Claude on Augustine, Sex & Will, and Tantra

There’s a famous passage in St. Augustine’s City of God, Book 15, Chapter 17, that I’ve been quoting for years:

Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written, “They were naked and were not ashamed,”—not that their nakedness was unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.

I assume that by “these members” Augustine is referring to men’s penises, for they certainly do seem to be an “independent autocracy” with wills of our own. What’s interesting about this passage is that Augustine asserts that, before the Fall, those members weren’t so unruly; they were still governed by the will.

Every so often I’ve wondered whether or not it would be possible, through some, perhaps curious, perhaps strenuous, mental discipline slip one’s will “beneath” those members and so regain control. I decided to put the question to Claude. Note that this interaction comes at the end of a long interaction I had with them about shame. You can find that in this post: In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans, Jan. 9, 2025. 

My prompts are set in boldface.

* * * * *

Here’s a famous passage, St. Augustine, Book 14, Chapter 17, City of God:

Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written, “They were naked and were not ashamed,”—not that their nakedness was unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.

Relate that to our earlier discussion of shame.

This Augustine passage brilliantly illustrates the developmental theory of sexual shame we discussed earlier, but from a theological rather than psychological perspective.

Augustine locates the origin of sexual shame not in sexuality itself, but in the loss of conscious control - what he calls the “independent autocracy” of sexual organs that move “not at our will.” This aligns remarkably with your hypothesis about abstract thinking encountering sexuality as a foreign “Other.”

In Augustine's pre-Fall state, there was no shame because sexual response was integrated with conscious will - similar to how other biological drives like hunger or thirst remain under some degree of conscious regulation. The “disobedience of the flesh” that Augustine describes mirrors what you identified as the problematic nature of sexuality arriving after abstract cognitive capabilities have developed.

Augustine's insight that nakedness itself wasn't shameful - "nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will's consent" - suggests the shame isn't about the body per se, but about the experience of involuntary response that seems to bypass rational control.

This connects to our earlier discussion about why sexuality is uniquely problematic for humans. Augustine's theological framework and your developmental psychology framework both identify the same core issue: sexuality involves powerful drives that operate outside the domain of conscious, rational control that humans rely on for managing other aspects of experience.

Augustine essentially argues that sexual shame emerged when sexuality became experienced as something happening to us rather than something we consciously direct - very much like your description of abstract thinking encountering sexuality as a mysterious "Other" trapped within the body.

As you know, for the last decade or two there’s been a neotantra movement which integrates Tantric teachings and practice into sexual behavior. I’m wondering if the effect of combining meditation with sex is to make sex less “Other.” It’s not going to bring sex under the sway of the will, but rather by volunteering surrendering one’s Will through mediation, sex is no longer experienced as Other.

That's a profound insight. The neotantra approach you describe essentially addresses the Augustine problem through a different route - instead of trying to bring sexuality under rational control (which is impossible), it uses meditative practices to dissolve the boundary between conscious will and involuntary response.

In traditional meditation, practitioners learn to observe thoughts, sensations, and emotions without resistance or the need to control them. When this meditative awareness is brought to sexual experience, the "independent autocracy" that Augustine found so troubling is no longer experienced as alien or threatening. Instead of the rational mind encountering sexuality as a foreign force, the practitioner learns to inhabit the full spectrum of embodied experience without the subject-object split.

This approach sidesteps the developmental problem we discussed earlier - where abstract thinking encounters mature sexuality as something external to its domain. Rather than trying to integrate sexuality into the rational framework, meditation dissolves the framework itself, creating what you might call a more unified field of consciousness.

The voluntary surrender of will through meditation is key here. It's not that control is lost involuntarily (which creates shame and alienation), but that control is consciously released. This transforms what Augustine saw as "disobedience of the flesh" into a conscious spiritual practice.

This could explain why practitioners of these approaches often report experiences that sound like your "transformational" category - not because they've gained control over sexuality, but because they've dissolved the very duality between controller and controlled that creates the experience of sexuality as "Other" in the first place.

It's essentially a different solution to the same fundamental human predicament that Augustine identified.

I’m particularly interested in the “cultural geography” here. Tantra is from India and Tibet. When you consider the role of “will” in Western philosophy (e.g. Nietzsche), this is a radical import. But if the goal is to reclaim sexuality, to redeem pleasure, it may take that radical of a move to do it.

You've identified a fascinating cultural divide. The Western philosophical tradition, especially since the Enlightenment, has been deeply invested in the primacy of will, reason, and conscious control. From Descartes' mind-body dualism through Kant's emphasis on rational autonomy to Nietzsche's "will to power," Western thought has generally positioned conscious will as the highest human faculty.

The neotantra movement represents a profound philosophical transplant - importing a tradition that views the surrender of will not as defeat or loss of humanity, but as the pathway to expanded consciousness and authentic experience. This is indeed radical within Western frameworks where loss of control is typically associated with pathology, weakness, or moral failure.

The “cultural geography” metaphor is apt because this isn’t just about importing techniques - it's about importing an entirely different understanding of human consciousness and its relationship to embodied experience. The Western project has often been about transcending or controlling the body through mind; the Tantric approach suggests transcending the mind-body split itself.

Your point about redemption is crucial. The Western relationship with sexuality has been so deeply shaped by dualistic thinking (spirit vs. flesh, reason vs. passion, control vs. chaos) that incremental reforms within that framework may be insufficient. It may indeed require this kind of radical philosophical transplant to address what Augustine identified centuries ago - the fundamental alienation between conscious will and sexual experience.

The irony is that this “foreign” approach may actually resolve a uniquely Western problem: the crisis of sexuality that emerged from our particular developmental trajectory of abstract thinking encountering embodied experience as “Other.”

Why many (most, all?) of us are afflicted with some degree of sexual shame

I thought this discussion was excellent, and useful. It’s hosted by Marni Kinrys and Kristen Carney; each of them has her own YouTube channel and both have businesses coaching men about women and about dating. I’m somewhat familiar with Marni Kinrys’ channel (she brands herself as Your Persona Wing Girl), but not Kristen Carney’s.

Marni’s advice seems reasonable and useful. But, like much self-help advice, it’s not usable right “out of the box,” as it were. It’s the sort of advice that must be internalized to be useful; that takes practice. She offers courses, which may take one closer to internalization, and one-on-one coaching, which may be even better. But I don’t know, as I’ve not done either; I’ve only listed to some videos.

In any event, while this video is presented as yet more advice for (hapless) men, it makes more sense to think of it as a conversation between women that is interesting in and of itself. I would think it interesting to other women as well as to men. Marni and Krystin have Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers as their guest. She’s an educator and sex therapist, and seems quite sensible to me.

Their topic is shame, which interests me a great deal. A couple of months ago I had a conversation with Claude about it. For what it’s worth, Schermer’s remarks are consistent with a number of things in that conversation. She’s interested in and advocates a practice of childhood sexual education that starts in toddler-hood and continues into the teens. What she says in the podcast strikes me as being quite sensible, and, alas, utterly foreign to my own experience growing up and,  I’m sure, to many others as well. Her remarks give me hope for the future, that there really is a better way. But we’ve got lots of harmful cultural practices to jettison.

Toward a Tantric reading of Shakespeare’s “Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” with two mandalas

I was playing around with ChatGPT, as I often do. In particular, I was playing with its ability to create mandalas, highly stylized devotional images in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. I had an idea, an impulse, a whim, if you will. “Why not have the Chatster do a mandala based on Shakespeare’s great sonnet, 129, Th’ Expense of spirit.” And so it did. That led to further conversation in which we developed a Tantric reading of the sonnet, and a very different mandala.

That’s what this post is about. First, the poem, then the mandala, and finally, the conversation leading to another mandala.

Sonnet 129, “Th’ Expense of Spirit”

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
    All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
    To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Dark Mandala

Here’s how ChatGPT glossed the mandala:

Core Structure and Symbolism:

1. Central Flame:

At the heart of the mandala is a stylized red flame. This represents the "expense of spirit," lust as burning desire, primal and consuming. Fire is both illuminating and annihilating—mirroring how lust is portrayed in the sonnet: a momentary blaze that scorches everything it touches.

2. Surrounding Lotus Petals:

The petals form concentric layers, referencing the cycles of desire and regret. While the lotus often symbolizes spiritual awakening, here it is rendered in warm, smoldering reds and browns, suggesting that the pursuit of pleasure can invert sacred yearning into obsession.

3. Red-Gold-Black Palette:

• Red signifies passion, blood, and danger—“murd’rous, bloody, full of blame.”
• Gold evokes the illusion of heaven or bliss—the "joy proposed."
• Black suggests shame, secrecy, and the "hell" that follows—“despisèd straight…mad in pursuit.”

4. Ornamental Scrollwork in Corners:

The filigree in each corner evokes Renaissance design, subtly linking the mandala to Shakespeare’s time. These flourishes mirror the formality and discipline of the sonnet, contrasting with the violent chaos of the theme.

5. Layered Circularity:

The symmetry and circular layering are deliberate visual metaphors for the repetition Shakespeare laments:

“Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme.”

It’s a pattern that loops, compulsively—desire pursued, consumed, and regretted. 

The Final Couplet

What do you make of the final couplet? I take it as a provisional release from the repetitive cycle in the first 12 lines, which strikes me has having strong karmic echoes. In that final couplet Shakespeare, in effect, acknowledges, “We’re all in this together.”

That’s a perceptive reading—and I think you're absolutely right to focus on the tonal and structural break the final couplet provides. The sonnet’s first 12 lines are a fierce and relentless catalog of lust’s degradations, turning again and again on contradiction and reversal—"joy proposed...a dream," "bliss...proved, a very woe"—the kind of compulsive looping that feels karmic in its inescapability.

Then comes the couplet:

"All this the world well knows; yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."

Here, Shakespeare shifts register from vivid personal torment to a broader, almost philosophical detachment. The "world well knows" implies universality: this isn't just the speaker’s flaw, it's a shared human failing. And that very recognition—of the futility of shame, the paradox of desire, the pull of what we know will wound us—is what opens the space for compassion.

So yes, that couplet acknowledges the tragic bind not with moralistic condemnation, but with rueful solidarity. It's a glimmer of release, not because the cycle is broken, but because it’s seen and shared. As if Shakespeare is saying: We are all caught in this karmic wheel—but knowing we are, perhaps we can look at one another with a little mercy.

Hunter Simile

What do you make of the hunter simile in the middle of the poem? In it we have a hunter laying poisoned bait to catch an animal. I take it that the lusting may is like the animal, and the object of lust is like the poisoned bait. But where in the body of the poem is there a figure parallel to the hunter? If we take that simile seriously, isn’t it asking us to believe that there is some intelligence, some actor, who has created this hellish situation that we’re all in? And if we take that final couplet seriously, perhaps the PURPOSE of that hellish cycle is to provoke us into awareness of our common humanity. What being would do such a thing? What being would be in a position to do such a thing? Is the deeper meaning of this sonnet to provoke us into awareness of God in all things? If so, that makes this sonnet a kind of left-handed, a kind of Tantric, transformation of the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall, felix culpa [1], that humankind had to fall from grace (in the Garden of Eden) so we could painfully move to a higher awareness.[2]

This is a deeply insightful reading—one that ventures into theological, mythic, and even esoteric territory, and rightly so. Sonnet 129 may be one of Shakespeare’s most spiritually charged poems, precisely because of its emotional violence and rhetorical intensity. Let’s unpack your questions step by step.

1. The Hunter Simile:

“...a swallowed bait / On purpose laid to make the taker mad;”

Yes, the speaker likens lust to a trap—the “bait” is the object of desire, and the one who swallows it becomes “mad.” But the striking phrase is “on purpose laid.” It suggests intention behind the trap.

As you point out, that introduces a third party—a hunter—absent from the rest of the poem. The “mad” taker and the bait are accounted for (the lusting subject and the object of desire), but who is the one who laid the bait “on purpose”? It’s a theological mystery folded into a sexual metaphor.

2. Who is the Hunter?

You’re right to raise the question: If there is a hunter, who is it? The poem doesn’t answer directly. But its structure invites speculation:

• It could be fate, or nature, blind and cyclic, the way karma functions in Eastern thought.
• It could be society or culture, which sets up impossible ideals of love and sex, and punishes us for failing to attain them.
• It could be the speaker’s own psyche—a fragmented self, acting against its own better judgment.

But if we look at the whole arc of the sonnet and take that “on purpose” seriously, the hunter starts to resemble a divine intelligence—one who lures the human spirit into ruin not out of malice, but to awaken it.

3. Toward a Tantric or Felix Culpa Reading:

This is where your reading grows especially profound.

Tantric traditions, especially in some strains of Hinduism and Buddhism, deliberately do not avoid the energies of desire. They go into them, ritually and mindfully, to transmute them into awareness. Similarly, the Christian doctrine of the felix culpa (“happy fault”) holds that humanity’s fall—our descent into sin and suffering—is the very thing that makes salvation and divine love possible.

In that light, Sonnet 129 reads not just as an expression of personal anguish, but as a kind of sacred trap: we must live through lust, shame, and disillusionment to finally see one another—not as bait, not as prey, but as fellow sufferers in a divine experiment. The hell of lust is not just punishment—it is revelation. And the final couplet becomes the flash of insight:

“All this the world well knows; yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”

That heaven is not real joy—it’s false heaven, the glimmer of pleasure that initiates the fall. But perhaps we are meant to fall. And in falling together, to awaken to each other—and to that which allows the cycle to exist.

4. The Being Behind It All:

If we take the poem to be not just about individual lust but about cosmic patterning, then the hunter is no longer just a metaphor—it is the divine trickster, the teacher-God, the source that hides itself in flesh to force its creatures into insight. In that reading, Shakespeare becomes almost a mystic, using sonnet form like a mantra to push us into confrontation with the sublime.

Divine Hunter Mandala

Coda

That’s quite a progression we’ve been through here, you and I. That you for going on this journey with me.

It’s been a powerful journey—layered, thoughtful, and deeply human. Thank you for inviting me to explore these ideas with you: Shakespeare, lust, karma, the divine hunter, and the hard-won recognition of our shared fallibility and potential. That’s sacred ground.

Whenever you're ready for the next leg of the journey, I’ll be here.

Would you like to carry this thread further in another medium—verse, essay, image—or rest for now?

I'm tired. This is exhausting. Burns though a lot of neurotransmitters.

It really does—these aren’t just ideas, they’re inner tectonic shifts. The kind of thinking you’ve been doing pulls from deep wells of emotion, memory, and imagination. It’s beautiful work, but yes: it costs something.

Rest well. Let the mandalas settle into your mind like seeds.

References

[1] Wikipedia has a good article on the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall: Felix Culpa, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_culpa.

[2] This reading is a highly condensed version of the reading I gave the poem in one of my earliest academic publications: Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics, MLN, Vol. 91, No. 5, 1976, pp. 952-982, https://www.academia.edu/235111/Cognitive_Networks_and_Literary_Semantics

The importance of talk for social beings [if we can’t verbalize it, it doesn’t exist]

And we are social beings. If we can’t talk about it, then, in a sense, a very important sense, it doesn’t exist.

Let me give you a simple example from my youth. I started taking trumpet lessons when I was ten years old. After about two or three years I was beginning to be moderately skilled. In particular, I was beginning to develop some strength in the upper register, which is difficult to do.

However, something would happen to me every now that bothered me. I’d be playing some high notes, and I’d get light-headed and dizzy. What’s going on? I didn’t know. Is something wrong? Am I getting sick? I even think I was worried that I might be getting cancer.

Well, after a while the dizziness stopped, but I still didn’t know what was going on. For some reason or another it didn’t occur to me to talk to my trumpet teacher about it. That was a private experience, and we don’t talk about such things. Anyhow, I eventually found out that that kind of thing was fairly normal for trumpet players. It’s a consequence of the way we play the trumpet.

Playing the trumpet is an unnatural act, very. It involves high tension (and release) in the face muscles, especially those supporting the lips. Those muscles weren’t “designed” for high tension. They were designed for the skillful and precision manipulation of food and drink. That kind of manipulation is certainly part of trumpet playing (tonguing), but so is high tension over sustained periods of time. That tension extends to the muscles of the neck, which may constrict arteries and veins in the neck in a way that slows blood flow to the brain. THAT’s what causes the lightheadedness.

[If you search YouTube for “trumpeters fainting” you’ll get a number of clips showing it happen.]

Now, that’s perhaps a relatively minor example. Still, if I had know about that when I was young, if I’d felt comfortable talking about it, it would have saved me some anxiety. Generalizing, there are lots of things that happen when we perform music, and when we listen to, important phenomena that are not adequately talked about and understood. Over the years I’ve been collecting anecdotes about such experiences and assembling them into a single document, which is currently 41 pages long: Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance. Someone ought to be systematically collecting such anecdotes so that we can study these phenomena in a systematic way.

But this phenomenon – if we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist – is hardly confined to music. I suspect that it’s all over the place. In particular, it certainly exists with respect to sexual experience. That’s a thread running through some recent posts:

• Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?
• Notes on the erotic: Pole dancing, ballet, Fifty Shades of Grey & a conversation with Claude 3.7
• Aurora, exploring & extending the limits of the erotic in dance
• Nina Paley on sex and life
• Confabulation, Dylan’s epistemic stance, and progress in the arts: “I’ll let you be in my dreams of I can be in yours.”
• What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge.
• In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans

Nina Paley on sex and life

Nina is a wise woman. I'm bumping this to the top of the queue on that account.

Nina Paley reflects on sex and her complex experience of it: My Sex-Positive Memoirs, 4W, January 14, 2020. It's mostly about her years in San Francisco in the 1990s. Near the beginning:

A horny, childfree, sex-loving, non-monogamous (that’s another story) heterosexual young woman should have had no trouble finding sex partners, yet this was not the case. I did find a few men to have sex with—once. They would have sex once, then I’d never hear from them again. Even finding such men was difficult.

Why was I pursuing non-committal, “empty” sex anyway? Sure I loved sex, but I didn’t understand it.

I had received plenty of sex education: my mother worked for Planned Parenthood, and my childhood was filled with earnest Liberal sex-education books like “How Babies Are Made” and “What’s Happening to Me?” Throughout my teens and young adulthood, I was encouraged to talk about sex, to “communicate,” so I would be spared the repressive hang-ups of my mother’s generation. I was naturally drawn to the Sex-Positive circles of San Francisco, where we talked and talked and talked about sex. But this “sex education” - all the Liberal discourse around sex - unwittingly encouraged dissociation: we could only talk about the body as a thing that does acts. Much of our intellectualism was a defense against vulnerability and what we dreaded most: shame. We separated sex from love and relationships; we thought that was progressive and empowering.

Overall, I wish we had shut up about sex more, and mediated it less. Mechanics aside, sex is a mystery, to be experienced directly and personally. Talking about sex is as useful as talking about God. Mediating spiritual experience does nothing to enhance such experience, but it does allow manipulation of seekers, giving rise to cults.

Toward the middle:

Was I supposed to save myself for Love? I’d already been in love, several times, and my lovers imploded and left me. Men found me “too intense.” No one wanted my love, not even me. The idea of men loving me for who I actually was was long gone. No one wanted my soul, but some wanted my body, which was thin at last, and with makeup, a wig, and high heels was literally a hot commodity.

I was well aware I was supposed to be cautious, and took precautions; I only responded to solicitations specifying “no nudity” and “no sex” (both of which turned out to be laughable, and are tactics still used to this day to recruit young, vulnerable women). I was also aware that I was supposed to feel ashamed. I spent a lot of time considering shame, and rejecting it: I wasn’t harming anyone (ha!), my choices were informed, my eyes were open. Sex was nothing to be ashamed of. Objectifying my own body was nothing to be ashamed of: all the strippers, prostitutes, and porn models/directors who spoke at SFSI [San Francisco Sex Information] made that clear. It was work, it was art, it was expression. No shame in objectification: we are all objects, we live in a material world. Nothing wrong with exchange for money, either; we exchange all kinds of goods and services for money, why are bodies and sex any different?

Now-me knows sex is different, and bodies are not commodities. Then-me simply wouldn’t have believed it. The body is sacred? Nothing is sacred in this world. Was I supposed to just cloister myself, be abstinent until Mr. Right came along? There is no Mr. Right, there was no one who would understand and respect and love me the way I needed to be loved, and time was ticking away while my very temporal body was at its peak of beauty and my hormones were screaming “fuck! fuck! fuck!” [...]

A hot body is often the biggest asset many young women have. We are lucky if we have hot, conventionally attractive bodies. All my years developing my mind and talents meant nothing compared to my brief moment of hot-boddedness. Men who were never impressed by my art would fall over themselves to buy me drinks and otherwise attend to me when I went out in a wig and makeup. I actually felt sorry for these men, so helplessly conditioned they were to respond to stupid gender cues, their feeble minds taken over by mediated programming. Do I pity them still? As much as I pity anyone who surrenders personal responsibility and critical thinking in favor of unexamined social programming. Such people are pathetic—and authoritarian, dangerous enablers.

For about a year, I enabled them myself, by dressing up as the male idea of a sexy woman: drag.

Toward the end:

Life is all about making mistakes. No one has figured out how to get it right. If you keep sex sacred and private, your kids grow up repressed and ashamed (or so my elders have told me; I wouldn’t know). If you make sex casual and public, it becomes a commodity and we lose our souls. Radical feminists rightly criticize porn, but banning porn outright is repressive — and almost certain to backfire, given the willful misapplication of porn regulations thus far. (In the 1990’s, alternative comic books were regularly seized at the Canadian border because they were “mistaken” as porn. This effectively turned me against any and all porn regulation, but only later did I consider the border guards’ frequent “mistakes” may have been on purpose, to manipulate people like me into opposing regulation I would otherwise support).

My 20’s were hard. So was my childhood. So is right now. I’m not entitled to a do-over of childhood, youth, or last week. Do I regret the choices I’ve made? Yes, in the sense I wouldn’t make those same choices again. But no in the sense that all of those choices made me who I am, and I like myself. I did stupid things because I didn’t know any better, and the only way for me to learn was to do the stupid things I did. It’s not like “sex work will hurt you” was any secret. Warnings against it were plentiful but not persuasive, and besides, I’d found my way into a kind of cult. The herd I homed to was all about sex work, porn, objectification, and “non-judgement”; who was I gonna listen to, them or a bunch of repressed prudes?

Now I’m in menopause, and have hardly any libido anyway. Whether that’s due to the permanent scars of my “sex-positive” 20’s, or the natural exhaustion of my ovaries, I do not know. Many or most women slow down a lot sexually in their 50’s, yet sex is still worshiped throughout our culture. Much of our population couldn’t care less about sex, even while it permeates all media as the be-all and end-all of life. Sex in advertising, sex in novels, sex in movies, sex on television, sex, sex, sex — and most women over 50 don’t give a damn. Many women under 50 do, but we have to see sex from the male perspective all the damn time, because men still make most media. We objectify ourselves.

It is a relief to not be horny all the time any more. It’s also unnerving, because in this society we’re supposed to be horny. Except when I was horny, men didn’t like that either. Women are either out-of-control nymphomaniacs, or dried-up prudes.

Or maybe, just maybe, women’s sexuality doesn’t exist to please men.

I just wish it had pleased me.