The following is a brief excerpt from one of my favorite iconoclasts, Camille Paglia. In her must-read book Sexual Personae she makes a Hobbsean/Sadean argument that unrestrained sex and unbridled "nature" are dark, chthonian threats to civilized life.
"Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. There are hierarchies in nature and alternate hierarchies in society. In nature, brute force is the law, a survival of the fittest. In society, there are protections for the weak. Society is our frail barrier against nature. When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs or depression. My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind. Romanticism always turns into decadence. Nature is a hard taskmaster. It is the hammer and the anvil, crushing individuality. Perfect freedom would be to die by earth, air, water, and fire.
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 around with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges. I called it an intersection. This intersection is the uncanny crossroads of Hecate, where all things return in the night. Eroticism is a realm stalked with ghosts. It is the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.
This book shows how much in culture goes against our best wishes. Integration of man's body and mind is a profound problem that is not about to be solved by recreational sex or an expansion of women's rights. Incarnation, the limitation of mind by matter, is an outrage to imagination. Equally outrageous is gender, which we have not chosen but which nature has imposed upon us. Our physicality is torment, our body the tree of nature on which Blake sees us crucified" (p. 3).
Ready?......Discuss.
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
I wasn't aware that I was telling anyone what to do in their bedroom. I think the passage from Paglia is interesting because it suggests that sex is a primal force that doesn't fit well with modern day casual attitutudes and utopian protestations of guiltless pleasure. I think she also makes a strong case for the intrinsically "cruel", hierarchiacal nature of the sexual impulse. The irony she presents is fascinating. Those who wish to liberate themselves from "oppressive" social conventions through "free love" and causual sex often end up subjugating themselves to even more oppressive sexual compulsions over which they exert gradually less and less control.
You're free to agree or disagree, of course.
By the way, Camille Paglia isn't a conservative. She's a moderate left-wing literary/cultural critic.
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
I have no idea what the Hell all that shit is supposed to mean. But this camilia paglia whoreslut sounds like another mouthy broad who needs to learn some manners at the blunt end of a steel pipe.
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Aug 11th, 2006 11:31 PM
