Sleeping Beauty Fights Insomnia
Sex is definitely a problem, Griet decided. And masturbation isn’t a solution. ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action’, Shakespeare wrote four centuries ago. A waste of shame, and Shakespeare wasn’t even a Calvinist.
She lay sweating in the darkness, the sheet clinging to her naked body. These days she was wearing a nightie again – pale blue with a frill round the neck, bought while she was pregnant, chaste as when she was a child. But tonight was one of those humid summer nights, almost subtropical, when you knew that you were living in Africa. Where for centuries people hadn’t been too bothered about clothes.
And because she was naked tonight, she thought about sex. Calvin’s bequest to her people hadn’t made things easier. Was it coincidence that lus, the Afrikaans word for lust, could also be translated as a noose? Give them enough lust and they’ll hang themselves?
She’d pulled up the blue blind at the window, hoping that sometime tonight a breeze would play over her skin. Like a man’s hands, she thought longingly, fingers caressing her hips and thighs, making music with her body. She touched herself, stroking her stomach, tangling her fingers in her pubic hair, feeling the gooseflesh break out. But it wasn’t the same. It would never be the same.
The moonlight shining through the open window made the room look otherworldly. Moonlight is supposed to be silver, but that’s just another modern myth. If you’re tossing and turning, burning in frustration without even the smell of a man, moonlight is grey – blue-grey, lilac-grey in some patches.
Masturbation was still a taboo subject, Griet told herself as she contemplated her body in the moonlight. Even among her friends who had no scruples about discussing sex. If they talked about the Lonely Deed, they retreated into the past tense – as though it were the preserve of schoolchildren, like smoking on the sly – or behind cynicism and mockery. A woman needs a man because a vibrator can’t push a lawnmower, ha ha ha.
Was it because you did it on your own that there was so much shame attached to it? There weren’t many swear words left for the last decade of the twentieth century, but ‘alone’ had to be one of them. ‘Alone’ and ‘Aids’, Griet had realised since she’d been trying to live without a man. To be single was to be a misfit among all the couples around you. It was nothing short of perverse.
She let her hands slide down to her groin, allowed her fingers to stroke the secret skin on the inside of her thighs. The softest, shyest, sweetest skin on a woman’s body, George always said. From here it was only a tongue’s length to the heavenly hors d’oeuvre, the angel on horseback, the muse on Pegasus.
Her male friends all acknowledged that they’d masturbated at school. In every thinkable and unthinkable place: in biology classrooms, in cinemas, even in team competitions in hostel bathrooms. While the girls sitting near them in those biology classrooms and cinemas – the poor respectable girls like Griet – didn’t have the faintest notion that wanking was by far and away the most popular sport among their male classmates.
It was something that she often envied men, the easier relationship they had from early on with their sexual organs. Masturbation could at least familiarise you with the map of your own body before you risked the frightening, uncharted territory of the opposite sex. But for Griet and all her respectable sisters sex was a double-track road from which you strayed more or less accidentally on to the single track of masturbation, not the other way round.
Griet was an adult woman before she first ventured to that mysterious region ‘down under’ by herself. It shows you what becomes of respectable girls, she thought later. It takes an awfully long time before they learn to fly on their own.
Griet was prim and proper at school, hardly aware of her private parts except for the three days of the month when she was fed up because she couldn’t swim with the boys. When the penny finally dropped and she became aware of the powerful attraction this Forbidden Territory held for the opposite sex, she guarded it with the vigilance of a crack commando. These days she wondered whether it had all been worth the trouble, all those years of desperate defensive tactics, in dark cars and on uncomfortable sofas, to keep that virgin membrane inviolate – only to give it over to the enemy of her own free will in the end.
Like South Africa’s vain attempt to hold on to Namibia. Or the Soviet Union trying to separate people with a wall. Nowadays Griet accepted that you can’t cordon off a geographical area in an artificial way, not even your own body.
Her hand was cool against the feverish warmth of her groin. She rubbed her ring finger lightly over her clitoris, drew her middle finger up to the hollow of her navel, spelled out her hunger with an index finger on her stomach. Then she let the witching finger sink slowly down to where she’d grown moist with longing.
As an inhibited schoolgirl she hadn’t been able to thrust even the smallest of Lil-lets – ‘designed by a female gynaecologist for safety’ – into this secret opening. The thought of anything bigger or harder – like a finger designed by a male god – threw her into paroxysms of anxiety. A male sex organ would definitely be a fate worse than death.
What do you do, she’d wondered, panic-stricken, if you get stuck? Two dogs could be dragged to the nearest tap, but two people?
And when she finally laid down her arms at the feet of that young surfer who was riding the waves of success in the business world these days, she was almost disappointed that everything went so smoothly. A few drops of blood later she began to suspect that the fearful barbarian invasion she’d been fighting off for so many years might even become a source of delicious pleasure. Like most late developers, she immediately set about making up for lost time; but, like all respectable girls, she had to burrow out from under a mountain of guilt and old wives’ tales before she could start enjoying sex. And then she was married.
And that is where the story ends.
When the urge for procreation charged in through the front door, sexual pleasure slipped out through the back.
And now that she had been freed from marriage at long last – kicking and screaming all the way – she was frozen in a new nightmare. Just when she thought it was safe to venture into the deep end of sex again, she was frightened off by a monster that made Jaws look like a goldfish. You just can’t win, as her sister Petra always said. You can’t win in a world where something like Aids has become possible.
No one needed devils nowadays. Fear of Aids had created a private hell for every sinner.
This had to be the curse that the thirteenth fairy had laid on modern man. A malevolent maiden who wanted to punish mortals where it would hurt most: sex, the thing that separated earthlings from fairies.
In the last two decades before the year two thousand, this fiendish fairy had decreed, sex will become a more dangerous weapon than the spinning wheel ever was. Sleeping Beauty and everyone around her will live in anxiety, day and night, until life becomes so unbearable that no one can take comfort in sex any more. Humanity will be damned to a sleep of celibacy.
And this time Sleeping Beauty will just have to save herself. With her own hands. For what is left but hope and masturbation?
‘Masturbation, like voyeurism, paedophilia and sadism, is perverted in nature, in other words it is sexual satisfaction other than normal sexual intercourse that takes place within marriage.’ That was where everything had begun this morning, with this item in the newspaper. It had her all but choking on her coffee. It had also started a train of thought she’d tried to stop all day. Then she’d been to a party tonight and that had stoked the fire burning in her.
She stood in the crowded kitchen, a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other, when her friend Anton-the-Advocate put his hands unexpectedly on her hips. She raised the bottle and the glass above her head as he pulled her against him and she laughed, more in surprise than pleasure, as he kissed her left ear.
‘You’re a very erotic woman,’ he said with his mouth against her ear. ‘You’ve got this way of brushing your fanny against the furniture when you walk through a room, as though you want to fuck the chairs and tables.’
Then he laughed too, probably at the shocked expression on her face, and asked her to dance. ‘Light My Fire’, Jim Morrison sang in the living room, sounding far too cool to be set alight. Luckily the music was so loud it was impossible to talk, because she didn’t know what to say. ‘Masculine desire is as much an offence as a compliment’, Simone de Beauvoir had said. Maybe not quite an offence, Griet thought. Heaven knew, she was grateful that there was still someone who found her desirable after her husband had so completely lost interest. But how the hell did you react when you heard something like this from a good friend – a good married friend, someone you’d never contemplated as a prospective bed-mate?
The worst of all was that Anton and Sandra were just about the only couple in her circle of friends whom she’d always regarded as happily married.
He probably only wanted to be nice, she decided. Anyone could see her self-confidence had taken a terrible knock. But the way he danced with her, his hands still on her hips, made her wonder.
She’d always found him attractive, in a boyish way, sunburnt and blond as the surfers of her schooldays. The Doors were still singing ‘Light My Fire’, just as they’d sung twenty years ago at school parties. Her lawyer friends alleged that a woman in the throes of divorce was the easiest prey on earth. She looked Anton straight in the eye, and then she couldn’t fool herself any longer. She danced herself free of his hands. She could never again be the respectable schoolgirl who wouldn’t know when the boy beside her was wanking off.
What if he’d been married to someone else, a devil whispered in her ear, someone she didn’t know? Where were her grandfather’s angels, she wondered, when she really needed them?
Jim Morrison had started singing something else. To burn off the worst of her libido, she danced until she was ready to drop. And to drown her spasms of guilt, she drank hopelessly too much.
And now she lay in the moonlight wishing that someone could help her through this sweaty night.
‘All this the world well knows; yet none knows well: To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.’ Shakespeare said all there was to say about lust, Griet decided, and gave herself up to the mercy of her own hands. Shakespeare probably said all there was to say about anything.