Fear of Flying

I was not against marriage. I believed in it in fact. It was necessary to have one best friend in a hostile world, one person you’d be loyal to no matter what, one person who’d always be loyal to you.

Constant vigilance, that’s my motto.

Alas! the love of women! it is known

To be a lovely and a fearful thing;

For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,

And if ’tis lost, life hath no more to bring

To them but mockeries of the past alone,

And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,

Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real

Torture is theirs-what they inflict they feel.

They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust,

Is always so to women; one sole bond

Awaits them-treachery is all their trust;

Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond

Over their idol, till some wealthier lust

Buys them in marriage-and what rests beyond?

A thankless husband-next, a faithless lover-

Then dressing, nursing, praying-and all’s over.

Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers,

Some mind their household, others dissipation,

Some run away, and but exchange their cares,

Losing the advantage of a virtuous station;

Few changes e’er can better their affairs,

Theirs being an unnatural situation,

From the dull palace to the dirty hovel:

Some play the devil, and then write a novel.

– Lord Byron (from Don Juan)

Any system was a straitjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

Given the perspective of history, it’s clear that Bennett and I owed our being in Heidelberg (and in fact our marriage) to the hoodwinking of the American public by the government which was later revealed in the Pentagon Papers

Somehow the idea of bearing his baby angers me. Let him bear his own baby! If I have a baby I want it to be all mine. A girl like me, but better. A girl who’ll also be able to have her own babies. It is not having babies in itself which seems unfair, but having babies for men. Babies who get their names. Babies who lock you by means of love to a man you have to please and serve on pain of abandonment. And love, after all, is the strongest lock. The one that chafes hardest and wears longest. And then I would be trapped for good. The hostage of my own feelings and my own child

With no toadying servility and no ingratiating seductiveness. A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was neither bitchy nor

Masters and Johnson’s charts and numbers and flashing lights and plastic pricks tell us everything about sex and nothing about it. Because sex is all in the head.

Until I was twenty-one, I measured my orgasms against Lady Chatterley’s and wondered what was wrong with me. Did it ever occur to me that Lady Chatterley was really a man? That she was really D. H. Lawrence?

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one. Whenever it seemed I was close, I discovered a horse with a papier-mâché horn, or two clowns in a unicorn suit. Alessandro, my Florentine friend, came close. But he was, after all, one clown in a unicorn suit.