Sometimes, when I sit down at my computer to write, I am completely stymied by the enormity and complexity of the subject. Today, I fear is going to be one of those days, so this piece of writing will either be a completed blog or more likely notes for a subsequent piece of writing that is more structured and thought-out.
Though I don’t really do that!
When I write, it tends to flow directly from fingers to screen and in some ways that rawness is quite befitting for the content matter within these blogs.
Jealousy and envy are different, I think. It is interesting that when looking up the differences, some commentators distinguish between the two by saying that the former is an ‘emotion’ whereas the latter is a ‘feeling’, that the former is entirely negative whereas the latter could be used to positive effect.
For example, one can be envious of another person having sex with someone else without necessarily wanting to have sex with that person whereas if you are jealous about the sexual encounter involved, then you are upset and hurt by this and wish to be involved sexually with one or other of people involved.
Does this make sense? I am not sure.
My lover said to me the other day that it seemed strange for someone to be jealous of something that they already have. How could I, for example, be jealous of him having sex with another woman if I was getting the very best sex with him? And he is absolutely right. There is no need for me to be jealous about him having sex with another woman when I am perfectly satisfied with the sexual relationship that we have. Furthermore, one of the aspects that I find most attractive in him is his sexuality. As I have said before, to deny that would be to negate its power, and if his sexuality that I adore manifests itself in fucking other people, then that is as it should be.
It only really becomes a problem when you add other things into the mixture. The sense of belonging and ownership creates an intense jealousy and it is this that people really have to overcome if they are perfectly honest about it.
But it is a big thing to overcome when one has been conditioned by society, by family, by their own thoughts on relationships over decades and decades, and it is something that I would like to return to later.
So, do I feel envy at the thought of him shagging other women? Or is it the dreaded green-eyed monster?
If I am honest, it is probably both and it is probably neither.
Shades of light and dark can fluctuate through the mind on a daily or hourly basis. The darkness can subsume for a minute and in the next, the more rational, lighter thought emerges from the depths of despondency.
I embrace these fluctuations but they are sometimes hard to live with. They are certainly hard to rationalise and even harder to explain in the spoken or written form because you can end up sounding like some sort of schizophrenic.
As far as relationships and sex go, nothing is straight forward. It should be. It should be as simple as anything. People should be free to enjoy sexuality and sexual experiences as much as enjoying a good meal. It really should be that natural. If you want sex with someone who is not your ‘designated’ partner, then that should be fine. It shouldn’t take away from that relationship.
But I still sometimes angst about going to another restaurant in case the people at my favourite one discover my infidelity! How ironic is that from a woman who basically has no qualms about having an extra-marital relationship? Not so simple, eh?
So, should I worry about who my lover is having sex with? Absolutely not!
Do I worry about who my lover is having sex with? Absolutely sometimes, even though in my rational moments, I can logically determine that this is not a problem in the slightest, and furthermore, I get really turned on by the thought of him fucking other people, especially if I can be included in the proceedings.
Is there anything that I should be jealous about? Definitely not! I have the most fabulous sex, the very best that one could imagine. If he is getting or is likely to get mind-blowing sex from another then I should be delighted he has the opportunity to enjoy his sexuality to this extent, and why should I be bothered by this if he’s getting equally as good sex with me?
Is there anything that I should be envious of? Not really. Envy doesn’t really come into it but it happens anyway. I am envious of time that he can spend with others when I am not able to do so but I wouldn’t want him not to spend time with others, and it is the same with sex. I might be envious that he is fucking another person but that would not detract from me wanting him to do it regardless.
So returning to his theory that I should not be jealous of other people because I am getting the very best of his sexuality, then that is absolutely the case. And of course, I am exceptionally lucky that there is enough trust in this relationship to be honest about what is happening with other people.
But should I be jealous of him sleeping with another person; saying goodnight to them and waking up in the morning with arms wrapped around one another? Obviously, the correct answer is no. Just because we cannot do this as often as we would like, then it does not take away from our intimacy, yet it is the one thing that pushes my jealously deep into the darkest points because it is something that I an unable to have, and yet I want so much.
I am hanging out for some justification on this regarding his theory of jealousy. I do not have this therefore I am entitled to feel a little jealous (or should that be envy for I would not want him to miss out on this experience with others either?) but in reality, I have no entitlement at all, and it is my problem and my management of this destructive emotion that I need to contend with.
And why am I talking about my lover? Don’t I have a husband?
How would I feel about him having an affair? How would I feel about him sleeping with another woman? How would I feel about him loving another woman in the same way that I love another man?
The answer to this appears to be that I really would be pleased for him that he had found someone who could excite and energise him, amuse and admire him.
Is this borne out of indifference or a sense of relieved self-justification? I honestly don’t know.
Yes, I would have no right whatsoever to feel any jealousy because I have chosen to do the same.
But would I feel jealous regardless? I have to say, at the moment, I really do not think I would.
But then that is how Catherine Millet, author of “The Sexual Life of Catherine M” and “Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M” thought she would react.
But she didn’t.
And I cannot fathom her reaction. I cannot understand how she felt so jealous of her partner’s infidelity when she was doing the same thing. I do not really understand why she was so enraged with jealousy that she was pushed to self-harm. She knew her husband loved her. There was a sense of intimacy and their sex life was excellent, from what I can gather.
And yet, isn’t she describing some of the battles of emotion that I have explained regarding my lover?
There is no rationality to it and Catherine herself said that she only came out of this gross depressive behaviour when she realised that she was deliberately maintaining her jealousy “to derive pleasure from the pain”. She goes on to say “Once you become conscious of the mechanisms, they cease to exert such a hold”.
I am not sure how to respond to this other than it is essential to explore one’s behaviour in regard to negative emotions. It is important to rationalise and consider what is happening with jealousy in order to manage it and confront it and eradicate it. As to subconsciously getting pleasure from the pain of such an emotion, well, I cannot understand that at all. For me, jealousy is nothing but destructive, and when it overwhelms me for a second, a minute or even longer I find it completely abhorrent and an enormous sense of self-loathing overwhelms me.
But I can understand her jealousy to an extent because I do feel it sometimes, as I said, at the moment, more with my lover than my husband. And I know that this is not rational.
I have sex with two people. I make that choice. I should totally accept and understand that my lover should do the same. He knows that my having sex with my husband takes nothing away from our sexual relationship. I should do the same.
Choice is partly the issue, and I think this is probably at the stem of some of my jealousy.
I don’t feel as though I have choice. If I did have choice, then I think things may be different. I may choose to have sex with other people as well as my lover, just as he has that choice now. I may also choose not to, and he too has that choice, which I honestly wouldn’t want him to take – not on my account anyway.
Maybe what I am jealous of is not the fact that he has sex with other people but the fact that he can choose to have sex with other people; a choice that I do not feel is there for me.
This is really, really complicated but maybe what I am jealous of, in the moments when I am jealous which really and truly is not a constant, has more to do with the equity of choice than the fucking.
Or maybe it is simple unadulterated jealousy, where I want to be the best, the most important, the significant one.
It’s a bit pathetic really.
But this doesn’t really explain Catherine Millet’s response. She was jealous of her husband having sex with other women. She was jealous of him doing the things that they might do, despite the fact that she had her special times with him. According to my lover’s theory, there was no reason why she should have been jealous, and yet she was. She is. I can be.
Maybe she comes to the conclusion in her book that jealousy is not something that can be rationalised. It is an irrational response and therefore attempts to justify cannot happen because in essence, no jealousy is justified.
Yet it still exists.
I am envious of people who have no jealousy. There – if ever there was a distinction between those two words this is it. I am not jealous of the unjealous, I am envious of them. I want what they have because for me, it is an extremely important part of self-actualisation and maintaining balance and fortitude in life.
I think for me, one of the important things about Catherine Millet’s book is not that she offers a solution to her situation but that she acknowledged the irrationality of her emotions and that she explained how she was feeling. A conclusive response to her jealousy really would be a best seller. Her ability to deal with her jealousy is incomprehensible to me, but then I haven’t read the book. My way of eradicating jealousy might be completely different to hers but what I do admire is her ability to stand up and be honest that it exists.
Those who do not ever suffer from jealousy are rare creatures to be applauded. They are extremely fortunate and it is almost impossible for them to empathise with those of us who suffer considerably or occasionally from this affliction.
Jealousy is very real and should not be dismissed as an irrelevance. Working at understanding it, living with it, eradicating it is a vital importance to me, and I am sure others.
Listening to those who do not suffer from this is a good starting point. Reading how others have had to contend with it, in such irrational ways, is comforting.
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The articles on Catherine Millet gave rise to other thoughts whilst I was reading and writing.
In this next section, I have taken some extracts from the pieces in the newspaper and would like to write a short offering on each.
1. “Sexual mores have evolved recently, nevertheless some sexual practices are only tolerated if they are kept hidden. During publication, people came to me wishing to describe their own experiences, which had been secret. Now they feel they can talk about them without being ashamed. I look forward to a democratisation of sexuality where anyone can reveal their true nature without suffering socially.”
These are Catherine M’s words. It needs people like Catherine Millet in this world. We need people in this country to say the same thing. We need people like Pete Ayrton; founder of Serpent’s Tail publishing to be brave (what a stupid word re sexuality) enough to print books such as “The Sexual Life of Catherine M” but we are a long way off.
Isn’t is sad that it takes a book launch to enable people to be honest about their sexuality? How many people, like me, live with this secret as though it is a dark and deceitful one rather than a part of life that is an integral part of my being?
In hope, I want to be able to shout from the mountain tops that I enjoy sex, that I have a lover, that I cannot think of anything sexually that I would not be prepared to do with him, that the sex is something that makes me feel more in tune with myself than anything else in my world, that I care for someone else and that is perfectly normal and understandable, that I am a sexual woman, not a nymphomaniac. In reality, I cannot do this because the people in my life could not cope with such indiscretions. It goes totally against the conformity of family and social life and thus it has to be smothered as though it was a disgrace. It is not a disgrace. It is so far from disgraceful as to be the polar opposite.
If I ever get to the stage of having my book written and launched, I hope that I will be in a position to be honest, and not having to hide behind a pseudonym. But I doubt that will be the case.
2. "You're trying to get me to say he's my grand amour," she scolds. "Well, I did meet the man of my life. I may not have been swept off my feet when I met Jacques, but I did have the impression that . . ." She pauses. "That this was my place." It's only a passing moment of weakness, though, and she collects herself. "The point is," she insists, "that even having a relationship like that doesn't stop you having others. Even from loving others." Indeed.
Again, Catherine speaks.
The important phrase for me in all of this is “That this was my place”.
Returning to belonging and returning to the jealousy thing, isn’t this the crux of the matter?
She felt that this place with her husband was where she belonged. This is quite, quite different from ownership. She felt that this was her place. It did not mean that she wanted exclusivity, or at least that was not the way she was behaving. Yet, possibly she did intertwine ownership with belonging when in many ways they are as different as jealousy and envy.
For me, I do feel as though I ‘belong’ in a relationship with my lover but that does not mean that I want to own or possess him. It feels right, that is all, and going back to the previous point, something that feels right should not have to be hidden and seen as some sort of disgraceful behaviour.
And I have always believed that you can love two people simultaneously.
As far as Catherine Millet is concerned, she readily accepts that the majority of her sexual experiences had nothing whatsoever to do with love, and maybe it was this that concerned her more than the sexual infidelity when it came to her husband. Although she rationally recognised that you can love two people simultaneously, she felt threatened by the prospect of being demoted!
So if you can have two loves, can you also have two places? Or do the ‘loves’ and the ‘places’ naturally have some sort of pecking order? I do not know or even want to answer that self-imposed question for it brings up all sorts of dark thoughts that I do not want to consider, but it really ought to be asked.
3. "I had no need," she has written, "to go and build love stories out of sexual relationships." And: "I had love at home. I sought only pleasure outside."
She says that she didn’t need to find love elsewhere for she had that at home but did she find it anyway? Did she really only seek pleasure outside or was there the room, as she has outlined in the previous quote, for duplicitous love?
As I said, I thought you could love two people simultaneously, but maybe the love for one is slightly different to the love for another. Who knows?
It is interesting to me that there has to be some sort of explanation and justification for her action. If she wasn’t looking for love, then she must have another reason for playing away – i.e. pleasure.
For me, it was never like that. I sought nothing. I gained a very great deal and maybe it was more wonderful because there was never an expectation of anything. At the time, I didn’t feel as though there was something huge missing from my life. On reflection, there was but I could have lived gloriously unknowledgeable to this and been perfectly content.
4. “I continue to believe that love and sexual desire are feelings you can experience divergently, and that you can be attracted to and love many people at the same time. Of course, there are relationships that are more important, deeper, than others. But there are an infinity of ways in which a person can experience love. We're fighting against the heritage of romanticism, mon ami. I hate giving advice, but we need to rid ourselves of the notion of l'amour unique. It's not like that in real life. Romantic love affairs generally end in tears, you know."
Catherine Millet seems to be a person who has her head screwed on which is all the more reason for being personally delighted that she is challenged by jealousy!
I think the ‘romance’ that she is describing here is what some would call “being in love” – a rather dangerous state of mind. But there is a huge difference between having a special person and falling in love. And I have to disagree with the “L’amour unique” if I have interpreted the translation properly. A unique love does not mean possessiveness. A unique love does not mean that it is the only unique love that you might experience, however contradictory that may sound. A unique love is not a romanticised and abstract view that is far removed from reality.
I truly believe that sometimes you can have a “l’amour unique” but this doesn’t equate to exclusivity. The two things do not go hand in hand. Does this sound like a contradiction? Possibly, but if you truly embrace people’s sexuality then you can have both a l’amour unique that has sexual excitement and experience with other people whilst you do the same.
5. The essentially promiscuous nature of the female species has been reflected in recent research into semen conducted by the English scientists R Robin Baker and Mark A Bellis, who wondered why a human penis must ejaculate 350m sperm when a man has no (conscious) desire to fertilise 350m women. The theory of sperm competition says that sperm must be prepared to do battle with the sperm of another man inside a woman because of the possibility that she has 'double mated'. Evolution seems to tell a truth denied by civilisation.
And here is my final offering on the extract front.
This woman, for me, embraces all the contradictions and the joys of being sexual and being a woman. It is not just society that inflicts the destructive emotions of jealousy on us. There is a distinct possibility that there is something quite instinctual about this, though I am positive others would disagree.
Reading about the fact that there are very sexual women out there who like nothing more than penetrative sex is a beautiful and wonderful liberation.
I love sex. I love being fucked to climax again and again. I adore having fingers explore my fanny, reaching into places that even the most delightful of cocks cannot reach. I adore being worked up to such an extent that I am simply unable to do anything other than jet my spunk out in a cascade of enormous proportions.
Nothing, nothing does for me more than feeling a cock deeply embedded in my cunt, working its way around and finding more space inside me as I expand at the elation of having him there.
To know that other women have the same thoughts on sex, even if they choose to be stimulated in different ways, i.e. through recreational sex, is extremely exciting.
I fluctuate. Sometimes, when I am watching porn, I really wish I was involved and that I could participate in these orgasmic inducing experiences. Other times, I worry that I am one of those people who really only gets off on sex with feelings for the person that I am fucking, but I know that I love sex enough to understand that I could just fuck for the sake of enjoying a fuck. It would just be very different from the sex I have now. Acknowledging the difference is quite important to me.
The important thing is that once more, we should be recognising and stating quite confidently that sexual excitement is not the domain of men. Women like to fuck. Some women like to fuck a lot. Some women like to fuck a lot of men. Some women like to fuck men and women.
Women like fucking.
If the likes of Catherine M and Zenpuss do nothing else than make the world realise that sexual enlightenment and enjoyment is available to women of all ages, then they have served their purpose. Sex doesn’t have to be dirty or gratuitous. It can be but it doesn’t have to be.
Sex can be within loving relationships or it can be just recreationally brilliant. Sex can be done alone, with a partner, with a stranger. Sex is fucking good!
With regard to this particular quote though, once more there is significant scientific explanations as to whether monogamy is indeed the ‘natural’ way or not. I’ve heard of this before. I have read about it, i.e. that the woman’s body is so spectacular that it can actually differentiate between different types of sperm, and like the survival of the fittest, chooses to retain the sperm from the man who is most likely to impregnate her in a way that is compatible to her particular eggs.
For me, it is quite indicative that our species were probably not made to be monogamous. If we have this incredible function in our bodies to choose between sperm, then surely we should be experiencing a range of sperm, coming from a range and variety of cocks in our lives?
But once more, life is not so simple. For the human mind comes into play.
There is the instinct of fucking, for sure but there is the spirituality of intimacy that also occurs. There is a passion and a desire for a person as well as the passion and desire for sex, and this is before you take the societal expectations of monogamy as well.
Did our forefathers, or rather foremothers, fight tooth and nail to retain the man who had the stronger and most compatible sperm for a lifetime? I don’t know. Certainly something happened in society to promote monogamy and I am sure this is related to child-rearing and ease of this. It is almost as though it was the lazy thing to do to evolve in this way rather than the intelligent.
Maybe, they still fucked around but still had a “L’amour unique”?
Who knows?
The point is that it seems that having a “L’amour unique” for a lifetime is somewhat contradictory to how our bodies originally evolved.
Again, of course, I could just be returning to self-justification.
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Apologies, dear readers, for I seem to have droned on for over four thousand words and I am still not sure that I have produced anything that is either readable or conclusive.
Furthermore, I fear I have once more been too honest, if there is such a thing.
It’s good to have an opportunity to think about these issues. It is wonderful to know that there are people who are prepared to air the views that women’s sexuality is as vibrant and real as male counterparts. It is scary and stimulating to consider one’s own interpretation of jealousy and envy, and it is always wonderful to think about sex.
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