Thoughts on Sex and Language
We depend on poetry and story to enrich our courtships and partnerships, and to advance our sexual pursuit and eventual sexual partnering. Sexy language is inventive and fun. Sex and language combined create an intoxicating brew. One might even say that the Sextale and Sextini are the true love cocktail.
This use of language is not reserved only for partners or potential partners. Our history is equally long in using sexy language to address higher powers. Thousands of years ago, poets and worshippers routinely addressed deities to ask for advice and intervention in daily life. One supplicant was the legendary Sappho, poet of Lesbos. In her Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho achieves a marvelous balance between submissive and girlfriend as she pleads with the goddess to turn the poet’s spurned offerings to a reluctant lover into irresistible lures.
To fully appreciate the weight of this address by Sappho, remember that Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality (in Roman mythology, Venus) who was born when Cronus cut off Uranus’s genitals and tossed them into the sea; from the sea foam Aphrodite arose and was born. She is also the wife of Hephaestus (eternal cuckold) the lover of Ares, and later the lover of Adonis.
Here is my translation of the poem.
Hymn to Aphrodite, by Sappho
Glittering, deathless Aphrodite on your altar,
Zeus’s daughter, enslaver, I beseech you!
No, I beg you, dear Goddess, do not torment me
By grinding my spirit to dust.
If ever you’ve heard me pleading to you,
Then return to me now just as you did when
You left your father’s shining palace,
Yoking your faithful sparrows to your sky-car.
Humming down the currents of heaven’s airway
They delivered you to earth’s fecund black breast,
And there you rose with sudden radiance,
Goddess, before me prostrate in the sand.
With a smile that buckled my knees, you asked
What pain I bore, who had wronged me so,
And what would calm and comfort my racing mind.
Why, you asked, had I summoned you
To my side. “Who is it you are seeking
To satisfy your hunger? Who do you desire?
Who has abused you now, Sappho? Who is it
That treats you so unjustly?
“Abide. She evades you now, but soon she’ll pursue.
Rejecting your gifts, soon she’ll rush to give gifts.
She says she doesn’t love you, but soon all she is
Will burn with desire for you and only you.”
Come to me, my Goddess, and comfort me.
Remove this bitterness from my heart, my mind,
And give me what I hunger for. Goddess,
In all my wars, I beg you, fight beside me.
There is nothing coy or secretive in the exchanges between the rebuffed poet-lover and her goddess. There is no question as to who is in charge, but the two meet as friends. There is unmistakable affection between them, and one has no doubt that the resisting object of Sappho’s affection will have no chance against such a potent love-combination as the ardent poet and all-powerful goddess.