Sexual Philosophy

Family stuff to do over the holiday period, the seasonal cheer wearing thin after a while, then a tonic, an email from Jane.

Hey darling R, your last email has lifted me for days, you can’t imagine, the sense of being loved physically, not just the sex, also the sense of being known and loved as me, not anyone else, not because of corresponding with some juvenile male template. i don’t know if i’ve been unlucky in love, for not having had that feeling very much, or if i’m lucky for having had it at all, other women seem to have happy sexual times but maybe they’re just easier to please, or maybe they just pretend.

But when i talk to my friends none of them seems sexually happy, some aren’t interested themselves, a lot of the rest are just resigned. i remember chatting with you at that party on that boat on the thames, just when you started noticing me, or so i hoped, you quoting kant, of man’s crooked timber nothing straight was ever made, you then saying, and nowhere more so than in matters of sex, you about twenty, me just leaving school, and me in awe at your knowledge of the world. makes me smile, the memory, but now after all this time i know you were right.

So R now i feel like there’s a great timber beam in my mind, a structural girder, which is my sexual being, and it’s twisting and buckling and refusing to be fitted into the banalities of married life, i don’t even think it’s just T, though he’s pretty hopeless, i think it could be anybody. same ancient dichotomy, dionysian abandon versus apollonian order. no solution, or none that i can see. some of my friends dump their husbands, find someone new, before long it’s back to the same old problem.

Oh god, R, i’m terrified of scaring you away by grumbling, but there’s nobody else i can talk to. anyway, i really know that you’re never put off by any philosophical discussion. that’s the thing that conquered me in student days, i just loved it that you’d discuss anything, well, except trivia, if i could find a man here like that he could have me as he wanted, mind you, he’d need good hands like yours too. mmm... and tongue. mmm, and... oh r, just emailing you is making me frisky, i’d better go. email me soon. love Jxx.