voyeurs of our own caresses
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- Published on Monday, 29 January 2007 19:49
- Written by Erik
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In my class on “The Politics of Resistance,” I gave my students the intro chapter of The Sadeian Woman by the extremely brilliant Angela Carter. This is her observations on the wrong way of making love:
Any woman may manage, in luxurious self-deceit, to feel herself for a little while one with great, creating nature, fertile, open, pulsing, anonymous and so forth. In doing so, she loses herself completely and loses her partner also.
The moment they succumb to this anonymity, they cease to be themselves, with their separate lives and desires; they cease to be the lovers who have met to assuage desire in a reciprocal pact of tenderness, and they engage at once in a spurious character of maleness and femaleness.
The anonymity of the lovers, whom the act transforms from me and you into they, precludes the expression of ourselves. So the act is taken away from us even as we perform it. We become voyeurs upon our own caresses.