On Why It’s Hard To Write About Sex With Someone You Love
“My boyfriend doesn’t love the idea that I could write about having sex with him. Lucky for him I think it’s impossible or at least extremely difficult to write about sex with someone you love, who loves you (also possibly not interesting). That kind of sex automatically precludes any kind of analysis. Not that it wipes your memory clean the moment you roll away, but if you’re standing outside yourself and observing your experience and mentally transcribing your noises and dialogue and remembering what parts touched what other parts in what order, you are by definition not having the kind of sex I mean when I say “good sex,” which submerges the judging, thinking, observing layer of the brain the way drugs, exercise, and (I hear) meditation do. Of course sometimes I am outside the experience and still noticing. But it’s harder to do the kind of noticing that leads to writing when you compassionately mutually love someone. It’s easy to do that kind of noticing when you’re having highly intellectualized sex with someone who exists for you much more as an idea than as a person. Noticing has to have an object, or at least the kind of noticing that leads to writing has to have an object.”
Emily Gould is pretty sharp sometimes.
