How did sex ever get so unsexy?
When I first asked
that question over two decades ago, I was responding to a dreary 70's
politics-of-the-bedroom and responding especially to Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will. Much as I disliked the author's assumptions of female victimhood, she seems to have touched on an enduring philosophical problem--going beyond sexual violence to the whole matter of woman's nature. Thus, while Rousseau hailed women as icons of "sensibility," Condorcet was the rare champion of gender equality and gender sameness; woman was equal to man, he said, because it really made no difference that she was a woman.
Does gender difference matter? Oughtn't it to matter? The debate still rages, but the ground has shifted, and in Anglo feminist circles at least (surely not in French?) it is Condorcet's super-rational followers who now hold moral sway. Recognizing gender difference as the "social construct" that it of course (like all complex human behaviors) is, cultural feminists see in it the root of all "sexism"-- all they thought to have overthrown. So on both sides of the Atlantic comes renewed feminist lament--in America from Ariel Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs) who sees in current "raunch culture" a proliferation of meaningless (and joyless) sex-as-a-commodity; in England from Natasha Walter (Living Dolls: the return of sexism) who sees the brilliant marketing strategies of Disney and others "managing to fuse the doll and the real girl," turning grown women into "primped and shallow dolls."
Hear! hear! And isn't that what I was remarking myself about the
Barbie-doll culture from which so much American feminism of my era
sprang? -- about the screaming sisterhood that rallied on college
campuses around the nation to "take back the night," their state of oppression, it seemed to me (as it did to Camille Paglia), as much within themselves as without.
Except . . . I'm still not on the same page with feminist rage. Yes,
gender difference is stupidly and crudely trumpeted today (and for
obvious commercial gain). More meaningfully and magically, it is also celebrated in folk ballads offering a very different perspective on the
whole matter of "femininity" from either popular American culture or
feminist rhetoric. They leapt to mind, along with their feisty
heroines, when I read (in the 1/02 Atlantic Monthly)
Cristina Nehring's review of some "dreary dating books" and her
concluding plea: that "we allow magic to reign where we find it, lest we
color the world gray."
I applaud Nehring's bold words
even as I realize that I'm hardly answering her call for an "intelligent
reappraisal of romantic love." Romantic love (like "meaningful
relation") is surely a civilized goal. But I can't help wondering if it
isn't time for reappraisal of a more suspect and yet more magical
realm: the intersection of love and lust.
This site takes a shot at it. Thus,
strong lovemaking, the celebration not of rape but of rapture. My starting
point
is the ballad of the lady and the lusty smith or "The Twa Magicians"
(no typo here, "twa" is simply Scots for "two") -- a ballad sometimes seen as
"rapist," though on both sides of its applauded action, and in
ballads sharing
much the same erotic assumptions, women of extraordinary energy and
wilfulness play starring roles. In these ballads, the celebration of masterful
male force and female
"defeat" as part of a core sexual mystery does not
appear to be in any way a celebration of female victimhood, but rather
of
something more interesting and altogether more life-affirming.
• The larger context for my project is an erotically
heightened world of
spontaneous animal delight (the so-called "pastoral") which polite society
has long taken for man's domain, woman entering it only as hapless object-
of-desire. Its special focus is the cocky virgin, whose
contradictory sexual
feelings (betrayed in
flaunted sexual resistance) seem to me both natural
and a vital part of
the applauded erotic narrative.
• In
realistic terms, my defense of this animal world and its warrior values
doesn't mean that I dismiss rape or the anguish of real rape victims. It's just
that I see both sexes normally having good reason to avoid any such ugly conflict
-- that as balladry suggests and my own unsought field experience confirms, the
pastoral "power problem" is sometimes a problem of sexual theatre which
an image-conscious age mistakes for (and may well convert to) oppressive
reality.
• It's also a problem, historically and in polite
literature, of pastoral "enclosure"
-- a myth of sexual enchantment turning indeed to the shape of oppression
as the "feminine" is both elevated and enervated. Privileged polite
"femininity" has thus come to mean something more fragile, more fearful
and naturally more prone to victimhood than its folk counterpart.
In the grip of this misconstrued and much enfeebled myth,
radical cultural
feminism invests an act
most women want to approve with a meaning -- sex
as rape -- they cannot
possibly approve. For heterosexual women of an
ideological bent (i.e., with no more pressing matters at hand!) it cannot be a
happy state of affairs.
For an evolutionary introduction, click here
or to jump into the meat of the matter, go to:
Ballad of the Lady and the Lusty Smith
Power in Bed and the Pastoral Connection
The Taunter: "right stuff" of the high folk pastoral
Because She Was so Bold: simplifications on a theme
A "PC" Sexual Dare: the feminine in feminist clothing?
"Rob Roy" and "Eppie Morrie": reality and deep play
"He rade and she ran": female commitment and male flight
Childbirth: the ultimate power trip?
Pastoral Misadventure: the scene that nobody wants