physical pleasure

In offering someone physical pleasure, she can take control again.

Physicality plays such a role in this novel, where physical pleasure is a luxury commodity, outside the reach of a world sunk into deprivation.

Chaucer’s exploration of “‘sovereigntee’ began to sound a lot like ‘consent,’ for example, and Alison’s insistence on physical pleasure not unlike the sex-positivity movement, while her contempt for class privilege feels uncannily close to our debates on that topic today.”

This novel is more in touch with physical pleasure than anything McCarthy has written, as if he is eulogizing sensory experience itself.

“I’ve always trusted physical pleasure, as long as it felt right in the emotional centers of the body. I never thought that’s the wrong thing to do,” says Thompson.