Quote:
|
Originally Posted by rickholio
Hmmm... perhaps its your prosaic style, but my interpretation is that you insist every sexual encounter involves some sort of power imbalance, where there must always be a dominant (puppetmaster) and submissive (puppet) role. I'll grant you that often power games can add a lot of spice to a sexual pallette, but I reject the notion that EVERY coupling involves such crass manipulations.
Don't get me wrong... I love bending my wife over and riding her halfway across the room sometimes, and I love her pouncing on me when she's feeling frisky, but I also love it when we meet together as equals in giving and receiving pleasure. 
I think this is also the first time I've gotten to use the word 'pallette' on GFY, ever.  |
"Black & White", for all its polarized narrowness, puts people at ease and steers a situation down familiar roads.
Kudos to you and your wife for being evolved enough to trade back and forth in pursuit of gray. I think the very first thing people do on their way to liberating themselves is discard all the behaviors they don't HAVE to do. Life becomes a rich mosaic of yourself, suddenly, enacting different roles and discovering you are not quite so "That One Thing" as you thought, or had been told -- same thing.
Getting Sex out of Identity, when Sex is just something that happened to you at the mercy of other people, is a big achievement. It's exhilirating to give the old chalk board a cleansing wipe and realize the words you'd been reading for so long were so arbitrary.
There's a kind of power one feels when one considers a blank slate.
"I could write anything!"
But, having stared at my own "empty" canvas (which bore the marks of erasure and scratching-out as undeniably and as suggestively as anything ever written there in the past) for a long, long while, I've decided that what you don't "write" you can't experience. Memory, the record of experience, is ill suited to shades of gray. To remember an equivocated value is to live forever between numbers, between Here and There. The value of history as resource for the present diminishes around those actions and events we chose (or were forced) to remember ambivalently. Some say that the Holocaust is exaggerated in the modern collective consciousness. Perhaps it is only that some people resist the blunting of an edge that figures so influentially in their lives.
Now my point:
My wife is the most intelligent, most gifted, most terrifyingly ancient person I have ever met. She could build and raze empires of achievement. She could be anywhere with anyone. But she lives with me and does nothing but sleep and eat, creating for herself a "happiness" she can sustain. Whereas I get to go to work and play mogul everyday. We endure two different varieties of guilt.
The "imbalance of power" in our relationship, to use your term, is entirely superficial and simply UNREAL. The fact that I get up at 6AM and get dressed and take 2 trains to work everyday is simply my "lot" -- but only in THIS "play". Likewise, merely the fact that she COULD "DO ANYTHING" with her life, that she could play an assortment of very different parts in myriad plays (all the more so for being considerably younger than I am) is more present between us than the lines she speaks to me.
We heed character, she and I, in our respective ways, NOT because we cannot imagine other people we might be, but BECAUSE WE CAN and know WHY we choose not to.
j-