Issue date: 4/14/08 Section: Viewpoint

Blood rushes to your lips. Your pupils dilate and contract with a hankering recklessness. Your lungs respire more rapidly, fluttering to keep up with it all. Your heart has lost all its sense of rhythm. Everything feels. Your body doesn't know what to do, but it does.

You close your eyes for the kiss, and suddenly your lips have met their magnets. They do more talking now than they have ever done with words.

But you can't keep your eyes closed forever, you have to know that they're still there, so you can be sure you are too. So you open your eyes again, just to check, and they are still there, swaddled up in your arms, looking back to you. How unbelievable.

The locks of your body have fallen off, and all the barriers between you and the world dissolve, for just this moment, for only this person. All questions melted away with the answer in your arms. You almost expect that you should be waking up shortly. But you two, tangled up and interweaving, happen, and create the art your bodies were meant to, and for a small piece of time you're further than yourself.

Intimacy is humanity's finest moment. Our best attempt at getting back to paradise. But all of this power, all of this intensity and surrender has been taken down and wrapped up all into one tiny word whose associations crack down its goodness. Sex.

The word is a cheapening of what we do when we do. It becomes an act without its possible meaning, an obligation.

But we know that that's not what it is, or at least, not what it has to be. Something is wrong when our word for the highest expression of love has been rendered tawdry and meaningless.

As much a part of life as sex is, perhaps being even the central element, it manages to continually escape the grasp of our conversation. It surrounds us and confounds us, and so we whisper its name because we're not sure exactly what it is that we're dealing with.

We have our American Pie, our Sex in the City, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, KY, Plan B, Loveline, everyone's knight in shining armor, The Trojan Man, and when we feel like we have nowhere left to turn, we can always Ask Jeeves.

All of these mediums and mythicized sex figures fill in a void in our society, a cowardice when it comes to the topic of sex. We would like to imagine that sex is no longer taboo, but simply because it is so prevalent in our world does not mean that it is not taboo. Think about how much you talk about it, and not just if you do, but how. It's easy to joke about, but that's just another sign of insecurity. It is still something to worry and wonder about; it's not sex, it's sexxx.

Continued...

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