HarperCollins
What is love? In her new memoir Sex With Shakespeare, New York-based journalist Jillian Keenan doesn’t claim to have a definitive answer – but it’s a safe bet that Eurodance musician Haddaway’s famous line, “Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more…” wouldn’t be it.
Keenan is a spanking fetishist. A spanking obsessive, even, by her own admission: “all day, every day, for my entire life,” she says, “I’ve thought about spankings.” She describes her fetish as in fact her sexual orientation, “an innate, unchosen and lifelong centre of my identity,” vastly more important to her than any other form of erotic activity.
Keenan first outed herself as a fetishist in 2012 in the New York Times, where she published a confessional essay about her sexual development: kinky fantasies that began in early childhood, a relationship in late adolescence with a fellow spanking enthusiast, years of self-denial and repression after that relationship ended, and her eventual revelation of her desires to her then fiancé, now husband. Funny and insightful, Sex With Shakespeare elaborates on that history and interweaves it with a lively discussion of the author’s other obsession: the plays of William Shakespeare.
The Bard and BDSM are linked for Keenan because she senses that in the discomfiting depths of both she may find clues about how to love. Her grappling with that problem – the nature of love, and what it has to do with sex, particularly non-normative sex – gives her memoir the quality of an ongoing personal search.
She describes her spanking fetish as her sexual orientation, ‘an innate, unchosen and lifelong centre of my identity’
She admits that when, for instance, she interprets A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Helena as a half-fledged sexual masochist, she’s seeing not just what she wants to see but also what’s helpful for her to see. In Keenan’s treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, they become instruments of self-knowledge, to be actively used by the seeking reader who encounters them.
By juxtaposing the plays and kink, Keenan frames sexual behaviour as performance – a performance that can be as much about language as about the body. “It’s not really physical, this thing we do,” she tells a fellow fetishist. “It’s wordplay. That’s the part that matters.”
The language of kinky role play, like the poetry of Shakespeare, itself gives pleasure: “Obedience. Discipline. Authority. Accountability. Respect. Punishment. Those are good words. Someone out there, I promise you, is masturbating to that list of words right now.” For a person wired like Keenan, that language alone is almost sex. When exchanged with a partner, it can create an explosive intimacy.
But is that intimacy love? Keenan is reluctant to affirm too close a link between overwhelming sexual connection and what sustains married life, for example. Sex With Shakespeare includes a portrait of Keenan’s own marriage and the romance that led to it, full of light and laughter.
The language of kinky role play, like the poetry of Shakespeare, itself gives pleasure
When she confesses her fetish to her game but “vanilla” (i.e. non-kinky) fiancé after they’ve dated for many years, he accepts it and tries to learn to satisfy her needs. They make a great team – supportive, affectionate – even if their bedroom preferences aren’t a perfect match. Her most sexually intense relationship, on the other hand, had been blighted by deceptions and at least one moment of non-consensual violence.
As drawn in prose, Keenan’s marriage gives the impression that it’s possible for the erotic and the companionable to be lastingly reconciled. So it may be. But to the extent that her memoir frames this marriage as the mature form of love, Keenan subtly demotes another vision of romance: passionate, often difficult, sometimes even quite dark, but intoxicating and transformative. Antony and Cleopatra’s love, say, that would trade an empire for a kiss.
That kind of love, inseparable from sexual need, may not always form a stable basis for lifelong union. Yet it may also be among the most profound human experiences – and one of which Shakespeare was singularly aware
At its best, kink brings to light in language this alternative vision of the erotic. It names the darkness, the ugliness, the violence that can abide in sex; when done responsibly, it deprives them of their toxicity but preserves the vulnerability they evoke.
Like Shakespeare’s plays, kink can be an intense and beautiful mode of beholding the world through words, of reconciling the world’s brutality through a tenderness that refuses to deny it but accepts and transcends it. At its best, Sex With Shakespeare lets us see that possibility.
La estructura económico-empresarial del kirchnerismo se derrumba junto con su jefa. O antes que ella. El pedido del fiscal Gerardo Pollicita para que citen a Cristóbal López a declaración indagatoria podría constituir la antesala de su procesamiento por evasión impositiva. Lázaro Báez ya está en la cárcel de Ezeiza, ahora procesado por el juez Sebastián Casanello. Martín Báez acompañará a su padre en la cárcel luego de la indagatoria a la que fue convocado para los primeros días de mayo. López y Báez fueron los empresarios elegidos por el matrimonio Kirchner como socios o como testaferros de sus bienes. La política santacruceña indica a López como socio y a Báez como testaferro.
