Sharon Old's Essay 'Sexless Love'

In a fast paced read by Sharon Old’s poem “Sex Without Love”, she expresses the poet’s attitude towards loveless sex as a cold, hurtful act. She picked certain words to come across to us that the activity of sex is cold and the speed of reading the poem is almost as if it was the speed of having intercourse. It’s not a beautiful thing us humans do, it is more of an activity that we do for pleasure. Old starts off the poem questioning how people have sexless love. You are not quite sure if she is disgusted or ok with the act of sexless love. In the quote “Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies”, Olds compares sex to something beautiful, like ice skating. In ice
The ice skaters trained for quite some time to get to where they are. They may look super happy but it is just an activity they got really good at. And then the poem takes a rapid turn, where you realize that she is actually against the act of sexless love. She quotes “Children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away”, she brings up the consequences of sex. Because of the activity that these two human beings like to pleasure themselves with, in the end, an unwanted child was born. By saying that the mother would give it away makes it even colder and heartless than if a dad because mothers are supposed to have a connection with her baby and more loving, but she gives the baby away anyways. And finally, Olds brings God into the poem. Once God comes into a poem, you immediately get that she is against it because having sex before marriage is a sin according to that religion. Throughout the poem “Sex without Love” by Sharon Olds, there are many factors in the poem that come together to portray how cold and hurtful sex without love is. She persuades us by being neutral in the beginning, showing the consequences, and bringing in her own religious beliefs to help up realize that it is wrong to have loveless