Working
here at the Nerve offices, I’ve found it’s completely natural to have sex on
the brain pretty much always. When you spend your day figuring out the perfect
words to parse the graphic, lovely photos from The Daily Siege, or mining the
Nerve archives for steamy personal essays from years past, and when you are a
sexually frustrated twenty-three year old, yes, you will spend much of your day
thinking about boning.
But
reading Betty
Ross’s essay, Nocturnal
Omissions, I felt a resonance different from the kind I get from reading
hot fiction about gay sex. Because I don’t explicitly remember most of the sex
I’ve had. I tend to chalk it up to having been drunk at the time.
My
friends can regale me with detail after detail of their sex lives, but when my
turn to spill comes around, I usually can’t muster anything more few brief,
qualitative sentences. Ross’ essay explores the idea that sex – despite the
amount of time, energy, and money we spend trying to figure it all out down to
the littlest detail – may not actually be a memorable thing (also, this new
study suggests that it may be true on a biological level):
But in making compelling or attractive
points about the loss of sexual memory, they all miss the point: We don't need
the bells and whistles of high-art fantasy sequences or Hollywood melodrama
to engage in a fantasy about forgetting and sensuality — we live that amnesia
every day. All of us remember less about our sex lives than we do about what it
feels like to stub a toe or what we had for dinner last night. It is an
unspoken truth that no matter how much time we spend obsessing about it, sex —
even without the benefit of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay — is an inherently
forgettable experience.
— Caitlin MacRae
Read
the entire essay here.
