Sometimes, when he pulls her hair, he isn’t violent about it.
It’s a reminder.
It says, “I’m here.”
hair pull
I want you to take me right after I’ve gotten out of the shower. I want you to tear the towel from my body, grab a fistful of my wet hair, and throw me onto the bed.
I’ll put up a fight. I’ll pout. I’ll try to explain that I just got clean. Yet I’ll just watch the puddles soak into the sheets from my dripping hair. I’ll moan and bite my lip as my protests become stifled by my growing desire. I’ll squirm and whimper and give myself over to it.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t get just as pouty when you tell me to clean myself back up afterwards.
The word passion comes from the Latin stem pati, which means to suffer and to endure. This was, of course, grounded in a very deep suffering on a religious level, but I don’t want to get into that right now.
What I’m more interested is how we use it now. Crimes of passion. Passionate love. Passionate sex. We simply throw this term around without even realizing what we’re implying. Crimes of suffering. Suffering love. Suffering sex.
I feel as if we don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to endure. And rather than seeing love as a means of suffering, we see it as an end to suffering. Which, in my opinion, it is not at all.
I don’t mean to say here that suffering is a bad thing. It’s not. Suffering is a human trait. It’s not necessarily being crucified or tortured or oppressed. It’s not even necessarily a bad feeling. It’s more of just this constant tug that drags us from room to room in life, the constant nagging that keeps humanity yearning, the innate tortured aspect of the human condition that allows us to feel so broken that we need someone or something to share and halve it. “You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart,” says Auden.
Love is suffering. Suffering is love. It seems we always talk about love as this very comfortable thing. And I mean love on all counts. Familial, religious, romantic, platonic, etc. Love is not benign. Love is not the solution. Love does not suddenly calm the storm, save the damsel, and feed the hungry.
And I think that’s why we get so shocked when love is not so simple and when we can’t just be like, “well, we’re here” and then just sort of close the book on the whole thing. Love doesn’t want to handle us lightly, it would drop-kick us to our knees whenever it had the chance. Love is this wild and crazy creature that is this embodiment of our suffering. So, no wonder love is passionate. Sex, too.
I think that’s part of the reason why I love BDSM so much. Aside from the trust, the control and the pleasure aspects of it, it’s an incredibly powerful physical manifestation of our passion, our suffering. The entire process is one of endurance. From enduring the suffering, you experience the pleasure. That’s a hell of a lost of passion there.
I’ll cut this little rant off right here before I just ramble on forever. But, God, language is mind-blowing.