TITHONUS' DIARY!!
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my life Saw "My Life Without Me" with my ex today. Great film, I commend it to you all unreservedly. - I was thinking about lust on the ride home. There are some interesting little observations on lust in this movie... anyway, to test my theory, I want to ask you to ask yourselves the following question (or some variation thereon that applies to you): given the opportunity to have sex with someone who has a movie-star-perfect-body, or to change your own body so that it would be movie-star-perfect, which would you choose? - Now, am I right in thinking that the answer was unhesitatingly the latter? - Before I ramble a little into what I think this might mean, there's a story by D.F. Wallace I want to reference, from his book "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men". In it there's a conversation between two characters, one of whom argues that men who want to give, but not receive, oral sex, think that women are stupid. The argument basically runs like this: the man who desires to give pleasure, but is not especially interested in his own physical pleasure, wants most of all to be a "good lover", to be thought of as a "good lover" and to be able to think of himself as a "good lover". It's mostly his vanity, not his body, that he is trying to satisfy in bed. And the woman is, to him, just a necessary object through which he can demonstrate his sexual virtuosity. He does not think that perhaps she might want to do the same thing; that she might want to satisfy her own vanity by proving to him and to herself that she is a "good lover". - Like so many things by Mr Wallace, I think this is quite a clever little argument but... somehow misses the most important step. Because... see, it seems to me that the big deal with sexual relationships and sexual politics and so on is not to see who is smartest or who wins the battle of the sexes or to pick up on people for failing to understand certain vital points of... similarity or contrast. In the end, it's really about the great mystery of love, sappy as that sounds. And the tragedy of people who are more interested in being a "good lover" than they are in the person they're sleeping with is that they miss out on the most important element because they're too busy trying to "win" life. Um. No way you'd find Wallace saying anything like that, of course. :) - Right, so where was I? It occurred to me that there's a socially sanctioned form of lust, which is the lust for self-improvement or self-perfection, and then a socially thingumjig, word for the opposite of sanctioned... um, frowned-upon? Form of lust, which is the desire to enjoy... well, I don't know exactly. Sex? Life? Physical pleasure? But, actually, the form of lust that is socially approved of is far more powerful to begin with, and far more dangerous and destructive in its effects. I think the idea that self-improvement is a good, natural and inevitable thing to desire is a curse. Especially self-improvement based on increased self-control. But that's a rant for another time. - "'Cause if I make you happy I don't need to do more" - Carole King |
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