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Sexy for ourselves
In the play Coming in Hot (see “The play Coming in Hot,” April 7, 2010), a young woman’s story drew a soft, ironic laugh from me. Her smarts saved her from being raped by another soldier with whom she served, and during formal questioning about the incident, the interrogator states that the young woman wore a black bra under a white T-shirt. He uses the statement as an accusation, the pathetic, ancient, worn-out, yet terrifying charge to the woman accused that her dress or behavior caused an intended or actual criminal act of sex by a man. In other words, the man’s conduct was the woman’s fault. My laughter may seem perverse, but its catalyst was the insane chutzpah of systemic, institutionalized stupidity. I imagined other women laughing too, silently or otherwise. Women’s astute laughter. It can bond us whether we’re sitting next to one another in a theater or thinking similar thoughts from international distances.
A black bra symbolizes sex, so a woman wearing a black bra is a symbol of sex, and a sexy woman can only mean slut because women who show that they’re sexy or who like sex are sluts. The “logic” of that progression completely bypasses any regard for women’s liking to dress as they so desire, which may indeed be conventionally sexy. The transparency of the garment over a black bra adds to the “fact” of deliberate seduction. (Whether women dress for themselves, for men, or for other women is a subject of perennial debate, but it isn’t the subject here. Neither is the subject of women’s actual ability to choose or show how they’ll look sexy–at those times when they feel or want to feel that way–in a culture that readily misapprehends women’s sexuality.)
- April 27, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 7
Church down the street
The Seventh Day Adventist church down the street from me seems to draw a full house on Saturdays. Cars are parked up and down the blocks near my home, Sunday morning too.
I usually notice the title of the upcoming sermon, which is posted in a big glass case on the corner of the church property. I have 2 favorite titles. One from a while ago, so I’m likely paraphrasing it rather than recalling it exactly, is: WHAT’S THE BEST VITAMIN FOR A CHRISTIAN? B1. The other title was the most recent subject: INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE LEAVING EARTH.
I laughed at the pun in the first title. I enjoyed it and wondered if the pastor would be speaking about health and spirit. I misremembered the second title earlier this week, thinking that it was: INSTRUCTIONS FOR LEAVING EARTH. Either way, I’m interested. Did the pastor hand out a list? Like the 10 Commandments? I certainly want to learn what’s useful. Maybe he talked about the best way to live here and now rather than about blasting off to some dreamy abode in a fluffy heaven filled with angels sporting long wings and hair.
Obviously, I’m imagining the sermons down the block to be anything but insipid. Maybe the sermons I’m imagining are discourses I’d deliver to a congregation, discourses which would feature the humor that comes from delight in ideas that the speaker, along with the listeners, bring into earthly being.
Timeless
1) I was attending a faculty meeting that included professors from throughout the liberal arts, and the pre-meeting banter brought this comment from a male colleague: “When I had a body.”
2) I was dating a man who said he was a mind without a body.
The first comment was made jokingly, the second was made as a self-revelation. Both came from men in their 50s, intellectuals who, from the outside, people would not perceive as physically fit.
The comments surprised me, sadly, when I heard them. Most of the time, they still do. They describe a state of loss or dissociation that verges on the unimaginable.
Do the comments indicate surrender? To nature and the “natural” course of corporeal events? To mental activity as a numbing of the body? To an inability to feel?
I think that people commonly surrender their bodies to the “ravages” of time. Men, women, older, younger. They expect to be ravaged by time.
Last week I happened upon a statement by Herbert Marcuse about the true ravages of time. Marcuse is one of my intellectual heroes, and I hadn’t read the statement in years. Here’s what stays with me, in my own words and interpretation: the concept of time conditions people for submission, for surrender to misery, tedium, and dullness; timelessness is an essential component of pleasure.
How funny!!! I just heard on the television (which I rarely watch) as I’m writing: “Time is always running out.” The result? Stress and urgency.
How I love the timelessness of writing, of playful, fascinating conversation, of making love.
- March 21, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 3
Quandary, clarity
Saturday morning another intense vinyasa workout (see January 14, 2010, Morning/yoga/dance) overjoyed me. Michelle guided us in constant movement from a high lunge at the top of our mats to one at the back, over and over. Then, as on Wednesday, we sank into Goddess Squat, this time with our arms striking straight up and then forward, parallel to the ground. In each of the many repetitions we opened our fists in the outward gesture and closed them as we pulled our hands, fingers up, into the torso. Vocalization increased the exertion and the pleasure: Ha! with every inward action of the arms.
The last week of 2009 into the second week of 2010 found me in an uncharacteristically indecisive place about an aspect of my life. Quandary then clarity then quandary then clarity . . . By the Wednesday evening after the first super-activating vinyasa class clarity was mine!
- January 18, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 2
Morning/yoga/dance
I usually go to a vinyasa class on Wednesday mornings. Vinyasa is a yoga practice in which asanas, poses, flow together and often feel and look dance-like. Vinyasa combines movement and breathing, both rhythmic, and can be moderately to extremely energetic as it helps a person to develop flexibility, strength, stamina, and cardiovascular fitness. Sweat, elegance, and meditation, the latter possible even during chaturanga, which is a push-up, draw me to vinyasa classes.
Yesterday was especially vigorous and included an asana called, in English, Goddess Squat.
In the pictures below, my stance is Goddess Squat. If I were strictly in the pose, my arms would be symmetrically raised with upper arms parallel to the floor, forearms and hands facing forward, and palms open with fingers spread.
In Goddess Squat we shifted to the right and to the left, holding the squat while further increasing its intensity with dynamic arm gestures. We were dancing to a primally exciting audio of drumming and activating a lot of heat.
Our instructor, Michelle, in whose spirited honesty and vulnerability I learn to further love those qualities within myself, laughed as she promised, “We’ll be here a while!” I felt taxed, and then came a loosening of the mind, a transcendence of Oh, I’m not strong enough physically to continue, to enjoy this. I became stronger, and so did my pleasure. Felt great then and feels great now!
- January 14, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 0
Salon
I held a salon and it was great fun! I use the word salon to describe the conversation I hosted, because it partook of elements essential to the salons of 18th-century Paris, where women of intellect and education, called salonnières, received guests and facilitated polite conversation–stimulating, fluid, focused, intelligent, and harmonious. Conversation is erotic, in contrast to small talk and chit chat. Conversation is an erotic art, by which I mean it is an art of connection.
- December 19, 2009
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 2
Sacrifice and softness
People believe in sacrifice and define it as giving up or even destroying something that you care about or love for a greater good. Sacrifice is a severe kind of surrender, because people can only sacrifice something that they presumably would prefer not to give up: like parents, who sacrifice their sleep for the sake of their infant; like a career woman, who sacrifices her marriage for her work; or like a soldier, who sacrifices his life, period. Sacrifice is difficult and may bring altruistic pleasure but just as likely none. Sacrifice results in loss. Selfish people don’t sacrifice.
I’m not especially selfish (if selfish means operating only for one’s own benefit), but I don’t believe in sacrifice as the culture I live in defines it, and I don’t understand the attendant self-punishment or necessary suffering. I’m a strong person, but that differs from being hard, and my hardness does neither me nor anyone in my life, from intimates to strangers, any good. For me, sacrifice is a softening of blocked or inhibited feelings, of fears that have collected in the body. That way, sacrifice is pleasure, like a sigh of relief or healing tears.
Fresh threshold/geranium
I just had my two front porches painted a gorgeous red. I’d give you a photo, but the color on your computers would probably not match the creamy, dreamy richness of Benjamin Moore geranium in Low Lustre Moorgard (with a lifetime warranty!). When a friend of mine came over the other night, she noticed. She said something like, “How do you keep the porch so clean?” When I gave “new paint” as the answer, she asked me for information about the paint. That’s how great it looks and feels. Many–most?–porches in Tucson, when painted, are some version of terra cotta, and the color is often very faded, similar to the pale, muddy orange that my porches used to be. They had been painted long long ago, way before I lived here.
Every summer my father bought a bright red geranium for a planter on the back patio. Bright reds can be harsh, even in flowers. His choice was a mellow red–brilliant and comforting. Like the beauty that my front porches have become.
And depending on the time of day, geranium casts a warm pink reflection on the white walls of my home.
New color energizes the threshold. I and others enter and leave with a freshened spirit.
A simple day
Sometimes life is this simple–watering the plants, painting a gate and then the threshold of the front door, seeing things (seemingly) fall apart then come back together (all apparently of their own accord). Within less than 24 hours. With the bad mood that I tell other people I’m in, teasing myself out of it. With the underlying pleasure of taking things as they come rather than taking things to task.
Incandescence
Celebrities interest me very little, though lately I’ve been reading about the phenomenon of celebrity. Such as David Haven Blake’s Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, from which the reader learns about the construction of fame in 19th-century America, and through that, facts about the foundation of today’s fame-as-the-manipulation-of-people, both the celebrity and the public. The worship of personality, the invasion of a so-called personality’s privacy, the publication of supposedly intimate details about celebrities’ lives, and the embodiment of greatness or talent in the celebrity body–nothing new. And all of it historically as now accompanied by–dependent upon?–frequent disinterest in and even ignorance of the artistic, intellectual, or other skills and talents that supposedly generated the “greatness” of the celebrity; and, more in line with the celebrity as star, skills and talents that presumably generated the celebrity’s brilliant luminosity.
At its absolute height, the star’s brightness is incandescence.
INCANDESCENCE. It describes Rita Hayworth in Gilda, which I watched again a couple weeks ago. Gilda is one of my favorite movies, and I can count them on one hand.
As a star and as an actress, Hayworth got Hollywood-ized up the wazoo. But it isn’t that she’s hot, it isn’t that she’s gorgeous. Here’s what she IS in Gilda: transporting. She transports me–deep within myself. There, and only there, I might learn to flame, glow, and sparkle mightily. She is an impetus towards radiance, and I am grateful to her self-creation in the midst of the film industry’s artifice.
Incandescence is a noun, so may seem static, but Hayworth’s incandescence within me operates as a verb. Incandescence is an idea about radiance, which is always in the making.
- November 18, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media, Pleasure
- Comments 3
