Transcriber: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Capa Girl
So we've all spent a day listening to these conversations
about people who are going to revolutionize things,
and they've got revolutionary technology,
and revolutionary ways to build cars and educate people.
And I have like the least revolutionary idea you're going to hear all day,
that is that you, and you and you and you, are allowed to have sex
exactly the way you want to, as often as you want to,
and it's up to rest of us to make sure that you know that.
(Laughter) So, right? That's not a bad way to end the day.
And it's kind of a perfect time in our history to have that conversation,
now that we finally got rid of "don't ask, don't tell".
Right? (Applause)
So, I had to think about what the opposite of "don't ask, don't tell" is.
It's "ask and tell"!
So now that we understand that it's OK
if the soldier fighting next to us is having gay sex,
it's time to ask ourselves if it's OK that the neighbor living next door to us
is getting tied up and spanked in a little girl dress every night.
And the answer is it is OK because it has no impact on you, whatsoever,
because what they're doing is a consensual act between adults.
and unless you're doing it with them, it does not matter to you.
But we have to get back to a very simple question:
What is sex? Sex is a consensual act between adults.
And that's all that it is.
If you look at this picture right here,
that's a temple like a thousand years ago in India and that is not monogamous,
and it's probably not heterosexual.
As long as people have been having sex
they've been doing it in wild and creative ways and they often even call it art.
Sex is a consensual act between adults
it is intimate, it is personal and it is totally natural.
So why do we have all the shame around it?
I think the first question really is to understand what shame is,
and we need to go ahead and separate that from guilt.
Guilt is an internal voice inside your body that pops up when you know
you have done something wrong to someone.
I told a lie, I feel guilty about that, I did something bad.
Shame is an external force that other people put on you;
it tells you that you are something bad.
So not I told a lie and did something bad; it is I'm gay, I am bad.
That's a really, really debilitating idea.
That takes away your autonomous control over your sexuality
and anybody who wants to take control over your sexuality
does not have your best interest at heart.
Whether it's your preacher, your teacher, your lover or anyone else,
that's not natural.
But what does shame do to people, why does this even matter?
I think you can turn on the news and you can see about
gay kids jumping off of bridges, because they're ashamed to be gay
and know that this matters.
In fact there's actually a lot of research about the impact of sexual shame
on gay and lesbian people.
Unfortunately it's all about gay and lesbian people
'cos people don't research shame with heterosexuals too much.
So if you look at the statistics, youth between the ages of 21 and 25
are 8 times more likely to commit suicide
if they feel marginalized because of their sexuality.
That's really mean.
In the 16 states in 2005 that instituted constitutional amendments
saying that gay marriage is wrong and banned,
the statistics are kinda shocking.
Depression in the gay and lesbian population
in those states went from 23% to 31%;
generalized anxiety went from 3% to 9%,
and alcohol abuse went from 22% to 31%.
This hurts people. Sexual shame hurts people.
But that's just gay people, so that's good news for the rest of us.
Except that it turns out gay people are in fact just people.
So if sexual shame hurts gay people, it probably hurts straight people also.
Turns out about 8% of the population is homosexual.
In a survey that was done in 2005 asking people
about their sexual behavior, 20% of respondents
identified themselves as kinky.
Meaning that they had multiple partners at the same time,
they used toys, bondage, spanking, watched porn together.
8% of people were let out their closet, 20% of people, and I think that's low,
are still living in shame in the closet, which is probably
where they keep all the toys and so maybe that's OK.
(Laughter)
The problem is this is a huge thing for all of us.
Sex is a huge industry.
Even in the depression it's a $13 billion industry to watch porn.
25% of every single search engine request is looking for porn.
That's a lot. Think about that, right. 12% of the sites in the Internet are porn.
And if you thought that was big, 13 billion on porn,
last year, the world's worst economy, remember, since the depression,
15 billion dollars worth of sex toys were purchased.
We are a kinky people, we are spending a lot of time and money
looking for sex, or looking for more fun sex anyway.
So what exactly is normal sex,
now that we've established that we don't want people to feel shame.
Normal sex is anything that is a consensual act between adults.
You can spank each other, you can wear costumes,
you can do anything you want and it is normal.
So my boyfriend and I this morning we're trying to come up
with a way to illustrate the depth and breadth of human sexuality
without scaring you with photos which are scary even to me.
So we went to the Lustlab, which is the strangers online personal ads
specifically for people who are looking for interesting sex.
There are 90 different kinks just on Lustlab
that you could register looking for a partner for, and that's in Seattle.
Seattle is really gotta be one of the most uptight cities in the country,
so that's saying something, right?
Looking at Lustlab everything went from asphyxiation to water sports,
and water sports in case you didn't know is pee not water,
and everything in between like bondage,
knife play, group sex, you name it, it's all normal.
Why does it matter that we're shaming each other,
as if jumping off bridges wasn't bad enough,
as if being depressed wasn't bad enough?
The truth is people are destroying marriages, careers, lives and communities
by keeping secrets about what they're into sexually.
All those, let's say politicians, who are suddenly looking
for a little boys in airport bathrooms.
It's bad enough that his own career was destroyed.
What about the woman he married who believed that
she was in a happy consensual marriage with somebody who's getting his needs met.
That lie didn't just hurt him, that hurt her, and his family.
It's just not cool. Just not OK.
So Milton Diamond was hired a few years ago to do research
on the impact of porn in kinky sex and sex crimes,
hopefully to prove that people who have kinky sex and watch porn
are the ones committing the crimes.
Turned out he found actually an inverse correlation;
people who watch porn and are sexually fulfilled
are less likely to commit crimes.
And that statistic is beared out in the fact that there's less crime
in the cities where there's more porn watched.
Guess what state has the most porn watched in the country -€“ Utah.
(Laughter) It's not a coincidence!
As I was running around doing statistics,
and the politicians and airports are kinda funny,
I read across a statistic that really hit home for me;
trans-people, people who are transitioning from either being male or female,
have three times the urinary tract infections of the general population.
You know why?
They're afraid to go in public bathrooms because people will ridicule them.
That's pretty direct. So why do we do it?
I think it's really simple, nobody actually knows why we shame people
about their sexuality, if you take the church out,
which I'm trying to do.
I think that we shame people about their sexuality
because we're afraid of our own sexuality.
It lives very, very deep inside of us and it's intimate and real and scary
and personal and we want to and we should protect our own sexuality.
So if we give those people the right to do those really scary,
weird things to each other,
I think we're afraid that we're giving them permission
to do those things to us as well.
And that is kind of scary.
I've awesome news for you. It actually works the opposite way.
When we give people back autonomous control over their sexuality
and say, you are allowed to define your sexuality however you want, you go do it,
we give ourselves that same right.
So we're allowed to say, I want you to tie me up
but I don't want you to spank me.
We are allowed to draw our own boundaries.
Not only do we get to have what we want;
we don't have to have what we don't want.
The upside for that as people
is that we create a really safe place for ourselves to be honest.
And when we are honest and safe with our lovers
we might actually be able to push our own boundaries
just a little bit farther and discover the whole spectrum for ourselves.
So here's the last thing. I'm hoping you all got your surveys,
please tell me there are surveys.
This is kind of a game so you have to play this one along with me.
I hope you all filled out your surveys. Nobody will ever know your answers.
I promise.
So what I want you to do is to take your surveys and ball them up,
into a totally crumpled ball, and then I want you to throw it
as far away from yourself and into the audience as you possibly can.
(Laughter) My God! That's awesome looking!
OK, now pick one up and throw it again.
I want you all to feel really comfortable that nobody will see your answers.
But mine are right there, in case you are wondering.
Those are my answers.
I've got nothing to hide anymore.
OK! Stop!
Pick up a survey. Open it. And read it.
It is my greatest hope that you will see something in there that resonates.
Oh! I would have tossed it to you.
OK. We're not done yet, there's one more piece
and I'm sure I've gone over time, oh, I know I've gone over time.
So as I'm walking off the stage,
I ask as a favor to you, one: hand those surveys,
to the ushers on your way out, but more importantly:
I want you to read the survey that you have
and I want you to look at somebody next to you,
and I want you to look at him in the eye and say, "I am afraid
that you will find out that I'm into -- all of the above."
And it's not because I want you can trust a secret
but I want all of us to get that muscle memory and build that language.
It's OK for you to be honest with me, I will accept that.
And I want all of us to know what it feels like to hold somebody
the thing most important to them, and treasure it,
because that's how we as a community
are going to learn to accept people for who they are
and end sexual shame and start having
really rocking good sex.
(Laughter) Thank you.
(Applause)