Here we go. This one is from my girl, Kate. Thank you :) Without further ado:
In one of my favorite books, "on the road", Jack Kerouac says his friend Dean (AKA Neal Cassidy) believes "sex is the one true holy thing."
Dean may have had a point.
While Dean spends the novel "worshipping" at many "temples," I was torn. On one hand, I agreed with him. On the other, his promiscuity cheapened the sacredness of his claim. At the time of reading this, I was in high school; still abstaining from sex despite the fact that no one would have even believed I was a virgin. I drank and did drugs, I hung out with the kids fresh out (and back into) juvie, I hooked up with boys at parties whose names I'd forget the next day. All in all, it wasn't anything terrible, (in fact, it was like your average John Hughes or Amy Heckerling movie), but I wasn't exactly in the running for "homecoming queen" either.
In high school, several of my friends had become accidentally pregnant, all with disastrous results. I'd lost three people to AIDS within a year. Most of my sexual experience was from seeing the bad result, or being pressured about it. I had fallen for an older guy who had been a player and suddenly "found god" and put an enormous amount of value on my "purity"...something I was as uncomfortable with as being pressured to put out. At this point, I was so sick of sex being an issue I was officially sick of sex before I'd even had it.
Like Dean, I felt like sex should be something more substantial, but by the time I entered college, I was confused and impatient. My best friend at the time was a Wanna-be punk-hippie who grew up without electricity in the woods of Vermont, and whose father was becoming a woman. After her constant philosophizing on the importance of sex having meaning, she lost her virginity to some guy she didn't know during a party, and in the next couple of months went through many men and women. Later, she wrote a screenplay about it, in which blamed her father.
This was one in a long string of female friends who would fuck up (rather literally) and blame their father. I had an amazing father, why was I drawn to older men, why did I distrust all men?
As they say, it happens when you're not looking for it. I'd decided sex was over-rated and had gone fully into The Celibacy Zone when I started seeing someone who had similar experiences and philosophies as my own. Sex was never an issue. When it happened, it just happened-- there was no planning beforehand (except protection). No pressures - no one was doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. It just felt right.
Dean was right.
At the time, our lives were complex and tumultuous. With sex, it was like the rest of the world just fell away. Sure, we were right in a fairly bad section of a city, there were probably drunks screaming outside and ambulances flying by with sirens blazing. We didn't notice.
In the end, we broke each other's hearts. Like people do all the time.
Even though we weren't meant to be together, it was still an amazing reassurance to me that two people could cast such a spell. Knowing that cut away all the bullshit surrounding sex. And I see a lot of it. I live in Los Angeles.
I think my point is...trust your instincts.
