Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Interpretation
Understanding sex deeply requires embracing its complexities, even at the risk of emotional turmoil.
This quote by Sharon Olds suggests that to truly grasp the nature of sexual relationships, one must be willing to confront the potential challenges and dangers that may come with them. Engaging deeply with such an intimate aspect of life can lead to profound experiences, but it also comes with the risk of emotional vulnerability and potential hurt.
In practice
In a discussion about the complexities of adult relationships.
Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.
If you're walking with your lady on the sidewalk, I still like to see a man walking street-side, to protect the lady from traffic. I grew up with that, and I hate to see something like that get lost. I still like to see that a man opens the door. I like those touches of chivalry that are fast disappearing.
If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.
Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.
My feminist training was that this was your goal, to be a self-sufficient woman, but that is a miscalculation. It's just not the way we work. We work in dialogue with the community.
If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
That is the motto women should constantly repeat over and over again. 'Good for her! Not for me.'
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