is extremely rare and limited to a very specific cultural and economic sphere, so it is merely a blip in relation to prostitution when we talk about paying for sex.
JontKopeck — March 2, 2013
Cute.
[links] Link salad wakes up in Houston, wonders what the heck happened | jlake.com — March 2, 2013
[...] Should sex be like jazz? [...]
M.ark — March 3, 2013
Thank you! Spot on or -- better -- jammin'. ;^)
Leilanea12 — March 3, 2013
This would be (except for what Anna wrote) an ideal world type thing for me. But all of our culture, media etc. tells us that aat least in heterosexual settings sex is someone that women do to men cause that it was men want. And in return, the women *sometimes* *if they are lucky* get affection, love and children in return from the men. Or none of the above cause women are only breathing sex dolls in the first place. So... good luck...
ViktorNN — March 4, 2013
Sex as jamming is a nice metaphor, but Chan's use of it falls apart at the point where she invokes the eeeevil "culture of judgment."
Sex happens within the larger context of our lives - and for most of us, it's intricately entwined in the relationships we form with partners that we're going to have children with, build families with, and live family life with for major portions of our lives. While of course we all want to make sex "judgment free" or whatever, the fact is we do judge people who make bad decisions about sex and end up making big messes out of their own lives, the lives of their partners, and most of all the lives of their children, and rightly so. Not all judgments and stigmas are eeevil.
To put it another way, while there are plenty of nice thoughts here, this sounds like something put together by a young college student or someone who plans on being single and childless their whole lives.
Duly Noted | Headspace — March 4, 2013
[...] Reconceptualizing the way we think and talk about sex… with a metaphor which actually implies — nay, requires! — the agency and consent [...]
pduggie — March 4, 2013
It was my understanding that jazz was a word for sex originally.
Well, sex that invovled semen
"As with many words that began in slang, there is no definitive etymology for jazz. However, the similarity in meaning of the earliest jazz citations to jasm, a now-obsolete slang term meaning spirit, energy, vigor and dated to 1860 in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, suggests that jasm should be considered the leading candidate for the source of jazz. A link between the two words is particularly supported by the Daily Californian's February 18, 1916, article, which used the spelling jaz-m, although the context and other articles in the Daily Californian from this period show that jazz was intended.Jasm is thought to derive from or be a variant of slang jism or gism, which the Historical Dictionary of American Slang dates to 1842 and defines as "spirit; energy; spunk." Jism also means semen or sperm, the meaning that predominates today, causing jism to be considered a taboo word. Deepening the nexus among these words is the fact that "spunk" is also a slang term for semen, and that "spunk", like jism/jasm, also means spirit, energy, or courage (for example: "She showed a lot of spunk.") In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, jism could still be used in polite contexts. Jism, or its variant jizz (which, however, is not attested in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang until 1941), has also been suggested as a direct source for jazz. A direct derivation from jism is phonologically unlikely; jasm itself would be, according to this assumption, the intermediary form."
Shingirai Mandizadza — March 10, 2020
Where is the link to this video?