Pleasure, once I overcame the major influences of Catholicism and it became an end in itself, began, little by little, to take on the qualities of work. Whereas the gratification of forbidden impulses used to arouse guilt, once I’d dealt with those issues, failure to have fun lowered my self-esteem.
I countered with psychic self-improvement. I got in touch with my feelings, I ate healthy, took lessons, immersed myself in the wisdom of the East, learned how to relate, and even overcame guilt and fear at the prospect of pleasure itself. All this came to be measured by standards of achievement, like amateur sport gone professional.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the woman I was with at the time, who was in the habit of answering everything I said by asking, “Are you sure that’s what you meant to say?” was into, of all things, the measurement of sexual performance.
She insisted that satisfaction depended on the acquisition of proper technique and believed that it could be achieved only after disciplined, coordinated effort, practice and study. She had books and diagrams showing the location of the g-spot, and newsletters from the Boston Women’s Collective. It started out quite exciting, but in the end I was just exhausted.
I was finally able to break away and repudiate the rhetoric of achievement when she ran off to an ashram providing group therapy sessions for vegetarians, advocates of free love, and counter-cultural enthusiasts, with herbs and potions and crystals on silver chains, in which the attainment of spiritual wisdom, coming face to face with God Herself, required the emptying of the mind of all preconceived notions.
Spiritual guidance took the form of encouragement to stand and scream at the surf pounding on the beach at Goa . There was massage therapy and aroma therapy and encounter groups, the brochure said, as well as various other facilities to assist catharsis and the search for inner peace, with a choice of single or double occupancy and continental or native vegetarian breakfast.
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