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I have known such people of my grandmother’s generation, and
I not only believe them to have been happy but am prepared to believe
that they may, after years of such exploration without other points
of reference or comparison, have been better lovers than we who are
reared with copious sources of knowledge, all of it incomplete, a
relentless demand for gratification as of right and a huge, international
menu whose contents we are expected to have tried before we even
consider the main course.
Such speculation, of course, is pointless. I was reared in an age
in which sexual pleasure is regarded not merely as a human right
but, incongruously, as the highpoint of human existence. In every
advertisement and music video and most films and novels, sex, whose
culmination is seen as orgasm, is presented as at once commonplace
and invariably, indiscriminately desirable, though it is neither. |
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In fact, sex – always assumed to be good and responsible and
caring though its participants and their states of mind and body
are not specified - has taken the place once occupied by marriage
as some sort of highpoint and apotheosis to young life. Yet those
who claim the sort of sexual freedom promised and advocated by marketing
and media, as I have done, find themselves condemned by both.
Though aware of the incongruities, I was persuaded by this, just
as I had inherited the equally distorted attitude to marriage, and
I was attempting to reconcile both. I had feasted on the tree of
knowledge and could neither reconstitute the ravaged fruit nor deny
that it had been exceptionally delicious.
I also told myself and Tony that I wanted him to have sex with other
women in my absence.
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