I Love You Not

Is saying “I love you,” a trigger? “Love you means never having to say you're sorry,” is the famous line from Love Story, but it appears such declarations may soon require apologies. In a Sunday Review piece  (“Regulating Sex,” NYT 6/27/15) Judith Shulevitz points out that reaching out to take someone’s hand could one day be considered “criminal sexual conduct.” This is already happening on college campuses. Governor Andrew Cuomo just signed an “affirmative consent” law similar to that passed in California (“Cuomo Signs Affirmative Consent College Sexual Assault Bill Into Law,” Huffington Post, 7/7/15). The absence of a "no" is no longer equal to a yes. Remember Molly Bloom's soliloquy? "I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me and he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes." Who would ever have dreamt that it would epitomize the doctrine of  “affirmative consent?” But when will we start hearing about “speech rape?” When will certain kinds of language be considered an unwanted advance? Young men and women in particular are impressionable and could easily be triggered say by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…” Pity is a famous form of entrapment and before long the object of your desire (aka prey) may be reaching their hand out to you. If nothing else "affirmative consent" will make the legal profession happy. Imagine the new kind of ambulance chaser arriving on the scene of a  neo-Juliet stalking her would be Romeo with an unwanted, “Oh Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” Speech is a very potent aphrodisiac, which can be almost as effective as Spanish Fly. Certain poems have such a powerful effect on emotion, they're like Quaaludes, the drug that has recently come back into the news in connection with Bill Cosby (“Bill Cosby admitted he got Quaaludes to give to women,” CNN, 7/7/15). What about D.H. Lawrence,  Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Charles Bukowski, not to mention Catullus, Chaucer and Rabelais? What about the Kama Sutra? Perhaps only very old friends, or old married couples who have known each other for decades, and have signed waivers should be permitted to read these forbidden texts to each other. And we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief when Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” is finally banned for good.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Can Stephen J. Gould’s notion of punctuated equilibrium be applied to human sexuality?  If evolution doesn’t conform to a smooth pattern, how do we determine what sexual congress will be 500 years from now? For instance, rather than being a period of repression, the Middle Ages were a very sexy time. The Canterbury Tales is one of the most ribald works of world literature, easily competing with Frank Harris, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Going back further in time, there’s Sappho and the great erotic poet Catullus. It’s odd that the swingers club of the ‘70s was named Plato’s Retreat. Shouldn’t it have been Caligula’s Retreat, for a time when the vox populi was urged to carpe diem?  In fact, sexual expression seems to move by the principle of devolution rather than evolution, with advances in man from his earliest prehensile form, homo habilis, leading to the predominance of mind over matter.  In the ‘60s there were love children, but homo is often not erectus by the time he reaches his adult state. He’s too sad.

   

Still there’s the notion of progress.  In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discussed the compromise that man must make between his instinctual drives and his social nature. The mind is rather inventive. If fetishism provides a detour that allows the discharge of sexual energies that might otherwise have been inhibited, then perhaps progress can be described as the movement from merkins (pubic wigs) to hot waxing, from girdles to thongs, from pantyhose to the scene in the appropriately named Basic Instinct where Sharon Stone startles her interrogators by revealing the absence of any undergarment at all?

  

But what does the future hold?  If the sexual drive derives from procreation, then Viagra has helped to make sex a gratuitous act that persists far beyond the procreative years. Will there be some drug in the next century that makes sex possible for consenting adults who have already passed away? Nicholson Baker created a character in his novel The Fermata who has the futuristic ability to undress women with little or no consequences. Now this fantasy has become a reality with the new generation of security devices to be used in airports around the world.  Do these devices herald the prospect of a kind of parthenogenesis or immaculate conception—at least in airports—in which the voyeuristic impulse can impregnate another mind? What about timeless erotic passion, what the Germans called Liebestod, or love-death? And what about Wagner? Will there still be a Bayreuth Festival in 2500?

Crimes of the Heart

What do Terry Stanton, Tiger Woods, Silvio Berlusconi, Eliot Spitzer, and Bill Clinton all have in common? Each of these men has attained a certain degree of celebrity not only for their professional abilities, but also for their extramarital exploits. More importantly, each epitomizes a tendency to make value judgments about human sexuality. Bonobos have recently come into the news because of their polymorphous perversity, bisexuality, and, in the case of males, generalized priapic behavior. Recent stories have revealed a degree of admiration for these love apes—though a piece in The New Yorker qualified the matter by questioning the bonobo as a paradigm of cuddliness, and introduced the specter of aggression into the palette of their behaviors.

   

Victor Hugo, George Simenon, John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and most of the characters in novels by mid-20th-century American authors like Richard Yates, John Updike, and John Cheever—all indulged in adulterous exploits. In fact, far more repressive times have yielded a greater admiration for infidelities. Even as children, we were taught that Benjamin Franklin explored electricity in ways other than simply flying a kite. Colette, George Sand, Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, the abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell, and Mary McCarthy are only a few of the famous women who led equally colorful sex lives.

Yet for all the openness about sexuality in our current age, and all the attempts to deal with both the problems and pleasures of the libido, few periods in history, with the exception of the Puritan world of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, seem to be as censorious of human impulse as the present day. Yes, crashing cars and hiring prostitutes might be a source of interest and even concern. It’s true that condom companies are the only endorsement Tiger Woods is likely to retain in the coming year. But the shock and surprise that a golfer might gratify the attraction generated by his legendary swing betrays a questionable threshold for human transgression. Adultery isn’t a victimless act, but why has it risen to the top of the food chain in the evolution of society’s response to human sin? Only the French seem to cherish desire as the ultimate form of natural selection.