She had a very glass beauty; one repentant of its physicality. It seemed that her every motion was intended to deemphasize her abundant charms, grace, poise. Sometimes, I looked at her (she really held an extreme sexual attraction for me), but mostly, I listened, and knew her beauty.
It seemed to me that her intellectual purity and prurience would quickly wilt under the full examination of an impassioned mind, that it would somehow reveal itself to be less than a fully-ostentatious beauty of rut and sensation. I always thought to see wrinkles around the eyes of her thoughts, or to find the creaking joints of long use, but she always was fresh and important and virile.
This, all with a manner that suggested asexuality and sterility, fired me like a pottery fertility statue.
Hmm.
ReplyDeleteI'd leave it at that, but it's an unsatisfying answer. But I don't know how to exactly describe the emotion(s) this piece evokes. Hmm.
I like it though. So there's that.
Madonna/whore complex?
ReplyDeleteWas that rude of me? Probably. I dunno. This piece just struck me as the thought process of a dude struggling to understand that it's possible at least one woman in his life is an actual person.
DeleteLike ... she's sexual! But wait, she's also ... pure? But not pure? But she has a brain! But also a body. How can she be anything but either 100% perfect or 100% debased? Who cares; I'm turned on by it.
That this follow-up comment could be taken as even more offensive does not escape me, but I think maybe it shows that I didn't mean to be dismissive.
Perhaps. But I wrote it thinking more about the apparent ability of some women to have "bodies to kill for" without liking it or, in fact, wanting it. It's not that she happens to have a brain; it's that she doesn't like that she has a body as well, and a body that is beautiful and graceful. It's also probable that I give my characters more credit than they deserve.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. *stream of consciousness alert*
ReplyDeleteMost women are taught from a very early age to hide their bodies, to suppress or deny any sort of sexuality. I don't think I know a single woman in my circle of friends who doesn't have some weird tension in her heart/mind about wanting to reveal her beauty, to enjoy sex, and all that mixed-up-ness and wanting to be valued and respected for her mind and not for all the physical stuff.
We are given bodies to care for, and we can change it a little here and there, but we're not able to really change whether we're born as someone else's ideal or not, you know? So like ... people here always stare at me a lot, always treat me as "other" at least in part because I just look so radically different from most. And men in particular always treat me very differently from most other people/women for reasons that aren't at all connected to their estimation of my mental faculties.
And yeah, I'd never really paid much attention to the way I look before I got here. I still pay less attention to my looks than other people do. But I have become so much more aware of things, so much more willing to change my appearance to blend in a little better, because even though the attention has rarely been negative, it still sets me apart as "other."
One of the other teachers here used to date a woman who won beauty pageants, and he said that the whole time he was with her, he was worried that he'd lose her to someone else. That because he was "only" a teacher, because he had only average looks, people spent a lot of time asking, "Why is she with YOU?" That even though she was a down-to-earth sort of person that he loved to be around, he couldn't take the pressure of trying to live up to so much beauty.
I have recently made friends with some young men who spend so much more time thinking about and commenting on my appearance than I ever thought possible, and I confess I am beginning to actually prefer communication that is not in person as a result.
I don't really think that in all this I've offered any valuable insights, but you've made me think, which I value, and I wanted you to know. Thanks.