LOVE CONTINUES TO TEAR US APART: National Post (Canada)

book review:

Every weekday in the early 1970s young Pascal Bruckner took his son to an alternative preschool on the Left Bank in Paris. It was a co-op, staffed by parent volunteers who believed children should develop their personalities in a free, unstructured atmosphere. Bruckner, being a progressive intellectual, agreed.

But the project, like many of its kind, was a disappointment. The parents seemed to believe it would run on its own steam; the children, being freed from constraints, would shape their own education. Nothing describable as education happened.

At the start of his exhilarating new book, The Paradox of Love (Princeton University Press), Bruckner recalls that the parents mostly hung out on the second floor of the building, smoking dope and enjoying sex, while downstairs the big kids tormented the little kids. There were a few parents who did some work. They were among the first to see what was happening and the first to withdraw. They shifted their children to schools run by what they sometimes called “the bourgeois capitalist state.” After a few angry meetings, the alternative school closed its doors. ...

But Bruckner’s central theme is the fallacy of free love. He considers it an oxymoron. “How can love, which attaches, be compatible with freedom, which separates?”

For a long time his generation acted as if only moral, political and religious obstacles “prevented love from flourishing in all its splendour.” This is where he stabs directly at the heart of what vast numbers of people once believed (and perhaps a good many still do).

As he says, the obstacles have all fallen — the law, the church, the codes of parents, all have been overcome. Yet the major problems of love remain. Endless upheavals and disappointments, great waves of anger, still find their place within the realm of sexuality. Just as before, it can take humans to the depth of existence as well as the heights.

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Labels: culture, desire, sex

posted by Eve at 9:09 PM VOTE

WOMEN'S DESIRE, LESBIANS' SEXUALITY: Jennifer Vanasco

at the Independent Gay Forum:

..."Fluidity is not a fluke," sexologist Lisa Diamond told the Times. Of the women who told Diamond that they were lesbian, only one-third reported attraction solely to women. The other two-thirds felt genuine, periodic attraction to men.

This means that, if we were all honest in our labeling, the majority of women would need to call ourselves "bisexual" or "queer," instead of "straight" or "gay," as we do. The research says that there are far more women attracted to people of both sexes than there are women who are attracted to only one sex. If only one-third of lesbians are completely women-centered when it comes to desire — and only two percent of the country is lesbian — then that is a tiny number, about 2 million.

Of course, being a lesbian is about more than desiring other women. It is also about a female-centered culture, about consensus building, about emotional bonds with other women. That is what we mean, usually, when we talk about a lesbian "community" — and why lesbian communities often have such a different feel than gay male ones.

more--comments also very much worth your time

Labels: desire, gender differences, lesbians, women

posted by Eve at 5:32 PM VOTE