Steve Almond Lecture

I'd like to start off by saying that Steve Almond is without a doubt one of my favorite speakers thus far! In his writings, he perfectly combines love and desire to create romantic and lustful scenes in his stories that are still very realistic.  The reality of sex is a key element throughout Almond's writings and is something he emphasized in his lecture.  In today's society, people especially young men have this fantasy about sex.  Sex is so quick and easy to obtain these days because of porn on the internet, but there is no reality to porn.  Yes, the actors in porn are very well experienced in the physical aspect of sex, but they completely lack the emotional side of sex when two people connect with each other.  Another aspect that many young men do not understand is that porn appears to be perfect because there is a crew doing the lighting, the makeup, the editing, and the scenes are not done all at once, so this makes up for why there are no awkward moments in porn like there is in real life sex.  The most interesting story that Almond read was without a doubt "Skull".  The story is told by a narrator who is hanging out with his friend getting drunk.  The narrator's friend goes on to tell the narrator that his girlfriend has a glass eye because she was shot in the eye with a play gun as a child.  As the friend goes into more detail, he expresses that his girlfriend likes to take her eye out and have him massaged her skull tissue in a very sexual and graphic manner.  The line that stuck out to me the most and I wrote it down was "that's what we all want, a lover to accept the most damaged part of us".  The woman fears rejection because even though her body is very gorgeous, she has a scar that she feels insecure about.  Therefore, to expose her weakness to her boyfriend shows that she trusts him because he accepts her.  This idea of acceptance in the story is ultimately what everyone strives for.  Everyone has a physical or emotional part of us that is damaged that we try to hide.  However in  reality, all we want is for someone to see that damaged part of us, accept it, and love us anyways.  While this story may be a little out there, it gets down to the core of human desire which is not always purely sexual, but sometimes emotional.