Passion is a Virtue

I gave a talk the other night for the Women’s Wellness and Cancer program at Northeast Health. I talked about the value of an unbalanced life and the importance of passion.

As much as we yak about balancing our lives, and every woman’s magazine proposes strategies to get more balance in our lives, I don’t think it’s balance that we want at all. What most of us want is to feel good and to have peace, and that really comes from being well used by life. And that comes from PASSION.

Passion often gets a bad rap. The first error is that we immediately think of passion as sex, and while yes, I do prefer my sex to be passionate, the passion in sex doesn’t come from body parts being rubbed together. I think that people who have passion in their lives tend to bring that passion into the bedroom (kitchen, living room, back seat) rather than the other way around.

I write about cancer and sex and caregiving—because I got so mad and so passionate about wanting to share what I had to learn the hard way. I am –you see from this blog—fierce about teaching and language and making information about sex accessible to people in CancerLand. I have a couple of other things in my life that I am crazy passionate about and it is the fury and joy that I derive from that work that I bring to my bed and to John as my lover.

The other huge mistake we make in our thinking about passion is that we often think that passion is not a higher virtue. We think that things like charity or kindness are on a higher plane or that they are more important. But we are so wrong about that. Every religion advocates that we become more compassionate but we can only become compassionate by connecting with our own passions. Trying to exercise compassion without true personal passion always looks smarmy and feels like saccharine, and it’s the route to burn out.

The other night in my talk in Troy I mentioned Susan Sarandon as an example of a passionate woman—on and off the screen. There are so many beautiful actresses and pretty movie stars but Sarandon shines in her sixties because she lives a deeply passionate life as a fierce social justice advocate. That is true libido—strong life energy—passion first in the world, then in the bedroom.

Why Women Love Bull Durham

The past couple of nights I have been watching Bull Durham. This is the movie from 1988 with Kevin Costner playing an aging catcher in the minor leagues. This is a movie that appears to be about baseball life with its travails and hopes and the desperate desires of men who want to play ball for a living. It is seemingly a men’s movie with all the swearing and ass slapping and drinking and real life baseball lore. But no, this really is THE all time best chick flick.

Yes, we love Kevin Costner from the first moment he arrives in the locker room wearing his navy blazer, rumpled white shirt and the khakis that are the perfect shade of tan with a hint of olive. He’s a manly man who in the first 20 minutes gives the fabulous, if too artful, monologue about his beliefs which includes, “I believe in the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back…that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap”, and which ends with his belief in “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days”.

Yes! You had us at “long, slow and deep”—and yes, at the Susan Sontag critique too.

But there is a later scene that truly outs women for what they really want.“Do you want to dance?” Sarandon asks Costner, sitting in the kitchen late at night. He says yes, but surprises her by not dancing but instead by sweeping all the food and dishes off the kitchen table onto the floor. He spins Sarandon onto that now empty table and they go at it rolling and clutching.

Oh, that’s part of it. We want a man to want us that much; we want a man who wants to make love a second time so much that he goes for it on the kitchen table. We do want that kind of passion in our lives. But, there is something else in this scene that truly makes this a women’s dream come true.  What most women truly desire is not what Costner does, but what Sarandon does NOT do. As all of her dishes and the leftover food crash onto the floor Sarandon allows herself to be swept onto that table instead of diving for a broom, or a dish cloth or saying to her lover, “Hold on just a second, I’ll clean this up and then meet you in the bedroom.”

No, she is in the moment and desires this man and this sex more than she desires a clean floor or neat kitchen. She wants the rapture of this man and his body even with cereal and milk oozing under the fridge. And she is not saying, “Oh God that was my mother’s china bowl.” Nope, she’s on that table fucking her brains out.

Oh, to be that kind of woman. We assume the power is in the man, that to be taken that way would free us. But what we see in Bull Durham is a woman who CAN be taken. She is not a woman thinking, “When did we last wash these sheets?” while a man is going down on her.

Oh, we do wish for a partner to love us with such sweet abandon, but Sarandon, in Bull Durham, shows us a woman who can abandon herself.