My reading

So, I've been totally preoccupied with my reading for Wednesday. I'm posting a bit of it below. If you're offended by frank talk about sex, skip reading any further.

The point of the negotiation is surrender. What is it for a man to surrender to a woman? Is it to imagine what it is to be the glove, rather than the hand? To be the sheath. That is what vagina means, you know. Sheath. From the Latin. She finds it fascinating that a part of the female body, the canal through which women bring forth new life, the first journey we experience as human beings-sliding through a fleshy tunnel into the light and cold-that the name for that conduit is not related to its function in birth, but rather, bears the name of a holder of a weapon. A scabbard-the covering in which you insert your sword.

Is this what men think of their penises as? Weapons? Swords? But a sheath is where you keep your knife to keep it safe, to keep it when you're not using it for violence. It's a place for it to rest until the next time it's needed. When you place your sword inside its sheath, you've put down your weapon, you've disarmed yourself, you've made yourself vulnerable. You've surrendered.

But who is being asked to yield? Because she wants to surrender, too. She wants to lay down this burden of boundary and border and being closed. She wants to be borderless. And that doesn't mean that she wants to be penetrated by him as if she has no wall. Of course that's part of it. She does want to be penetrated by him, and if she allows her mind to wander, the delicious details of what that physical penetration would entail are quite distracting. But part of giving up her borders is not letting someone in; it's being free to take up as much space as she needs, to fill him up, too, to exceed the tiny little space she's been taking up since she was a little girl. This is about feeling. About liquid. About being liquid, and engulfing someone so that he swims in her, floats in her.