Shaky Egg

I’m a bit embarassed to have had the reaction I have, to Conversations with Other Women. But my thoughts travel nicely with others I’ve been having lately and wanting to blog about, so what the hell. I crank up Spoon’s The Ghost of You Lingers and off we go.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/conversations_with_other_women/

First of all Helena Bonham Carter is hot, hot, hot (yes I’ve been watching Eloise, sue me), whether she’s a sketchy 12 step addict in Fight Club or Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With A View. But she really was so lovely in this movie. She expressed so much longing for me. She’s 38– or, as she explains it, 15 years older than the male lead’s 23-year-old girlfriend Sarah-the-Dancer. She’s at this wedding reception smoking, alone. How I long to just smoke and be okay with the idea that it is completely socially unacceptable. She had the perfect imperfect no-longer-young-still fabulous body and the perfect messy honey brown curls the perfect black clothes and the perfect aging beauty self-deprecating frailty over a core of sinewy practical essential self. She knows driniking is a mistake, as is this conversation, and she steps in and swallows anyway.

The conversation between the two characters is quite sexy. Aaron Eckhart is a nobody, and completely not my type, but the story line and chemistry made him fabulous. It made me wish like hell for such an opportunity, to be pursued in that way, even though in real life I would run from it as fast as I could. (Wouldn’t I?)

Here’s the thing.

I’ve been thinking about the problem with porn, for a while. It’s not that it’s offensive… I am a staunch freedom of the press type, as long as it’s consenting adults (the definition of consenting is a topic for another time). It doesn’t even make me jealous. It’s a total non question.

The problem is the difference between what women, okay what I, want, and what porn is.

Porn is people we don’t know performing acts. It’s not necessarily offensive… and it may even be mildly titillating. But it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with hot. Nothing.

I may have mentioned Ian McEwan’s Chesile Beach already?

As I was reading that book, and having this discussion about erotica and the publishing industry and librarians’ usual position (so to speak) on freedom of the press and whether or not to put pictures OF HIMSELF– and looking at said pictures!– in his new ‘how to love/sex your partner’ book with this dude I don’t even know at my workplace, I was thinking… if men could just GET IT!

What was sexy about this movie– okay lots was sexy, but what really got me in the heart and the brain was the male lead’s expression of emotion. I don’t want to spoil it. But screw it. You can’t even be quite sure of the ending, even when you see the ending, and the ending isn’t even the point.

What women, or what I, want, and what is completely lacking in porn, is that abiding soul regard for me –ME, as me, knowing who I am and still desiring me as a friend, a partner, and sexually. Seeing me, stretchmarks, PMS, grown out highlights, weird ass vegan hair and skin care routines, issues, baggage, anger, motherhood, exhaustion, menial job… and intellect, dedication, thought, ability, beauty, professionalism… wanting the entire package, as a person not as a body or an act.

I mean, I try to take care of myself and look pretty and be a fun, hot person some times. But welcome to marriage, nobody’s that way all the time. Who would want to be? I’m too fucking tired.

But I have always felt this way about my boyfriends, and in a nonsexual way about my friends and some family members– everything you are is special to me, because it’s yours. The annoyance/irritation/pissed off that you express makes sense to me and is often hilarious and adorable as well as completely reasonable. Your bone structure, the shape of your hands, your terrible taste in literature or television suddenly becomes wonderful just because it’s you. In fact, what tips me off the fence into crushing on someone, whether I’ve known them ten days or ten years, is some small detail about them that is just them, nobody else. My husband’s hands aren’t going to win any modeling contracts, but sometimes they make me swoon.

The guy in the movie says he loves her and (whether he means it or not) begs her to give it all up and leave him. He knows all this sad and unattractive stuff about her and he just — loves her. And says so. I know I’ve already given it all up but it would be wonderful if someone would pretend I hadn’t and ask me to anyway.

If only men got it, they’d have more women than they could handle! [How easily women can think guys do get it, and think they are hearing it, as opposed to really getting and hearing it, is another topic for another day.] If a guy said, I want to do you, meaning not you because that dress shows off your breasts or you because you happened to walk through the bedroom naked or you in those fishnets and smeared eyeliner and bed head– YOU, that is me, as a human being, as the multifaceted spirit and body and set of experiences and circumstances and issues that makes you, YOU that is, me, me — I’d be gone.

No wonder women love gay men… they notice, and remember, for Christ’s sake, intimate details that are so precious to women, and such nonstarters for men– forgotten or flicked away almost before they come out of a woman’s mouth or cross the man’s field of vision.

Okay okay… some other elements come into it too… a slight bit of hard to get (otherwise known as integrity, people?), a little tension and adversity helps… but this is the key. If I could bottle it I’d be rich, rich, rich.

Next time– unless I think of something bullshit to say about my mundane existence first — the nature of longing including its attachment to something that isn’t even real.