SEX

A few weeks ago I picked up a Penguin Modern Classic, 'In Praise of Older Women', by Stephen Vizinczey, which is basically the author's memoirs as a teenager growing up in Hungary. He found that older women made much better lovers than his fellow-teenagers, who did not know what they were doing and did not treat him very well. And he wrote the book because, having moved to America, he found that older women were not valued as they had been in Hungary, and he wanted to change that perception.

Anyway, I am now reading his later novel, ‘An Innocent Millionaire’, in which he says at one point: "Sex is a mixed blessing. This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news. Men and women are not made for mutual satisfaction. Women cannot always flow, and even when they do, they well up slowly, while men are quick as torrents - they are primed by nature to burst forth at different times."

 

I’d suggest that a ‘Shamanic’ take on this predicament begins by trusting it. Our modern approach is to think we know better than nature, and to think in terms of where nature has got things wrong. Or, in this case probably, to invent an ‘evolutionary’ argument about numbers of offspring and taking care of them, which I think would at best be only a thin slice of the full picture, and even then speculative and prosaic.

 

We have forgotten to trust nature and to trust Spirit, and to sit loosely, and to frequently not know. Why are some people ‘short-sighted’? Has nature made a mistake that we need to ‘correct’? Or do these people just see differently, and what is the nature of their seeing, and what can we learn from that? And I think there always remains an element of mystery, and that gives us humility.

 

And it is the same with sex and this ‘incompatibility’ between men and women. Note the author is not claiming that nature has got it wrong. He is just observing a truth. So why has nature made men and women in these different ways? There is no fixed answer, just various contemplations we can go on.

 

For myself, I would begin with the idea that maybe there is something for both men and women to absorb from each other to do with the general nature of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ consciousness. At that moment of intensified intimacy and openness, we meet the very different way in which the other gender works, and on an energetic level, maybe we absorb something of that. This is maybe part of the bliss, the sense of wholeness, of completion.

 

We men maybe have to learn patience and consideration in our rush to completion, to be present-oriented and feeling-oriented rather than goal-oriented. And maybe women need to feel OK with what they want, and not just brush it to one side because they think it is not important, that the other matters more than they do, and because they want to be liked? And maybe these reflect wider principles to do with how we live and finding the balance within, a long-term and gradual process which is the whole purpose of this shamanic way. And of course it fits in nicely with Jung’s idea of the animus and anima, and men and women finding that other half – which is their soul, and their guide to it – in the second half of life. Which is something I observe all the time when I do astrology readings.

 

So I am just speculating, there are no final answers. But I think it begins with trusting in the wisdom of Spirit and of nature. And, as ever, not judging, not thinking that one gender has got it 'right' and that the other is 'wrong'. And not judging our 'performance'. It is not a 'performance', it is a natural interaction, it is what it is, nature has made this joyful thing for us, and any notion of success and failure is unhelpful.