“A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself. We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives.” – Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment (trans. Goldstein)
Shits happen
July 11th, 2013 · 2 Comments
Tags: Lit & Crit
2 responses so far ↓
1 Averil // Jul 11, 2013 at 10:16 am
My dirty mind adores this. Yes, we are dazzled by man’s desire to fuck (the desire more than the act itself, sadly) and we accept it from every guy as a personal bestowing of approval: he wants meee! Me, and every other woman, and though we know this is true of all men, for the ones who actually get in there, we assume an emotional leap has been made by both parties. It’s always a shock to realize how emotionless the whole transaction can be for a man.
2 Tetman Callis // Jul 11, 2013 at 1:26 pm
While I found when I was young and single that casual sex was never completely casual for me, and for my own mental health I had to be careful not to have too much, I also found that there was a concept of sexual partnering that was largely foreign and even abhorrent to women, and that was the so-called “fuckbuddy.” Most women wanted much more than that. I think it’s part of the biological difference between the sexes; though, nowadays, I’m given to understand, young women are comfortable with “hooking up” in ways they weren’t when I was young. I, for one, do not believe that’s so, believing, rather, that it is yet one more of the many lies a terribly confused and frightened and lost people attempt to grant credence for whatever cold and tattered consolation it may bring them.
And Elena Ferrante is a good writer. I recommend her books.
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