Saturday, April 15, 2006

The last word on the subject

I know some people say that sex and love are easily confused, that you may think that sex is love when actually it's just sex. But I say, if you say that sex is anything but love, you're not talking about sex. Because sex is love.

Don't talk nonsense and say that sex is not love. You might as well say that love is not love. Shakespeare said that. Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. Sex is not sex that loves not when it sexes.

Sex is love. It is the body loving. It is anything loving. It is pleasure. And now know also that love is sex. Love is nothing but sex. But can't there be love without sex? you ask. Um, not really. You see, you must love with your whole being, which includes, as it happens, your body. Or else you have altered the love beyond recognition. I don't care who or what you're loving. It's a body thing, ultimately.

The next time you plan to use the word "love" in a sentence, at the last moment substitute "sex" instead. Know the truth of what you just said. Feel the implicit rightness of it. See how people react. They will be surprised. That is how you know when you have touched the real.

5 comments:

Vincent said...

I love this, Doug! It comes from the whole self and not the analytical intellect. Truly worthy of an admirer of John Cowper Powys!

Vincent said...

On further reflection, though, I am not at all sure what you are saying. Sex is clear. Love is a puzzling thing. But to equate them as synonyms does not get us out of the puzzle.

Vincent said...
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Darius said...

If what you mean is that love often involves attraction, I'd agree.

But not necessarily. People work with the diseased, criminals, the dying, the elderly. Think of Mother Theresa. People can come to the aid of people who repel them on a physical level.

In other words, I think it would be a mistake to say more than that love often but not necessarily involves attraction of some kind. People clearly experience and act on love in ways that have nothing to do with sex unless you want to define that term so broadly or ambiguously as to render it meaningless.

Doug Mackey said...

I am going to try to shift this out of the sphere of Mother Teresa's experience, which in fact I do not know, to my own, and what this experience tells me is that love is real when it is fully embodied, whatever form that may take.