“She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She’s refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.” (73) is not normally how sex or a sex drive is described in literature. In this passage of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, the narrator (who I will refer to as X to avoid the dilemma of gender) describes one of X’s married lovers. Through use of sea imagery and cyclical ideas Winterson brings together the familiar and the new; again reproduces the odd effect of making something infinite yet forever ending. The phrase “opens and shuts” (73) implies repetition. The lover does not open and shut just once. Similarly in the next sentence the narrator explicitly states that she is “refilled each day” (73). Just as X continuously seeks a new lover to be with forever, the lover is always emptied and renewed. This connection between ending and forever seems to be echoed in the images of the sea. Not only is the lover refilled every day but each day it is “fresh tides” (73). The repetitive idea of tides- coming in and out, in and out- is broken by making them “fresh”, enhancing the contradiction of once yet repetitive. With that in mind the passage takes on a new meaning for me. It is not about the sex, or this women, it is about how this women is every women. The narrator hates yet cannot seem to escape…dating- for lack of a better word. “She” becomes a metaphor for all the she’s that repeat in X’s life. Each time X begins a new relationship the lover is refilled.