the story of o

For today we hear seemingly normal people, even those with a level head on their shoulder, blithely speaking of love as though it were some frothy feeling of no real consequences. They say it offers many pleasures, and that this contact of two epidermises is not completely devoid of charm. They go on to say that charm or pleasure is most rewarding for the person who is capable of keeping love imaginative, capricious, and above all natural and free. Far be it from me to object, and if it’s all that simple for two of the opposite sex (or even of the same sex) to give each other a good time, then indeed they should, they would be crazy not to. There are only one or two words all this which disturb me most: the word love, and also the word free. Needless to say, it is quite the opposite. Love implies dependence – not only in its pleasure but by its very existence and in what precedes its existence: in our very desire to exist – dependence on half a hundred odd little things: on two lips (and the smile or grimace they make), on a shoulder (and the special way it has of rising or falling), on two eyes (and their expression, a little more flirtatious or forbidding), or, when you come down to it, on the whole foreign body, with the mind and soul enclosed therein – a body which is capable at any moment of becoming more dazzling than the sun, more freezing than a tract of snowy waste. To undergo the experience is no fun, you make me laugh with your entreaties….

- “A note on Story of O” Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues
The Story of O by Pauline Reage

You think you know love and sex? Read “the story of o”. Then “the sexual life of catherine m”.
The French. They know their sex and love.

We think we do. But we don’t.
Not yet. I think.