Let's Make Love

You laugh, but "make love" beats "have sex" any day.

I've recently discussed this with a young person I know.  I won't say why.  (Maybe Granny is getting some.)

Here's the deal.  I have a real issue with "having sex."

"Let's have sex."  "Should we have sex?" "Wow that sex was the best I ever had."

Like it's on the menu at a restaurant."

Hmm, this looks good.  Yes.  I'll have the sex, with a side of broccoli and dauphine potatoes.  And the pavlova after."

"Have sex" commodifies.  And makes it standardized.  It's the same "sex" for you to "have" as for me.  Standard order.  And if you don't want it, the next guy will, just the same, delivered without us cooking it.  Cooking is up to the chef, who always makes it the same and doesn't care whether it's me or you or Seth Rogen ordering it.  Until then, the sex waits there in the fluorescent kitchen, its dead fish eyes clouding and its long wet tail flopping sadly over the edge of the counter.

To "have," like, "I have a skin condition."  A bad cold, the flu.  A mortgage, an overdrawn bank account, hammertoe.

All states of being.  Conditions.  And weirdly not part of you.  There's you and what you "have," like halitosis, or a tax audit.

"Making love" on the other hand is something that's being created.  To "make love" is to conjure something right now that didn't exist twenty minutes ago over that second glass of wine.  "I made love" is an accomplishment.  Something you've "made."  It's a painting, a sand castle on sunny day, a great Indian meal prepared by a foodie.

It's a cake, a home -- you can even "make" whoopee.

"Making love" also means you're not alone.  In its usual form, it takes two.  The two of you come together to create a dance, a moment that's unforgettable.  It's art when it's very very good.  You've "made love" as a duo, which you can't do alone.  You lay there after in that glow from that mystical thing you've designed.  There's a magic in performing that coupling performance that "making love" so evocatively describes.

"Making love" is bespoke.  "Having sex" is something from the drive-through.

As a straight woman, I would also much rather say that a man made love with me than we "had sex."  Because one, I'm not going to mention it at all if it wasn't great, and "We had sex" sure sounds like it was underwhelming.  I mean, IMHO, maybe rethink the whole relationship thing if "We had sex" is the very best you can say about what happened.

Two, isn't that truly the glorious act itself, no matter the specific anatomical activity?  The two of you approaching, merging, and coming apart in a dance that has created something?  Something ancient.  Something primitive and yes sacred that stands apart from you, that's so huge it depletes you.

Afterwards, did I "have" it?  Nah.  Never.  I was not the passive receiver of a plate of fish, served just the same ten minutes later to the next table over.  Rather, I was an active participant.  My being there made it unique.  It was different for him, for me, than it would have been for anyone else.  Isn't that always true?  What we did was for us, and only in that moment.  Next time, even for the same two people, it will be different.  "Making love" is beautiful but ephemeral, and will never come again.

"So, madame, will you both be having the sex tonight?  There's a two-for-one special."

"No, thanks.  We'll have the bouillabaisse but we're going home to make love."  

A Country Safe To Grow Old In

We are one nation.  We are  comprised of those imagining their future contributions to our country, those now making them, and those whose contributions brought us forward.   We are made up of citizens who cannot yet walk, those who run and think they will run forever, and those who know the truth.

We need all of us.  Each of us is equally valuable.  Not one of us deserves to be pushed out on the ice floe.

While my American politics did not agree with hers, today I am mindful of the UK's Margaret Thatcher, who in 1979 described the collective voice of the "thoughtful people" of Britain.  Just before she was elected as its first female Prime Minister, she said:

"Today, if you listen, you can hear that voice again . . . Its message is quiet but insistent.  It says this: Let us make this a country safe to work in; let us make this a country safe to walk in; let us make it a country safe to grow up in; let us make it a country safe to grow old in.  And it says, above all:  May this land of ours, which we love so much, find dignity and greatness and peace again." 

A Boomer’s Apology

Okay so I admit it.  Before the other day, I had poohed-poohed the whole old-people-rag-on-millennials deal.  I had heard it happens but I had never seen it.

So you know, I am one of them.  Not a millennial. I’m 63.  I have two incredible daughters who are forty years younger, though.  One’s a millennial, the other’s a 19-year-old Gen-Z-er, apparently.  (I don’t keep track of such demarcations.)

I’m a novelist, as you know.  I was taking an online creative writing class at a very fancy place recently where all of us, including the teacher, were talking heads in thumbnails on a screen, stacked like the Brady Bunch in those opening credits.  (I said I was old.  You may have to look that one up.)  My fellow students were mostly millennials with a couple of older people. I was the oldest, but not by much.  We were discussing Cat Person, that excellent viral 2017 short story from the New Yorker, the one about a young woman’s growing dread of an odd young man she liked initially and her sexual sort-of consent.  

Despite the high-techery, it’s a universal story.  Every woman of every age can relate to it, I think.  The only difference between now and, say, 1975, is the means of communication.  Texting versus letters in a mailbox. The story’s point though was its knife-edge of indecision, rendered by a skilled author able to conjure not the presence of something but the lack, which is very difficult to do.  Yet it was done with no mechanics showing. Seamless.  Easy.  Nothing but growing creep in our protagonist.

So we’re in class online.  Cat Person has been assigned as required reading in advance of class that day, so we’ve all read it.  But about five minutes in, this other older woman in a row above me on the tic-tac-toe grid starts shaking her head.  Side-to-side, visibly.  She’s annoyed.  Then she suddenly pipes up.  

She spits out, “Spoiled millennial.”   Then sits back, arms crossed.

Not “spoiled woman,” or “I don’t get this protagonist,” but a sweeping “spoiled millennial”.  I couldn’t see it, the thumbnails were too small and my eyesight’s not great, but I could hear the lip curled.  She hated the story, found it ridiculous because of the self-indulgence of the main character, the self-absorption, she said.  The prolonged navel-gazing.

But what this 50-something classmate had done was dismiss an entire generation.  With the back of her hand, she had rejected the experience of a young woman simply because of her age and the smartphone in her hand.  And this classmate did it publicly. She didn’t hesitate.  She spoke loudly, too, as if there were nothing to be ashamed of.

I felt I had to protest and followed her with a short speech about universality, but the woman just peered into the screen with her mouth pursed.  Then we all went on.

What struck me hard after class was that no one called her out but me.  I’m not the point here.  The rest of the class is, including the teacher.  What she said would never have been tolerated if she had dismissed the character because of the protagonist’s race or her orientation.

As I thought more about it, I realized one, that this silent class was mostly young people -- her targets, which meant two, they must have all heard this before.  And three, heard it so often from oldsters that they are now tolerating it the way they have to listen to Drunk Uncle at Thanksgiving (a SNL reference there).  Which meant four, to my great shame, that these young people were being polite while they were being vilified, because they have been taught by us to be polite.  My classmates were showing grace while this woman spit on them. She got away with it because they were raised to be respectful of their elders.

So I want to say I’m sorry.  I have been blind.  I had not believed until that class that such breezy pronouncements were being made -- publicly, freely, with entitlement and without accountability -- about a group that constitutes a quarter of our population.

Discrimination is the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.  See that?  Age.  And not just old age.  What this woman said was discriminatory.  Full stop.  

To the young people I encounter in the future, I say -- I commit that, if this ever happens again, I will call it out for what it is.  I will call the statement and the aged speaker discriminatory.  Prejudiced against an entire group of people.  And I ask every other oldster to do the same, for our children and grandchildren might not, for we have taught them to respect us.  In so doing we have muzzled them.  They are giving us grace.  So it’s possible -- and I believe -- that only we old folks can correct ourselves.

We must do so.  We owe them to treat them as individuals, the individuals we have ourselves created.  They are a part of us, from us, the result of us.  They are both good and bad, tall, short, but all grappling with life.  Just like the rest of us.  No matter what age we are.

People.  We are all people.