On the 16th June I went to a discussion about writing emotion with Katherine Angel as part of Warwick Book Festival. Katherine gave a reading that was beautiful and frank in terms of female sexuality. The book is fragmented in structure, the resulting narrative like poetry, true, unsettling, revealing… Listening to her reading it felt like many threads of the way I had been feeling were being woven together.
How to feel one’s sexuality and be a feminist, or at least a woman who believes in equality even if I can’t relate to the word ‘feminist’, regarded as extreme… as if one dislikes men. At least in my experiences it is so when walking streets outside of the academic community. For it seems to be a woman who wants equality and being a sexual being have conflicts. Katherine’s work drew out some of these conflicts.
‘stitched into myself’ was a phrase that resonated, expressing to me the difficulty women have explaining sexuality to men and one another. I have been pondering, if a woman can understand and accept the penetrative nature of sex, whilst also feeling her own engrossing, or receiving force, why can’t men accept the duality of human desire? What I am trying to grapple with is why are books, movies, and television so penetration obsessed, where is the duality?
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