The Scorpio thinks that I should write about something that would help people.
My mind goes to all the injustices I would banish if I were Queen – a justice system that isn’t just, world hunger, poverty, racism, intolerance, low-rise jeans and lurid floral patterns in drapes, woman who scream at little children and yank their little arms. But no. That’s not what he had in mind.
“Sex,” he says, having pondered it for a moment. “You should write about sex.”
I should not be surprised at this suggestion. Sex is the Scorpio’s favorite activity. I believe he may think it is the cure for everything that ails us, excluding death. Good sex, at least. I’m inclined, at times, (usually when I’m with him), to agree.
“Well,” I admit, “it would interest me to write about the taboos against seeing yourself as a sexual person as you get older.”
“Right,” he says, pouncing on the remark as if I’ve proved his point, “Why is it that when your sexual attitudes finally mature, suddenly you think you’re not supposed to have sex anymore?”
It’s a damn good question, isn’t it? And while I grinned at the initial suggestion that this would be a “helping” thing, I’m beginning to think again.
I remember, and there is still a sting to it, my (twenty-something) friend, Mark, telling me he’d remarked to a female friend that women around forty had a kind of juiciness about them. “Yeah,” she answered, “like fruit, right before it rots.” Now doesn’t that just make you feel like putting on your red dress and getting on the dance floor? Right.
Whether I have the nerve to pursue it here is another matter. I’ve thought about skulking off to set up an anonymous blog. And an anonymous email to go with it. And having my phone number unlisted. And dying my hair another color. And changing my name to something Dutch sounding.
I consider just talking about it, generally. We don’t have to get into the explicit, do we? Coward, coward, coward. We are rational people here. Just a discussion. Then I remember the comment of an editor friend who had just read my piece on the gentrification of cities and subsequent displacement of the poor. She said, “You are obviously very sincere here. We just aren’t sure about what. You stink at polemic.”
She wasn’t being mean, just truthful. I do stink at polemic.
What I stink less at is writing about experience – mine and what I know of other people’s. What I positively excel at is painting a huge bull’s eye on my forehead and then wondering why so many people are shooting at me. The other thing I excel at (see any entry in the blog to prove this) is wandering off.
If I talk about sex, then I have to talk about relationship. If I talk about relationship, I have to talk about the differences between men and women and how they think. I have to talk about societal attitudes and the media and then I’d end up on the subject of religion. Before you know it, I’d be running around with a forehead full of arrows and my email crashing under the load of hate mail. (We've come full-circle to the stink-at-polemic thing.)
So. For now, I’ll just have sex, thanks.
Meanwhile, perhaps I can consider it a contribution to a small group of humanity that I am not causing my friends further undue embarrassment on my behalf.
At least not yet.
