american fixations

10Nov06

We were doing Wilde a week or two ago in class and I was parenthetically delivering over a watered-down version of Foucault’s revision of Victorian “puritanism” – you know, that the interest in the prohibition of sex really, in the end, is only a tacitly desired spur to the proliferation of sexual discourse. Brought it up to date with the old – “you know, any one who spends their life maintaining a website designed to eradicate the scourge of teenage oral sex probably is a wee bit fixated upon teenage oral sex” etc etc… Stunned silence. One girl chimed in to helpfully offer that oral sex really was a huge problem at her high school.

OK. I dropped it. Back to Wilde.

Anyway, do you think if I showed them this video next year when I teach the class it would do the trick?