10:58 am. After last night’s journal entry, I received the following email from a reader of this journal: “With all due respect, I would take out sex related parts of your journal. It’s not that interesting and feels disrespectful to K.” Not sure why this troubles me as much as it does. Tempted to reply: “With all due respect, it’s interesting to me and it’s my journal.” But it’s also true that it stopped being my journal the minute I decided to put it online. Plus, on more than one occasion, I’ve invited readers to weigh in. So, fair.
But I’m also tempted to say: “I’m not sure why you think it’s disrespectful to someone to talk about having sex with them.” When B. threatened to sue me for slander because I’d said in The Show About the Show that we’d had great sex, she pointed out that New York State law defined slander as, among other things, publicly disclosing that a woman had been unchaste. I found this hard to believe so I looked it up and she was right. That is what the law says. But it must be from the last century and I can’t imagine it’s enforceable. It just seems so obsolete to me. But my point is I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having sex or enjoying sex or wanting sex and so I don’t really agree with the notion that it’s somehow disrespectful to the other person to talk about it. I guess it’s arguably disrespectful if they’re not okay with it, but even there, the truth is the truth.