Being human is

complicated, not least because of our experience of sex. Between the hard-to-kill notion of women as property or status symbols and the not unrelated power of a woman’s control over her own fertility, we live in a constant state of dissonance. Are we free? Is there justice? What would that even look like, a world where no one sees anyone else as an object of possession or conquest?

But the tangle of these wildly disparate ideas has left one shining thought in my mind: that amid the noise and haste of the political world – a world of race and religion and economics and gender – two people may, astonishingly, implausibly, gloriously, connect. They may look into each other’s eyes and see the infinity of each other, and all the rest of it, the war and the injustice and the property and poverty, may wash away like dust under a rainstorm. Two humans, cleansed of culture and economy, can find the entire universe in each other’s eyes.

I hope Kate and William are happy. I hope everyone who was born an unwanted child has the opportunity to have only the children they want. I hope bin Laden’s widows find peace. I hope that you, all of you, can connect sexually with someone you care about without getting snared in the spider’s web of culture.

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