Sex Without Love-Sharon Olds

  I did not like this poem. It kind of grossed me out, but maybe that’s the intention, given that the narrator doesn’t like or understand the idea of loveless sex. However, it’s not the concept of loveless sex that bothers me, it’s the comparisons and certain word choices made throughout the poem. I despised lines two through eight, which say “Beautiful as dancers, / gliding over each other like ice-skaters / over the ice, fingers hooked / inside each other’s bodies, faces / red as steak, wine, wet as the / children at birth whose mothers are going to / give them away.” We talked a bit about it in class, but the ice-skating part is odd; it says ‘gliding’ over each other, which is a lot better than saying something like, I don’t know, running each other over with blades, but it’s still unpleasant to think about. I think that the comparison is meant to be subtly unsettling; the next segment is questionable as well, describing fingers as “hooked inside each other’s bodies”. ‘Hooked’ makes it sound like something painful is happening, much like the ice-skating. I think the word choice is intended to be borderline negative; painting these occurrences in a negative light helps demonize loveless sex. As for the comparison of red faces to steak and wine, then leading from wine into blood and childbirth and the orphaning of an unwanted child...yikes. Something about “faces red as steak” was deeply disturbing to me; I didn’t like the mental image built from sex, meat, and wine, or the way it transitioned perfectly to childbirth. I agree with Victoria; Sharon Olds must have gone through Something when she wrote this.

I will never look at you without Remembering

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lady with the Dog-Anton Chekhov

       I actually enjoyed this reading, despite disliking the main character; Dmitri, an older man of about forty, is a bit of a woman hater. He refers to women as “the lower race” and dislikes intellectual women, finding more appeal in passivity and innocence, a huge red flag in my eyes. He doesn’t even have higher grounds to stand on; it’s stated within the story that “without his ‘lower race’ he could not have existed a single day.” He’s a very unlikeable man, overall, so I’m disappointed to say that I really enjoyed certain parts of the story where he talked about his ‘love’ for Anna Sergeyevna. Paragraph 86 was particularly great in my eyes; it says “Anna Sergeyevna too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that for him there was in the whole world no creature so near, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette
Read more

The Flea-John Donne

Image
     I enjoy when people take mundane or unusual things and give them meaning, which is precisely what’s done here (I don’t like the context BUT I’ll explain that later); the poem is about two people that were bitten by the same flea. It’s not romantic or even appealing, but the narrator manages to paint the blood-bloated flea as some kind of ritualistic, meaningful thing that shouldn’t be desecrated, lest the relationship (spirits?) of the lover and themselves be damned. The narrator takes this stance as a weird, macabre, and slightly childish response to their lover’s refusal to have sex, claiming that the mixing of their blood within the flea is something more divine than sex or marriage. The narrator then tries to guilt their lover into sparing the flea’s life by describing the flea as a vessel of their love, a third life, an extension of themselves. It’s super weird; luckily, our unfortunate lover doesn’t buy into that and squishes the flea anyway. It’s a strange little piece. I
Read more