Fear and Desire

Why do fear and desire so often accompany each other? Usually, a little fear just wakes me up, excites me, makes me feel a little more alive. Whether it is biking aggressively is traffic and taking corners too fast, roller-coasters or pushing myself skiing, the fear makes it all a little sharper and more vital.

But when it comes to sex, and even more extremely S&M, the fear is much greater even as the risks are less. Surely biking in rush hour traffic, dodging taxis and delivery trucks and potholes is far more dangerous. Cabs don’t stop for safewords and gravity doesn’t check your eyes to see how you are doing.

It is the fear of who I might become, or maybe who I actually am, even as I’ve done my best to play the ‘nice, sweet, innocent, and pure’ part.

A dance concert this week juxtaposed some flamenco dancers with a couple of African women. The European ladies were uptight, upright, controlled, and composed. The African women were uncontrolled, joyous, and spontaneous; it is a tradition so despised in the European world that it has been reviled, mocked and compared to animals. The European composition, control, and denial runs in my very veins. Even in my blog about sex, I’m careful to be consistent in my inclusion of the Oxford comma. Control and denial.

And what are my fears if I follow my denial? On one level, I have rational fears that it could make my job much harder, but those, just like unwanted pregnancy, are dealt with and controlled.

The visceral fears that control my behavior are much more primal—that I will surrender entirely to my desires—that I will lose my sense of self, my chance to impact the world, the respect I have in one long, shuddering orgasm. Think Agave, in The Bacchae, tearing off the head of my own son as I've lost all contact with reality, morality, logic or my individuality. The Greeks believed we needed to balance the primal with the logic. In contrast, since the fall of the Roman Empire, the Europeans have tended towards binary views: the Puritans simply banished erotic yearnings in favor of the logical. In the 20th century, Jung said basically women were ruled entirely by eros while men were ruled by logic.

I still want a little fear--enough to keep me vital, alive and aware, but I hope to find people who can lead me through it and not allow the fear to imprison me in motionless stasis.