By we I mean people born after Watergate, around–about. Of all the terms we use in my generation, many of them ironic (surprise surprise), making love is all but unthinkable. "Then we made love." "Then I made love to her." It would be like a joke, almost. I'm inclined to say that to fuck is far more socially acceptable than to make love. Does that say something troubling about us?
One excuse/explanation is that fuck has the advantage of being transitive and intransitive both, whereas you need that particularly weird-sounding preposition to make the transitive work with the making love. But, again, why does it sound so weird?* It must not have sounded weird to those crazy hippies who (I haven't done the research on this, but...) lifted the term right out of the tight lips of those prudish kids of the 1930s or so (who weren't actually so prudish or tight lipped, but, you know).
You might say it's because the love part is cheesy. I mean, do you "make love to" someone you meet in a bar and take home without hardly even exchanging names? Did Eliot Spitzer make love to Ashley Alexandra Dupré? Do porn stars make love on your DVDs and your infernet machines?And yet it seems most of us wouldn't be caught dead using the expression even with someone we'd be very happy using the word love with. "I'm in love with you...I think we should get married...let's fuck." And this is what I'm worried about: Could it be the making part that bothers us?
Are we afraid of having to put a little effort into things? Are we all emotional hoarder–misers? Erich Fromm (yeah, yeah, I know, why don't I marry him—well, I just might) claimed that people in our society are all terrified of having to work for anything: in America in particular, we want everything to be easily obtainable, easily consumable, and indisputably ours (to sell as well as to buy).
Is the cheesiness defense just an excuse? Do we not like making love because it sounds too hard?**
* And why must it be transitive, for that matter...?
** Huh-huh...he said hard.
1 comments:
I have a guess. As I understand it, originally "making love" to someone meant something more like "wooing" them, not fucking them. So maybe part of it is the residual PG-13 implications of that. Plus "love" is gay and if you're cool you've divorced love from sex and sex is all about selfish pleasure.
Post a Comment