D.H. Lawrence on Tender-Hearted Fucking

We all want to be loved for who we are. We don’t want to be seen and loved as a nice piece of ass, as just another cock or cunt, as essentially replaceable. We ask our beloved: do you love me or just my body (or even worse, only the pleasure that it can give you or that you can get out of it)? But who exactly are we? Who is this “me” that we want them to love, or that we want to be loved for? Well, it seems that what we are referring to can best be described as a particular set of thoughts and feelings, memories and experiences, values and interests, or perhaps that elusive substance that all of these things or processes are expressions or articulations of, some kind of underlying unifying principle, a unique essence. Whatever it is, we are largely convinced that our body is not part of it, so that the love that we wish for is one that, as it were, sees right through the body and connects directly to our personality. This wish is of course tied to the fear that once our body changes and loses its sexual or aesthetic appeal, we will no longer be loved. For bodies change quickly, personalities less so (or so we think), and even though we may not mind so much being identified with our body while we are young and our flesh is still fresh, we find it increasingly difficult to do so once we get older. Being loved for what we are insures us against the potentially love-destroying effects of our ageing bodies.

In D.H. Lawrence’s notorious novel about the dying world of an industrialised England between the wars and the liberating and invigorating power of uninhibited sex, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I have just read for the first time, the unhappily married and sexually unfulfilled Constance Chatterley slides into a passionate love affair with her husband’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. After their first sexual encounter, Constance reflects on what happened, and she realises that she hardly knows her new lover and wonders what kind of man he actually is. She finds their encounter strangely impersonal, even doubts that he likes her very much. She thinks that he is kind and passionate, but then again, for all she knows he might be kind and passionate with any woman. “It wasn’t really personal. She was only a female to him.” Too bad. But then, rather surprisingly, this seemingly devaluating assessment is turned on its head. After concluding that there was nothing personal about her affair with Mellors, she continues: “But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley: but not to her womb they weren’t kind. And he took no notice of Constance or Lady Chatterley: he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts.”

I think this is more than just male wishful thinking (expressing the male author’s desire for a woman who actually doesn’t mind being treated as a sexual object and who doesn’t expect any interest in her as a person). For Lawrence the sex act leads us, or should be leading us, or has the potential of leading us, beyond the existential separation that characterises our individual personalities. The individual person is defined by its apartness, by detachment. And when we love each other as individuals we maintain and reaffirm this detachment. “All that weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! – a disease!” What the sex act should be is the union between not a female and a male, but between the female and the male. Who we are as individuals is no longer relevant then. I am no longer I, and you are no longer you, which not only means that the difference between you and me is obliterated, but also the difference between you and others that I might love in your stead. In loving you I in fact love all the women in the world, whose representative or ambassador you are.

What Lawrence reminds us of is that we exist in and through our bodies, and that it is through our bodies, and not through our minds that we are connected to the natural world to which the body belongs just as much as it belongs to us. The mind sets us apart, the body makes us a part. Our individual personalities have only a fleeting existence. They are a surface phenomenon. Dig a little deeper and what you find is a living, sexual body, and it is the loving acknowledgment of this bodily existence that we secretly long for, though also, fearing for our treasured autonomy, shy away from: “Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half-conscious, and half alive.”

To become fully alive, we need to stop being ashamed of our bodily existence. For Lawrence, the body is the really real, and sex - the kind that makes us forget, or forget to care, who we are, the kind that Lawrence calls “tender-hearted fucking” – is one way, perhaps the most profound, truthful and blissful way, of exploring it.