A response to The Harper Review’s spring 2025 proposition, “it’s all about sex.”
Dear editors,
As a boy, I wandered the shrub-steppe in search of Indian paintbrush. I traversed arroyos, dirt roads, and green belts, yearning for the flower’s irresistible, yet insufficient, sweetness. I was relentless. If I found some, I would pick them all and walk to find more, dissecting them as I went. I unearthed the ones I found beautiful without knowing whether they contained any nectar or not. Not once did I save one. Their beauty, unpossessed, never interested me—only the immediate pleasure of consuming all I wanted before anyone else could. Behind me, a trail of prairie fire smoldered and roared. Now, the flowers are nearly all gone, and those that remain shrivel before I can reach for them.
As a man, those flowers became women, a means of experiencing oneself for the first time, many times. Only an eye sees the sun, only a hand feels the earth, only I know the woman.
What voyeuristic pleasure there is in seeing oneself react to a new whimper, a new gasp, a new grunt, a new scream—on a new bed, in a new car, against a new wall! For me, she moaned with a trill! For me, she clawed. For me, she wanted to be had. I became a stranger, and her movements, in response to mine, became the call of a new name which I announced to the world.
She said she trusted me—though she does not trust easily—enough to make love to me. She says she had never been touched in such a way. She said I was the first. Without her, how can I tell myself and my fellow man that I am the epitome of trust, sensuality, and novelty?
At least on the steppe, the flowers were a private thing, but now they offer me prestige. If it is not her name that inspires envy and awe, then it is her reaction to me. For many, the mere fact of having been with a woman guarantees it.
Yet this prestige is self-defeating. Any man—unless recreant—will not allow his mother or sister to be sexualized, and if he has any honor, he refuses to discuss the intimate moments he shares with his partner. For the mother, the sister, and the partner are not flowers to be used to enjoy oneself or to gain prestige, but flowers to be considered, tended to, and picked discriminately and carefully. Even my desires are not objects, but sacred, dignified beings.
He who possesses a sexual consciousness remembers his lovers, even if they are his lovers no longer. If he does not, a disordered consciousness holds the core of a mature one. The sexual act should be seen as the apotheosis of an emotional process. It must shift from everything being all about sex to sex being about everything we share. Having multiple partners without understanding the emotional journey could lead to memories of past lovers infiltrating intimacy with a cherished partner. This undermines the potential of the sexual act, the fullness of the experience, and the secure enjoyment of self.
When it’s all about sex, it becomes about prestige: the woman is both the divine medium and demonized informer. She determines your value, both in your own eyes and in those of other empty men, while you reduce hers to immediate satisfaction. Sex, just as picking flowers from the land, must be an acknowledgment of that which exists before, with, and beyond you. Then, neither steppe nor heart becomes barren. Cultivate your love for a land of flowing ambrosia, rather than one of dried-up, unguaranteed, and unappreciated nectar.
Consciously,
Jordan Gabriel
Image: John William Waterhouse, Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May, oil on canvass, 1909 (private collection, UK).