"Sex With Shakespeare," by Jillian Keenan.
Jillian Kennan sees Shakespeare and his characters everywhere. She's imagined Helena and Demetrius fighting in the Omani desert. She's spoken with Cleopatra while visiting a boyfriend's childhood home in North Dakota. And she's chatted with the Bard himself while riding the New York City subway.
They're fake conversations, of course. But the wisdom she's gleaned from them has had a real impact.
"The literary characters we love can challenge our affections just as much as the people we love," Keenan writes in her memoir, "Sex With Shakespeare: Here's Much to Do With Pain, but More to Do With Love." In that imagined conversation Keenan witnessed between Helena and Demetrius, straight from "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Helena tells Demetrius "I am your spaniel ... the more you beat me, I will fawn on you."
"It was always hard to watch Helena debase herself in the face of Demetrius's obvious scorn," she writes. "On paper, that scene is sad, unfunny, and doesn't make sense within the context of the play." The scene -- in which Helena is begging Demetrius to love her, even though he doesn't seem worthy of her affection -- had always troubled Keenan.
But then she finally decodes it. At this point, Keenan was in her early 20s, studying Arabic in Oman and attempting unsuccessfully to "break up with William Shakespeare and start my grown-up life," when she saw Helena's desperation and Demetrius's remarks that follow (which could be viewed as a rape threat) instead as "the fundamental question at the core of every sadomasochistic relationship," Keenan writes. "Demetrius asked Helena how she could trust him enough to submit herself to physical risk at his hands -- and Helena assured him that she can, and does."
In her close reading of that scene, Keenan realizes that she can't ignore her sexuality any longer. "For decades," Keenan writes, she was afraid to admit to herself: "I'm obsessed with spanking."
"My spanking fetish is innate, unchosen and lifelong," Keenan tells me in a phone interview. "I think of it as my sexual orientation. But because I never heard about people like me, because I never saw stories like mine, I thought I was the only one. I thought I really was deeply messed up. So I buried my identity under a lot of fear and shame and isolation."
Until Shakespeare seemed to validate her identity. "Everyone agrees that Shakespeare was this incredible chronicler of the human experience, that he described and illustrated human nature better than maybe any other writer," Keenan says. "When it first occurred to me that Shakespeare had found room for me in his own world, it was the first time that I considered that maybe I wasn't as unnatural as I had always feared. If I could fit into Shakespeare's world, maybe I could fit into my own."
That sense of fitting in, of course, doesn't happen overnight. It's one thing to recognize a fetish or a sexual orientation, yet another to feel comfortable in that identity in relationships with others -- a journey that unfolds in Keenan's memoir, with each chapter unfurling more details from her life and pairing them with insights from different Shakespearean plays.
"I was in this relationship where my real self was essentially locked in a bathroom," Keenan says of her main relationship explored in the book, "sometimes literally so."
Shakespeare helped her out of that bathroom. Explicating "Antony and Cleopatra" made her realize that love can't always be reasoned; sometimes it's OK to be reckless. In "Othello," she sees the conflicting notions of sex as an act and sex as an idea -- a contrast she has to resolve in her own life.
But above all, she sees Shakespeare as a tutorial in how to talk to one another -- whether that's about consent, desire, or our own fantasies or fetishes. "There's so much in Shakespeare about the importance of communication and dialogue," Keenan says, highlighting "speak to him" from "Twelfth Night" and "speak to her" from Hamlet. It seems incredibly simple, Keenan acknowledges, and yet "sometimes communication is such a difficult thing to define. We can communicate in so many ways -- we can communicate non-verbally, we can communicate with our actions. ... But at a certain point, we just have to open our lips and speak because that is the first step to making everything else possible."
It was the first step in Keenan's own story, the ending of which I won't spoil here. And it's timeless relationship advice that applies just as much to Shakespeare's time as it does to our own.
© 2016 The Washington Post
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
They're fake conversations, of course. But the wisdom she's gleaned from them has had a real impact.
"The literary characters we love can challenge our affections just as much as the people we love," Keenan writes in her memoir, "Sex With Shakespeare: Here's Much to Do With Pain, but More to Do With Love." In that imagined conversation Keenan witnessed between Helena and Demetrius, straight from "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Helena tells Demetrius "I am your spaniel ... the more you beat me, I will fawn on you."
"It was always hard to watch Helena debase herself in the face of Demetrius's obvious scorn," she writes. "On paper, that scene is sad, unfunny, and doesn't make sense within the context of the play." The scene -- in which Helena is begging Demetrius to love her, even though he doesn't seem worthy of her affection -- had always troubled Keenan.
But then she finally decodes it. At this point, Keenan was in her early 20s, studying Arabic in Oman and attempting unsuccessfully to "break up with William Shakespeare and start my grown-up life," when she saw Helena's desperation and Demetrius's remarks that follow (which could be viewed as a rape threat) instead as "the fundamental question at the core of every sadomasochistic relationship," Keenan writes. "Demetrius asked Helena how she could trust him enough to submit herself to physical risk at his hands -- and Helena assured him that she can, and does."
In her close reading of that scene, Keenan realizes that she can't ignore her sexuality any longer. "For decades," Keenan writes, she was afraid to admit to herself: "I'm obsessed with spanking."
"My spanking fetish is innate, unchosen and lifelong," Keenan tells me in a phone interview. "I think of it as my sexual orientation. But because I never heard about people like me, because I never saw stories like mine, I thought I was the only one. I thought I really was deeply messed up. So I buried my identity under a lot of fear and shame and isolation."
Until Shakespeare seemed to validate her identity. "Everyone agrees that Shakespeare was this incredible chronicler of the human experience, that he described and illustrated human nature better than maybe any other writer," Keenan says. "When it first occurred to me that Shakespeare had found room for me in his own world, it was the first time that I considered that maybe I wasn't as unnatural as I had always feared. If I could fit into Shakespeare's world, maybe I could fit into my own."
That sense of fitting in, of course, doesn't happen overnight. It's one thing to recognize a fetish or a sexual orientation, yet another to feel comfortable in that identity in relationships with others -- a journey that unfolds in Keenan's memoir, with each chapter unfurling more details from her life and pairing them with insights from different Shakespearean plays.
"I was in this relationship where my real self was essentially locked in a bathroom," Keenan says of her main relationship explored in the book, "sometimes literally so."
Shakespeare helped her out of that bathroom. Explicating "Antony and Cleopatra" made her realize that love can't always be reasoned; sometimes it's OK to be reckless. In "Othello," she sees the conflicting notions of sex as an act and sex as an idea -- a contrast she has to resolve in her own life.
But above all, she sees Shakespeare as a tutorial in how to talk to one another -- whether that's about consent, desire, or our own fantasies or fetishes. "There's so much in Shakespeare about the importance of communication and dialogue," Keenan says, highlighting "speak to him" from "Twelfth Night" and "speak to her" from Hamlet. It seems incredibly simple, Keenan acknowledges, and yet "sometimes communication is such a difficult thing to define. We can communicate in so many ways -- we can communicate non-verbally, we can communicate with our actions. ... But at a certain point, we just have to open our lips and speak because that is the first step to making everything else possible."
It was the first step in Keenan's own story, the ending of which I won't spoil here. And it's timeless relationship advice that applies just as much to Shakespeare's time as it does to our own.
© 2016 The Washington Post
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Track Latest News Live on NDTV.com and get news updates from India and around the world
