New Yorker and word substitutions

6/12/06

Taking a part out of a NY story, and substituting the word "men" for the word "art", or hey, how about substituting the word "sex" for "men"?

..."Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain men, I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to men. I wanted to submit and submerge, even to die a little. I developed a preference, among others, for men that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the non-believers...By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist, I was asking men to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient men became thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water."