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By Erica Jong Submitted by Misti Date: 2002 Jun 06 Comment on this Work [[2002.06.06.21.00.22049]] |
| We talked all night. Under the flashing Love, Don't Love sign, above the sloshing of the waterbed. Josh held onto me for dear life and told me about himself. He didn't want to fuck that night; he wanted to talk. "I lose the other person when I fuck," he said. "I go into pleasure and become autistic." I understood. I understood everything he said. For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to be a man, to grow up with a throbbing cock between your legs, to be scared of women and want them at the same time, to be told that men were supposed to be strong and yet to feel weak and vulnerable, to want shelter and protection in a woman's arms and yet to fear being trapped. I had always somehow assumed that men were insensitive- perhaps because the men I knew had always found it so hard to articulate their feelings. I had also felt contemptuous toward men- contemptuous toward their arrogance, their strutting, their need to deny their emotions. Women, at least, were in touch with their feelings. For all their faults, they were tuned-in to their own needs. But here was a man who seemed to know himself a little, and would share that knowledge with me. Was this a new thing, a generational thing? Were men under thirty an improvement on the older models, or was it just Josh? Whatever it was, I liked it. Suddenly there was no pretense, no playacting. We were just two friends, staying up all night, telling each other the stories of our lives. |