Love

Time to slow the train a bit. We've arrived at the station in Love Lost. It is here that I shall write my first, but probably not last, take on the infamous four letter word LOVE. No idea what this word means. I try to stay optimistic about it but the truth is, sometimes (more often than not) I feel totally incapable of following through on what that word actually means. I'm not like most people though. I don't fear love. I fear the repercussions of what love means, but I don't fear love in and of itself. Sometimes, when I sit and think about love, I feel I'll never really know what love, true love, is. And, what is TRUE love and who came up with the concept that all love couldn't be true love? I'm digressing now, a tactic used in the procrastination of punching these keys and writing out how I really feel about love. Funny thing happened yesterday. I was watching a video of a woman. And the video showed the woman in a compromising state under the "control" of a man. It was in that moment that I viewed women as nothing more than a thing. A thing that had to be controlled. Not exactly inhuman but not fully human. Like they're here to be controlled by men. Even with the independent women of the 21st century, watching this woman, this one woman being compromised by a man really struck a chord in me. In combination with an essay that I studied in my Film Studies class, I watched a woman, which is especially common in today's society, being controlled under a watchful gaze of both the male and the audience. In a term called fettishistic scopophilia, used by Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," the male, afraid of the real threat a woman poses because of her lack of the phallus (a penis), men tend to break the woman down into parts so that the woman is no longer seen as a WOMAN but rather a piece of meat that the male is able to mold and shape into anything he so pleases. To bring my argument back to center, while watching the video, my perceptions of women and love turned into this blah of a portrait that circled around the idea that love does not exist. Rather there is only submissiveness to the man and through this, and this only, can true love (or a true heterosexual union) exist. I say this because if a woman poses a threat to a man, the only way a man can TRULY love a woman is if he is able to assert his dominance over her and loom over his prize like a hunter would his kill. Love. I hardly know you and yet I know you well. Like strangers on the dance floor we twirl in intimacy never once stopping to ask who we are, then, as strangers on a train we depart never to see one another again. Love. Alright passengers, it seems the conductor is a bit tired. We'll have to remain in Love Lost for the night. Surely you do not mind for I see some of you have brought your female counterparts along for the journey. Be careful, do not wander the darkness, for there are many dangers that lurk within the streets of Love Lost. If you are afraid, take my hand. We shall walk the streets of the Lost...together.