Amizade, intimidade, casamento...

"Our paradoxical longing for intimacy and independence is a diamagnetic force — it pulls us toward togetherness and simultaneously repels us from it with a mighty magnet that, if unskillfully handled, can rupture a relationship and break a heart. Under this unforgiving magnetism, it becomes an act of superhuman strength and self-transcendence to give space to the other when all one wants is closeness. And yet this difficult act may be the very thing — perhaps the only thing — that saves the relationship over and over."
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

The lack-of-relationship culture / Maybe it's time to start talking about love, then

... and intimacy...


"Are rising rates of unhappiness contributing to the sex recession? Almost certainly. But mightn’t a decline in sex and intimacy also be leading to unhappiness?"

"[Ian Kerner]... works with a lot of men who, inspired by porn, “are still masturbating like they’re 17,” to the detriment of their sex life. “It’s taking the edge off their desire,” he said. Kerner believes this is why more and more of the women coming to his office in recent years report that they want sex more than their partners do. [...] for one thing, many straight women told me that learning about sex from porn seemed to have given some men dismaying sexual habits.

[...] “my undergraduates tell me they try hard not to fall in love during college, imagining that would mess up their plans.

[...] ”the overwhelming majority of matches don’t lead to so much as a two-way text exchange, much less a date, much less sex.

[...] Many online daters spend large amounts of time pursuing people who are out of their league. Few of their messages are returned, and even fewer lead to in-person contact.

[...] In my interviews with young women, I heard too many iterations to count of “he did something I didn’t like that I later learned is a staple in porn,” choking being one widely cited example. Outside of porn, some people do enjoy what’s known as erotic asphyxiation—they say restricting oxygen to the brain can make for more intense orgasms—but it is dangerous and ranks high on the list of things you shouldn’t do to someone unless asked to.

[...] A 31-year-old in Phoenix explained that in her experience, porn has made men “expect that they can make any woman orgasm by just pounding away.”

[...] Research suggests that, for most people, casual sex tends to be less physically pleasurable than sex with a regular partner.

[...] If young people are delaying serious relationships until later in adulthood, more and more of them may be left without any knowledge of what good sex really feels like.

[...] Other sources of sexual inhibition speak distinctly to the way we live today. For example, sleep deprivation strongly suppresses desire—and sleep quality is imperiled by now-common practices like checking one’s phone overnight. "

Option paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none (a term popularized by Black Mirror).

FOBO: fear of a better option.

“spectatoring”—that is, worrying about how you look and sound while you’re having sex.

Article: Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?

Call me by your name / da intimidade / The words to say it

Conversation with Author André Aciman

"The most beautiful thing that can happen in life is really being intimate with another person. Being completely, shamelessly intimate with somebody else."
[minuto 15:57]

"For me, the most important thing is the sentences, the style. What does the style do to someone. In other words, if you're a decent writer, anything you say, provided it's done in a certain kind of style, with a particular kind of rhythm and cadence, what you're asking the reader to do is to follow in your footsteps. You're giving them your hand, you're walking them and you say, 'Ok, now we're going to stop because there's a comma here. But don't stop walking. We'll take another few steps further. Now there's a semi-colon. We're going to stop a bit longer and catch your breath', and once you do that to a reader, what you're forcing them to do is to believe everything you say, trust in what you say, and basically, to use a clichet, you're introducing the reader to himself or herself. That's the point of the whole exercise, as far as I'm concerned as a writer. I'll say things about myself and lay myself open to whatever but, in fact, what I'm trying to do is, by doing that, I'm forcing you or, at least, inviting you to open yourself up to what I have to say. And at some point we'll become really like very close friends. And you'll say, 'I've always known this about myself, you're not telling me anything new, but I never quite considered it'.
André Aciman


Call Me By Your Name Monologue + Transcript

"Right now you may not want to feel anything. Maybe you never wanted to feel anything and maybe it’s not me you want to be speak about these things but feel something you obviously did. Look you had a beautiful friendship, maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste! Have I spoken out of turn? Then I’ll say one more thing it'll clear the air. I may have come close but I never had what you two have. Something always held me back, her stood in the way. How you live your life is your business just remember our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once and before you know it your hearts worn out and as for your body there comes a point when no one looks at it much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow, pain don't kill it and with it the joy you felt."

Intimacy and closeness

"For example. Children who have endured the death of close family, without any help, support or consolation from others, often associate closeness with abandonment and the loss of safety. In other words: “If I stay away from people, I won’t lose anyone”.

Mais aqui.

Sleeping with married men

"Maybe I was being too pragmatic about issues that are loaded with guilt, resentment and fear. After all, it’s far easier to talk theoretically about marriage than to navigate it. But my attitude is that if my spouse were to need something I couldn’t give him, I wouldn’t keep him from getting it elsewhere, as long as he did so in a way that didn’t endanger our family.

[...] We all go through phases of wanting it and not wanting it. I doubt most women avoid having sex with their husbands because they lack physical desire in general; we are simply more complex sexual animals. Which is why men can get an erection from a pill but there’s no way to medically induce arousal and desire in women.

[...] I am not saying the answer is non-monogamy, which can be rife with risks and unintended entanglements. I believe the answer is honesty and dialogue, no matter how frightening. Lack of sex in marriage is common, and it shouldn’t lead to shame and silence. By the same token, an affair doesn’t have to lead to the end of a marriage. What if an affair — or, ideally, simply the urge to have one — can be the beginning of a necessary conversation about sex and intimacy?

[...] In the end, I had to wonder if what these men couldn’t face was something else altogether: hearing why their wives no longer wanted to have sex with them. It’s much easier, after all, to set up an account on Tinder."
Aqui


On Modern Love

triangulos

"The foundational stories we tell about Western civilization are stories of trauma. [Oedipus, Oresteia, the book of Genesis, Noah].

[...] In these foundational stories, a trauma occurs in a triangle composed of two men and a woman. When we focus more closely on what actually happens, we see that a father or a husband's authority is challenged. [...] What follows has the cast of tragedy, as if what happens had to happen. The order of the triangle has been challenged (father over son, man over woman), and a man, wounded in his love, responds by unleashing a cycle of violence.

Perhaps patriarchy, by establishing hierarchy in the heart of intimacy, is inherently tragic, and like all trauma survivors, we keep telling the story we need to listen to and understand."

Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure

Véus / what to let see or not to let see?

E será realmente possível revelar tudo?
Não me parece. E depois há a tal questão da mecânica quântica e da influência da observação...

Still Stalking

A good conscience, Schopenhauer says, means more than a good reputation. Our greatest goal should be good health and intelectual wealth, which lead to an inexhaustible supply of ideas, independence, and moral life. Inner equanimity stems from knowing that it is not things that disturb us, but our interpretations of things.

This last idea — that the quality of our life is determined by how we interpret our experiences, not by the experiences themselves — is an important therapeutic doctrine dating back to antiquity. A central tenet in the school of Stoicism, it passed through Zeno, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to become a fundamental concept in both dynamic and cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Staring at the Sun, Irvin Yalom

Stalkers / Intimacy seekers / Human connectedness / The power of presence

Cries And Whispers, Ingmar Bergman

We human beings are all hardwired to connect with others. From whatever perspective we study human society, whether its broad evolutionary history or the development of a single individual, we are obliged to view the human being in his or her interpersonal context — as related to others. There is convincing data from the study of nonhuman primates, primitive human cultures, and contemporary society that our need to belong is powerful and fundamental: we have always lived in groups with intense and persistent relationships among members. Confirmation is ubiquitous: to cite only one example, many recent studies in positive psychology stress that intimate relationships are a sine qua non for happiness.

[...] Because many therapists have trained in traditions that stress the importance of opaqueness and neutrality, friends willing to reveal themselves to one another may, in this regard, have an advantage over professional therapists. [...] The more you can be truly yourself, can share yourself fully, the deeper and more sustaining the friendship.
Staring at the Sun, Irvin Yalom

Desperate Housewife

Por acaso até se trata de um grande filme.

– You keep at it. You don't let anyone down. You do your Tuesdays, your wednesdays. You just dabble with this and that.

– You dabble with us.

– I mean with myself.

In the company of nudists, no one is naked / A nossa liberdade acaba onde começa a dos outros

Ok, Ok, eu sei que vocês não vão ter tempo para ver isto com a calma e a atenção necessárias, ou, se calhar, com o mesmo entusiasmo que eu vi, mas este senhor (Jeff Jarvis), nesta palestra que deu, sobre as tão actuais e polémicas questões sobre o público e o privado, diz coisas muito importantes e pertinentes.



Jeff Jarvis também aconselha vivamente a ler o Cluetrain Manifesto , fala-nos da Declaration of Independance of Cyberspace de John Perry Barlows, da importância de podermos estar ligados em rede e em redes. De George Carlin e disto:


e também disto:


Busquei aqui.

E depois há isto, e isto e isto.

Jeff Jarvis ainda refere duas coisas interessantes, na parte final da palestra, no seguimento da abertura da sessão a perguntas do público (muito pertinentes, diga-se). É que Jeff Jarvis é totalmente a favor do "default public" (grande polémica que surgiu por causa do Facebook), mas ele também diz que: I don't want to bring other people into my glass house, quando se trata de publicar fotos ou informação acerca de outros, e também: If you say that you don't want to know [certain] things then don't look.

e ainda isto.

Ilustrações / das profundezas / 2 em 1 / Recorrências / TIME / The problem is when we know what the problem is

A gestão do tempo, dos movimentos de câmara, da escolha dos planos e dos silêncios, em ambos estes dois exemplos, é fabulosa. Já para não falar dos diálogos e das situações de vida (interior) e de conflito (de interesses..., desejos, vontades) que representam.

Ai! Como eu compreendo AMBOS.


Just a glance. Nothing more.
And yet... ... ... for one night ... ... ... And yet it was wierd because at the same time ... ... ...


I wrestle alone in the dark. In the deep dark, and only I can know. Only I can understand my own condition.
You live with the threat of my extinction and yet I live with it too.
I wish I could be happy in this quietness.
– Very well. London then.
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

e depois...



...



GRANDES FILMES. TODOS. GRANDES ACTORES!