cloudboy
Posts: 7306
Joined: 12/14/2005 Status: offline
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I was in Barnes and Noble having a coffee, and as is my custom, I pick a book to browse and if I like it, I buy it. So, much to my own surprise, I bought Maureen Dowd's, ARE MEN NECESSARY, WHEN SEXES COLLIDE. I don't want to pump the book, but I thought his passage was particulary pointed to my own 40 year old condition. "Sex is a spiritual obligation. It makes up for the poverty of bourgeois experience. We're too late for the Spanish Civil War. We missed landing at Omaha Beach. But still we need to know what we're capable of. So it is in the realm of private life that we have to risk ourselves, to disclose ourselves, to vindicate ourselves; and the more private, the more illuminating. Our theater for self discovery is smaller. And in this lucky but shrunken theater, the bedroom looms very large. It is the front line, the foxhole. The bedroom is where people who live otherwise safe lives can learn how cowardly or courageous they are, what their deepest and most dangerous desires are, whether they can follow unreason within them to what it, too, can teach." Dowd quoting Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic. One thing about BDSM is that it gives its practitioners a lexicon and layout for adventure. I suppose one might even refer to it as our own "manual" of unreason.
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