(in which sex and love may be childishly conflated)
by Loie Merritt
Sexual authority means a belted dress and a beast that terrorizes your intellectual hunger until you just want to dance, Beauty and the Beast:
For the rest of your life, snowball fights qualify as foreplay.
Looking hot enough to fuck means wearing a sheet, exposing your collarbones, and having your voice stolen, like The Little Mermaid.
The perils of sex include having children who you may destroy. Dressing in drag is the only way to make a fallen man persuasively appealing again. You cry during Mrs. Doubtfire:
The next morning you glimpse your father in bed with the new woman. You try to understand why she sleeps topless with her back exposed.
Doesn’t that tickle too much?
Commitment, the kind of commitment you catch yourself lusting after, looks like Face/Off.
Pissing on those unfair terms of attraction, or how to mourn love and its sexual shortcomings, at Muriel’s Wedding.
Then there’s Body Heat, Basic Instinct, Wild Things:
All of which you can stick to, recall, and evoke unreasonable lessons in pleasure when you go to slice an apple with a very sharp knife.
How to kill someone.
How to caress a breast.
How to film yourself fucking.
How to make noise.
How to use your jealousy.
How to scratch your lovers back.
How to do what you’re supposed to do.
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