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I believe that once again it was literary notions of possession
and commitment, of ‘serial stasis’, as Ned had written,
which restrained me. Perhaps in part all women retain an inherited
sense that the act (the act?) of sex entails a risk of impregnation
and so fifteen or sixteen years of commitment to, and dependence
on, a man - notwithstanding the pill, the condom, the absolute certainty
that this man or that desires nothing more than to share pleasure
and the sense of companionship which such sharing induces.
Certainly, amongst my new-found Ann Summers friends, there were
girls who claimed to be ‘in love’ with men on no better
grounds than that they had effectively been raped by them when drunk. “So
you do not know him,” I would tell them, “You do not
approve of what he did to you. You cannot even remember it, yet because
you awoke to find goo between your legs and him snoring beside you,
he is your man. Why?” |
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There was no answer. It was just a fait accompli.
Again we come back to the notion of intercourse, like marriage,
as the ending to the story, a transformation, rather than, like a
kiss, say, or a row, as one of many inevitable developments in the
unplotted plot of a relationship.
I did not for a moment suppose that Paul and I would become husband
and wife and live happily ever after, but something in me kept telling
me that, so soon as his penis entered my body, the umbilical cord
to my previous status, my previous life, would be cut, my marriage
irrevocably over. I would have moved from one man to another or,
still worse (why in God’s name ‘still worse’?),
to ‘manlessness’.
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