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The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent

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Betty Martin

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“Why do you perversely follow your flesh? Turn back, and let your flesh follow you. Whatever you perceive through her, you perceive in part. You do not know the whole, of which these are the parts; nevertheless, the parts give you pleasure. But if your fleshly sense were capable of comprehending the whole, and had not, being itself a part of the whole, been confined within its right and proper limit - that being a punishment proportionate to your crime - you would wish all that exists in the present to pass away, so that you could derive still more pleasure from the totality of things. The very words we speak you hear by means of the same carnal sense, and you do not wish the syllables to stand still but to pass away swiftly, so that others may come and you may hear the whole. Likewise all the constituent parts that make up one thing (even though they do not all simultaneously constitute it) give more pleasure as a totality than they do individually, if it is possible to perceive them as a totality. But he who made them is better by far than them all, and it is he that is our God, who does not pass away, nor does anything take his place.”

SpiritualPleasureFleshCarnal
Book:Confessions
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“Maybe the true surprise, I thought, was that it had not happened sooner. My uncles’ eyes used to crawl over me as I poured their wine. Their hands found their way to my flesh. A pinch, a stroke, a hand slipping under the sleeve of my dress. They all had wives, it was not marriage they thought of. One of them would have come for me in the end and paid my father well. Honor on all sides. The light had reached the loom, and its cedar scent was rising in the air. The memory of [Redacted]’s white-scarred hands, and the pleasure I had taken in them, was like a hot wire pushed through my brain. I dug my nails into my wrist. There are oracles scattered across our lands. Shrines where priestesses breathe sacred fumes and speak the truths they find in them. Know yourself is carved above their doors. But I had been a stranger to myself, turned to stone for no reason I could name.”

PleasureFeminismLustEroticaSexual Fulfillment
Book:Circe
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