What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me. I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust.
The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.
Talent like beauty to be pardoned must be obscure and unostentatious.
I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world and machines - TV telephone cars - were still more or less ancillary and computers were unheard of in everyday life.