Oyster pearl
Oct. 8th, 2006 06:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusDespite being "the pornographer of the phonograph" and "the tender pervert", I actually write very little about sex and relationships on Click Opera. Sure, I'm attracted to topics like yesterday's discussion of a sex-and-ecology magazine edited by Ryuichi Sakamoto. But I very seldom write about my own sex life. And for pretty obvious reasons, surely; this stuff is fucking dynamite. It destroys the foundations of any kind of stability in life.
My sexual and emotional life is dramatic, to say the least. It's undoubtedly the centre of everything I do, the most important thing in the world for me. But if, as a result, I ride an emotional rollercoaster, I try to make sure that all people see on the outside is a gently undulating golf course. I've got very good at dissembling, although some truth peeps through in my records; art is, after all, "the lie that tells the truth".
Anyway, let's not talk about me. I want to talk about someone called Esther Perel. Nice name: it sounds like "oyster pearl", which in turn is an excellent metaphor for a hidden, but very precious, sex life. Esther Perel is a writer and sex therapist with an office on 5th Avenue in New York. Her new book is called "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic". Polly Vernon has an interesting interview with her in today's Observer. I found myself agreeing with just about everything Perel said, despite the fact that she overturns many of today's axioms and truisms about love and sex.
"Love," says Perel, "needs closeness and intimacy and familiarity to flourish. Desire does not. Desire needs distance, insecurity, novelty and surprise. Desire needs tension, breaches and repairs."
Check. Sometimes, given a situation in which a sexual relationship threatens to turn into a friendship, I act like a drama queen. I engineer a crisis. I try to keep that tension. Every passionate, angry breach is potentially erotic.
"Love is not comfortable with fights, but desire needs fights," says Perel. "Fights generate energy, erotic energy - and this is not just desire for sex, but a general exuberance and vitality, an élan, an aliveness! We often judge couples on the amount they fight, like: "Oh, they have such a good relationship! They never fight!" And yes, I know of couples who never fight and do have a very good relationship - but they also have a sex life that is somewhat flat. Desire needs fights! Intimacy - that is, emotional intimacy - inhibits erotic expression. Desire needs edge!"
Perel has a good line about how you don't tend to desire your longterm partner when you're eyeball to eyeball, but when you catch them about to deliver a lecture, or preparing to windsurf or something. In other words, when you see them almost as a stranger, a person out there in public, inciting desire in other people.
"Love needs absence of sexual threat, but desire? Desire needs to know there are other options out there for your partner, that your partner moves out there in a sexual world when they are not with you, a world of other people who look at them, sexually. Love needs talk. Desire needs not to talk. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to maintain a sexual edge in our relationships, we must learn to tolerate this void, these uncertainties."
Some people think there's a contradiction between the size of Japan's sex industry and the fact that Japanese people have some of the least sex in the world. But the reason that reported rates of intercourse are so low in Japan is that married couples there stop fucking. And Perel thinks this happens everywhere:
"I wrote this book," she says, "because, in 22 years of practice in six different languages, I've met couples over and over again who were having a good relationship, who love each other, but who have no sex, no tingle! I met couples who had a bad relationship, and who I helped to have a good relationship again, and the expectation was that the sex would just come back - but it didn't. I began to think there's something in this premise - that if sex is wrong, the relationship is wrong; and equally that more talk, intimacy and closeness will equal more sex, better sex - that just doesn't work."
It's not comfort that defines love, although comfort may define marriage. We love, often, in conditions of turbulence.
And it isn't always good to talk. Perel mocks "this idea that the only way a couple can be healthy, or can heal themselves, is with absolute honesty. Come on! We need secrets! We can never know our partner completely, and they can never know us completely, and that's good."
Check!
"Fantasy... is never politically correct, it's transgressive and about power, which is why it's so hot. It's about surrender, revenge, aggression, abandonment. You can transcend moral and social boundaries. But this idea that you should share your fantasy with your partner... I think that's very risky."
Check! I've been having this fantasy recently in which you're -- oh, some other time.
"Talking is overrated. Especially talking to just one person".
Yes. The most enduring relationships are the ones where you can spend long periods of time just being together without talking.
"I cannot stand this tendency to identify a victim and a perpetrator in an affair."
Quite. It always takes two to tango, whatever convenient stories we may choose to tell ourselves after the event.
"This idea that tenderness and emotional intimacy leads to good sex - I'm afraid it became current when women came into my profession."
Good sex comes from having a good line to your unconscious desires. And there's some scary stuff down there.
"Couples are the best theatre around! What two people do to each other, it can be sublime, and it can be evil."
God, tell me about it!
This week is proving to be a very bad week for affairs, according to Perel. "I dunno why! It's a bad week. Ouf! You know, the phone was ringing all night, all night, I had about four hours sleep I think!"
And what the hell am I doing up at this time in the morning, anyway, my head racing, thinking about love and sex? I'm a happily-coupled man. Back to bed.
My sexual and emotional life is dramatic, to say the least. It's undoubtedly the centre of everything I do, the most important thing in the world for me. But if, as a result, I ride an emotional rollercoaster, I try to make sure that all people see on the outside is a gently undulating golf course. I've got very good at dissembling, although some truth peeps through in my records; art is, after all, "the lie that tells the truth".
Anyway, let's not talk about me. I want to talk about someone called Esther Perel. Nice name: it sounds like "oyster pearl", which in turn is an excellent metaphor for a hidden, but very precious, sex life. Esther Perel is a writer and sex therapist with an office on 5th Avenue in New York. Her new book is called "Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic". Polly Vernon has an interesting interview with her in today's Observer. I found myself agreeing with just about everything Perel said, despite the fact that she overturns many of today's axioms and truisms about love and sex."Love," says Perel, "needs closeness and intimacy and familiarity to flourish. Desire does not. Desire needs distance, insecurity, novelty and surprise. Desire needs tension, breaches and repairs."
Check. Sometimes, given a situation in which a sexual relationship threatens to turn into a friendship, I act like a drama queen. I engineer a crisis. I try to keep that tension. Every passionate, angry breach is potentially erotic.
"Love is not comfortable with fights, but desire needs fights," says Perel. "Fights generate energy, erotic energy - and this is not just desire for sex, but a general exuberance and vitality, an élan, an aliveness! We often judge couples on the amount they fight, like: "Oh, they have such a good relationship! They never fight!" And yes, I know of couples who never fight and do have a very good relationship - but they also have a sex life that is somewhat flat. Desire needs fights! Intimacy - that is, emotional intimacy - inhibits erotic expression. Desire needs edge!"
Perel has a good line about how you don't tend to desire your longterm partner when you're eyeball to eyeball, but when you catch them about to deliver a lecture, or preparing to windsurf or something. In other words, when you see them almost as a stranger, a person out there in public, inciting desire in other people.
"Love needs absence of sexual threat, but desire? Desire needs to know there are other options out there for your partner, that your partner moves out there in a sexual world when they are not with you, a world of other people who look at them, sexually. Love needs talk. Desire needs not to talk. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to maintain a sexual edge in our relationships, we must learn to tolerate this void, these uncertainties."Some people think there's a contradiction between the size of Japan's sex industry and the fact that Japanese people have some of the least sex in the world. But the reason that reported rates of intercourse are so low in Japan is that married couples there stop fucking. And Perel thinks this happens everywhere:
"I wrote this book," she says, "because, in 22 years of practice in six different languages, I've met couples over and over again who were having a good relationship, who love each other, but who have no sex, no tingle! I met couples who had a bad relationship, and who I helped to have a good relationship again, and the expectation was that the sex would just come back - but it didn't. I began to think there's something in this premise - that if sex is wrong, the relationship is wrong; and equally that more talk, intimacy and closeness will equal more sex, better sex - that just doesn't work."
It's not comfort that defines love, although comfort may define marriage. We love, often, in conditions of turbulence.
And it isn't always good to talk. Perel mocks "this idea that the only way a couple can be healthy, or can heal themselves, is with absolute honesty. Come on! We need secrets! We can never know our partner completely, and they can never know us completely, and that's good."
Check!
"Fantasy... is never politically correct, it's transgressive and about power, which is why it's so hot. It's about surrender, revenge, aggression, abandonment. You can transcend moral and social boundaries. But this idea that you should share your fantasy with your partner... I think that's very risky."
Check! I've been having this fantasy recently in which you're -- oh, some other time.
"Talking is overrated. Especially talking to just one person".
Yes. The most enduring relationships are the ones where you can spend long periods of time just being together without talking.
"I cannot stand this tendency to identify a victim and a perpetrator in an affair."
Quite. It always takes two to tango, whatever convenient stories we may choose to tell ourselves after the event.
"This idea that tenderness and emotional intimacy leads to good sex - I'm afraid it became current when women came into my profession."
Good sex comes from having a good line to your unconscious desires. And there's some scary stuff down there.
"Couples are the best theatre around! What two people do to each other, it can be sublime, and it can be evil."
God, tell me about it!
This week is proving to be a very bad week for affairs, according to Perel. "I dunno why! It's a bad week. Ouf! You know, the phone was ringing all night, all night, I had about four hours sleep I think!"
And what the hell am I doing up at this time in the morning, anyway, my head racing, thinking about love and sex? I'm a happily-coupled man. Back to bed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 06:42 am (UTC)maybe that's why i have a marvelously stable home life and a rather controversial alter-ego.
or maybe this is just striking a nerve because there's a 1970s soft-core film soundtrack playing in the background as i type.
what is that photograph?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 07:35 am (UTC)No, it's some stuffed animal in an art school degree show, actually.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 07:47 am (UTC)you're just all over the fucking place.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 10:11 am (UTC)Does this mean that desire leads to restriction and restrictions lead to fights and fights leads to sexual tension which in turn leads to a good sexual life which in turn leads to, as a psychologist I heard once say, separation between these lovers?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 10:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 10:34 am (UTC)Story of your life
Date: 2006-10-08 11:27 am (UTC)I wonder what Hisae thinks about it ? Are you able to talk openly about your mutual needs ?
Sorry for getting personal when I don't even know you. In fact the other way round! as reading your writings and listening to your lyrics provide me with some approach of your person. What is your purpose in giving a "close" access to your private life ?
Anyhow I wish you all the best.
Cxxx who is glad cos she's going to receive very soon her order "Ocky Milk" :-) Youpi !!!
Re: Story of your life
Date: 2006-10-08 03:17 pm (UTC)Re: Story of your life
Date: 2006-10-09 04:03 pm (UTC)Re: Story of your life
Date: 2006-10-10 07:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 10:18 am (UTC)Thanks.
I'll go back to lurking, now.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 01:11 pm (UTC)I wouldn't doctor a crisis, even though the estrangement of a fight produces great sexual tension, but a "what you don't know won't hurt you"-attitude works for me. Unfortunately, I get very jealous, so I never read my wife's e-mails or diary. Never. Besides, I rarely call her "wife". That word itself is an inhibitor.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 01:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 03:19 pm (UTC)I don't think love and sex really have to be all that different, i mean, where both are present. But then there's the kind of sex that friends get into, etc etc. People intrigue me.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 03:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 03:21 pm (UTC)We have yet to effectively couple from any farther away than a few feet.
Oh dear!!!
Date: 2006-10-08 03:48 pm (UTC)Not so with me, I kept telling everyone that I was "different" They never got it because its not so common, with me "familiarity and intimacy FUELS desire".. perhaps that's why I do well in long term relationships..
I don't know about a corrospondance between sexual fire and "a good fight" although I've always noted that the same energy one could be using to have a fight, may just take a bit of fire out of the sexuality, due to the fact, when people (or just myself and my husband as a couple) if we fight, we feel hurt and its not easy to find a way to bridge the bad feelings.. other people move on, in spite of that energy, where as it forms a "black hole" and no one dares to venture.. however after a wonderful day, you know the kind of day I mean, when you've gone out for a walk, did something fairly active and then have a nice meal, delightful conversation, don't you just look into their eyes and feel, "gee, I would just love to be alone with you when we get home!" ? You know what I mean?
The typically American way is, women are supposed to push men away.. as male desire is supposedly "always there".. and I feel that this book may just be based upon that type of perspective with these quotes.
Oh and THAT was an excellent obsevation, Momus!
Date: 2006-10-08 04:13 pm (UTC)Yes, I think this is totally, unbelievably true, that's why maybe some of us don't need to waste energy in "fights"..
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 05:14 pm (UTC)Related stuff. (http://http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/nagel/papers/exposure.html) Serious, but interesting.
Sorry. Correct link:
Date: 2006-10-08 05:27 pm (UTC)love and sex
Date: 2006-10-08 07:05 pm (UTC)Re: love and sex
Date: 2006-10-08 07:30 pm (UTC)Re: love and sex
Date: 2006-10-08 07:35 pm (UTC)Re: love and sex
Date: 2006-10-09 05:48 am (UTC)It doesn't have to be "on stage", but I've always found it easier that others start those key steps, so being on the stage has its advantages because of that... right now, a feel like I'm an over weight, over aged, matronly sort of person..no one knows my musical past, nor really cares and yet I can still open a conversation and get people talking.. once that happens, you have a certain amount of control of where that can take you. Friendship, relationship, sex.. a job, what have you..
If you say you never had a job nor went to college/school, nor had a conversation, then I'd say you were probably "fucked". ;)
Re: love and sex
Date: 2006-10-09 10:26 am (UTC)Its all about the confidence to communicate and then the desire to do so.
Loving oneself is essential. Not a blind adoration but a real care.
As for your latter sentence:
"If you say you never had a job nor went to college/school, nor had a conversation, then I'd say you were probably "fucked". ;)"
How come those people breed like rabbits round these parts?
Re: love and sex
Date: 2006-10-09 11:43 am (UTC)Re: love and sex
Date: 2006-10-10 05:37 pm (UTC)Ah when I said "fucked" I didn't mean....never mind but yes, when people don't have much going on in life, I guess they can "multiply" faster than some of us who seem to be a bit more modest and care. It too is about self confidence. I'm not going to judge people who never had a job or went to school like that, I was thinking of a more adverage person who had at least some social skills to be a part of a relationship. In areas where people are "breeding like rabbits" there is a seperation of the labour and usually, but not always, men and women work in homoginious work places, don't communicate with each other unless intoxicated or "out to score".. but once again, depending upon where you live in the world, or in the US you can still be the "hiarchy" and still live much like those people who are only "breeding".. thats the beauty of America.. equal oportunity discrimination.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 07:30 pm (UTC)Shannon and I were just now discussing this exact thing in regards to my own life, though I think I let a little more of my rollercoaster show. Finding this post in the midst of our conversation is serendipitous and I find your golf course inspiring.
All piston's pumping
Date: 2006-10-08 07:31 pm (UTC)In one of your own posts you talked about pornutopia and perhaps that it is a myth. Sex is the main drive for some in the same way that golf is the main force for Tiger Woods, I guess. Some careers provide more opportunities - celebrity and its allure, of course. But only the abnormal are not sexual beings but the degree of emphasis varies.
Fantasies should be secret, we all have a sewer that drains our soul. But to live to an industrialised ideal of sexual activity? i vote with the luddites.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-08 10:43 pm (UTC)Part of me bucks whenever a new "self-help" book seeks to tell me what I'm feeling about a girl/boy/bit of stucco. But to be fair, I'd guess the reason I haven't had a good relationship in two years is that I run to dead Italians and Romans for my love advice. Ovid, you done me wrong. I've tried moving forward to Chaucer, but he just keeps telling me to do crazy, crazy stuff: "As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte;/And prively he caughte hir by the queynte,". Oh, Geoffrey, you old rake.
So in other words, what's the ISBN for that book?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-09 01:19 am (UTC)The right mix
Date: 2006-10-09 05:49 pm (UTC)As for sharing sexual fantasies, I decry the notion that we are to keep those for ourselves! I want to share my fantasies with my partner because that is the most intimate aspect of my life that I can share. I wish more women would talk openly, with their partners and the public, about their sexual fantasies. Why do we have fantasies that in real life we would never seek? What is it in these fantasies that captures us so much but are off-limits to us in real life?
Controlled danger, perhaps. I'm reading a book now called "Arousal" in which the author has worked with numerous strong women that fantasize about rape scenarios. Why? Because these women are accustomed to managing everything in real life, so they desire a fantasy situation where they have no control at all, in which their actions are inconsequential. They can relinquish control in this one situation.
And the result of this analysis does not lead them to rape situations in real life; the result is that as they begin to understand that which is driving them, it begins to hold less power, and their fantasies start changing.
So I'd say if you're three years into a good relationship but the sex is getting dull, don't manufacture fights; instead, trot out the fantasies and see what you have to work with.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-11 03:17 pm (UTC)Brassens?
Date: 2006-10-16 07:59 pm (UTC)Have you used that phrase in one of your songs too?
I love the Brassens song "Le Pornograph"