Hard to Get by Leslie Bell

Author:Leslie Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520261495
Publisher: University of California Press

In talking about being with women, Maria spoke very freely and easily; when discussing other topics, she had not seemed so relaxed. She believed that trust would be easier to achieve with a woman. Maria still had fears about safety, both emotional and physical, which felt very linked to gender for her—men could hurt her in a way that she imagined women could not or would not.

Maria felt encouraged to live it up in her twenties, and some of those experiences helped her to further her development. She had one really good instance of casual sex that was pleasurable and that allowed her to experience sex differently. But she was principally sexual in the context of relationships, and worked toward having more satisfying sex, toward discovering ways in which sex and emotion would not be so split within relationships. She felt challenged, primarily by partners, to be both more expressive about her desires and more vulnerable in relationships.

For a time, Maria had seemed to be acting “like a man"— uncaring, invulnerable, and unaffected. She cared about neither relationships nor about the person she was in a relationship with. But she was not enjoying sex; she was not expressing her desires, nor was she climaxing. The problem with taking such a defensive stance is that it denies the fact that the expression of sexual desire and pleasure is often vulnerable, that their expression involves the admission of need, and not just wantonness. Merely being bold and callous in her pursuit of sex did not guarantee that Maria would get the sex she wanted—that would have required some vulnerability on her part.

Maria attributed her “hardness” to witnessing and experiencing sexual dangers as an adolescent. She responded to these dangers quite differently than did Jayanthi (chapter 3), who continued to put herself in dangerous situations following traumatic sexual experiences, or than did Alicia (chapter 5), who withdrew from sex and became a good girl to avoid danger. Maria continued to be involved in sex and relationships, but she withdrew emotionally from them. While this distance was perhaps protective for a while, she later recognized the ways in which it kept her removed from partners and from herself. Maria ultimately made use of these life challenges to further her development rather than limit it.

Maria expected that her thirties would be a logical outgrowth of her experiences in her twenties. She had used her twenties to focus on herself, and she viewed that as progress toward being able to focus on commitment and compromise in her thirties. She anticipated being able, in her thirties, to reap the rewards of the growth she had accomplished in her twenties.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.