Rape, Drunkenness and Consent, or Is Sex Intrinsically Harmful?

About a month ago (14 February 2015, p. 4) the British newspaper The Guardian published an article in which it was reported that three men had just been jailed for “raping a woman who admitted to being so drunk she did not know whether she had consented to sex.” An initial decision by the Crown Court to dismiss the charges was successfully appealed by the Crown Prosecution Service. Now they have been sentenced to six years each in prison. The woman whom they are alleged to have raped - and who in the article is consistently referred to as “the victim” - declares herself pleased with the decision. A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service praises her for the “tremendous courage” that she has shown after suffering such a “horrific ordeal”. But it is good to see, he says, that now finally “justice has been served”. The DI who led the police inquiry, agrees: “We hope this serves as a warning and reminder to everyone that before engaging in any kind of sexual activity you must be absolutely sure that the other person has the capacity to fully consent and does so.”

Now I don’t know anything about this case except what I have learned from this newspaper article. So perhaps there are aggravating circumstances that I am not aware of. But let us, for the sake of the argument, assume that the article relates all the facts of the case that were relevant to the verdict. In that case, what happened was this: the woman in question went to a bar, where she consumed “up to 12 shots of vodka”. She met the three men who were later convicted of raping her, and accompanied them (voluntarily) to a flat where she drank more vodka and repeatedly had sex with all three men over a 20-hour period. Her family reported her missing and when the police found her at the flat the next evening, she couldn’t remember anything. She admits that the sex she had with those men may have been entirely consensual. However, because she was drunk at the time, it was ruled that she did not really have the capacity to consent, from which it follows that the men had sex with her without her consent, which fulfils the legal definition of rape. Hence the criminal conviction.

There are various things that puzzle me about this case. The first is that the woman seems to be absolved of any blame or even responsibility for what happened in that flat. The three men alone are seen to be responsible. The woman is simply a “victim” of a crime. She didn’t do things; things were done to her. The director of public prosecutions commented: “It is not a crime to drink.” Well, no, it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean that you are not responsible for what you do after you’ve gotten yourself drunk. If I get drunk and then drive home in my car and cause an accident, then it is unlikely that I will be exonerated on the grounds that I was so severely drunk that I didn’t really know what I was doing and thus incapable of consenting to driving a car. And that is because it was my decision to get so terribly drunk in the first place. I should have known better.

It may of course be argued that the case in question is different because other agents are involved and those agents committed a crime. If I get drunk and you relieve me of my wallet, and that is only possible because I’m so drunk that I don’t really know what is happening to me, then this is still a crime and you should rightly be convicted of theft. True, but in the rape case things are different. Here the crime does not simply remain unaffected by the victim’s drunkenness (as in the theft case). Rather, it is the victim’s drunkenness that turns the deed into a crime. Had the victim been sober, then she wouldn’t have been a victim and no crime would have taken place. Now imagine that you had not simply taken my wallet from me, but that I had insisted, in my drunken state, that you take all the money in my wallet. If you then did what I asked you to, you would of course still have taken advantage of me. It was certainly not a very nice thing to do because you could and should have guessed that if I had been sober I wouldn’t have offered you my money. And if later, after sobering up, I asked you to return my money, then I think you should return it, and perhaps even be legally obliged to do so. But I don’t think that you should be sentenced to prison for theft. One may disagree with this, of course, and insist that what happened did amount to theft, but my guess is that this would be mostly because you clearly inflicted harm on me, and that harm exists independently of my inability to consent to your actions. But in the rape case there is no harm other than the harm that consists in, or results from, the woman’s inability to consent. I’m of course not talking about rape in general, but only about this particular case where, it appears, there was no violence and no coercion. No physical or other direct harm was inflicted on the woman. Nonetheless what happened to her was regarded as a “horrific ordeal”, apparently not because she suffered in any way or even minded much at the time, but solely because she was not capable of consenting to it. The odd thing about this view is that it seems to suggest that the sexual act is intrinsically harmful unless it is consensual.

Imagine that the three men didn’t have sex with her, but instead played tic tac toe with her all night because that is what they are into. The next day she cannot remember anything, and it emerges that she was too drunk at the time to be able to consent to playing tic tac toe. If she had been sober, she would never have agreed to play that particular game with those particular men. Clearly, the men took advantage of her. Yet it would probably not occur to us to demand that those men be imprisoned for what they did to her. Seizing the opportunity to play tic tac toe with somebody because they are too drunk to refuse would not be considered particularly blameworthy. Yet seizing the opportunity to have sex with someone because they are too drunk to refuse is considered to be a heinous crime, punishable by six years of imprisonment. I wonder why exactly that is.

It is not only that I find it a bit worrying to be officially reminded and warned that “before engaging in any kind of sexual activity you must be absolutely sure that the other person has the capacity to fully consent and does so”, because this makes sex an awfully complicated and serious affair, full of legal pitfalls. This does not only rule out any drunken sex, but also any light-hearted sex, any sex that is not self-conscious and wary, stifled by the fear that one may have to pay for a misinterpretation of the signs with serious jail time. It’s going to be hard to actually live by that rule and still enjoy sexual encounters with people one hasn’t known for a long time. And even then we will not always have the required certainty. Do we ever have the capacity to fully consent to sex? What exactly does that mean? And can we ever be absolutely sure that the other has that capacity? How exactly do we become sure of that? Simply by asking? Are you sure you want this? Are you really sure? Are you sure you’re sure? But the most interesting question is why the absolute certainty of full consent is deemed so terribly important when it comes to sex, and to sex only. What is it about sex that makes it so special, so unlike all other activities that we cannot do it with another human being unless we are absolutely sure that they really want it?

One more thing: the unacknowledged gender aspect of the whole case. Imagine everything had happened the exact same way, but with the victim being a man and the perpetrators being women. After 12 pints in a pub the man is taken to their flat by three women who take advantage of his intoxicated state and repeatedly have sex with him. The next morning he finds he cannot remember anything, but, reasoning that he had clearly been too drunk to give his consent, he sues the three women for rape and they all get convicted and sentenced to six years of prison. The public and the media applaud the decision, and everyone, including the man himself, is very pleased that justice has been served. How likely is that scenario? Not very, I should think. And that is not because men are any less likely to suffer and be traumatized when they are subjected to sexual violence. I think it’s rather because we find it very difficult to see the violence in this particular case when the main protagonist is a man. In fact, I don’t think we would accept that the man has been harmed at all by the sex he engaged in, despite his alleged inability to consent, and we would most certainly not think that he went through a “horrific ordeal”. But why would that be? Assuming I’m right about this, what  makes the two cases so different that they are evaluated so differently morally?

At the moment I can only guess that it has something to do with the way we view human male and female sexuality. Despite the fact that women want and enjoy sex just as much as men, we are for some reason assuming that for women the sexual act is intrinsically harmful,  so that they should only be subjected to it if they explicitly consent to it, while for men the sexual act is intrinsically not harmful, but on the contrary pleasurable, so that, since pleasure is good, explicit consent to the sexual act is not morally required.   

Sex and the Posthuman Condition

Some of the readers of this blog may be interested to learn that I have now incorporated many of my previous blog posts in a book that Palgrave Macmillan are going to publish next month. It is called Sex and the Posthuman Condition. The book looks at the way sexuality is framed in enhancement scenarios and descriptions of the resulting posthuman future and how those representations are informed by mythological and other historical and literary paradigms. I examine the glorious sex life that we are allegedly going to enjoy, due to greater control of our emotions, a vastly improved capacity for experiencing pleasure, and, most importantly, the ready availability of sex robots that are willing and able to fulfill all our dreams and desires. Through a series of philosophical and literary explorations, questions are raised about both the replacement of the real flesh-and-blood human lover with a machine or other kind of artefact (from Ovid's Pygmalion to the soon-to-be-perfected sexbots) and the mechanization of the process of love (from De Sade to neurotechnological manipulations of our love-related emotions and attitudes), as well as the values that underlie such ideas and developments.

Synthetik Love Lasts Forever

One of those who prefer the artificial lover to a real one is the self-declared technosexual and iDollator Davecat, who lives with two $6,000 RealDolls, one of which he regards as his wife and the other as his mistress. His and his “wife’s” wedding bands are engraved with the programmatic statement: “Synthetik (sic!) love lasts forever.” Davecat knows, of course, that his artificial wife does not really love him, that she, literally, couldn’t care less. He is not deluded in that sense. Yet despite being aware that his “wife” is just a doll, that is, a thing, he speaks to her and treats her – as far as that is possible with a doll – as if she were a real person. He speaks about her family history, her interests, likes and dislikes, her moods and thoughts, and strongly resents people who regard and treat her as a mere thing, which he finds disrespectful of her. “If animals have rights, and rightly so, why shouldn’t we treat something that looks and acts like a human with similar rights and respect?” Well, perhaps because if animals do have rights, then this is not because they look and act like humans, but for other reasons. Animals can be hurt. They can suffer and perhaps even be humiliated. They can be killed. A doll or a robot (assuming that they are not sentient) cannot do any of those things.

Yet for Davecat the case is not that clear-cut. For him, his “wife” is, very much like Santa Claus and other imaginary creatures for small children, both real and not real, not part of the real world, but still, somehow, an agent, to be feared or, in this case, loved and cared for. The boundaries between a mere thing and a person have begun to blur, or are simply considered irrelevant. For Davecat, the difference is merely that the one person is “synthetic”, while the other is “organic”. However, the more the synthetic looks and behaves like the organic the easier it is to see it as a person and to sustain the make believe: “Part of the (sexual) appeal of synthetics is how much they look like their organic counterparts. If you have a robot shaped like a refrigerator, that won’t have as much draw as a robot in the shape of a human.”

Thus the blurring of the line between the real person and the simulated one depends on the similarity that the synthetic bears to the organic. Yet the resemblance that is required and desired is confined to the synthetic lover’s appearance. It is a strictly external resemblance. What distinguishes the organic from the synthetic, the real from the made-up, is equally important: “but the much larger part of their appeal is that they’re humans, but they don’t possess any of the unpleasant qualities that organic, flesh and blood humans have. A synthetic will never lie to you, cheat on you, criticize you, or be otherwise disagreeable.” In other words, the synthetic lover will never be a stranger. They will always “have a mindset or a personality that’s compatible with my own.” And if you are someone who, like Davecat, is “not keen on taking emotional chances”, if you want to spare yourself the “enormous investment of time, money, and emotion” that a real human lover requires, if you are not willing to take the huge risk that is unavoidable when you have someone in your life “who may bail at any time, or who transforms into someone unpleasant”, then you shouldn’t think twice: the synthetic lover is exactly what you need. Organic lovers are not really worth all the trouble we tend to have with them. After all, why should we waste time on an organic if “I have a Doll who is in love with me at home”? That would be just silly. Organics are not worth pursuing because they are “far too unpredictable”. Synthetics on the other hand “have a consistency that I’m grateful for.”

They are also immortal in the sense that their bodies can be replaced when no longer usable. It is interesting how this is being described by Davecat. If after a few years the body, from too much usage, is beyond repair, he simply goes and buys her (!) a new one. So although his “wife” isn’t really anything but body, he distinguishes very clearly between her and her body, as if there really were an immaterial and detachable entity, a soul or person, that, perhaps at any given time, inhabits and expresses itself through a particular body, but that can just as well be present in a different body if the old one is no longer suitable or available. The new body does not even have to look the same as the old one. With each new body her appearance can change, but it will still be her, just improved and upgraded in line with the latest technological developments. So as far as her owner is concerned, she is not a machine: she is the ghost in the machine.

Is Davecat happy? He insists he is. Perhaps, he admits, not one hundred per cent, but that is not because his artificial lover is not really real, but simply because there are certain things that it cannot do yet (for instance speak and interact like a human person would). But once the sex doll has given way to the (soon to come) sexbot of the future, there will be nothing left to desire: “your spouse should be easygoing and a joy to come home to. (...) I think the best way to reach that goal is through humanoid robots.” This would be the perfect remedy against loneliness. It would, he says, be like having your cake and eat it. Indeed, it would.

All the quotes are from an interview that Julie Beck did with Davecat last year. It was published as “Married to a Doll. Why One Man Advocates Synthetic Love” on September 6^th, 2013, in The Atlantic and can be found here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/married-to-a-doll-why-one-man-advocates-synthetic-love/279361/

Animal Nature Disgust in Ovid's Pygmalion

The story of Pygmalion, as it has been related to us by Ovid in the tenth book of his Metamorphoses, is characterised by an astonishing ambivalence towards women and the idea of sexual love. Pygmalion is not just a sculptor who one day creates a statue that he then happens to fall in love with (which is how most people will remember the story), but rather somebody who deliberately sets out to create a being that is worthy of being loved by him. Ovid introduces him as a man who is disgusted by the whole female sex after seeing the daughters of Propoetus prostituting themselves in public (which is not entirely voluntary, but rather a punishment inflicted on them by the goddess Venus for having offended her). They are being described as having “lost all sense of shame” and “the power to blush, as the blood hardened in their cheeks”

This loss of shame is clearly understood as a decisive step in a process of dehumanisation: a little more hardening, we are told, and they would be indistinguishable from flint. (Compare this to Lord Ewald’s claim in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s The Future Eve that Alicia has no “soul” because she is too earthly.) Appalled by so much female depravity, Pygmalion decides (just as many centuries later Celia’s disillusioned lover in Swift’s “Lady’s Dressing Room”) that he no longer wants to have anything to do with women and is determined to stay a bachelor. Yet entirely happy with his wifeless (read: sexless) existence he is not, because soon enough he carves a statue that looks exactly like a woman and is so exceedingly lifelike that one has the impression that she might move any second now and that it is only modesty that keeps her from doing so. And Pygmalion falls in love with his own creation. Here is, finally, the woman that he has been waiting for, that all men (if we take Pygmalion to represent the male sex) have been waiting for: a woman who knows how to behave properly and who is pure and free of all unseemly desires and inclinations, and this purity and freedom makes her much superior to all real women. In Pygmalion’s mind, the statue is actually more human than any real woman could ever be. All real women are ultimately like the Propoetides: natural born sluts, and as such less than human (less than what humans, or at least human females, should be), more like stones, almost like living statues. The actual statue, on the other hand, is as a woman should be. The statue, in its immaculate ivory-whiteness is the true woman.

Curiously, however, Pygmalion has a very sexual relationship with this statue. He clearly desires her: “Often he runs his hand over the work, tempted as to whether it is flesh or ivory, not admitting it to be ivory. He kisses it and thinks his kisses are returned; and speaks to it, and holds it, and imagines that his fingers press into the limbs”. He dresses his new love, gives her presents, gets her jewellery, and most importantly, takes her to bed and sleeps with her. For a while that seems to work, but for obvious reasons (a statue is unlikely to make a good sex doll) it is not very satisfactory in the long run. So Pygmalion approaches the goddess Venus and begs her to bring his ivory maiden to life. She obliges, and ivory becomes human flesh. He kisses her, and she “felt warm: he pressed his lips to her again, and also touched her breast with his hand”. Gradually her body yields to his touch, loses its hardness and becomes malleable under his caressing hands. “The lover is stupefied, and joyful, but uncertain, and afraid he is wrong, reaffirms the fulfilment of his wishes, with his hand, again, and again. It was flesh!” Soon enough, the no-longer ivory maiden becomes aware of what Pygmalion is doing with her, and in the same moment that she becomes fully awake to the world, in the very moment of her birth, acknowledges him as her rightful lover: “The girl felt the kisses he gave, blushed, and raising her bashful eyes to the light, saw both her lover and the sky.” She cannot help loving him back, and since we are told that nine months later she gives birth to a son, she is obviously not reluctant to have sex with Pygmalion, nor he with her.

So why is Pygmalion not disgusted by her? What is it about her that makes her so different from all other women that he can accept her and even have sexual intercourse with her without being repelled by her? It must have something to do with the fact that she is not an ordinary woman, but a statue come alive, and that she carries the modesty, the bashfulness of the inanimate thing, over to her new existence. She doesn’t move on her own. She doesn’t follow her own will. She has no own will. She is a perfect mirror of her lover’s desires, without having any desires of her own that might threaten her purity. She lives only for her lover, who is her one and only. He is, quite literally, her world. She is a supposedly living woman, but without the flaws, a living paradox. She is perfect and pure, but also perfectly usable, obedient and ready to serve her one and only master. She does what she is told. She is the ideal woman, the Eve of the Future, a precursor of today’s or tomorrow’s sexbots, a tailor-made, always-willing, never-tiring sexual companion, a Stepford wife.

Isn’t it odd how little our desires have changed over the last two thousand years?

Michel Houllebecq on Posthumanity

I have long avoided reading anything by Michel Houellebecq. Although I had come across Houllebecq’s name occasionally in the context of transhumanism, the nature of what I heard somehow led me to believe that I wouldn’t care very much about his books. Now I’ve finally got around to reading his 2005 novel The Possibility of an Island, which at the time of its publication raised the hackles of many critics (I remember one scathing, astonishingly vitriolic review by Michael Worton in The Guardian). To my surprise, I discovered that I liked the book well enough. I found the story engaging and his analysis of the human condition and his reflections on the transhumanist endeavour to transcend it and to help us evolve into something better and less dependent spot on and actually quite perceptive.

The book is of course deeply immersed in Schopenhauer’s philosophy: life is suffering as long as you have desires, and once you stop desiring you glide into boredom, which is equally unbearable. The series of Daniels from today to the distant future represents the endless cycle of rebirths or rather, to be more precise, our various phenomenal existences that do not allow a real escape from this life of suffering. But there is also the sense – which reminded me of D.H. Lawrence - that all dignity and worth of human existence is inseparably connected to the human body: the body that desires, that longs for a unity with the other that it can never have, or at least never hold on to, the dependent, vulnerable, suffering body, which is also the body that loves and laughs. The very tragedy of our bodily existence is also its one redeeming quality. That is why Stoic indifference and the shallowness of a life that only seeks pleasure and is constitutionally unable to feel anything else is, despite its appeal, in fact not a desirable goal and prospect at all.

When Daniel1, the main narrator and our contemporary, falls in love with Isabelle, the editor-in-chief of a magazine called Lolita, she tells him: “You know the magazine I work for: all we’re trying to do is create an artificial mankind, a frivolous one that will no longer be open to seriousness or to humour, which, until it dies, will engage in an increasingly desperate quest for fun and sex; a generation of definite kids.” So this new artificial mankind, the kind of posthuman that we are already turning into, is not post-human due to some bioenhancement procedure, but due to a change in attitude. They have learnt to look at life differently. Their advancement consists in having lost something essential to humanity: seriousness and humour, none of which can exist without the other.

“The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consisted of ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment, had finally, in this generation, been accomplished. (...) They had succeeded, after decades of conditioning and effort, they had finally succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done, what had been destroyed could no longer be put back together, no more than the pieces of a broken cup can be reassembled, they had reached their goal: at no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free.”

From this perspective, love is a destructive force. It prevents us from enjoying all the pleasure that we could enjoy. It entraps us, binds us to another human being, makes us dependent on them, and wreaks havoc with our emotions. For the sake of individual liberty and autonomy, we should try to control it, suppress it, and, if we can, get rid of it entirely. Love is just as much an obstacle to complete autonomy and the maximisation of pleasure as the ageing of the body. Houllebecq describes an increasingly common fixation, where certain natural impulses reign supreme, unchecked: “It’s understandable that people are afraid of getting old, especially women, that’s always been true, but in this case ... It’s gone beyond anything you could imagine, I think women have gone completely mad.” All taboos have been given up, except one: the taboo of being, or getting, old.

The new religion that, in the novel, gets the ball of posthumanity rolling, Elohimism, is in its goals and general worldview a close relative to real-life transhumanism, and Houllebecq describes quite plausibly how much it owes to the cultural shifts that have already taken place in our time. “As for Elohimism, it was adapted perfectly to the leisure civilisation in which it had been born. Imposing no moral constraints, reducing human existence to categories of interest and of pleasure, it did not hesitate, for all that, to make its own fundamental promise at the core of all monotheistic religions: victory over death. Eradicating any spiritual or confusing dimension, it simply limited the scope of this victory, and the nature of the promise associated with it, to the unlimited prolongation of material life, that is to say the unlimited satisfaction of physical desires.”

The one overarching goal is the elimination of all natural bonds and boundaries, which also means that when the body becomes more disabling than enabling, when it loses the (limited) use that it had as long as we are (relatively) young, it has to be discarded. A member of the church would commit suicide (naturally in anticipation of resurrection) “when he felt that his physical body was no longer in a state to give him the joys he could legitimately expect from it.”

But the determination to get the most out of life, to let nothing hinder the pursuit of happiness, ironically leads to a state where all the fun has drained out of life. One thousand years in the future, Daniel24, Daniel’s autotrophic, but otherwise not radically enhanced clone (directly born into the adult body of an 18-year old) no longer has any strong feelings about anything. The so-called neo-humans don’t laugh or cry. There’s no bodily contact between the few neo-humans who live alone, in “a condition of absolute solitude”, and only communicate with each other rarely and via electronic media, which leaves no room for cruelty or compassion. They aspire to end the “suffering of being that makes us seek out the other” and thus “reach the freedom of indifference, the condition for the possibility of perfect serenity”. His immediate successor, Daniel25 reflects: “Our existence, devoid of passions, had been that of the elderly; we looked on the world with a gaze characterised by lucidity without benevolence.” There are also advantages, of course, but those advantages are those of a well-functioning machine: “Compared with a human, I benefited from a suppleness, endurance and functional autonomy that were greatly enhanced. My psychology, of course, was also different; it did not comprehend fear, and whilst I was able to suffer, I felt none of the dimensions of what human called regret (...). Consciousness of a total determinism was without doubt what differentiated us most clearly from our human predecessors. Like them, we were only conscious machines; but, unlike them, we were aware of only being machines.” The machine works well indeed, but sadly there is no longer a purpose to what it does. The future just repeats the past. It is the past that still lies before us. “I had perhaps sixty years left to live; more than twenty thousand days that would be identical.” The neo-human’s survival, his very existence, has itself become a matter of indifference. “I saw my body as a vehicle, but it was a vehicle for nothing.” Fatalism is linked to immortality (that is, here, the infinite reproduction of one’s genes). The neo-human is only an “improved monkey”.

In that remote future, humanity still exists, side by side with neo-humanity, but has degenerated a long time ago, nobody really knows why. Curiously, though, it all started with the invention of android robots, “equipped with a versatile artificial vagina. A high-tech system analysed in real time the configuration of male sexual organs, arranged temperatures and pressures; a radiometric sensor allowed the prediction of ejaculation, the consequent modification of stimulation, and the prolonging of intercourse for so long as was wished.” That went on for a few weeks, but then sales collapsed, not because people realised that the old ways were ultimately more rewarding, but simply because humanity was finally, as Houllebecq puts it, about to give up the ghost.

And yet, sex is important, in fact essential to a human life worth living, but just as for D.H. Lawrence, there are different kinds of sex, those that connect and those that disconnect, those that are basically a form of masturbation where the partner functions as a mere tool to generate sexual pleasure, and those that seek a kind of communion, which again is essentially a communion of bodies, not of detached minds. Thus David1 reflects: “Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and violence, to all the other pleasures life had to offer, (...) it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, and all other pleasures (...) were only derisory and desperate compensations”. “When sexuality disappears, it’s the body of the other that appears, as a vaguely hostile presence; the sounds, movements and smells; even the presence of this body that you can no longer touch, nor sanctify through touch, becomes gradually oppressive; all this, unfortunately, is well known. The disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism. There is no refined relationship, no higher union of souls, nor anything that might resemble it, or even evoke it allusively. When physical love disappears; a dreary, depthless irritation fills the passing days.”

The reason for this irritation is that without the communion of the bodies, the mental communion is also lost, and one finds oneself alone: “it seemed unsurprising to me that the exchange of ideas with someone who doesn’t know your body, is not in a position to secure its unhappiness or on the other hand to bring it joy, was a false and ultimately impossible exercise, for we are bodies, we are, above all, principally and almost uniquely bodies, and the state of our bodies constitutes the true explanation of the majority of our intellectual and moral conceptions.”

We truly live only through our sexual bodies: “When the sexual instinct is dead, writes Schopenhauer, the true core of life is consumed; thus, he notes in a metaphor of terrifying violence, ‘human existence resembles a theatre performance which, begun by living actors, is ended by automatons dressed in the same costumes’. I didn’t want to become an automaton, and it was this, that real presence, that taste for living life (...) that Esther had given back to me. What is the point of maintaining a body that no one touches?” What is indeed!

Real love is physical love, love of the body and through the body. Real love is also, for beings such as us, possessive, because “non-possessive love only seemed conceivable if you yourself lived in an atmosphere saturated with delights, from which all fear was absent, particularly fear of abandonment and death”.

Yes paradoxically it is also fear that often ends our love: “It’s not weariness that puts an end to love, or rather it’s a weariness that is born of impatience, of the impatience of bodies who know they are condemned and want to live, who want, in the lapse of time granted them, to not pass up any chance, to miss no possibility, who want to use to the utmost that limited, declining and mediocre lifetime that is theirs, and who consequently cannot love anyone, as all others appear limited, declining and mediocre to them.”