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There is a deep privacy to our sensual lives, so deep that we don’t want to read about those of others. Here I am using “sensual” to be synonymous with “sexual,” when in fact it isn’t. We do not want to read about others’ sex lives.
Or do we? There is some debate, I suppose, from a writer’s point of view, of what a reader wants to read, has to read. “Where is the passion in the body?” “We don’t need the graphics.” “It’s the emotions that count.” “For Chrissake, don’t give us all that anatomy, all those genitals!” “We all know, don’t we, what happens. Keep it minimal—a gesture maybe, an article of clothing.”
It’s too private, too invasive.
For some anyway. Surely for others, the voyeurism is the titillation, I suppose. But I’m talking about serious writing, not the sensational novels — or movies—where the invasion into the sex lives of others is the entire point.
I don’t know about you, but I do not enjoy watching other people humping and breathing and calling out, competing in the volume of the ultimate shouts of release. “Humping.” Sorry about that word. F—ing. Making love? Really?
Would it be different if I had a partner next to me so we could be doing the same thing at the same time—the movie couple stimulating us further? But, for those of us who do not have a partner at the time, — or who are sitting next to a person we barely know—such a scene produces nothing but either longing (in the first case) or humiliation (in the second) that we, with a relative stranger, are witnessing the privacy of the sexual life.
It’s like watching someone eat and drink while one is hungry and thirsty oneself.
Do I even know what I’m talking about?
In a way, yes. I just wrote a book that begins with my being torn between two men. If we (I) take it to the bedroom, there were contrasts. The first was almost acrobatic, energetic, experimental. He sometimes whispered “words,” a practice which, frankly, I didn’t like. I liked him, though, and our romps. The second was quieter, more traditionally sensual. Although he’d probably have liked some of the “stuff” that had gone on with the other, I wasn’t about to introduce it, and, ultimately, I married him, the second one, the reassuring one. It was all, as it should be, a private affair, and . . . well. . . would anyone ever mention to one lover what had gone on with another? Sexuality needs to be private.
But sensuality? To shift the word slightly—that’s hardly private at all. Sensuality is the shine of hair, the soft pile of a velvet jacket, the look of a slightly unshaven chin (which men have caught onto so it’s all the rage now, all of them sensual, sexy in their five o’clock shadows), of the fragrance of a particular perfume, one hand grasping another in a movie, the slurp of whipped cream on a cup of hot chocolate, the crunch of salted peanuts, the zoom of a roller coaster as it plunges from its height, so sensual one screams. There’s nothing private about any of that, thank god. I’ll take it all, with or without company.