Category: Sex, Love, Lust
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Infatuation
What saves infatuation from being merely that? Its being a love of God that doesn't understand itself.
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Cesare Pavese on Romantic Folly
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 177, from the entry of 30 September 1940: The best defense against a love affair is to tell yourself over and over again till you are dizzy: "this passion is simply stupid; the game is not worth the candle." But a lover always…
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Infatuation
It is fitting that infatuation is fleeting.
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Love Untranslated
Love untranslated into action remains an emotion and in many case a mere self-indulgence.
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Coitus Reservatus and Beyond
It is a decidedly unpopular thing to say these days, but I'll say it anyway, echoing a conviction of William James: Much profit comes from avoiding sensory indulgence. A much more difficult practice is to enter into it with cool detachment. Coitus reservatus, for example. But it is no more difficult than playing blindfold chess, which is…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder
We'll start with murder. David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!): Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug…
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A Cure for Infatuation?
One of the very best is marriage. Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.* But while infatuation lasts, it…
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Word of the Day: Zaftig
Said of a woman. Having a full, shapely figure. Voluptuous. Plump and vigorous. Rubenesque. A Yiddish word. Supposedly from the German saftig, juicy. More here. Trigger Warning! Snowflakes of the distaff persuasion will be offended. Time was when 'female persuasion' and the like were used figuratively as a kind of joke; after all, one cannot…
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The Romantic Fool
It has been my experience that the folly of the romantic fool has an expiration date — at least with respect to any given object of his folly, if not with respect to his propensity to make a fool of himself in matters amorous. The wayward heart is fickle. The older and wiser see the need…
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Master Desire and Aversion
It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires,…
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Amy Wax Interviewed
Here is a taste: Once again, you’d have to define racism. You’re basically saying any generalization about a group, whether true or false—and we know it doesn’t apply to everybody in the group, because that’s just a straw man—is racist. I mean, we could do “sexist,” right? We could. So, women, on average, are more…
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The Fall of John Searle
By now you will have heard that the distinguished philosopher, John R. Searle, has been stripped of his emeritus status at the University of California, Berkeley. He was found to have violated sexual harrassment policies. A long-time reader of this blog astutely observes that things went worse for Peter Abelard, and then adds: Also, behaviour…
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Into the Late Sensate: Concupiscense Unconstrained
Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has proven to be remarkably prescient. From Pitirim Sorokin Revisited: Sorokin’s critique of private life begins with the disintegration of the family. “Divorces and separations will increase until any profound difference between socially sanctioned marriages and illicit sex-relationship disappears,” he predicted in the final volume of Social and Cultural Dynamics. [rev. ed.…
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Their Cocks Make Them Sure
There are those who are cocksure that there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem judgment, no ultimate meaning to human existence, and that we are all just material bits of a material world. Now it may be so for all we know. This is not an area in which proofs or disproofs are possible. …
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‘Nonconsensual Choking’
I was struck by a curious expression I found in a recent NYRB piece: I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and—the most serious allegation—nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002. As opposed to what? Consensual choking? So if you are on a date…