PELVIC ISSUES
by Catherine Madsen
Judith Levine
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 299 pp. $25.95.
Mark D. Jordan
The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
2000. 322 pp. $25.00.
Linda Holler
Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Moral Agency. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 239 pp. $23.00.
Eric L. Santner
On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and
Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001. 156 pp. $16.00.
It seems very difficult for the keepers of spiritual life to deal
with the fact that we get here by a biological process. The
additional fact that it is a pleasurable process, and that its
pleasure can outweigh its reproductive potential to the extent of
sidestepping it altogether, seems even more terrifying. Riveted, as
to a primal scene, by the knowledge that this is where babies
come from, religious authorities urge that nothing must
interfere with the arrival of babies, but also that everyone must be
kept for as long as possible from both the practice and the theory
of sex. Of course people find out the practice anyway, and the
results of religious prohibition are comically (and tragically)
mixed; middle-class Americans can get any sexual information they
want on the Internet, but an international summit on the environment
cannot discuss population. Meanwhile the poor cannot reliably get
information, contraception, abortion or health care. The practice of
sex will survive any obstacle; it is the theory that suffers.
Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors— already the subject
of a fierce outcry from the Christian Right—contains some solid
basic theory. The book recounts the virtual suppression of sex
education in the schools over the past twenty years, as well as the
erosion of access to abortion and the outbreak of various panics
(some more justified than others) over sexual abuse. For the benefit
of readers who have heard the outcry without reading the book,
Levine does not (as her accusers claim) consider the sexual abuse of
children nonexistent or not serious, or relationships between adults
and teenagers unproblematic; she does think preschool and
kindergarten teachers should be able to hug the (very tactile)
children they teach, and that statutory rape laws are a bad way to
deal with relations that are consensual from the younger person’s
point of view. She thinks young people ought to be listened to and
given the means to think about their developing sexual experience.
She also objects to the basing of public policy on
oversimplification and hysterical rage—faults to which every
parent confronting the sexuality of his or her child is susceptible,
and which should not be written uncritically into law.
Levine thinks we may be unnecessarily upsetting ourselves with
the concept of premature and rampant “teen sex”; throughout most
of history and most of the world, humans have become sexually active
in the mid- to late teen years and sometimes earlier, generally but
not reliably with nuptial rites attached. The
abstinence-till-monogamous-marriage model has been an ideal rather
than a reality (and not always even an ideal, as some religious
premarital accommodations like “bundling” attest). Levine is
impatient with media representations of sex, but for different
reasons than we are accustomed to hearing: what she objects to is
not the representations themselves, but their flat and uniform
emotional tone. What is never shown on TV is sexual “speaking and
feeling”—uncertainty, bewildering indecision, the ambivalent
coexistence of desire and dislike, the amazed delight in the full
range of a personality: nothing to disturb the popular perception
that sex is a matter of biological plumbing. Levine’s remedy for
this policy of omission is— mirabile dictu!—a literary
reading list: Shakespeare, Donne, Whitman, Emily Brontë, Emily
Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, and others whose subject is the power of
sexual love. (Sharon Olds is worth adding to the list.) Levine’s
point is that children will experience sexual curiosity, and
adolescents will experience sexual passion, whether their parents
like it or not; the curiosity should be satisfied honestly and the
complexities of passion helped to articulation.
Some of Levine’s most encouraging examples of sex education are
based in community social service agencies and on websites (Columbia
University’s “Go Ask Alice”) rather than in schools. The
independence of these venues from parental control allows enough
privacy, sometimes anonymity, for the most delicate questions to be
raised, and on the questioner’s rather than the curriculum’s
terms. (Often enough the questions are not anatomical but emotional,
like “How do you know you’re in love?”) It may make sense for
students in their twenties, like those on the Columbia website, to
be the mediators of sexual knowledge to adolescents; sexual
knowledge is new and fresh to them, they have a high stake in its
accuracy, and for the most part their experience is not yet so
layered with ambivalence as to make them recommend an impossible
caution. The classroom model, mired in a quicksand of caution,
addresses only biology and peer pressure; it shies away from desire,
particularly female desire. Even in the most open classroom,
adolescents may learn a good deal about how sex happens
without ever considering why. Freud once remarked that when a
young woman is forbidden to think about sex she becomes reluctant to
think about anything; perhaps a similar pattern accounts for the
general inanity of popular culture.
Levine is a journalist with a command of statistics and rational
argument, but she is no sunny optimist; she does not believe that
enough commonsensical sexual indoctrination will yield happy and
healthy human animals. She does believe in the need for sexual
privacy, and for a high level of physical and emotional
self-knowledge within that privacy as a means of averting ruin and
tragedy in young people’s first experiments. Sexual surveillance—for
the three-year-old observed masturbating as for the sixteen-year-old
caught making love—is invasive and deeply unsettling; whether the
parent is accusing or well-meaning, there is always a shock in it.
Levine also believes that at a certain point in adolescence it is a
parent’s business to bow out and let the child make his or her own
mistakes—and as a citizen to provide, so far as possible, the
legal, social and medical means to rectify those mistakes in
privacy, without forcing the child’s abject return to dependency.
She does not believe that any set of precautions constitutes a
recipe for entirely safe sex:
Abstinence-only education falsely promises parents it can
eliminate the awfulness of watching children try and fail (because
by the time they get to sex, they will be adults and able to handle
it). But comprehensive education may also encourage a similarly
unrealistic, but profoundly held, hope: that teen sexuality can be
rational, protected, and heartbreak-free.(109)
The truth is, our hearts are broken by sex —whether because it
starts too soon or delays too long, because it takes us too far from
our families or not far enough, because our love is unrequited or is
requited confusingly, because our partner or we ourselves can’t
hold the monogamous line. The triumphant acceptances— and the
triumphant restraints—that the proponents of abstinence imagine
routinely achievable by the inexperienced can usually come only
after, and because, we have made mistakes.
Mark Jordan’s The Silence of Sodom is a subtler and more
intellectually ambitious book, on an even more volatile subject: the
Catholic church’s thinking about homosexuality, and the church’s
peculiar status as “at once the most homophobic and the most
homoerotic of institutions.” Jordan argues that this paradox is
structural, intrinsic to the male celibate priest- hood;
heterosexual priests may do their work more or less unaware of the
complicated resonances that gay men perceive in the church, but the
resonances have been there for centuries and show no signs of
disappearing.
In reviewing the debate about the actual numbers and percentages
of gay men in the priesthood, Jordan concludes that it is impossible
to trust any numbers; the gay presence in the church is not so much
a functioning network as a multi- locular closet in which gay
priests are largely isolated from each other and from statistical
scrutiny. Certainly the priest- hood has historically been a haven
for men who—for a variety of reasons of which one was homoerotic
attraction—did not want or could not convincingly engage in family
life. Church doctrine has created tremendous sexual shame in both
heterosexuals and homosexuals, and has offered a remedy for that
shame in the purity of the celibate life; in particular ways,
homosexuals have experienced the vow of celibacy as simultaneously
an immolation of desire and a compensation for its loss.
The priesthood and religious life are all-male institutions that
reward vows of celibacy within a religion that demands celibacy of
all homosexuals. If you have to be celibate anyway, why not get
rewarded for it—and do it in the company of other men with similar
inclinations? (106)
To the conflicted young man, and more recently to the older
candidate in flight from active gay life, the “Fathers”—some
of whom are themselves conflicted or deeply closeted—“promise. .
.the keys of a kingdom without homosexuals in exchange for
his obedience in everything, but especially in trifles” (223). But
the reward comes at a price. In the priestly “formation”
process, purity is monitored in the confessional, in a spiritual
protocol that allows the confessor an extraordinary entree into the
candidate’s physical privacy. (Every ejaculation—even when
alone, even when asleep—must be reported). Whether or not the
strict rules against sexual contact and “particular friendships”
are ever breached, this sexual surveillance is both limitation and
agitation; it is never possible to approach the simplest biological
level of arousal without dread and a fear of exposure. The human
response to the forbidden being what it is, this atmosphere
heightens eroticism; it also cripples trust at the root.
Jordan’s summary of the documentary history of “sodomy”
highlights the church’s ways of discrediting anyone who speaks
either openly or critically of the established patterns. On the
institution’s terms, the only permitted speech about homosexuality
is horror and scandal; even recent attempts at official statements
of tolerance, like the 1998 American bishops’ letter Always Our
Children, have been rerouted through the traditional rhetoric of
condemnation, and avoid the practical questions that arise after the
initial coming-out process. (“What, for example, is an obedient
Catholic parent to do if the child decides to take a permanent
lover? To have a union ceremony? To adopt children? To publish a
book critical of church teaching?” [45]) Any statement of more
thoroughgoing tolerance, or even of accurate description, is taken
as special pleading and a covert admission of homosexuality: “Only
a sodomite could consider sodomy something less than an occasion for
hysteria” (120). There has been an ironic history in the church of
creating a public horror of “sodomy” and then covering up occurrences of it in the priesthood to avoid scandalizing the faithful;
this habit may account for the criminal negligence with which the
contemporary church has concealed the widespread abuse of young
boys. Ultimately the impulse behind the concealment is the same
reflex of self-protection and absolute loyalty that the church has
demonstrated in other modern controversies, notably the disastrous
1968 decision on birth control.
There are, as Jordan recognizes, certain “intellectual
satisfactions” in absolute loyalty—in getting one’s mind
around decisions that tease the reason and keep it alive even while
demanding its ultimate submission. He reminds us that Nietzsche
called Pascal’s faith “a continuing suicide of reason.” “Nietzsche
is astute,” he adds, “to single this out as a distinctively
Catholic pleasure—the protracted, the deliciously painful
self-mutilation of a magnificent mind undoing itself in obedience”
(215).
Jordan’s analysis of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t camp
aesthetic in Catholic liturgy is both diverting and sad, with the
melancholy of a pre-Stonewall existence in which an encoded
aestheticism is the best that can be hoped for, and organized gay
visibility seems an unspeakable vulgarity. But Jordan is also
critical of post-Stonewall gay and lesbian attempts (in the
organization Dignity and in a number of books critical of church
teaching) to be “good homosexuals” in terms consonant with the
church’s official statements. He sides with Foucault in thinking
that “the homosexual” is a nineteenth- century medical model
whose adoption is risky: how much of an advance is it to be pinned
to a nineteenth-century diagnosis of sickness rather than a medieval
designation of sin? How much difference is there between the two
models, if the same inflexible authority administers both and makes
no careful distinction between them? “We should feel contrition,”
he tells openly gay Catholics, “for having pretended to have a
sexual identity, when what we had were desires, memories, and loves.”
He insists on a new language to express both the erotic and the
sacramental life, a language that cannot be imagined beforehand but
can only evolve with use.
Linda Holler’s Erotic Morality is not about sexual
behavior at all, apart from some of its abuses and grievous
adaptations; it is a consideration of the relationship of physical
touch to the moral life. It is an extremely ambitious exploration of
what happens when touch is crippled by either nature or nurture,
beginning with the organic disorder of autism and proceeding through
the philosophical objectification of the body, sadistic and
pornographic touch, violence to the self as an attempt at
self-healing, and “mindful touch” and the practice of meditation
as less damaging restorative methods.
Holler confronts some of the most irreparable human suffering we
know: the child who experiences touch as pain, the adult so fearful
of the link between touch and emotion as to have to sever that link
through cruelty, the survivor of cruelty who must recreate the pain
(through eating disorders, self-inflicted injury, contractual
sadomasochism, or religious asceticism) to relieve the sense of
helplessness or emotional deadening. She cites the terrible
behavioral studies of touch-deprived baby animals, who endured
shocks of pain in any number of ways simply to have something
approximating a mother to cling to. (It is worth considering the
phenomenon of clerical sexual abuse as the fallout of deprivation:
if piglets will lie in a cold corner till they die of hypothermia
rather than under a heat lamp in the center of the pen for the sake
of having a wall at their backs, is it any wonder that men denied
physical tenderness may inflict themselves again and again, without
tenderness, on boys who don’t want them? The disruption of touch
may become a profound disruption of judgment.) Holler also explains
the current neurological knowledge about the influence of touch, eye
contact, tangible and visible affection, and repeated experiences of fear or
violence on brain development. She has done a great service by
drawing all this research together; the book may serve as a
supplement to Judith Herman’s indispensable Trauma and Recovery
(Basic Books, 1997) in explaining the neurochemical adjustments—some
of them never fully readjustible—that children make to early
experiences of neglect or terror.
Holler is acutely conscious of the world’s fragile state and
the possible role of “mindful touch” in restoring it; against
the Cartesian dualism in which feeling is ruled out as a source of
moral information, she would bring into human consciousness the
suffering of animals in the slaughterhouse, the risks of
environmental pollution and nuclear accident, and the sheer cost of
our unnecessarily anxious working lives. Through the restoration of
“tactile consciousness” she hopes to detach us from superficial
cravings and unbend the rigidities of our economic life, restoring
tender feeling and its corollary responsibility for the planet and
its inhabitants.
It would be unfair to fault Holler for not providing a
specifically sexual model of “mindful touch” if that was not her
purpose, but—like Levine’s high school sex education programs
that never mention female desire—the book does lack any discussion
of how sexual touch can be made restorative, a healing as profound
as the original wound. This is unfortunate for friends and lovers of
the survivors of sexual trauma, who face a rigorous moral test of
their forbearance, integrity and hope as they put the survivor’s
needs first while trying to keep their own desire from annihilation.
It may indeed require other agencies than the lover’s before the
survivor can contemplate healing: the cultivation of nonsexual
physical awareness, the relearning of emotional patterns, the
articulation of feeling, recognition from those less damaged and
compassion for those worse damaged. The extraordinary human capacity
to re-teach oneself touch from within, as it were, is surely an
essential part of recovery. But friends and lovers are not
superfluous or always a liability. Until what is learned from within
has a place in the outer world—until it is received, in
profound conversation and physical mercy, by people who have earned
the survivor’s trust—the survivor is still in quarantine.
Levine and Jordan both call for a new language of sexuality;
Holler does not, but in her vision of a new tactile consciousness
toward the world there is a similar movement toward accuracy and
care. (And as many writers on trauma have said, there can be no
consciousness without language.) How can such a language arise? A
dignified popularization of Hindu/Ayurvedic women’s oral
tradition, Vinod Verma’s Kamasutra for Women (New York:
Kodansha, 1997), defines sexual union not in terms of mental or
physical health, social integration or religious obedience, but as beatitude—a
startling word to see outside the pages of Dante, and not for
idealized chaste love but for the warm and sticky real physical
thing. How can we arrive at a language that will accommodate the
experience—not a language of abstract sexual identity, but of
specific desires, memories, and loves?
A crucial suggestion, I think, comes from a book whose subject is
not sexuality but the intersection of psychoanalysis and
spirituality: Eric L. Santner’s The Psychotheology of Everyday
Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (University of
Chicago, 2001). Without attempting a full review of the book, I want
to sketch Santner’s central argument and suggest its relevance for
intimate relations.
Part of Santner’s purpose is to delve beneath the current
rhetoric of cultural pluralism to discover a basis for contact with
the Other more compelling and less superficial than the generalities
of group identity. He is more or less starting where Jordan ends. He
distinguishes between “global” consciousness (as represented in
religious studies by the work of Regina Schwartz and Jan Assman) and
the “universal” consciousness of Freud and Rosenzweig, a
distinction he casts as the difference between the outward and the
inward.
For global consciousness, conflicts are generated through
external differences between cultures and societies whereas
universality. . . signifies the possibility of a shared opening to
the agitation and turbulence immanent to any construction of
identity. . . .[F]or global consciousness, every stranger is ultimately just like me, ultimately
familiar; his or her strangeness is a function of a different
vocabulary, a different set of names that can always be translated.
For the psychoanalytic conception of universality. . .it is just the
reverse: the possibility of a “We,” of communality, is granted
on the basis of the fact that every familiar is ultimately strange
and that, indeed, I am even in a crucial sense a stranger to myself.
(5–6)
The schematic methods of identity politics cannot hold the “specific
form of disorientation, the idiomatic way in which one’s approach
to and movement through the world is ‘distorted’” (39). The
procrustean solidarities and tolerances of political life leave
untouched our inward peculiarities. But it is peculiarity—the
untranslatable, the fact beyond our imagination—that compels us.
For Freud, this is the “excess of demand” created by trauma, for
Rosenzweig the overplus of validity—surpassing all possible
meanings—created by revelation.
What makes the Other other is not his or her spatial
exteriority. . .but the fact that he or she is strange, a stranger;
and not only to me but also to him- or herself, is the bearer of an
internal alterity, an enigmatic density of desire calling for
response beyond any rule-governed reciprocity. . . .God is above all
the name for the pressure to be alive to the world, to open to the too
much of pressure generated in large measure by the uncanny presence
of my neighbor. (9)
This “density of desire” may or may not call for specifically
sexual consent (which can be as “rule-governed” as any refusal);
it does call for a depth of recognition unimagined in the categories of masculine and feminine, gay
and straight, healthy and damaged. The people whose presence demands
such recognition of us —not a manipulative demand, but a distress
we almost know how to relieve—are the people with whom the
new language can be created. With these Others it is possible to
evolve a sexual intelligence— that “intelletto d’amore”
of which Dante spoke at the beginning and the end of his work—that
respects but is not fearful of desire. For there are verbal as well
as physical conversations that attain the open- eyed deliberateness
and the extraordinary stillness of which Yeats’s “Woman Young
and Old” speaks to young brides:
And both adrift on the miraculous
stream
Where—wrote a learned astrologer—
The Zodiac is changed into a sphere.
— Catherine Madsen
