Susie Bright has been putting out consistently interesting and thought-provoking writings on things sexual for years.
this, from today's Guardian, is a good example.
I particularly like this paragraph:
If you take a honest look at your sexual history, you'll see it's a panorama of everything about you that's seed-and-egg creative. The risks you took blind, the way your imagination survives in spite of every banal and repressive catechism. The church has tried to shut sex up, the advertising world has tried to buy it out. We are fortunate to be engineered so well that the flame isn't easily extinguished.
Exactly. We often see our sexuality as something existing on some sort of parallel track to the rest of our lives. This is a really crap illusion. It can't be separated from what we are any more than breathing can. I'm not talking about being turned on or thinking about fucking all the time. Even a celibate who is genuinely uninterested in sex and never gives it a second thought has a sexual connection to life. A few years ago I found myself thinking of sensual experiences that normally wouldn't be considered sexual. It's highly subjective, of course, but here are a few of mine: Do your own list - it's an interesting excercise.
The hiss of car wheels on wet streets.
The smell the earth gives out when it rains after a long, warm dry spell.
Laying in bed at night, in the dark and smoking a cigarette while listening to some soft jazz saxaphone on the radio.
Certain pieces of music - e.g Roxy Music's 'Avalon'
(I picked this because I don't like the original video they did for the song)
My point being that these are not experiences that are a turn-on in any literal physical sense. They are sexual in themselves.
Our sexuality is an integral part of the weave in the fabric of our lives. Not a separate piece of fabric which can be ignored, suppressed or discarded, as the puritans would have us do. Not something to agonise about or place within an 'acceptable' framework.
And definitely not something that should load us with conventional morality-generated guilt when we think about expressing it.
Life-force is sexual force, and you're right about that sense of our sexuality being parallel to the rest of our lives somehow. Guilty of that!
ReplyDeleteI know a man who says his whole body is that pleasurable, and he is a true celibate, in my opinion, he's no longer attached to sex, even though yes, he does still have it. He's free. And that's the point of celibacy, freedom, not forgetting all about sex, but being free of the bind of it, the limitations of it in the conventional sense, etc.
In freedom there's no difference between sex and not-sex, all is pleasure.
I have a long way to go, to get to that point, but I have the intuition of it every so often. Great post.