What you need is your own sexual revolution BODY LANGUAGE Jeanette Winterson Sex who needs it? You do. New Year’s resolutions are wasted on diets and good works. Forget the year ahead and make 2002 the year to come. Why do I say this? Not because I want to turn Body Language into a cover version of Cosmo, but because all those anxieties about nicotine and chocolate and weight and ageing yield to one simple solution: sex. I have had my mid-life crisis, so I already go to the gym and I have bought the fast car. I know that’s pathetic, but I don’t see what good it would do me to get old and fat, when both can be avoided as never before. If you are around 40, well, congratulations we are the generation who need not go gentle into that good night. Why not roar into the sunset? Roaring girls need lots of sex because we know that the faster our bodies process life, whether it’s food or toxins or what the world throws at us, the easier it is to stay healthy and feel good. Health on its own is pretty boring feeling good is the key. What is the point of a 30-day detox if all it makes you want to do is hate your family and murder the office dogsbody? The pious among us will say that suffering like a medieval martyr is just penance for a year spent stuffing your tummy with mini Mars bars in front of Blind Date. But why suffer at all? Why not turn every negative into a positive and go into 2002 determined to be who you are? Big question who am I? Not one answered by giving up junk food and oaked Chardonnay. Not answered by losing 10kg. Not answered by getting a better job, or even a better partner. The answer starts with giving out instead of taking in and, curiously enough, that leads us back to sex. We eat too much, we drink too much, we have too much stuff, too many stresses, too many things to do. Ours is a society endlessly consuming, without the energy to process what we consume. Life has to be processed, or it lies in rotting heaps of discarded emotions and unfinished desire. Talk to anyone for half an hour and, once past the platitudes, you come face to face with a mound of frustrations and left-over business.
The therapy boom thrives on left-over business, and while I am not against therapy, I feel that we could all do more for ourselves if we understood the simple principle of processing what we consume. Energy cannot be lost it can only be transformed. We convert food into heat and strength and movement if we have too much, we store it as fat. In a world that bombards us with sensory input, what do we do? If we can’t slough it off, our minds store it just as our bodies do as restlessness, as misery, as all the discontent that clogs modern life. This is not a time to be sluggish. To be fit means just that; fit for life. So I was talking about sex … which is a giving like no other. The exchange of energy offered by sex blasts through layers of accumulation, and starts a flow strong enough to sluice away stagnant emotions. Sure it can be dangerous, but ours is a dangerous world, and the illusion of safety the most dangerous thing in it. If sex becomes a river that bursts its banks and carries you off, please trust that something had to. That’s not what I intend. The wisdom is that sex rarely lasts long enough to make a relationship, but usually long enough to break one. Sex as self-indulgence is as destructive as any other appetite even if it doesn’t make you fat. Sex as energy is full of potential, including the possibility of different kinds of relationships. How many of us have really thought about how we might live? The last time we had a sexual revolution was in the 1960s. Now we can live together without marriage, and sex is something everyone can discuss but is talking about it just another way of consuming it? Sex is the staple of consulting rooms and women’s magazines; men never seem to get enough, women are still faking orgasm. This month will be a print-orgy of how to spice it up/get it back/rekindle it with firelighters, or just steal your best friend’s bloke. I don’t have any advice except desire. Have your gym and a lifetime of cabbage soup. Get the facelift, the job, the toyboy whatever it takes to start shifting things outwards instead of endlessly taking them in. But don’t forget that, maddeningly and mysteriously, what happens in the bedroom can still change everything overnight.