Sex Without Love by Sharon Old Essay

Consciously, the woman communicates that she yearns for her lover, yearns to engage in sexual intercourse with him. Subconsciously, however, the need to “bear” her partner’s “weight” indicates that there is a burden attached to her expectations surrounding this engagement. This specific word choice takes the passion out of the erotic, so much so that the psychoanalytic interpreter is left to wonder why this woman is actively pursuing something that she clearly does not enjoy. To draw upon the developing thesis, the answer is that she does so in order to avoid acknowledging her repressed sexuality. In this way, the lover is not a ‘lover’ in the romantic sense of the word, but rather a sexual object. He is an objectified prop manipulated in order to fulfill

Aubrey’s mum turned up and told Aubrey that she didn’t come because some days are too hard

I have found the perfect definition of sex from Greta Christina’s paper “Are We Having Sex Now or What?” and that is, “Maybe if both of you (or all of you) think of it as sex, then it’s sex whether you’re having fun or not.” I find this definition as sex because it clearly tells the audience that sex is sex if you thought of it as sex. For example, when opposite or same sex have a sexual activity or intercourse with each other whether you like it or not, it is sex. However, this definition can be unsatisfactory to others because there can be cases when people may not want to count it as sex, such as getting sexually assaulted by someone. In this case, the person who got sexually assaulted would not want to count it as sex and avoid the truth, but for the person who made a sexual assault to someone, that person would count it as sex. It may be hard for those people who gets sexually assaulted, but that is the reality and the truth that he/she had sex with someone. Therefore, even though this definition may be broad and unsatisfactory to some people, it will narrow down and clearly prove that you had sex if you think you had sex.

Marie Howe created an ode for all the females that she had intimate relations with called “Practicing”. It backtracks to middle school as Howe ambiguously states the acts they performed. This poem is organized into ten separate couplet-stanzas without a rhyme scheme or a distinct meter. Her imagery does not contain specific details on the physical attributes of any of the girls or if there was one she really admired. However, the imagery goes into their sexual explorations with one another behind closed doors. By using metaphors and sentence structure Marie Howe creates imagery that is correlated with the form, and syntax that stays consistent with age.

Ever since the beginning of time, love has played an enormous role among humans. Everyone feels a need to love and to be loved. Some attempt to fill this yearning with activities and possessions that will not satisfy – with activities in which they should not participate and possessions they should not own. In Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker encounters an emotion some would call love but fits better under the designation of lust for a woman. In contrast, the speaker of Robert Herrick’s poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” urges virgins to marry, to make a lasting commitment in which love plays a

Sex has been reduced to a common action with no social bindings and it is not a gesture of showing love for someone else as people think of it today. When will today’s society be consumed with only the physical aspect of sex? With all of the premarital sex and the age of becoming sexually active decreasing every generation, it leaves a question to be answered; where did the value of love and responsibility of partnership go? Monogamy, in “Brave New World“, is unheard of and taboo to everyone except those who see how powerful love is. The connection that unites people is reduced to a competition to see how many times people have it rather than which the person is. In the book, John knows the importance of love and even resists the temptation to have sex with Lenina. John is among a few people who have not been reduced to mating animals but rather humans that still feel a need for love and companionship.

Lust is having a self-indulgent sexual desire. Susan Minot portrayed the mind of a promiscuous high school female perfectly. Lust is powerful and seductive, but it's inherently selfish and opposed to love. For many girls who are having sex with different boys they can identify with the desire to be needed. The characters in "Lust" are written in a way to highlight the dysfunction and disconnection of everyone involved. The narrator herself is nameless and faceless, making the reader believe that she has already somehow disappeared, just as the men in her life have made her disappear after having sex. Similarly, the men are listed in a brief and are identified only by their sexual acts or by other, easily objectified characteristics. What

What does love have to do with sex? Sex is always considered a taboo and controversial topic, whereas most think they know something about love, and they’re more than willing to give others “unwanted” free advice. However, very few people talk about both in depth together. “Last Night” by Sharon Olds and “Seniors” by Alberto Rios cover a variety of topics, but most importantly they both cover love and sex. More specifically, they cover both what the male and female thoughts are about sex, what their expectations are during the act, and where love comes into play. Both speakers are memorializing their past experiences, the experiences between the two are exceedingly different. Both poems have very similar intentions,

'Sex Without Love,' by Sharon Olds passionately described the author's disgust for casual sex in which she vividly animates the immorality of lustful sex through the variety of her language. The sarcasm used in this selection can easily be misunderstood and quite confusing if the words and lines are not analyzed with specific construction. Olds' clever use of imagery and frequent uses of similes, to make the reader imagine actual events, makes this poem come to life. For example, Olds describes making love as 'Beautiful as dancers.' (Line #2) in this line, she questions how one can do such a beautiful act with a person whom one is not in love with. Olds also describes sex as 'gliding over each other

"They turn casually to look at you, distracted, and get a mild distracted surprise, you're gone. Their blank look tells you that the girl they were fucking is not there anymore. You seem to have disappeared.(pg.263)" In Minot's story Lust you are play by play given the sequential events of a fifteen year old girls sex life. As portrayed by her thoughts after sex in this passage the girl is overly casual about the act of sex and years ahead of her time in her awareness of her actions. Minot's unique way of revealing to the reader the wild excursions done by this young promiscuous adolescent proves that she devalues the sacred act of sex. Furthermore, the manner in which the author illustrates to the reader these acts symbolizes the

The poem, “sex without love” by Sharon Olds portrays the issues in the society today. Casual sex is on the rise and Olds is puzzled how one can have sex without loving the other partner. She states, “How do they do it, the ones who make love without sex?” (Line 1). She, however, describes sex with beautiful imagery of dancers, making it appealing but the eventual feeling of loneliness is inevitable. Olds choice of words, imagery, and symbolism throughout her texts is contrasting; sex without love is possible but is exemplified as a selfish empty act if love is absent.

Sex Without Love has a theme of how a person can not understand how someone can have sexual relationships without being in love. In this poem Olds is puzzled to how and why a person can share such passion and intimacy with another when there is no love or special bond that holds the two together. Although there is no kind of emotional connection she is not empathetic of the loveless physical connection that is shared between the two beings as they engage in sexual contact. Olds is appalled with casual sex and believes that people misinterpret "I love you" to simply just "loving sex". She feels if there is no love shared that the sex is only a selfish act between two.

Sharon Olds in "True Love" wonders about a true meaning of love in her uniquely written poem about a married couple. She hints that true love is about belonging to one another. That belonging or self-possession is reflected via ties of marriage. She further says that children, which are a product of marriage, only tighten marital bonds even more. The speaker starts her poem by describing two people having sex and looking at each other in a “complete friendship”. However, as much as the poem at first seems to have a positive meaning, the message appears to be quite opposite. In fact, “after making love, we look at each other in complete friendship" (2-3) sounds odd if used when describing the love between friends with benefits or a married couple. Friends with benefits contribute to unhealthy relationships that they are in, which is built on lust and only physical desire. Her poem, perhaps is an ironic portrayal of true love. A true love, if it even exists, is very difficult to preserve and can take a different turn especially within the marriage.

I think that during the end of the first stanza the poet starts to become quite theatrical. "Yet this enjoys it before it woo, And pamper'd swells in one blood made of two; And this, alas! Is more than we would do." This could be referring to sex.

In Marge Piercy's book, Woman on the Edge of Time, sex plays a major role in both the utopia and the dystopia. The portrayal of sex in the novel comes from a feminist point of view. The main character, Connie, is caught between a utopian world and a dystopian world where the takes on sex are on different levels. By using a feminist approach, the two worlds of sex can be examined and contrasted.