From the April/May issue of Maxim Italia begins my new editorial collaboration with an erotic column called Eroticarte. I am very glad and proud to finally come back on paper on a magazine designed for men after writing on Rolling Stone and Playboy. Thanks to Maxim’s editor-in-chief Claudio Trionfera for believing in my words.

In “Venus in Fur” an amorous erotic novel by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch – which when published in 1870 triggered a major scandal and then over the years became the pagan bible of masochism – the main character, the intellectual Severin von Kushemski, while talking to Wanda von Dunajew, a voluptuous widow, focus of his burning desire and innermost and unrelenting fears, says: “We are all easy to explain. What we are not … is easy to disentangle.”

The end of the emotional skein within each of us, men and women, is also quite intricate to unravel because impulses pervade us transcending our control and sucking us into vorticose whirlpools of the soul. Women know how to better navigate emotional storms because since birth they are groomed and educated to listen and understand their intimate being. Men are at the mercy and under the spell of tidal waves, sometimes Captains Courageous yet inexperienced in the art of sounding and feeling deep down the electric jolts thus risking to go haywire.

We live in a pretty bleak time, our emotions are digital; we resemble zombies with feelings nailed at our screens; we sublimate vices and restrain instincts. Consequences are dramatic and impinge on toxic relationships, dysfunctional families, chilling crime news. Men flounder and often react with primordial aggressiveness towards the shifted conditions of gender equality. We inhabit an era of looming sexual McCarthysm and emotional illiteracy, unable to handle the flows of our soul because addicted to a virtual reality which makes us feel sheltered but ultimately confines us within our physical and mental walls and deprives us of human contact and sharing (aside from posts and links…) the experience, also the sufferance and joy, of living in reality and in depth the desires with the result of succumbing to them and surrendering to a mere emotional survival. Self-awareness is essential when riding the emotional roller-coaster because impulses are more powerful than us and can bring us to peaks of pleasure but also drown us into abysses of desperation. Imagine self-awareness as a sort of seatbelt allowing us to let go – the Holy Grail of sexual ecstasy – without crushing to the ground. Only self-awareness enables us to savor all the colors of the sexual palette, driven by intoxicating frenzy, conscious unconsciousness and absolute dissolution. Emotions pretend, and deserve, to be touched, groped, molested.

Yielding to temptation is our intimate longing. Also men dream of being overwhelmed and shaken to the core by unusual passion, rocked by senses, stealing precious and regenerating moments of blissfulness from everyday gloom, indulging in an emotional elopement in remote and unknown territories. Choosing to vibrate the sexual taste buds – disregarding binging on fast-fuck in order to relish refined devious sexual combos as a gourmet of the pleasures of the flesh – is aphrodisiac panacea. In an interconnected world, ever more linked in a virtually exhausting and unceasing contact, it is indeed paradoxical and surreal that hyper-communication gives way to fragmented information and, in a most disturbing scenario, to a lack of comprehension.

We dissimulate, deny and conceal impulses because they scare and unsettle us but they also allow us to be and feel alive, pulsating, emotional and excited. Best remedy ever against the mean blues and mass hysteria.

I am a major supporter of men: I find them fun-to-be-with, I like them as partners or friends, I even have the hots for many of them. I don’t shy away from criticizing men when needed but at the same time I blame also my “sisters” – for a vagina connection – and although I risk to incur into the fateful wrath of the #MeToo Erinyes, I fiercely declare that also us women nowadays are not in a very good place and we should investigate and respect our intimate desires. We could also learn from men how to be more basic and sincere to ourselves, less twisted. More truthful. Of men I envy men’s camaraderie, that typical male ability of being practical and substantial, their sustaining one another even when unsustainable.

Going back to the previous literary quotation, I reclaim Wanda’s sentiment: “I want to live like Helen and Aspasia lived. Not like modern twisted women who are never happy and never give happiness. Never admitting to wanting unconditional love.” All human beings crave love without boundaries but we must put ourselves out there and confront also the most perverse desires. Sacher-Masoch wrote his considerations in 1870. A century and a half later I find it quite disheartening and troubling to ascertain that emotional intricacy has not resolved but revived thus generating an abyssal distance between Venus and Mars.

Let us grant the itch and the courage of being consenting and sentient animals. I suggest you investigate and discover your wild and savage nature without forgetting that every relationship is based on the devil and the deep blue sea in an amorous exchange of pleasure and pain, reversing to your liking the roles of victim and tormentor. There will never be any equality without the truthfulness of being one’s self.