Love and Sex - thoughts

This beautiful image is from the Anne of Carversville website. Click on the image to check it out, it's well worth a peek.

In In favour of the Sensitive Man, the opening essay entitled ‘Eroticism in Women’, begins with this assertion on the part of Ms Nin:

From my personal observation, I would say that woman has not made the separation between love and sensuality which man has made. The two are usually combined in woman; she needs either to love the man she gives herself to or to be loved by him. After lovemaking, she seems to need the assurance that it is love and that the act of sexual possession is part of an exchange which is dictated by love. Men complain that women demand reassurance or expressions of love. The Japanese recognized this need, and in ancient times it was an absolute rule that after a night of lovemaking, the man had to produce a poem and have it delivered to his love before she awakened. What was this but the linking of lovemaking to love?

We jump to defend women these days with the claim that a woman risks more when she makes love. She has more to lose; she can be left with a pregnancy at worst and with a poor reputation at the least. By societal standards, she is currency for the empty gestures of machismo, she has placed herself in a position where she stands to be used for his ego; the colder he behaves toward her, the more of a man he is. She takes these and many more risks when she agrees to lay with a man.

If the sex act is emblematic of her love or his, then at least she has a point of salvation. In many ways love will rescue a female from becoming a victim of sex if her desire is used against her. Love sanctifies sex, so she is made clean by love, where she was made dirty by desire. Her need for love is not biological, but practical and most of all, political.

Many things have changed now, and women are not as stigmatized by the reality of multiple partners, only by the appearance of it. And yet the hope that each has left their mark on the other still remains. I assert that just a woman hopes the man has fallen in love with her, so her lover hopes she has fallen in love with them. At the base level where casual sex occurs, love is evidence of attractiveness, of desirability and, again, of not being used for a lust inside the other that had nothing to do with them.

No one wants to be treated like a sex toy. Even if the sex act only involves short term satisfaction, we all want to be consecrated by the hope love brings with it; that hope is that we have caused something in the other person, even if it were just for one night. 

This beautiful image is from Anne of Carversville also. Click on the image to hop over to her page and be amazed.