Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

  What do you think about the statement by the unknown author of My Secret Life(pg.22), where he says that in order to justify his describing his sexual exploits,
"that his strangest practices were shared by thousands of men...the guiding principle...was the fact of recounting them all in detail..."

  He's obviously talking about men bragging about sexual conquests, as most men are prone to do.  Do you think that this is a form of confession in which the confessor actually holds the power as a storyteller over his audience, or another way that society has induced us to speak frankly on the subject?  I know that whenever a friend of mine tries to tell me of sexual encounters I picture Sam Malone @ the end of the bar telling his audience(Norm and Cliff) about some stewardess he had hooked up with the night before.

  If this is a form of confession, what is the guilt that the storyteller is trying to unburden themselves of?  What is the triad in this relationship?

  Also it is now commonplace to hear women doing the same bragging, while it seemed to be what women considered one of the more reprehensible acts perpetrated by men for the repression of female sexuality in the past.  In this age of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives the discourse on female sexual pleasure has seemed to grow immensly.  What changed in our culture to make it commonplace to hear frank open conversations about topics previosly thought to be taboo?  Is it just the abundant proliferation of information and entertainment via the television and internet, that now makes it nescessary for the writers of such infotainment to push the envelope and shock the viewer into talking about the subject, which in turn makes the subject matter less and less shocking? 

  These are just some questions that came to me while rereading the first half of the Foucault book.  Feel free to ignore them.  My next blog will be on if there's anything fluffier than a cloud.