Ripping Cupid’s Grove Together

THIS IS PART 2. If you haven’t read Part 1, this will make little sense to you, and I sincerely suggest that you don’t read this AT ALL — If you haven’t read Part 1, that is. We pick up our narrative thread from Yesterday …

The writer (of the New York Times essay) betrays our fundamental cultural ambivalence about matters sexual, just as the New York Times‘ decision to publish this quasi-pornographic bit of mea culpa* betrays that queasiness: Sex, we love it, we hate ourselves for loving it, therefore, we hate sex because we like it.

[* And, while we're on the subject, If you take a look at THIS, you might want to rethink your use of the fancy Latin term for "it's my fault" -- mea culpa -- in light of its old everyday Roman use. ]

Or, in the twistoflex world of the Times writer, we hate sex because we liked sex, but then we got bored, so, we, therefore, have no sex drive and what the hell’s the matter with all you horny people? Don’t you know there’s a SALE at Wal-Mart?

Look: this crazy essay has its value (albeit not the value it thinks) in its wonderful Western conception of sexuality: Sex is “icky” (as a University of Oregon feminist law professor posited in a debate I engaged in at a local college television forum), it’s “no big deal,” and, at the same time, it overwhelms and creates a long, weirdly guilty affair that can only be dismissed without ever understanding (”hotness” is, seemingly, the only criteria) with an equally but differently twisted soul [emphasis added]:

So I continued with my conservative Christian, and we had fantastic, obsessive sex while the whole time I waited to see when (or if) this affair would run out of fuel. I prayed that it would, so I could marry the man I loved.

Make up your own comment here.

Actually, I never had intercourse with this man, though we did just about everything else. He did not believe in sex before marriage. Therefore, when my fiancé asked me if I was “having sex” with someone (why was I coming home at 3 a.m.?), I could answer “no.” On the Christian man’s end, when his God asked him if he was having sex with someone, he also could answer “no,” and so we both lived highly honest, righteous lives filled with perpetual sex.

This is just toooo creepy. Oh, and she lied in college to avoid the horrors of defloration:

We’d gone out all summer before the start of our respective freshman years: Not once did he ask me for intercourse, even on our last night together. The very absence of his question underscored its implicit presence. When?

I confided to my roommate that we had not yet done the deed. Hers was a pause of shock. I was afraid. I didn’t want to bleed. Sheer fear of that plunging pain is what held me back.

Instead of telling my would-be lover the truth, I made up an elaborate lie. I was raped. Too traumatized to have sex. I needed more time.

Remembering this now, for the first time in a long time, I do not judge myself. I consider it a great deal to ask of a relatively newly minted woman that she offer her intact body up for this frankly difficult deed.

Ohmigod.

Frankly difficult deed? Honey, I gots news for yas: if the deed were ‘difficult,’ there wouldn’t be 6.7 billion human mouths to feed. (Frankly, if it were left to the human “mind” and not to raw, overwhelming, hormone-fueled instinct, there wouldn’t be 100 million humans extant.)

This is the problem, then: we are obsessed with sex; we hate sex because it is our obsession.

It negates our unquestioned and fanatical devotion to the trope of “free will.” Thus, even the pre-Christian pagans of Rome and Greece come up with euphemisms for sexual parts that translate as “shameful.”

The Latin term pudendum and the Greek term αιδοίον (aidoion) for the genitals literally mean “shameful thing”. (Wikipedia)

By the Middle Ages, the additional accusation was implicitly added that it was WOMAN’S fault, since Eve had brought about the “Fall” of Mankind. You see the same engine at work in Islam, where the “temptation” of the female form is so DANGEROUS that she must be kept hidden, from the headscarf of more liberal Muslims, to the burkas of the fanatics, like the Taliban. The only way that a woman could be “respectably” portrayed in Western art, until the Renaissance, was by portraying her as a mother, or as pregnant, since, in the role of “mother” she was the special vessel of the “pure” baby that was to come.

In Islam it was forbidden to draw woman at all. Men too, in fact.

We still see this cultural subtext short-circuiting in the well-known phenomenon of post-partum sexual problems (impotence and frigidity) between married couples after the first child. This “pure, unsullied” little “angel” has come out of that “dirty hole.”

The “rational” mind doesn’t explicitly parse it, but the subconscious KNOWS that it’s in an irresolvable conflict, and does the only sensible thing: shuts down the desire mechanism between the couple.

This is a problem beyond child-bearing, however, and often manifests after an affair (”I can’t trust you anymore”) or, as in this case, a complete rejection of sexuality as “beneath” someone who’s just been in an obsessive, “wrong,” and equally passionate affair. The grapes, they be sour.

But it isn’t healthy, and it isn’t helping anything. The fact that it’s as common as dirt doesn’t make it any less unhealthy, but whether the party in question transfers their passion to their newfound invisible friend, Jesus, or to a chunk of marble, the problem doesn’t vanish: it merely mutates into something ugly, and, too often, fatal to SOMEBODY — not necessarily the sufferer.

George Bernard Shaw wrote to Frank Harris, his old editor:

… the relation between the parties in copulation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously executed between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.*

[* Fine, but, parenthetically, may I at least suggest this much: never have sex with anyone you can't have a good conversation with WITHOUT the sex. Experience will bear out the wisdom of this prescription.]

Even old Shaw feels the need to belittle sex and point out how unimportant and trivial it is. Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. It is VERY important. It drives our lives in too many important ways. Certainly it determines who your parents and your children are. Is that unimportant or a thing to be pooh-poohed?

You see, the authoress is not a mentally well person — by her own admission — but, moreover, is not being honest with herself regarding her own sexuality. A series of outrageous rationalizations emits from a series of sexual misperceptions and (unpleasant) experiences that her own mindset seems to have a lot of culpability in having created. (The world, too often, conforms all too well to one’s expectations. But it needn’t necessarily be that way. Keep expecting to be in a car accident, and you’ll probably get your wish.)

But the New York Times saw fit to PRINT this bit of psychopathology, and I have to say that it’s just another symptom of a society that is deeply sick and depraved on the question of sexuality and WHERE we all come from.

Remember those new parents? Well, another subtexted command is that if sex is dirty, then we ALL come from dirty sex, therefore WE are dirty. (And its too-often practiced corollary, therefore if I reject ALL sex, perhaps I can become clean again.)

Cotton Mather, whose fiery puritanism so dominated Boston that young Benjamin Franklin ran away to Philadelphia to escape it once wrote that he (I’ll paraphrase bluntly) was relieving himself against a wall, when a DOG came and did the same thing to the wall. He was ASHAMED and EMBARRASSED to share this awful animal trait, and highly resolved to always PRAY when pissing. (And the other, one would assume.)

Really?

THAT is the wholesale rejection of the body and its desires whose pernicious stain travels the river of Western thought — all the way to our New York Times essayist: Betrayed by her own body, she belittles its desires and thinks that the onset of middle age hormone level decline has suddenly made her “pure” and able to enjoy the REALLY IMPORTANT stuff in life, like sales at the mall.

Good lord.

There is a fundamental schizophrenia at work here, reflected in forms ranging from sexual scandal news and headlines in popular media to slasher films, where the slasher is, all too often, a sort of divine retribution for teenage sexuality.

It is this: first the prurient interest is aroused (”hot sex” “affair” “highly honest, righteous lives filled with perpetual sex”), then is SLAMMED down (”no big deal” and “For me, sex does not even come close to the thrill of scoring gorgeous glass for a window I will use”). It is our cultural bait and switch:

First you see the hot chick kissing the hot guy, then you are sold chewing gum. First you hear the salacious headlines about teenagers having sex with their teacher, THEN we all spend pious hours and minutes DECRYING the very prurience that attracted us to the story in the first place.

It is the old embroidery on Cartesian thought: I am a pure mind trapped in a gross, physical body (and by “gross” we mean “gross” as in “ooh, ick, GROSS!”).

Fallopian echo

And that is a sickness that screams to be discussed. Not all at once, perhaps. And not as some sort of panacea, but the mental health of our society will never be robust if we do NOT address it.

So, I have resolved to take action.

I’m announcing here and now that I am going to present my long-withheld critique of all this madness by publishing my long-delayed manuscript. (Happily, rereading it, it has proven evergreen.)

I am sick and tired of dealing with bigots and morons in the publishing industry, having given them 22 years to step up to the plate and just READ my damned book: therefore, I will self-publish Looking For Aphrodite myself, within the next couple of months. Then, perhaps, the general public will be able to get past the bigotry of the publishing world.

Because what is presented in the New York Times essay, for all its highfalutin’ high-mindedness, is fundamentally the collective illness that my manuscript was written to address. And dreadful, awful writing, to boot. (Granite is NOT a sedimentary rock. It is igneous, ignoramus.)

And, true to their roots, I have a funny feeling that, if my book sells any copies, “legitimate” publishers will suddenly experience Damascene Road Conversion Experience [DRCE] and prejudices against the subject matter will vanish like morning mist on a hot summer day.

This is the long history of the publishing industry.

I kid you not.

I’ll leave you with WHY I entitled it Looking For Aphrodite , after originally calling it “Adventures in the Skin Trade” and a couple of other things. It was something I’d written without thinking about it that I saw during the editing process:

That’s what got me into the mess in the first place. I was looking for Aphrodite, I think, and kept finding only false eyelashes on the sink and pantyhose drying over the shower curtain rod.

– chapter iv.

Or, we can remain rooted in this fundamentally schizophrenic relation between our minds and our bodies and our sexuality. And we can accept the crazy lady’s call to Universal Rejection of that Icky Old Sex Thing.

Who knows? Maybe she’ll even be on Oprah.

But at least we can now find out, “what’s the big deal?” courtesy of our Delacorte Press author (and 25 other essayists).

comes out Dec. 30,
evidently NOT for Christmas

Won’t be THAT be a relief?

And noble Joe the Plumber’s noble book comes out nobly today, for a noble $14.95.

December is sure turning into a veritable literary cornucopia, ain’t it?

Huzzah.

Courage.

===========

UPDATE, 11:04 PM 1 Dec. 08: This just in from the BBC …

BBC: Cheap sex – the credit crunch is biting under the sheets —  As the credit crunch bites, Britons may be turning to sex as a cheap way to pass the time, a charity says.  —  A YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found sex was the most popular free activity, ahead of window shopping and gossiping….

Now we know what the “big deal” is about sex: it’s something fun that can be done for free!

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