In Praise of Bathhouse Fornication
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In our culture, we place a great emphasis on sex as part of a loving and stable relationship. In fact, we so privilege sex with someone we love over sex with someone we do not, or don’t as much, or don’t conventionally, or exclusively, or whatever, that it’s pretty much an accepted idea that sex with your beloved is/was/will be always inherently vastly superior to sex with the one you love less, if at all.
Moreover, the notion that sex with someone you love, and love exclusively and have sex with exclusively, is superior to sex with someone you don’t has such acceptance in this culture that we tend to consider other kinds of sex as not merely inferior, but somehow, well, wrong.
Morally wrong, sometimes. But also immature, unhealthy, a possible misstep on the way to the beautiful fullness of monogamous adult sexual health.
Bollucks.
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Yesterday’s Orgasmic Flavor
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It was either the spring of 1978 or the spring of 1979. I was seventeen, and I had therapy every Wednesday afternoon after school. I think my friend Anne Marie dropped me off-I can’t really recollect how I traveled from my high school that was a good twenty-plus miles away to my therapist’s office. Maybe Anne Marie drove; maybe I got one of my parents’ cars. I doubt the latter; they were never very forthcoming with the wheels.
At any rate, every Wednesday afternoon, I would go to my therapist. She was trained as an art therapist, though we never did any art projects. We just sat around and talked. Her couches were tan, a color I’ve noticed over the years is much favored by the therapists of the world, or anyway the color unites the ones I’ve been a patient of. Her office had a lot of kid things: tiny desks, floppy dolls, construction paper, heaps of crayons. It had the affect of a hotel lobby having a clandestine tryst with a kindergarten. I found it both a tad disconcerting and a bit soothing both at the same time.
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