inspo/sex

After he left I started to cry. Then I fell asleep again. At two o’clock I woke up, suddenly remembering I’d made a date with Judy’s Frenchman, the painter Claude Tonnard.

He took me to his studio, poured me out some perfectly ghastly tea and we looked at his paintings a while. Then, as if it was the only thing left to do, he made love to me.

The studio was dark and cold when I left. I felt experienced without feeling that I, personally, had been through anything. I’d really shocked myself, to tell you the truth. I was a long way from St. Louis. My past was receding a little too rapidly.

Sex. The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. Women deliberately choose not to think about technical sex. They get irritable when men talk technically, it's out of self-preservation: they want to preserve the spontaneous emotion that is essential for their satisfaction.

Sex is essentially emotional for women. How many times has that been written? And yet there's always a point even with the most perceptive and intelligent man, when a woman looks at him across a gulf: he hasn't understood; she suddenly feels alone; hastens to forget the moment, because if she doesn't she would have to think. [...]

The individuals involved can rarely tell you the precise moment. That’s because it’s impossible. One would have to admit seeking something that feels unsavory, alien. A husband who desires to enter another body, to hold another breast. A wife who wants to see her husband want someone else, so that she may want him as much as she’d like to. A third person who is not frankly loved in the world, who enters a room as a cipher in a tank top. A husband who makes the first move. A wife who closes her eyes to the first move. A third person who has eaten nothing all day. Someone turns on the music. Someone pours a drink. Someone reapplies lipstick. Someone positions her body in such a way. Someone is less hurt than he should be. Someone is afraid of her carnality. Someone is worried about not being sexual enough. Someone lights a candle. Someone closes a French door. Someone’s stomach drops. It is everything to do with bodies and it is nothing at all to do with bodies.