A Little Love Note for You Today, from Lady Chatterley's Lover

I am off doing tedious things but I haven't forgotten about you. I give you this in your day, a passage from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence. It came out in 1928 but in a heavily censored version because it was considered to be so smutty.

In 1930, the comically-named Senator Reed Smoot, opposing an amendment to lift a ban on imported smoot, er, smut, threatened to publicly read indecent passages of imported books in front of the Senate. Which sound less of a threat and more of an awesome promise. (Sadly, in the end, an unrealized promise.)

Said Smoot, before he later presumably retreated to the Senate bathroom to jerk off, "I've not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley's Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"

Anyway to me, Lady Chatterley's Lover is not obscene at all, but rather beautiful really, and smart about what goes down with women during really really good sex. Says the oddly poetic Wikipedia entry on the matter, "The novel is about Constance's realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically." Which...well, yes.

Here 'tis. Try not to think of Senator Smoot during.

She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the old shame died. Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself. She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! This was life! That was how oneself really was. There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

Back soon...

xoxox
jill

ps if you and the bedrock of your nature are feeling a lack of routing by "the phallic hunt of the man" and need some vicarious love, you can read the whole book free on pdf here.

(photo via the lovely Lady Cheeky)