Soundtrack: Skullcrusher Mountain (with lyrics)
After seeing a review of it, I just watched again the first episode of Lupin III. with an eye on how sex and love are represented. To my eyes, they seem to be shown as mutually exclusive: the evil boss sexual appetites have Fujiko tied up and (childishly) "raped". Lupin's love of Fujiko is shown as self-sacrifice, with him ending up in Zenigata's cuffs, with him enduring her betrayal. In the end, Lupin's sexual desire for Fujiko seems to turn her again into a disadvantaged position, as the instrument of "rape" of the evil boss comes back into play.
In all the literature that I remember as I grew up, there has been love and there has been sexual desire. Love was wishing for the other person to be well, sexual desire was wishing for oneself to be well.
For some reason, in most of the literature there seemed to be an implicit rule saying that two people cannot both be well at the same time. Love meant being soulless and devoting oneself to the other person entirely, and suffering from it. Sexual desire meant reducing the other person as an object of one's own pleasure, and (usually she) would suffer from it.
Sometimes two people loved each other and wished for both to be well at the same time, and were usually torn away by circumstances, or had to suffer and sacrifice a lot so that they could be together, or one of them would die, for extra drama. What being together meant, was usually not covered in the story, and tended to happen during that "happily ever after" that usually starts where the book or film ends.
Yet, I find that sex is a wonderful way for two people to be both happy at the same time, where I can desire my happiness and the other person's happiness, and where each feeling, each desire, each move contributes to both. In pleasing myself I please the other; in pleasing the other I please myself.
Is there a romantic story where the lovers do not just feel love, but also they long for, they desire each other? Where that desire is shown not by hitting the partner in the head with a club and dragging them to wake up tied up in a secret lair, but by inviting their partner to come closer, kissing them, holding them tight to their body, caressing them, discovering what gives them pleasure, opening up for them to play, each person riding their own, the other's, and their shared desire?
I cannot think of one. It sounds like I'll have to write one.
With my own life.