Free speech as a legal concept only guarantees you the right to speak. It doesn’t guarantee you the right to be heard, it doesn’t guarantee you the right to be agreed with, it certainly doesn’t guarantee you the right for your speech to not be challenged by someone else’s speech, and most importantly of all, it doesn’t mean you can’t suffer consequences if and when your free speech is used to cause harm to someone. Which is exactly what sexual harassment, racial slurs, and verbal bigotry are. That’s not censorship. That’s fairness.
Contact with another person reminds you that you are also a person, and implies that someone cares about you as such… [it] reminds you that you have a body, a fact you are trying very hard to forget.
Today’s slut is responsible, educated, and confident; she’s sexually adventuresome and won’t live by society’s random constraints on her personal sexual behavior. If she’s of a mind to pick up a guy in a club, take him into the bathroom and blow him, then she’ll do it. If a woman she meets at a professional conference asks her back to the room for a nightcap, she can accept understanding (hoping?) that it might turn into a ribald, lesbian romp. She fucks, but does so safely, responsibly, and consensually.
I was completely, deeply committed; I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off Esmond all weekend. I had watched the Scotts succumb to his extraordinary charm, like trees slowly falling before the wind. Although Esmond was the youngest person in the party, he had seemed like a star around which everything revolved. A wind, a star, he represented to me all that was bright, attractive and powerful, and I did wonder what he thought of me. There had been one slight indication; one night the party at Cousin Dorothy’s had played a primitive sort of parlor game, then popular, in which each guest gave the others marks for various qualities — beauty, sense of humor, intelligence, sex appeal and so forth. The scores were added and announced, and the papers kept anonymous. Terrified of being discovered, I had gone down in my dressing gown after everyone else was asleep to salvage the crumpled sheets from the wastebasket. I discarded two neatly penned papers as Scott products; another, in a spidery and old-fashioned hand, must be Cousin Dorothy’s; and I recognized my own. That left an untidy penciled scrawl, in which I had got straight “10’s” — the top mark. This must be Esmond’s paper. Other than that I had no clue.
I will remember your small room, the feel of you, the light in the window, your records, your books, our morning coffee, our noons, our nights, our bodies spilled together, sleeping, the tiny flowing currents, immediate and forever. Your leg, my leg, your arm, my arm, your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.
