Like Water for Chocolate

So I'm thinking about sex and chocolate and thought this image was in some way appropriate. Obviously, its not just me and Laura Esquival who associate the two.

According to Italian researchers, women who eat chocolate regularly have a better sex life than those who deny themselves the treat. Those consuming the sugary snack had the highest levels of desire, arousal and satisfaction from sex.

(Source: The Times
Date: 14 November 2004)

'In most countries chocolate is associated with romance, and with good reason, it was thought by the Aztec's to have aphrodisiac qualities, invigorating men and making women less inhibited. So when it was first introduced to Europe, it's small wonder that chocolate quickly became the ideal gift for a man to bestow on a loved one.'

(www.globalchefs.com)

More specifically,

Chocolate contains substances called Phenylethylamine and Seratonin, both of which (put simply), are mood lifting agents found naturally in the human brain. They are released into the nervous system by the brain when we are happy and when we are experiencing feelings of love, passion or lust. This causes rapid mood change, a rise in blood pressure and increasing heart rate, inducing those feelings of well being, bordering on euphoria usually associated with being in love. (www.globalchefs.com)

So chocolate can make us feel we are in love. This makes me wonder about the phrase "in love" and the feelings we associate with it. They are so inherently temporary, and yet "falling in love" seems to be what we are looking for according to most media representations of romance. But what happens next? Why do all fairy tales end with happily ever after when the couple is finally together? Why must the lovers finally die in Like Water for Chocolate? Is it because once the chocolate feeling wears off, we don't know what to do with the story? I'd like more stories about how falling in love turns into another love, but would that just not be exciting and euphoric enough?

More Love

Love is easily the most empty cliche, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion--because hatred is involved in it too--Toni Morrison

The Beatles (below) sing that "all you need is love," which attests to the power of the emotion, but also to its tendency toward cliche. Naming her novel, Love, is risky for Toni Morrison because of this tendency. However, the novel moves so quickly into the territories of hate, vengefulness, and lust that the title seems almost immediately ironic, or at least complex rather than trite. Morrison's quote above explicitly states that hate is a part of love, something she seems comfortable exploring in this novel. Hate, like love, is passionate, heated. The opposite of love, I think, is indifference, an absence of feeling toward a person. What is so slippery in this novel, though is how easily love slips into hate and how often many other emotions are confused with love.

Junior is a character that in many ways baffles me in this regard. I see no love in Junior. Lust, self-absorption, survival skills, and some self-hatred, but not love. Interestingly though, she embodies the duality of love and hate and its mixed nature in her sexual preferences. She likes to be hurt and to hurt her lover, to come close to death even to experience the thrill of life again. But, it is the tender licking of her foot lollipop by Romen that touches her finally, too late. She has spent the entire novel obsessed with a phantom man, and performing for "his" benefit, rather than seeking love with Romen. Her character is the saddest to me; everything is too late for Junior. She's been indifferent too long.

Here is a list of words I found myself circling in the novel as they repeated themselves:

heart
lust
shame
romance
wicked females
good men
pleasure
afraid
appetite and food
hate
childish yearnings/girlish
apple
snake
trees of various sorts
slut
desire
craving
body
blood
passion

I found the word "love" on p. 194; was this the first and only time it appeared? Even L is never given a name, but she says she is named after the subject of I Corinthians 13, which is Love. I thought maybe Morrison never used the word, but there it is at the very end of the novel. Why there? And then again on p. 199, in L's italicized section. She says,

If such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which of them is starving, which well fed; before they know color from no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mis of surrender and mutiny they can never live without.

And this mix she labels, "a child's first chosen love."

Love

What Kind of Freedom?

Rebecca Walker's essay, "Lusting for Freedom," amazed me the first time I read it. A lot of defensive questions sprang to my mind: How can an 11 year old girl know what she wants? How can assuming personas be a version of freedom? What are the implications of this experience? Why is she not apologizing for her actions?

I admit this because I think it was an important step to understanding this essay and how powerful it can be. What cultural mores are shaping my own reactions to her story and what are they keeping me from being able to hear? I remember sex education when I was eleven and it had nothing to do with pleasure, with exploring our bodies positively. Sex education was a warning and it left the continent of pleasure unexplored, not even on the map. How can we allow for this voice that says: sex is good; I love my body and using my body in this way; sex can be good even when you're young; I am not ashamed.

I am mostly amazed by her forceful voice in this piece. Though she is vulnerable in sharing personal details of her life, she is speaking something radically taboo and unapologetic. Young women deserve to know their bodies as they see fit, and deserve to see sex as a source of pleasure. This flies against all our cultural mores and even our statutory rape laws. This essay makes us think about how we treat young (adolescent and pre-adolescent) women and their rights regarding their own bodies. This widens the scope of the concept of "choice" and womens' reproductive and sexual rights.

In many ways, Anne Koedt's article is dated, but I feel it is still important. I have shared this article with many students now and am no longer surprised to hear them wonder why they didn't learn this information this explicitly when they were in sex ed. They understand the basic female anatomy now, but the myth has continued, and the insult of frigidity also continues. I think it is worthwhile to think about the media images we are exposed to concerning women's pleasure and orgasm. It is also worthwhile to think of "mainstream" pornography and its representaion of women's pleasure. How do women orgasm in these contexts? Is it explicit? Is it necessary?

Most importantly, then, is the female orgasm originating in the clitoris threatening to men? If so, is Ane Koedt right about why?

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Welcome

I do not yet have anything to say, but will this weekend when all of you do. But welcome to the blogosphere . . .