let them eat cake
An article on remystifying the orgasm in response to a book:
It’s not that the sexual revelations and revolutions of the recent past have not brought considerable good. It’s great that men know more about women’s bodies than they did, great they no longer imagine, like the cad in Milan Kundera’s 1972 novel The Joke, that any sexual exchange short of intercourse is emasculating. What’s bad is that now we have books like Margolis’s O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, which insistently and insipidly fetishize orgasms–adding, thereby, not just to our fears in the erotic realm but also, paradoxically, to our boredoms.
Nehring wants to “remystify” the orgasm. She even suggests that we have Christianity to thank for blurring religious and sexual ecstacies, making sex all the more exhilerating a treat for it’s forbiddenness.
I’m with her–not so much in that it needs to be remystified, but in the sentiment that we should not become attached to our orgasms like a cheap junkfood fix.
This is what I always hated about the HBO series Sex and the City. It made the taboo topic of women wanting sex accessible, surely not a bad thing. But it only replaced outdated lady-in-the-kitchen whore-at-night double standards with a high-heel wearing sexually promiscuous “liberated” woman questionable lack of standards.
Shock value was the substance of it. The sexiness of wild, wealthy carefree Manhattan living and daylong vibrator/orgy sessions seemed attractive only in contrast–like the way Siberia gets to sounding good when it’s 100 degrees and humid and they turn off the AC in the staffroom–with my, the viewer’s, comparatively cumbersome life of working and sweating and not EVER being dressed in the latest fashion (and not getting any sex at all at the time I was watching the show).
The actual characters’ lives, even their plentiful sex lives, were hollow shells of emotion-free hooking up, and I found nothing that made me want to trade places with them. They really seemed lonely and the sex seemed empty.
The best sex I ever have is the most emotionally charged. Oodles of orgasms easily had are a fun fantasy, but they are like those mini powdered sugar donuts, fluffy, eaten by the dozen, grounded in nothing and quickly forgotten.
I prefer mine rich and heavy, if somewhat fewer and farther between. With tension and buildup and plenty of time for contemplation of religious taboos I might be flouting (just kidding, Jesus doesn’t do it for me), and a technicolor finish. My best ones come with fireworks. I want tiramisu. Not grocery sheet cake with sprinkles; German Black Forest cake with fresh, juicy cherries.
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