Friday, October 29, 2004

The Past is as Good as Fiction

Or why you really should sleep with whoever you want.

I honestly do not think why it should be a problem sleeping with a perfect stranger. It’s a time honed tradition after all, and parents used to love the idea of their children giving their virginity to people they have never met in their entire lives. For some reason or other, they’re totally anal about it now and believe in lengthy, tedious, courtship periods. Courtship is fun, but only, and especially, when you get to test drive the good.

What I am trying to point out is this: There is a difference between sleeping with someone you don’t know, but plan to know better, and just being addicted to fucking someone new every other night.

Not inclusive of group sex, which by it’s nature alone, excuses fucking someone you don’t care to know. In my personal opinion, I believe it’s all in good fun and outside the scope of reality, and I never give a negative thought to one night stands with another woman (as long as they aren’t prostitutes; I really did give that one more thought than was healthy); simply because they come so few and far in between, that whenever I can have them, I will, in whatever context. It makes no logical sense of course, what difference is there between a one night stand with a male or a female? But it does prove one particular point, and that is, if you’re not going to have any absolutes when it comes to sex, don’t even bother to attempt it in any aspect. Because it’s all relative to how badly you want something, and the more you want it, the easier it is to justify it. But at the end of the day, it makes no difference.

Everything eventually will become past, and the past is as good as never existed. It serves to put you into your current condition and present situation, certainly, but it no longer exists. So that relationship I had with the Ex, who was someone I really did thought I loved, then, is really no better then the lone one night stand I had. Either way, they are over and they don’t play a part in my life and nothing they do will ever affect me again.

There are some people who will argue that things would be different if I wasn’t such a romance junkie and a nymphomaniac, which together, make for a life overflowing with more then my fair share of feel-good relationships. This would imply the alternative, which is to have the moral capability to only sleep with one person all your life. But the truth is, a hell lot of us don’t have intrinsically absolute morality, and a hell lot of us compromise. But because of the thought that a person shouldn’t be sleeping with people you don’t truly feel deeply for continually hounds you, you might just end up going back to the same person.

This comes from an analysis of the Ex, who went back to his first girlfriend after I couldn’t bear his stupidity any longer. He’s also such a fuck up he thinks sleeping with transvestites does not constitute as cheating, because they aren’t really women. Nonsense. It’s cheating if she wasn’t going to like it have you had told her.

It is sad when people are chained by convention and pointless absolutes that they cannot accede to entirely. It then becomes a paradox, because moral absolutes are just that. They are perfectly unqualified directives that are no longer perfect when something you cannot control happens and causes you to, put simply, fuck it up. Let the dead bury the dead, and sometimes it will serve everyone else well for people to just let go and get on with their lives already.

At this point, it is relevant to introduce the fact that while I think absolutes are for most people, irrelevant and impossible, and a pain in the ass to everyone around them, I have nothing against a very clear understanding of knowing what you do not want, and most certainly nothing against rejecting something you believe will not be good for you. The latter is an immediate feeling, a present sentiment; if you will get no pleasure in accepting it, then of course you should not. Absolutes confuse the feelings of the pleasure of choice and negate them with the anguish of having chosen the pleasurable choice. The decision was gratifying in itself, but out of some self-righteous mechanism, you decide you must be punished for it, because it went against what you believed you should have done. There is a difference between kicking yourself because you slept with a guy you knew was never going to see you again the morning after, despite you wanting him to, but still slept with him nonetheless; and kicking yourself because you've done it with someone that was genuinely nice to you but is now turned ugly because he caused you to forgo that absolute. (If he really did like you, feeling like that, and telling him so, might only cause unecessary upset.)

I believe that there is only one group of people who have any right at all to critique sexual licentiousness as is termed by this (very hypocritical) society. These are people who have decided that they will only sleep with one person and only that one person all their lives. That I think it is a very unhealthy mentality non-withstanding -it causes couples to take advantage of one another, and according to a particular Middle-Eastern Muslim friend of mine, it is what some men in his country do. They rape the girl so she is theirs, because she has not known any other way to approach sexuality. These people have all the right to say that sex is meaningless if you sleep with more then one person, because they must truly believe it, for in order to be so absolutely faithful all their lives. That they have the right to say it however, does not mean that they are right.

No one will ever know this for sure; if you have slept with only one person all your life and believe he has done likewise, then you would never have known that doing so with more than one person can have meaning too, because I feel it does. And because I have slept with more the one person, I can never say that, doing so with only one might have meaning beyond anything that can be described is complete bullocks. No one can ever have both experiences simultaneously within one life, and can no one can therefore come to a sensible, theoretically accurate conclusion.

But from the way I see it, sex, for the love of God, is just sex. The meaning is in the person, and not the act. So the whole argument is therefore a pointless metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference to the actual facts of real-life as we know them –Oscar Wilde (God I love that play).

It is around for you to take pleasure in, and not something in which to sling your moral bigotry about, targeting people you do not know, and probably have never slept with. My attitude is casual towards sex, certainly, but it is not casual towards people. I take people very seriously, and it is not in my business to hurt them. It is also nowhere casual to my well-being. Certainly, I have made mistakes, but I have also learnt.

I have never regretted sleeping with all the people I have –I know I did say with the exception of one particular before, but after much thought, have decided it was an unjust accusation- although one or two have been completely boring experiences. The virginity is more of a liability then an asset, really, and being the person I am (which is the same person since I was capable of memory and therefore, conscious thought) I cannot imagine a life where absolutes conquer me and nail me with their useless, pointless, meaningless conventions. To which the only pleasure I may find in acceding to its decorum the delight I take in the virtue of discipline, a pretended holiness and moral indemnification. Oh, I swear, self-righteousness does taste good, that’s why people love going about keeping themselves as ‘pure’ as they possibly can; But thou shalt not covet.

I choose who I will sleep with on the prediction that something will come out of it. That it will not be pointless eventually, and that the sex is just a very pleasurable means to that very human desire for inclusion and approval, ultimately. But you must not take this as if I have only ever slept with people who were strangers, and then, thereafter, Not. The only reason why this would matter to me is because I believe that the different ways in which you meet and eventually form relationships (of whatever sort) with people, are pertinent to each other. But more than anything, how they all work out is, at the end of the day, largely dependant on the character of the two people involved. The different verities of tenderness felt towards the same person by different people are all constructed in part from such.

Indeed, enjoy whatever there is to enjoy now. Certainly such joys are transient, but this whole life is anyway, and if how this life works is anything to gauge by, planning for the future, much less, the afterlife, is one of the most aimless tasks. But if you do not think so, then you must not find the idea of killing for the sake of 72 virgins (or was it raisin trees?) absurd.

xoxox

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