My thoughts today have been very much centered upon gendered notions of our sexuality...How we are expected to perform sexually and how those expectations present a double standard of sorts; an impossible ideal if you will.
Sex is arguably the purest form of human connection. Why then is it so often an experience during which participating members are on very different pages? We are expected to have an inherent understanding of what the other person needs to feel good...But because every individual is just that, an unique being with a unique set of needs, satisfying your partner without a discussion of what they personally find pleasing, is impossible.
These impossible ideals exist all over the place it seems. Take the Virgin Mary for example...This representation of the perfect woman is in fact, a biological mother and a virgin all at once...Humanly possible? Not really.
The people we see sprawled across the pages of Vogue are another example...Stylish? Perhaps, but thanks to computer technology, these ideals of femininity are also impossible. Images of beauty have been cut and cropped to such an extent that if they somehow manifested off the page and into the "real world", they'd cease to exist; their anatomical dimensions are impossible for a person to simultaneously possess and remain alive.

I am off on a tangent here, but what I am getting at is the presence and power of ideals in our lives and the impossibility of so many of them.
Ideals create expectations that, in my experience, serve to dull down otherwise interesting and mutually fulfilling events. Some would say that certain situations are instinctual and therefore do not need discussion. Maybe I just talk too much, but call me crazy, I would rather have an interesting conversation with someone about what turns them on, than fumble around in the dark trying to figure it out on my own. It's the expectation that we should somehow just know that makes situations uncomfortable or results in hook ups during which you find yourself daydreaming about the hot pocket you could be toasting, wondering how quickly you can leave without seeming rude, or guessing as to if you've gone "idle" on AIM yet...
But then, in the words of my exceedingly wise friend, lady J, " it is thru the mishing and mashing with other individual 'human mysteries' that we begin to truly understand our own."