Bad Boys Ravish Our Young Girls, But Violet Gives Willingly

I'm as tired as any woman out there of being treated by men as a sexual commodity to be begged, borrowed or stolen. I'm also tired of giving freely to men who give nothing in return or (the worst) act as if they've gotten away with something. But unlike most women, perhaps, I don't blame it on their base animal natures. [I myself am hardly immune when it  comes to a base animal nature.]  No, for me it became much easier to get along in this world when I was able to ascribe the moronic behavior of These Men to the shitty socialization to which this society subjects us all.

Capitalism has taught us women that our sexuality is a desired commodity to be carefully rationed. In contrast, men are conditioned to try to get something (booty, in this case) for free. We all know what an extremely disagreeable tension this causes. As an extreme example, let's look at what happens in a sex club.  Women get in free most places in Berlin or, in Madrid, pay at most pay 10 euros (with a cocktail typically thrown in).  Men pay five or more times this price, unless accompanied by a woman, which generally at least halves the entry.  It's hardly surprising when inside, many behave like animals -- after all, they've paid for the right.

What sort of attitude does this engender in women?  Getting into a club for free (the eternal ladies' nights) gives us women the rather smug feeling that we're getting away with something.  I'm not sure many of us stop to think how we're being sexually commodified.  Well then, and the men?  I imagine they're very aware of the true cost of a "lay" -- so many euros to get in, so many minutes of cheap lines and stupid small talk before a woman loosens up, so many drinks to get her well lubricated (pun unintended), and, above all, a tangible chance of failure in the end.  Male readers, feel free to weigh in on this topic, but if I were you, I think I'd find it frustrating and unfair. Even so, you know those clubs, don't you, as you seem to show up as if on cue, within a half-hour of the close of ladies' night hours?

Sigh.  Does it really need to be this way?  The insane hormonal rollercoaster on which I currently find myself tells me clearly I am meant to get as much of that "good thang" as I possibly can before my time's up. My intellect tells me that I, and women like me, are prisoners of this system just as much as men are, and it will always be extremely difficult or impossible for us to freely and unselfconsciously act on and enjoy our own sexuality.

Given the personality with which I've been saddled, it really is so hard for me to give up without a fight. The Pirate says, "there you go, moving forward, creating new imprints and conditioning - consciously, not just the random hubris of a mechanical system of lowest common denominators".  Guilty as charged! I keep thinking and puzzling and pushing the envelope pretty much just as far as I dare.  And that's because there's a reason that's much, much bigger than just myself.

In this regard, the other week I consulted my dearly beloved Ex, who was visiting me in Madrid and like me seems to have spent the last few years observing first-hand some really horrendous sexual pathology.  My question to him was how much pathology is due to this mentality of sexuality as some sort of precious limited resource, instead of something that should be as free and abundant as the air we breathe.  Because here's the crux of the matter: if eschewing our shitty socialization would get rid of even a fraction of the sexual abuse of children and women, shouldn't we advocate it?  Militantly?  I really rather think the answer is yes.

Thin Ice

Last Thursday night, The Gallego invited me to his laser/synthesizer show near Potsdamer Platz in a beautiful old building with a great view overlooking a large reflecting pool. Looking out, I couldn't help notice someone playing on the ice, running and sliding, and I thought of my ice skates which are still in California, probably rusting away. I slipped out after the show during the schmoozing-with-fans routine and went to check out the ice. It was maybe a foot and a half deep and frozen completely solid, so off I went, skidding and sliding across, following the ice skate marks. What I somehow didn't notice in the cold darkness of -8 degrees Celsius was that something had changed, and suddenly I tumbled into knee-deep water. I had enough momentum that I had to put my hands down to avoid falling and ended up soaked up to my upper thighs and past my elbows.

The cold didn't hit immediately, bundled up as I was with three layers of clothes. But every American read To Build a Fire in high school, and we know that there is only one option in such cases: to keep moving, quickly, definitively. So I hustled back onto solid ice and off to the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn, passing three second-generation teenaged boys (clearly of immigrant extraction for the liveliness with which they were laughing their heads off and calling out to me). But I had no time to interact; after the relative warmth of the S-Bahn, I would have to deal with a tram that runs only every ten minutes. As (bad) luck would have it, that tram was just pulling away as I exited the S-Bahn station, so I struck out on foot, covering 3 stations until the next one arrived.

Life, in my case, has been something like that reflecting pool -- solid ice for the first quarter century, then an ever-increasing series of cold, hard dumps into reality. Said reality has been difficult of late: my oldest friend from California murdered just a few months ago in Mexico... me turning out to be not so special to that special someone... and, unbelievably, my oldest friend in Berlin kidnapped by pirates in Somalia a couple of weeks ago.

I made it back to the Lively German's place where I was house-sitting, coat frozen into a solid sheet of ice up to my waist, boots squishing out water that hadn't frozen, solely due to the warmth robbed from my body. It was into the shower with me, feet too numb to feel the warm water for a good five minutes, thighs beet red with cold, sensation slowly returning, and with sensation, thoughts. I put my thoughts down here, on electronic paper, because they are so sad, and sad people just don't seem to move fast enough, before the ice finally closes over their heads.

Ship - Wrecked

Relationship, friendship, partnership... So many of the -ships can be so fraught with so many expectations and implicit (or explicit) demands, wouldn't you agree? Simple acquaintanceship is the first level for any sort of bond, and I've always been fond of playing with the idea of the point at which it becomes something more. But acquaintanceship itself is more than anything a product of modern human life and the anonymity that comes with overpopulation. When we, as early humans, were functioning at the tribal level, we would have been intimately tied to our fellow tribal members from birth.

Something a lover said recently prompted me to think about how ridiculously broad the term friendship can be. I turned to my trusty Internet search engine to see what more orderly thinkers than I might have come up with. Let's consider, then, contemporary Internet wisdom on friendship. It would seem that we are to visualize a three-point scale: something akin to casual friend followed by steady or good friend and topped by dear or best friend. I suppose a similar scale could be applied to lovers. The casual lover, the steady lover, the dear love. Shall we call these, then, sexualships? I have casual sexualships with various men, but good, steady sexualships become rather more tricky, don't they?

Sigh. What a hierarchy of -ships we've created; there seems to be no end to our scales and rules. But despite it, we're always searching for more terms. "Significant other", "longtime companion", "compañero". And then the sadly sexist terms of bygone years: "better half" or, the worst of all, "ball and chain". After all this, I think I want to forget about the term relationship entirely!

Partnership is the only -ship that is flexible and broad enough to interest me. Its root is the Latin partitio (portion), by which we are to understand a shared endeavor. It applies as well to how ancient humans functioned in tribes as it does to a business endeavor or to my relationship with the mother of my goddaughter. And what is a partner to me? That person's gender matters not, nor whether we are sleeping together, and certainly not whether one of us has said those three silly words that seem to cause so much grief in our modern world. [I'm referring to "I love you."] My dear ones are my partners. Their woes are my woes. Their joys are my joys. Their homes are my home. And my home and woes and joys are just as much, always and eternally, theirs, no matter how much time and space may separate us.

In contrast, those of you poor souls whose mothers never taught you how to share will soon enough be asked to disembark from the Good Ship Katchita. Because this skipper's seen more than enough *ship*wrecks in her career sailing the high seas.

Besetzerin meines Körpers

The Lively German and I were conversing the other day when I, as occasionally happens, produced something notable in German. Although he questioned my meaning, I wasn't sure it was an error. The large amount of schnapps we had consumed had, as usual, loosened up my mind quite a bit. I don't remember the exact context but I do remember using Besetzerin (from besetzen, to occupy) as opposed to Besizterin (from besitzen, to own), in reference to my own body.

English has of course neither the ability to play with gender (in German I'm using the female form of the word), nor such an intriguing single-letter difference. This is what etymonline.com, my favorite etymology dictionary, has to say: *Occupy, Latin occupare "take over, seize, possess, occupy," from ob "over" + intensive form of capere "to grasp, seize". *Own, Old English agen "one's own," lit. "possessed by," from Proto-Germanic, aigana- "possessed, owned". Interestingly, in my schizophrenic mother tongue [shall we be Latin-based or shall we be Germanic?], the words don't even come from the same roots.

The following day, it struck me that most people probably feel much more a part of, or even wedded to, their bodies than I. My family is phenotypically quite odd; many of my relatives are physically unattractive people, but then on occasion there is one who seems to have stolen the entire allotment of good-looking genes for an entire generation. I'm one of them. I've written before about the uneasy relationship I have with this body of mine (see here). With every year that passes, as I experience only a fraction of the aging that I by all rights should be going through, I feel less and less comfortable with it. Perhaps this explains why I feel like I occupy this body instead of owning it.

Although I've been the longest and most present occupier (the one who holds the keys), many others have roamed its labyrinths. I try to be selective about the visitors, but tend toward egalitarian and hospitable impulses. And so the visitors span nearly all social classes and numerous nationalities. Even I have the feeling that I haven't seen the whole of it; I roam endlessly as if in a dream, poking around among bricked-up dead-end passageways, wringing my hands over the rooms where the keys have long ago gone missing.

Human Nature

My father, having neither the talent of a theoretical physicist, nor the inclination to contribute to a field that brought us the atom bomb, ended up a college physics teacher and film reviewer. He started with physics teaching films, and I have happy pre-adolescent memories of putting up the screen as my father threaded the 35 mm film projector in our living room. As I approached puberty, he shifted focus to films on war and peace, producing two definitive guides during the Reagan years. I started blogging about four years ago, at the same age as when he produced the first guide; his second came at my current age. It was a time fraught with nuclear terror: the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' famous doomsday clock marking the imminent danger of world annihilation.

How the world has changed in the single generation between him and me! Our doomsday of the decade is global warming, a challenge we may find much less easy to disarm. The disaster of the post-agricultural human animal shadows our every move: strife and destruction define our hugely overpopulated societies. The post-agricultural population boom and its attendant loss of tribe and ever-dwindling sense of personal accountability and responsibility, well, it's enough to drive me to despair. How did we come so quickly to this end, after only a few paltry thousand years of development?

Humans, being simplistic creatures, look for simplistic explanations. But the topic I've chosen for today, our capacity for evil, is anything but simple. We can all agree on the evilness of the usual genocidal maniacs that are always trotted out, mostly likely due to the sheer numbers of people they disposed of. But it's not quite that simple, is it, because my ex, with his usual perception, quotes Stalin: "one man's murder is a tragedy but one hundred thousand is a statistic." Many say Stalin killed even more than Hitler but thoughts of Stalin just don't seem to make the blood of the average detached observer boil. Political exiles slowly starving in a place most of us find impossible to picture, the Russian Gulag, well, it's just not as visceral as the images we all carry with us, of truckloads of skin and bones during the Holocaust, or the piles of skulls from Idi Amin's Uganda.

The images of victims of various genocides, napalm, carpet bombings and the A-bomb form for me an endless collage of adolescent memory. But the most crystal clear of all is my image of a teenaged Katchita sitting in a darkened living room with her beloved father, a mature man of 40-plus, tears running down his face, as he screens the episode of The Ascent of Man where Bronowski, a Polish-German-American Jew who lost many of his relatives at Auschwitz, visits the camp. Nicely dressed in a dark suit and dress shoes, he slowly wades into one of the ponds at Auschwitz where his relatives were gassed. As he reflects on the abuse of power, he crouches down, thrusts his hands into the water and brings up the muck from the bottom, rich humic matter fed by all those ashes from all those ovens. In the 30-some years since, I have never seen a grown man come so close to being reduced to sobbing.

My friend Bob probably suffered about as much as one can, but, I hope, no longer than a few short hours. His children are still suffering, and their suffering is substantial and probably will be prolonged. And Bob's friends are suffering though our suffering is certainly not at the same level nor will it be as prolonged as his children's. I can ask myself, do I feel as sick at heart about what was done to Bob as I do about what was done by Pol Pot? It's a tough question, because the face of my friend is there with me when I start awake in the middle of the night but the rest are images from a past that largely predates me. During the second Iraq war, however, I remember the same night terrors, the waking, knowing my government was murdering innocent civilians and there was nothing I could do about it. It was Al-Jeezera that gave us the images of the wounded and dying children that humanized the evil we were committing. In contrast, such images were absent from Rwanda, the first genocide of my adult life, probably the most rapid and occult in history.

If evil is, definitionally, the intentional infliction of prolonged and intense human suffering, then I believe our concept of evil is primarily about the images rather than the numbers. It's about fates that we can viscerally imagine at the personal level, that we feel in our entrails. Torture. Violent rape. Cruel abuse of the weak and defenseless. Humiliation and powerlessness coupled with stark fear. Perhaps evil has more than anything to do with the imagination of the survivors and their need to tell the tale. It is, quite simply, something so vivid and so visceral that they, and those who hear them, can never be free of it.

Día de los Muertos

Today was the Day of the Dead, which is an important day in all of Latinamerica and of course Spain. People in Mexico create elaborate shrines, in Nicaragua flock to the cemeteries to beautify the graves of their departed, and in Spain, party all night long (not that that's particularly different from any other holiday in Spain, of course). I happen to be in Berlin, with its paucity of Catholic churches. But the historic Marienkirche in Alexanderplatz, which somehow survived both World War II and the DDR, has real votive candles for the public to light and that's where I ended up today.

I lit a candle for Bob who was brutally murdered in Ensenada two weeks ago; I think he would have appreciated the gesture. The tourists, in contrast, didn't seem to understand what the nice-looking middle-aged woman was doing kneeling in one of the pews off to the side, crying into her hands on a Tuesday afternoon. I attributed it to their lack of culture, don't you know.

Since losing Bob, it's been difficult to think about much more than the question of evil. It's a debate in which I've long engaged: trying to pin down the thin line between true evil (so intangible and difficult to define) and personal weakness (that I often think, in its tired banality, causes as much harm to others). There's no doubt that what was done to Bob was truly evil, but it was evil on a pedestrian scale, without meaning or significance. In Germany of course one always and forever thinks about the quintessential evil of Hitler, and then the German people and their collaboration. A book that strongly affected me, again recommended by my ex, is Hans Fallada's Jeder Stirbt Fur Sich Allein (Every Man Dies Alone). There is always some way to resist evil, however small.

Tonight I remember two imperfect men who resisted as best they could, consistently, clear-headedly and actively. My father who died at home twenty years ago, with my mother and me at his side. And Bob whose cruel death will never supplant the example he set for the rest of us. Rest in peace, queridos míos.

The Moviegoer (Reprise)

Here in Berlin I'm house-sitting for the Pirate during part of his extended visit back "home". In browsing his bookshelf in detail, I found Querelle, which set off an entire cascade of nostalgia. I remember seeing that film as I first went off on my own (to live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) at the tender age of 17. It was a hot-bed of resistance to the racist conservatism of the state that, election-after-election, returned the racist rabid anti-communist Jesse Holmes to the U.S. Senate. Chapel Hill was filled with punks, communists, queers and activists of all colors. Never much of a joiner, but rather an enthusiastic and energetic participant, I bounced eclectically between campaigns and crusades, whose breadth and diversity helped me define the kind-and-gentle anarchy that came to characterize my socio-political outlook. I spent as much of the rest of my time in the U.S. that I could in such enclaves: Ithaca, New York, West Los Angeles, Berkeley/Oakland, avoiding the vast American mid-section like a plague.

But let me get back to waxing nostalgic about film. Chapel Hill had an art film theater, called the Carolina Theater, that I haunted that first summer when I knew next to no one there. Coming from a shit town in northern Pennsylvania with a single-screen theater whose most memorable fare was the Bad News Bears, I was, quite simply, enchanted. The Carolina seems, sadly, to have closed in 2005; this report indicates it's been replaced by that bastion of mediocre homogeneity, The Gap store. It's been nearly 30 years now, and the movies I remember from then, according to IMDB, are scattered through the period of a year, such that I couldn't have seen them in just one summer. But memory is like that, it distills and intensifies, such that in my mind, in the summer of 1983, I saw Fassbinder's Querelle, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo and Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay in The Dresser.

Walking into The Carolina for an afternoon matinee anytime I damn well pleased was the purest expression of my new-found adult-hood, hundreds of miles away from my overbearing mother. It was freedom personified. To this day, leaving a theater and walking into the light of day with a foreign film still playing in my head, gives me a feeling nearly as delicious as that beautiful Carolina summer when I was so fresh and young and there was everything to discover.

Girlfriend Material

Are you aware, dear readers, that not only is there research aplenty showing that we women are measurably more attractive when we are ovulating (see this fascinating article) -- breasts firm and lift, waists narrow and faces glow -- but we also engage in behaviors that range from dressing more provocatively to being careless about safe sex? At this very moment, I'm contemplating a careful scientific study to measure the likelihood a woman ends up in a nightclub the two or three days she's ovulating as opposed to spending her period eating ice cream and watching Desperate Housewives reruns.

Last year a lover of mine told me women could be divided into girlfriend material or something that I understood to be the opposite (shall we say, ahem, boffing material?) . . . ! I asked him exactly how he could tell and he said, "just look at how she's dressed." To a woman (or at least this woman), that sounds so patently absurd that I can almost feel a rant coming on.

But I'm going to suppress the urge and finally introduce a book, Sex at Dawn, that I first gobbled up when back in the Bay Area last October. It may very well be one of the most important books of the century, although it's dangerous to say so only 11 years into a new one. It's important to emphasis that I'm basing this judgment on the authors' ideas alone, as it's sadly written in a hyped American vernacular style that makes me shudder to think about what form translation into any other language/culture would take.

If you take my recommendation, then, please do your best to filter out all the unfortunate references to American pop culture and think about the real meat of the message. It's important, so important that I finally feel like there's a book out there that does what The Ethical Slut and Open Marriage just didn't do for me. It emphasizes that we humans actually don't really have a choice; that it's not just some of us choosing to be bounders or cads, loose or slutty. On the contrary, we as humans are designed to be unapologetically non-monogamous, promiscuously sharing everything we have, including our bodies.

When I despair of how far off-track we have gotten (girlfriend material, indeed!), I now have an intellectual space to which I can repair. I can remind myself that it's not only a good thing to want sex, but it's an important way for me to build bonds of mutual support with the people who matter to me, who represent my community. And when These Men don't understand that I am happy to give freely but that in return I expect them to behave as responsible members of this community, it helps to remind myself that I'm part of an exclusive group of intellectuals who realize that this species has apocalyptically, irredeemably lost its way. We've evolved ourselves straight into our own private hell.

Well I, for one, intend to spend the rest of my time in this hell of ours fighting to be the minx, harridan, Jezebel, temptress and vixen, as well as the paragon, madonna and goddess that millions of years of human evolution intended me to be. The paperback version of Sex at Dawn is hot off the presses with newly added material, my ex informs me. As both of my hardback copies seem to be perpetually loaned out, I'm putting in my order for the paperback, and it's staying on my bedside table, to be consulted and quoted whenever one of These Men tries to make me feel bad about my (and Mother) Nature.

Einmal ist Keinmal

My ex recently pointed out to me that I'd never read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, although of course I saw the film long ago. I picked it up at East of Eden the last time I was in Berlin. Perhaps the most famous quote is Kundera's interpretation of this German proverb, Einmal ist Keinmal. He wrote, “[w]hat happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

I suddenly realized that this perfectly describes my longing for the fourth dimension. In a couple of short months I'll mark the twentieth anniversary of my father's death. These have been two decades of relentless change, a tireless quest to cheat time. There are many ways to do so, of course, by changing countries, whole continents, languages or even entire identities.

Time travelers like myself mark our true ages only internally. To all outward appearances we are years younger. In the two decades I've spent doing this, I've only apparently aged one. It's exhausting, though, and at times I have the sense that I will soon come face-to-face with the washed-up, wrinkled old woman who I should, by all rights, be well on my way to becoming. For now, though, I'm ovulating, and the mirror reflects a glow of beauty from years past, that sometimes still takes me by surprise. The necrotic cynicism that is so apparent to me there inside my head, falls away for an instant and I think, hey, Katchita, sometimes you really do somehow manage to pull it off.

Berlin, dahling, I will be back in your arms in a few short days, and together we will be the forever young, the forever beautiful, of those who never stop reinventing ourselves.

Chastity

Most dictionaries of name origin agree that mine derives from the Greek katharos, meaning pure. They go on to note, however, that there is some doubt as to whether the source instead may have been aikia meaning torture. Finally, there is a possible relation to Hecate, the Greek goddess of magic. Saint Aikaterina of fourth-century Alexandria was one of the earliest recorded with this name; she was born a "pagan" but died a Christian martyr. Depending on my mood, I could certainly think of my life as magical and of myself as a goddess, but there are definitely times when it is, well, pure torture! Right now, it's the purity angle that I'm working the hardest.

Whenever I go through periods of celibacy induced by the extreme despair brought on by the behavior of These Men (plus spending so much of the winter in gloomy Berlin, which nicely lowers my sex drive), it works well to visit pristine mountain towns on the Camino de Santiago where I can easily picture ascetics engaging in extended bouts of self-flagellation. I devoutly cross myself with holy water while lighting candles to my dear departed, picturing them looking down on me from heaven, content with this new leaf that I've turned over. [I do, naturally, instead of the recommended euro coin, put in 10 cents because I'm damned if the Catholic Church will profit from this pilgrim! A 10-cent coin launched into the collection box with conviction and a good flick of the wrist will resonate just as well as one euro.]

I'll conclude this post by regaling my readers with a list of some of my favorite synonyms: austere, celibate, clean, continent, controlled, decent, decorous, immaculate, innocent, inviolate, modest, proper, prudish, quiet, refined, restrained, simple, spotless, stainless, subdued, unaffected, unblemished, uncontaminated, undefiled, unstained, unsullied, unwed, vestal, virginal, virtuous, wholesome. Santa Katchita is back to wish you all an Easter full of appropriately heavenly thoughts.

Poets and Prophets or Porsches and Pretty Boys?

There was a time in my life, in Los Angeles, I suppose, when the arm of some famous movie producer is where I well could have ended up, dripping in jewels, with enough shoes to fill up the artfully designed pool in the backyard. I've been paraded down the main drag of Berlin in the sweetest little black Mercedes convertible and wisked out of muggy Madrid in a BMW on a fast track to the Spanish North Coast. But I soon dispatched the respective owners of those cars, as I have the few pretty boys with whom I've dallied, more than anything, in the spirit of social research.

In my 20s, I used to dream of disfiguring accidents that would rid me of this ridiculously fresh apple-pie face and incongruous bombshell of a body that have absolutely nothing to do with the strange creature that inhabits my head. In my 30s I came to some sort of uneasy truce with my looks, convinced they wouldn't last much longer. Well into my 40s, I'm still waiting for them to fade, because I'll tell you, this forever-young appearance is getting to be a real drag.

It's the last night of a pretty awful year, and what did my in-box have waiting for me today? I quote: "for gods sake! you could life [sic] like a queen and have a bunch of sporty guys right in your bed. you, like most women, don't realise the power you have. alone that perfect pair of tits can get you a wealthy guy and a mercedes sports car. drop the fucking morals and enjoy life."

Sigh. Is there anything I care less about than cars? So instead of the Hollywood glitterati, it was the poets and freaks in the West LA literary scene that I ended up with. After we headed north to the Bay Area, I was fond of vamping at parties, declaring I'd squandered my best years on my ex. But I think not somehow, just as I think these four years on my own in Europe have represented a much-needed journey for me. I seem to hear ever more clearly the prophets calling my name.

They Say It's Your Birthday

I'm nearing four years in Europe, but oddly, I've never spent any time in August in Berlin. This year I've remedied that situation, for the last week of the month, at least, which means this is the first time I've spent my birthday here. My times in Berlin and Madrid have become so intertwined that it's difficult to say exactly how that time has split out between the two. I'd have to say Berlin's probably still slightly ahead, but it will soon even out as Madrid finally starting to feel a bit like home makes it more comfortable to spend longer stretches of time there without that longing to get away, namely to Berlin. It still feels best to be in Berlin, but it's always been clear to me that one country would not be enough. The question will be, with time, whether two will be sufficient. I'm pretty sure I could manage three...

This year's birthday was one of the best I've had; I have that feeling of having finally become that interesting woman I always wanted to be. Blogging over these last (nearly) three years has been therapeutic, a stripping down to the bone, that has allowed me to re-invent myself as an iconoclastic American ex-pat, the optimistic misanthrope who is, despite her best efforts, constantly engaged by this frustratingly crazy world of ours. It's good to have celebrated this special birthday in the city that I certainly never ever would have predicted I'd grow to love so much.

Here's yet another reason to love it: the world's first airport to become a rollerblade park (as far as I know). The weird historical redundancies in Berlin yield some very cool public spaces (Mauer Park, East-Side Gallery, the Bernaurstraße Gedenkstätte). But this is the coolest of them all, photographed on one of a number of glorious early-September days with skies as big as Montana's.

Simply Irresistible

I always used to advise my women friends who lamented their bad luck with men, that as soon as they stopped giving a damn, they'd have to beat them off with a stick. I'm holding to that conclusion, as even at my advanced age, I'm finding it re-confirmed before my very eyes. My new indifference has them circling thick as sharks. In the last two weeks or so, the barrage has been nearly constant and I've been surprised with my guard down on several occasions. In the most extreme case, an older Spanish man grabbed my arm at my favorite salsa club in Madrid, as my date was in the restroom, and told me he simply had to see me (and my smile) again!? In another, in a group of new friends, a man I'd never met before, there in front of everyone, declared his burning desire to dance the tango with me. Phew, what's that about? Out of necessity I've dusted off and oiled the old body armor and sharpened my sword.

I am quite certain this works in the opposite direction as well, meaning women to men. Indeed, the other day, I was comparing notes with Mr. Incredible, who has resurfaced as a minor character on the big screen of my life. He'd made a very similar comment about feeling completely indifferent and the women being thick as thieves. It would seem that both men and women love a challenge. The mystique of the unattainable: I've got it, for the moment at least, and I'm damn well going to flaunt it. Dangerous Curve Ahead: sharp tongue/sarcastic mind.

Forty

As any Catholic, good or otherwise, knows, this is a special number in the Bible. Moses in the wilderness, Noah on the arc, and any number of various other rogues passed off as saints, bore their particular travails for forty days, after which they were variously enlightened or delivered from their trials. For me, the forty day point represents something a bit different, as that's when the No Sex or Bad Sex question starts to rear its particularly repellent head. It's a question that I always face with equanimity early on, completely convinced that this time, I won't cede. And I have to admit this time it really is going quite well; it's been a good long time since I've felt this level of indifference to the penile-bearing among us. Indifference being, of course, infinitely superior to my more usual aversion or disdain: these being, obviously, strong emotions, and strong emotions being at the root of the problem. No, this time it's indifference that I'm savoring, to keep me squarely on the straight and narrow. Is this, then, the much-celebrated shift that women have to look forward to in their, well, forties? Because, hello Lawd, there's a sinner here, camped out in her own little wilderness, who could use a little bit of deliverance...!

K is for Kafka

In yet another of the strange twists and turns in which my life seems to delight, I found myself this past weekend in Prague, in the very same hotel (the Hilton) that was the scene of one of the strangest experiences of my life a year and a half ago. I try to steer a wide berth around this sort of four- or five-star business/luxury U.S. chain hotel, the kind that are somehow supposed to define having "made it". But in neither this case nor the last was I the one in the driver's seat; I was just along for the ride. Approaching the hotel, as it became increasingly clear it was the same as before, I can hardly describe my sensations, other than that I was seriously channelling Kafka (and what better place than the city of his birth?)!

Although the first night was pretty sleepless, fortunately there was no repeat of my temporary amnesia of before. I'm now safely back and ensconced in the bosom of Berlin, and the odd feelings have passed, of being at risk of somehow losing myself entirely. Prague was cold and rainy and packed full of tourists, giving me the sensation of a city best avoided (just as Barcelona does). Although I went up to the castle both of the days I was there (how could I not?), the magic of that beautiful October weekend in 2008 had somehow faded. I'm left pondering whether some things may be best de-mystified. But not Kafka, never Kafka, whose Metamorphosis I'm back to deciphering (in German, of course).

Dirty Pretty Things

It's been an interesting couple of months on Sexless Berlin -- lots of input from readers that have me thinking mightily about "luv". It would seem that the older (and therefore more experienced) I get, the more I believe Sartre and de Beauvoir may have had it right. The ideal of platonic love as a pinnacle far above "romantic" (i.e., sexual) love seems, to me, just about right. Maybe it was all those years having to hear shitty romantic boleros on the radio in Latinamerica, while knowing nearly all the men (and naturally a fair number of the women) were cheating to beat the band. Or maybe it was, for the first and only time in my life, experiencing post-romantic love, in a pure, platonic sense.

In my line of work, we talk about confounding variables, and I find lust to be exactly that, a hopeless confounder of love. I've decided that it's simply impossible to separate the two in any sexual relationship that is at all successful. When the sex fizzles, as it generally tends to, well, then that's when things can actually become clear. Contrast that feeling of, "I knew I'd be better off without this guy" with the strange realization that, "hey, I actually want to keep him around".

What, then, is "romantic love"? It can be a terrible cage, ranging from intense feelings of desire and longing to childish rages and unreasoning jealousy. This mostly, I believe, stems from needs unmet. That's lust, my friends, that's sexual need, and it seems so often mixed with deep inabilities to communicate. It's no wonder that I despair of social norms that seem designed for little more than to manage our pathologic delusions centering around sex. My, my, Katchita, you will say, isn't that a bit strong? Well, yes, I suppose it is, but I ask you, really, how many couples do you know who have successfully combined the romantic and platonic aspects of love I'm describing here? Now how many have made it last?? I rest my case.

While I'm on an anti-romantic roll here, let me just continue by saying that I don't care how many songs have been written about it, "romance" is simply not about being in the moment. It's about the past ("this is the story of how we met") and the future ("we'll be together for the rest of our lives"), but what does that sort of thinking get us? It gets us waking up at the age of 80 realizing we squandered much of our lives. Letting go of that and saying, simply, that I am a sexual creature and this is what I need now, and I don't need to put a special name on it and I don't need to only do it with my together-for-ever one-and-only, well, that just seems somehow more real, honest and alive. And given that being in the moment bas become one of my greatest goals in life, that alone is enough to make me a non-monogamist.

But, dear readers, do not despair, as I have, under it all, an optimistic message to impart! And that is that it's becoming clear to me that platonic love to a large degree transcends all those physical needs; it endures and burns strong; it casts a light that represents perhaps the best of what we humans have inside. What do I know, I'm nothing more than an armchair philosopher, an idiosyncratic student of life. But it seems to me that a non-monogamist who's found platonic love is well on the way to achieving the truly sublime.

Not in Love, No, No

Womyn, as I’ve already alluded to here, a man’s relationship with his mother is an important, possibly critical, determinant of his view of women. My best advice is to find out how a man views his mother on the first date, if at all possible. You can subtly show interest in his family, for example, by asking about siblings, then move on to parents, where they live/if they’re still living, what do they do/used to do, etc. If it’s easy to keep the man talking about his mother, you have your answer right there.

Equally important but much trickier to extract is information on how a man sees the women with whom he’s previously been involved. It typically won’t be possible until after several dates and, in my experience, often not until you’ve slept with him. It’s a project for the future, I suppose: to figure out how to sufficiently probe this before jumping in the sack, without scaring the guy off. Because here’s how it works: the older the man, the higher the chance that the way all those other women ended up is exactly how you end up as well. There’s really no better predictor. All of us are special, of course (Sexless Berlin blog readers being naturally more special than most), but womyn, please don’t make the mistake of thinking you will be the beautiful fairy princess who finally sweeps this man into a rosy end-of-the-rainbow happy ending. Sure, these things do happen. But only in film, trust me. During the initial stages, go ahead, fantasize about it if you like, but please recognize that cold, hard reality will kick you in the ass and it’s much better if that happens sooner rather than later.

As extreme examples I present two mature, worldly European men from different cultures and countries who personally reported to me having never been in love before. These cases touch me in a special way, they truly do, after my initial astonishment wears off. I don’t know if there’s anything more wonderful than falling in love; it’s happened to me once in a big way and many times in a range of smaller ways [yeah, yeah, despite the tough exterior, Katchita finds it easy to fall at least a little in love with many of her lovers]. So to think of a man having spent half his life without this seems quite simply tragic. Even though I so much want both of these men to have this experience, it’s simply naïve of me to imagine that they don’t have their patterns well established. I have to ask, what are the chances for these men? Sadly, I fear they are low. Although I sincerely wish them both the best of luck, at the same time I must gently suggest that some serious paradigm shifts might be in order. OK, so, a screening question does occur to me: “tell me about the last time you were in love and who's that lucky woman?”

The Moviegoer

Roughly 25 years ago, someone rarely mentioned in this blog, my ex-husband, got it right for a change (gasp!), when he gave me Walker Percy’s book. In my restless shifting through the Berlin vacation sublet scene during this visit, I ended up for a week at T.’s, who had it in a yellowing original paperback version. Re-reading it, I realized I’d forgotten that it has very little to do with film, but everything to do with detachment from life. Moviegoers need not be detached, of course, and my own moviegoing is governed by the drive to learn from worlds I cannot possibly experience for myself. How could I be a gay man in an Alice Springs beauty pageant (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), for example, or a small Kurdish girl escaping war the only way she knows how (Turtles Can Fly)? But of course I understand detachment; it’s what I necessarily must do every time I truly enter someone else’s film.

Recently I've realized that finding a truly good film (which happens perhaps once a year), is a bit like finding a truly good man. But the numbers are, frankly against me. I’ve been a discriminating moviegoer for some 25 or 30 years and have learned to bring sophisticated screens to bear when choosing films. I probably see nearly 3 films weekly on average, between theaters, rentals and downloads. In contrast, I’ve only been dealing with dating in Europe for three years. And I have to admit I dedicate substantially more time to moviegoing than the whole dating routine, which I treat only in fits and starts, often tossing in the towel for weeks or even months at a time. The way I date would be rather like walking up to my crappy neighborhood, sure-dubbing-is-great-because-reading-subtitles-is-so-tiresome theater and expecting the best of von Trier or Claire Denys or Mike Davis to magically appear.

So the real question, it would seem, is whether I am willing to give dating even a fraction of the attention I dedicate to film. Could I give up even one third of my movie-going experiences? Two hours is more than enough for a first date, but could I actually manage this once a week? I feel a palpable reluctance to even contemplate it. Could it be that men are so much less important to me than film? That hardly seems possible, so it must be that my screening process is still completely inadequate, or I wouldn’t be having so many horrifying dating experiences. So hmmm, it's quite clear that I simply must apply myself more diligently to the dating problem. Sigh. Moviegoing is just, frankly, so much more fun.

The Opposite Sex

Americans, of course, are terribly fond of examining in obsessive detail the damage our parents did to us and Germans aren't far off the same mark. But most Spaniards seem to genuinely like their parents. One will find children happily living at home well into their 30s, until they're ready to marry, at which point the old song seems to apply: "I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad". As I was escaping the heat in Madrid by visiting Rosa, we had time for several intensive days of full-out feminist thinking and arrived at a wonderful epiphany. It's the relationship one had with the parent of the opposite sex that is definitive in determining one's romantic trajectory. Thus, my close relationship with my father ensured I am capable of strongly bonding to men in extended relationships. My friends who didn't have that tend toward unsatisfactory and/or truncated flings and don't make it much beyond two or three years at most. And just think of Germany: so many men with German mothers).

I'm sorry to say, then, that things look grim for those of you who had fucked-up parents of the opposite sex. But don't think I'm home free just because I had a good father. It seems pretty apparent that I am incapable of being attracted to a nice normal son of a nice normal mother. Why? Hell if I know! But Project Mind Made Up will serve as a useful test and is already generating interesting data. In the meantime, Rosa, you and I clearly have more work to do, before we get it all figured out.

Request for Proposals

This post is for those of you men from whom I haven´t managed to walk away completely and who, despite your extremely emotionally-unavailable selves, can´t help but be in contact with me, no matter how sporadically. It´s been two and a half years now that I´ve been on my own -- plenty long enough for this daddy´s girl to say, I proved I can make it alone. And more than enough to know that I don´t much care for solitude. So make me an offer -- virtually everything´s open for negotiation except what I need to do to maintain my residency here in Europe. I´m not looking for the love of my life -- the last time it came close to doing me in. I don´t want the world; I´ve had more than enough in the past, and it becomes harder and harder to bear each time the world falls apart. No more looking back and realizing another decade of my life is gone; I want a couple of years that are simple, peaceful, with enough drama to keep it interesting, but no more. I want the day-to-day, I want you tossing the salad as I bake the bread, I want to wipe your brow when you´re feverish and you to run down for Motrin when I can´t seem to make it off the couch. I want to hear about your day, to celebrate little triumphs together and soothe away each others' setbacks. I want someone by my side who's as out-of-place as I am in these ridiculously large brains of ours. I want to feel our way together, toward our own truths, because the rules have never been made for the likes of us. My mind´s made up: I won´t be alone another Christmas.