My Neighbor’s Sex Life

About a month or so ago, my building manager rented the apartment above mine to a new tenant.

I didn’t know that he had moved in, until I was treated early in the evening to the uncensored howling of “Oh, yeah, oh yeah, yeah” repeated at record breaking volume, a performance of which Jenna Jameson would have been proud.

I called the building manager the next day, to suggest that she mention the issue to whoever had moved in above me; she wasn’t interested.  The new neighbor, I was told, was a sixty something doing research or lecturing at Harvard Law, and my fifty something, working class, Catholic, female building manager was surprised to hear about the scenario that I described. She wasn’t  helping me out on this one.  Talking to the “older guy” doing work at Harvard about the decibel level of his friend’s pleasure didn’t find a location on her mattering map.  Of course, the surprise for me was that the source of so much twenty something (turned out to be an accurate guess) pleasure wasn’t a beast with animal attributes who had risen from mythic regions for the sole purpose of pleasuring women straight into Dante’s “Inferno,” but a sixty something geek doing work in law.

Oh, I couldn’t wait to get a look at this guy.

I knocked on his door several times for a polite face to face, but he never answered, though I heard him rumbling about above me.

So I decided that should I have to, I would assume the the role of bitch from hell, fairly certain that Studly’s performance wasn’t all that, despite the whelp’s yelping, and certain that in a showdown of cojones, I would win.

I later ran into a fellow tenant, and when I brought up our new neighbor, he said, “Oh, that one.  I saw him with a young woman, and I immediately thought ‘escort,’ because of the age difference.”

My curiosity was piqued.  But I was irritated beyond annoyance–these weren’t kids who might not have known better, this was a simply an aging academic for whom being a lawyer had apparently failed to provide enough phallic security, a male fighting mortality through the most platitudinous gesture available, doing a younger woman, and I had to listen to his insecurity by way of Ms. Twenty Something Performance Artist.  No way.  No how.

The next evening, when Studly and Jenna started going at it, and the sounds of female pleasure echoed out of his open windows and down our quaint street paved with red brick sidewalks, dotted with historical landmarks, and a stone’s throw away from Harvard Yard, I yelled out the window, at the top of my lungs, “Give It A Rest, We’re Not Interested!”

That worked.  For a brief time, Jenna was jarred from her own sexual self-importance to a world inhabited by other people and their concerns.  I wondered if I had underestimated them, thought too unkindly of them, even though the bad Meg Ryan impersonation smacked of poor judgment. But then came the night when Jenna had had a little too much to drink and started in, and I decided to duplicate her performance at maximum volume, so they would get a clue as to what she sounded like, not that it mattered to them.  As my interpretation was not flattering, Ms. “Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah” smartly turned down the volume for the rest of evening.

I happened to run into Mr. “I Am Pretending To Myself That I Am Never Going To Die And Will Always Be The Man I Was When I Was Twenty,” not long after the night I performed my bombastic rendition of Jenna’s Song.  A slight man, no more than five foot eight and one hundred and fifty pounds.  A full head of snow white hair, and an interpersonal defense mechanism that he wore like an over sized cheap faux leather jacket, stiff and uncomfortable.  Fit and obsessively self-conscious, bourjeois neurosis oozed from his every gesture, even down to the way his Nike gym bag matched his jacket.  It was evident to me why I had conspicuously heard so little from him, nary a grunt in comparison to Jenna’s vocals, and perhaps why the act itself wasn’t all that long lived, as evinced by brief scuffing of the bed frame on the uncarpeted hardwood floor.  Rarely more than 5 minutes for the actual bump and grind of it all. I quickly surmised that the rest had to be the overcompensatory stuff.

My impression softened me a little, got me to thinking about the insecurities we all carry around with us, and the complexities of intimacy in an urban setting.  “Give them some slack,” I thought to myself, “we’re all just people.”  I castigated myself for my cruelty and lack of understanding.  Well, my noble ruminations vanished last night, when again, Jenna seemed not to care that she’s not in Kansas anymore, having conveniently forgotten the lessons of the past few weeks.  King of the Universe is no help, apparently reveling in giving so much pleasure to someone so close to his own age.  In the surreal landscape they inhabit, there is no awareness of how sound carries in an old house, or that the neighbor below has absolutely no reservations about ruining their Hallmark moments, and no thought that perhaps she has yet to unload the weapons in her bitches arsenal.  (I should note that KOTU and Jenna haven’t had a fight; rather she simply visits a few times a week, in order to experience the greatest pleasure ever given to a woman.  I leave the rest up to you.)  When Jenna started singing in an increasingly loud cadence, “Oh yeah, oh yeah,” I yelled, “Hey, Knock It Off With The Bad Porn!”  I successfully quenched the passionate fires of delusion and narcissism, congratulated myself that I had forced Jenna to put on her big girl panties and significantly muffle it like every other half-conscious, libidinous 30 something urban living female, and continued reading “Signs of the Hermetic Imagination.”

So what is really irritating me about this situation? Other than the obvious lack of courtesy and odd obliviousness, what is causing me to set pen to paper, so to speak?

It’s not the age difference, not the gratuitous sounds of “uninhibited” sex, not really any of the stuff that this bit of tripe ostensibly takes a swipe at.  Rather, it’s human desire and female sexuality which are the victims here, and this is what rankles me.

“Jenna’s” performance is no more about female sexual pleasure than Playboy is about human intimacy.  It’s merely a hackneyed variation of nonsense that we should have abandoned decades ago: its a distortion of the inherent tensions present in healthy intimacy, all tilted toward banal carnality, and more than likely, in service to a fragile male ego whose pleasure is female exposure and vulnerability, an exposure conferring male sexual prowess, a.k.a. “power.”  If “Jenna” represents a kind of post-feminist response to female sexuality, it seems to me that instead of feminism bequeathing a legacy which allows men to more fully enjoy the healing, emotional nuances of sexuality, and liberating women to more fully enjoy pleasure for its own sake, all that’s transpired since the sexual revolution and the woman’s movement is a deeper, rawer form of sexual exploitation: the thorough objectification of female desire in continued service to his majesty, King of the Jungle, be it for professional or personal reasons.

Here is the problem’s core: women don’t recognize that their that bodies are still being put in service to male objectification, another consumer good in a secular, free market society.  It’s one thing for us (men and women) to look at pornography and say, “those women are being objectified and exploited,” it’s another to be living under the delusion that one is socially hip and savvy while living in complete disconnect of what is going on.  The latter is usually understood as a woman’s emancipation from subordination, because an exchange of power or goods is taking place.  King of the Jungle requires female pleasure to satisfy his sexual needs, and the liberated woman is free to exploit that need.  The woman is understood to be appropriating power, as is her right.  The more provocative the woman, the greater the market value, even if that exchange isn’t framed in flat out monetary terms.  But when this “freedom” is pushed from the large media picture to the small, interpersonal stage, the woman’s body itself, and more important, her subjective experience of intimate pleasure, becomes the trade object, no matter that experience’s reality.  The true perversity of this exchange has little to do with morality, rather it mortally compromises our understanding.  For such an exchange easily obliterates the woman’s awareness of her essential power, an incandescent quality which can’t be measured in trade terms.  For those moments of expressed pleasure capture the ferocious strength and intense fragility which psychologically characterizes the best women, and arguably makes us fundamentally different from men, though I essentialize gender norms with that assertion.

The female capacity for physical pleasure is multiple, and this capacity demonstrates a woman’s complexity and intensity.  However, these qualities characterize not just a woman’s physical pleasure, but her psychological makeup.  From this same ferocity and tenderness comes her capacity to give birth, raise her young, die while protecting her child, engage in heroic and unrecognized acts of everyday altruism, and survive loss with an unparalleled tenacity.

It is precisely this complexity which scares the cojones off of many men, because humans fear what they don’t understand.  If female sexual pleasure can be reduced to a primal scream and the merely physical, all is well for King of the Jungle.  Female pleasure is understood as being just like his.  But of course, it isn’t.  The best men know this.  Moreover, they accept and embrace a woman’s complex psychological makeup, and its assorted physiological correlatives, instead of trying to create woman in their own image.  And the best women have the strength to refuse such banal definitions, and fearlessly forge their inner strength, instead of running from it into an easy life of making men happy.

To assume that women are liberated because they are free to uninhibitedly express pleasure either in deference to the male’s pleasure or because they choose to, is to unceremoniously disregard a woman’s power and psychological complexity, the center of her being, and subsume it into mere carnality.  Such an objectification and reduction of the female experience is a man’s way of evaluating sex, one that too many women, especially those under thirty, buy into under the name of liberation and freedom of expression.

There is usually a distinction, in our post-Enlightenment Western minds, between ourselves and those “backwards” countries where women are covered up and are “powerless.”  Westerners frequently view  the repression of the hijab or even “female circumcision” as indicative of our socially progressive values and intellectual development.  But I’m am not certain that we’ve been liberated from domination’s perversity into something more substantive and equal, rather, we’re just playing out the same stuff with greater “freedom.”  It’s still the woman’s body which is subordinated for the male’s status quo, whether it is through the exploitation of sexuality or the repression of it.  In this country, women still make twenty five percent less than their male co-workers, and presumably equal work for equal pay is one of the most important status markers.

To this writer, Jenna and Studly are simply gross caricatures of the banal and meaningless, the theater of erotic absurdity.  They are to erotic complexity what fundamentalist religion is to spirituality; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and at the core, psychologically underdeveloped, emotionally stunted, and intellectually vapid.  They express nothing liberated, developed, or meaningful; rather, they are simply painful reminders to their neighbor that women still haven’t a clue as to their own power, and men continue to be all too happy to exploit female sexuality for themselves.  Neither education nor religion seems to reign in these predispositions.  Rather, a quality of character is required of both genders if they are to move beyond the merely commonplace into a more fully human sexual experience.

I hope to augment these thoughts at some time; I simply offer the above as my visceral reaction to “my neighbor’s sex life.”

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