Oh, long, long ago, when I was an adolescent (13 years old, to be exact) and completely in the dark about the affairs of the sexes, I used to scour historical romance novels. I read hundreds of them. These books were one of the few resources I had on hand to learn anything about sex. Had I been a sexual being at the time, I may have simply sought another person. But I was interested in sex in a most detached and analytic way. (I was very much still a child, and knew no tangible physical longings.) I just wanted to know what people were so excited about. What was this act that had everyone so enthralled? It seemed “sex” must transport people to other realms, almost automatically, as if once the penis entered the vagina (as my mother patiently explained when I asked about how babies were made), the couple would be (together!) raised to unprecedented realms of pleasure.
I was lucky enough to be one of the few kids who had not been sexually molested. (When you teach writing, you discover that a great many (many more than you’d expect) students have been subject to some kind of sexual abuse when they were children.)
All of this is to say that my present view of sex as encountered in my poems more often addresses the irony of just how much attention is paid to it! The poem David Lehman decided to include in the Best American Erotic Poems anthology, “Me and Men,” is an explicitly anti-erotic poem. The speaker very frankly dismisses the erotic power that the men in the poem have had over her. She says, at one point, “But more often, I liked best not being with them, / driving alone and thinking only of the fact of them.” This is sad. Sad both for the speaker of the poem and for the state of sexual relations today. Has sex become more about thinking than doing? Is the truly erotic not necessarily private? Or is the “erotic” to be merely summarized by a bawdy limerick? Is it just about getting naked? What’s so interesting about getting naked? Unless, it’s you getting naked with someone you’ve long been wishing to get naked with? Is the erotic (or, Eros) not about resistance? About waiting? What about desire? The nakedness of the other not yet real, but imagined? The very nakedness of the other’s mind and self as exemplified by the body?
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