SEX UNDAUNTED
Many confuse sex with eroticism. Sex is the biological and morphological complex of the male and/or female gender with reproductive capabilities.
Eroticism is an expression of sexual desire, pleasure, temptation, attraction or their positive and/or negative consequences, fulfilled in sexual intercourse and relative love (erotic) expressions. It has many forms, from pure desire and seduction, to the opposites, in life, literature, love plays and art.
Feminists believe that society determines sexual and erotic behavior, sex roles, gender-related conduct.
Therefore they scramble and homogenize sex roles, purge patriarchy out of society, let little boys and girls play mainly with dolls, and utopia will result.
The feminists, the liberals, the socialists live with Locke's (1632-1704) and Rousseau's (1712-1778) illusion that man was born good and then corrupted by society. Free man (and woman) from society's chains, and let him (-better: her-) reform society.
The French Revolution (ca. 1789-1799) hoped to reform society by freeing man from its "chains".
The disastrous results showed that the primordial in man was a demon that society had to restrain, as Hobbes (1588-1679, Nietzsche (1844-1900), Freud (1856--1939) and many more affirmed.
There was more.
The differences between male and female were much worse than the neo-Rousseauist "flower children" of the 1960's could have imagined: the primordial male's propensity to rape, violence and crime are not so much the result of pornography, poverty and social deprivation, but of his sexual aggression instincts. Woman's "surrender", "lower creativity and ambition" were not due to social injustice but to self-completion in her reprod uctive and kkk maternal capability within. Man's "leadership", creativity and aggression are a search for completion without.
Woman's destiny is fulfilled within herself, insofar as she exists: all she has to do is being herself.
Man's sexual lust, erection and orgasm are an aggressive quest for completion "without".
Feminism's demand for woman's equality with man in leadership, creativity and aggression supports the misunderstanding that man's drawback is a "superiority".
In other words, feminists are dedicated to woman's feminist-contrived inferiority.
Sexuality (as reproductive gender function) and eroticism are where nature and culture harmonize or clash, depending on our interpretation.
Feminists try to exorcize natural sexuality into a social pattern they can control: imposing e sex equality, sterilizing it with feminist procedures to neutralize man, regulate the natural processes in politically correct rituals, reduce them to a matter of social convention.
The new "gender feminism", in common with liberal and leftist currents, are inspired by Rousseau.
His "The Social
Contract" (1762) starts with: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in
chains" (an inane statement, because man can only be chained by man. How
was the chainer freer tnan the chainee?)
Putting benign Romantic nature against corrupt society, Rousseau
produced the progressivist strain in 19th-century culture, for which social
reform was the means to achieve paradise on earth.
The bubble of these hopes was burst by the catastrophes of the French Revolution (1789-1799) and 2 world wars. But Rousseauism was reborn in the postwar generation of the nineteensixties, from which contemporary feminism developed.
Rousseau rejects original sin, Christianity's view of man born unclean, with a propensity for evil.
Rousseau's idea, derived from Locke, of man's innate goodness led to social environmentalism, now dominant in American human services, penal codes, and behaviorist therapies.
It assumes that aggression, violence, and crime come from social deprivation -a poor neighborhood, a bad home.
Thus feminism blames rape on pornography and, by a smug circularity of reasoning, interprets outbreaks of sadism as a backlash to itself.
But rape and sadism have been evident throughout history and in all cultures.
Let's take the point of view of the marquis de Sade (1740-1814), the most unread major writer of Western literature. De Sade's work is a comprehensive satiric critique of Rousseau, written a decade after the first failed Rousseauist experiment, the French Revolution (ca. 1789-1799), which culminated in the Reign of Terror.
De Sade follows Hobbes rather than Locke. Aggression comes from nature; it is what Nietzsche calls the "will-to-power".
For de Sade, getting back to nature (the Romantic imperative that still permeates our culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials) would give free rein to violence and lust.
Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check.
When social controls weaken, man's innate cruelty bursts forth.
The rapist is created not by social influences but by a failure of social conditioning.
Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature.
Sex and identity are power.
Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions.
It exalts individualism and freedom, but it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy.
Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women, and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human definition by nature or fate.
The sorcerer's apprentice invokes the Muses and summons the Harpies.
Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted. Behaviorist sex therapies believe guiltless, no-fault sex is possible.
But sex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the confluence between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primordial urges, the uncanny crossroad of Hecate (Greek goddess of undergriund and death), where all things return in the night.
Eroticism is a realm stalked by ghosts. It is the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.
The identification of woman was universal in prehistory.
In hunting or agrarian societies depending upon nature, femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility.
As culture progressed, femaleness receded in importance.
Buddhist cultures retained the ancient meanings of femaleness long after the West renounced them.
Male and female, the Chinese Yin and Yang life and death, are balanced and interpenetrating powers in humans and nature, to which society is subordinate.
This code of passive acceptance has its roots in India, a land of sudden extremes where the femaleness of fertility religion is always doubleedged.
The Indian nature-goddess Kali is creator and destroyer. She is the lady ringed with skulls.
The moral ambivalence of the great mother-goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them.
We shed our own blood by grasping nature's bare blade.
Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness.
The last major western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete (about 3000 to 1000 b. c.).
That fell in a gigantic vulcanic cataclism and did not rise again.
The lesson is that cultic femaleness is no guarantee of cultural strength or viability.
Judaism, Christian parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature.
The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness. Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult.
It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as an earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.
The evolution from earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm.
Her mysterious procreative power put her at the center of early symbolism.
She was the model for the Great Mother.
But the mother cults did not mean social freedom for women.
Nature's cycles are woman's cycles.
Biologic femaleness is a sequence of circular returns that gives her a stability of identity.
She does not have to become but only to be.
Her centrality is a great obstacle to man, whose quest for identity she blocks.
He must transform himself into an independent being, free of her.
If not, he will simply fall back into her.
Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination.
The western idea of history as a propulsive movement into the future is a male formulation.
No woman, I submit, could have conceived such an idea, since it is a strategy of evasion of woman's own cyclic nature, in which man dreads being caught.
Evolutionary or apocalyptic history is a male wish list with a happy ending, a phallic peak.
Woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from natural cycle, because she IS that cycle.
The ancients knew that woman is bound to nature's calendar, an appointment she cannot refuse.
The Greek pattern of free will through hubris into tragedy is a male drama, since woman has never been deluded (until recently) by the mirage of free will.
She knows there is no free will, since she is not free.
Woman's reproductive apparatus is vastly more complicated than man's, and still ill understood.
All kinds of things can go wrong or cause distress in going right.
Western woman is in an agonistic relation to her own body.
Dysmenorrhea (menstrualdisfunctions),
it is argued, is a disease of civilization, since women in tribal cultures have few menstrual dysfubctions)complaints..
But in tribal life, woman has an extended or collective identity: tribal religion honors nature and subordinates itself to it.
It is precisely in advanced Western Society, which attempts to improve or surpass nature, and which holds up individualism and self realization as a model, that the stark facts of woman's condition emerge with painful clarity.
The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy, the more she develops her imagination, the fiercer will be her struggle with nature -that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her:
Do not dare to be free, for your body does not belong to you!
The female body is a primordial machine, indifferent to the person who inhabits it. Nature cares only for species, never individuals:
this humiliating biologic fact is most directly experienced by women, who probably have a greater realism and wisdom than men because of it.
The sexes are eternally at war.
There is supposed to be an element of "attack, search and destroy" in male sex, with a potential for rape.
There is an element of entrapment in female sex, a subliminal manipulation leading to physical and emotional infantilization of the male.
In the sex act, she is the Maenad (frenzied mad Nymph) about to render her victim.
Sex is an uncanny moment of ritual and incantation, in which the dominated becomes the dominator.
Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand.
Prostitutes testify to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop.
Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night.
The old "double standard" gave men a sexual liberty denied to women.
Marxist feminists reduce the historical cult of woman's virginity to her property value, her worth on the male marriage market.
But there is a biologic basis to the double standard.
Since hell and heaven divide and combine the sexes, let us abandon the pretense of sexual sameness and admit the relentless duality of gender.
Male sex is quest romance, exploration and speculation.
Promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen thought.
Promiscuity in women is a desperate search for identity. The promiscuous woman is incapable of clear ideas until the integrity of her body is enriched rather than menaced by each contact. I
t is in nature's best interest to goad dominant males into indiscriminate spreading of their seed.
Nature also profits from female-male convergence.
Male chase and female flight are not just a social game.
The double standard may be one of organic laws that paint Judeo-Christian anti-nature trust into a corner:
nature cannot be conquered from without.
The Greek and Roman pagans dealt with nature from within.
Aphrodite and Venus provided pleasure as a phallic devotion harmonized with procreation.
Rape's primordial power was harnessed in the orgiastic ecstasy of worship: woman was back at the center, but on the pagan altar, where she acquired the power of dispensing pleasure and power itself, without losing the prerogative of devouring man's maleness.
And males willingly surrendered to a love goddess who thrived on orgasmic worship.
She has a firm hold on the altar as long as she dispenses pleasure.
Here is where man and woman both gain and lose into each other: a bliss that aches for more.
Feminists missed the point.
Even a man-hating prostitute can be a love priestess with a better chance to enlightenment than a righteous feminist.
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