“Do you really have to be the ice queen intellectual or the slut whore? Isn’t there some way to be both?” ~Susan Sarandon
I came across this quote from my daily calendar on May 14. I have been chewing on this statement all summer and thinking about how it applies to my life. I have written about my personal transformation over the last few years. This also includes my view of sexuality, and also the importance that we place on sex. When there are so many difficult situations that are real in our world why does it still seem that sex is the number one sin that we focus on? I think it is far more scandalous that employers are not meeting the needs of their employees; that children are going to bed with empty stomachs; that there is still not a cure for the cancers that ravage our populations.
The statement poses a dynamic of what is potentially viewed as opposites. If I conclude that opposites still do attract, then wouldn’t it make sense that these two realities of personhood can exist in one person/woman? I have read this dichotomy in romance novels (when I was reading them instead of reading about Trinitarian relationship, and Papal Encyclicals). I would then venture that if this situation is being written about in popular romance novels (I am specifically thinking of Nora Roberts- one of my favs.), then there is truth to the situation. As there is nothing really new presented into these books- and are more of an escape from reality for the reader, I wonder what reality is the reader escaping from? Is the Intellectual ice queen tired from the reality of rigors of the mind, and is the slut whore tired of the reality of rigors of the body? Or is the escape something else and the blend of these two personalities something to escape to? I think that there is a way to blend both, but I also think that society is still intimidated by women who are in full possession of their mind and sexuality for the most part. This is nothing new, and women add to the problem by playing one part over the other and not being fully engaged in all that the world calls us to. Balance and moderation are key I think. What do you think?
About Me
- Genevieve
- I am a woman who is trying to continue to learn how to be a better person. The purpose of this blog is to help me to articulate my personal response to the world. This blog will allow for reflection, insight, and authentic understanding.
3 comments:
Hmmm . . . not being a woman but rather being a man who was trained to hold women under the particular polarizing lens you name, I agree that balance and integration are key for all of us. It strikes me, too, how this kind of polarizing tendency in the way we look at ourselves and one another binds us to a limited repertoire of relational roles and possibilities. I think of how celibacy would never have occurred to me, would not have arisen from within as a legitimate aspiration (except as perhaps being helpful for a limited time), if there wasn't so much emphasis on it in the Christian spiritual tradition. Yet, having been a monk, and still aspiring to live a contemplative life, a similar polarizing tendency exists in my own mind toward myself, between my spiritual and sexual longings. Why should you or I or anyone else draw these lines between body/sex and mind/spirit? This split would never have occurred to us if we weren't taught it, if there wasn't such a bulwark of fear, throughout Church history, erected to keep us alienated from one side or the other, the 'good' side or the 'bad.' So my question is, how do we unlearn this fear, this splitting up of ourselves and one another, women and men, in a way that makes us more whole, more unashamedly ourselves? Where are our models for a diverse continuum of healthy relational possibilities? How do we remove these damn fig leaves!?
It is refreshing to hear intelligent peeps speak honestly and freely about sexuality. Catholic Christians just have not done a good job addressing this central aspect of our human life (at least not in very helpful ways--but maybe my perception is a projection of my own upbringing). My experience growing up was that, lacking any space to talk openly about sex as a young Catholic, I had no context for puberty and no way to reconcile what I was hearing with what I was experiencing. Damn platonism and negativity about our corporeality! I'm with Irenaeus on the Incarnation question. :P
Go, G!!!
I like sex and i like susan serrandon. She went to cUA you know?
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