Monday, March 29, 2010
Sex Without Love
Sharon Olds wants to know to why people have sex with out the love for one another. How do you take such an act and dirty it just for pleasure. She says “wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away” She must mean that since the female took the time out to give her body away and yet give away, an abortion or adoption, so easily, knowing that they purposely put themselves in that position. She mentioned the bible because in the bible it says that people should not have intimacy out of wedlock.
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To get beyond the literal and judgmental aspects of the poem, see the Olds study sheet: How is the speaker both admiring and "deeply critical"? How is sex presented as both "desirable and frightening"? Look closely and the contrasts and ambiguity of the imagery, how each image condenses a lot: ice skaters, cutting figures in ice--a cold beauty; a sharpness and danger, brightness, pain, sterile beauty, artful precision; several other images also convey this ambivalent attitude, figuring the act as simultaneously (physically) hot and (emotionally) cold; an "art" that misses the mystery... an "art" in form, only?
ReplyDeleteAlso, this is more of a cultural criticism, than an indictment of one sex.