Dear editors,
I wanted to write something for The Harper Review and when I asked what I should write about, they told me that this quarter’s letter theme was sex. So I rolled my eyes because… because well, sex is very interesting. It is dramatic, empowering, violent, intimate, disgusting, ecstatic, and full of shame.
Full of shame? Well, it does strike me as strange that something so shameful would be the theme of The Harper Review’s spring letters. We like to talk about sex as if it is a secret because secrets are erotic, and we would like sex to be erotic. We would like it to be transgressive. It’s nice to keep things exciting. The novelty of sex is a reason to continue exploring one’s life.
But… we talk about it all the time, with little to no consequence. So what exactly does talking about sex transgress?
Foucault takes this somewhere further, roping in the church and confession and psychiatry, and you should read The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 if you’re interested. But I’ll be honest, sex has become a completely uninteresting topic to me lately.
When I was in high school, I was obsessed with the erotic. I ached against The Unbearable Lightness of Being—I loved its fatalism. I loved its “Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.” I found a masochistic pleasure in the gut-punch of its infidelity. (In fact, I discovered the book because it was recommended to my then-boyfriend by the girl who would come to destroy our relationship through her carelessness, her beauty, her intellect, and that heavy way she walked—God, I was probably in love with her. She was a Communist.) And I wept for the only love that didn’t betray me: the love between a woman and her dog.
I am far more interested in my dog these days.
After that boyfriend, I had another boyfriend who was equally dramatic, and another boyfriend, who is either the cause or the symptom of a cure.
Anyways, I was transfixed by the erotic. I thought, This is the deepest part of myself. This is the part of myself that is magic, that has power—true power, the power of an eternal being. And in many ways, I was right. Sex is the power of an eternal being. Sex is the kernel of life. It is the thread that binds every human we know.
There are other threads of course: food, mothers, bathing, music. For now, I am far more interested in music.
Shamelessly,
Kavya Krishnamurthy
Image. Jean Honoré Fragonard, The Love Letter, oil on canvas, ca. 1770 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).