The Devil at Large (28 page)

This is a perfect summation of misogyny—the same misogyny that justified blaming Eve for the expulsion from Paradise, burning witches, denying women the vote, denying them, even today, equal legal rights, equal pay, equal health care, equal right to have total control over their own bodies, equal right to life and limb in public and private spaces.

If woman is womb, the misogynist reasons, she is also tomb. If woman is life, she is also death. But the “primitive,” the “savage,” accepts this dichotomy unjudgmentally, making woman both the goddess of life and death; Kali; the Great Mother; Venus of Willendorf; the Goddess-Creatrix of the universe and everything in it. Woman is also the door to death, and to the afterlife. How much less primitive is the primitive than we are! The primitive is neither sexomaniac or sexophobic: both these states are aspects of one another. The primitive embraces the whole spectrum of his or her humanity.

We know now, as Miller and Lawrence could not—except in the truth of the unconscious—that the equation of woman with death is a patriarchal slander, made to deliberately discredit one half the human race.

Patriarchal societies are founded upon a crime, the crime is not the murder of the father, as Freud would have us believe. It is the rape and scorn of the mother.

Miller’s equation of womb with death is not an inevitable one; it is patriarchal one. By extension, it implies that only the wombless members of the human race can embody an imperishable spirit. It therefore designates men alone as prophets, preachers, and artists. Women are condemned to be vessels—vessels of birth and also vessels of death.

We are so used to this worldview that we forget we could easily see the world otherwise, if we chose. We could see woman and man as two halves of an organism that can, in harmony, produce and sustain life. We could see deity as androgynous, as in fact the Hindus do. We could see death as inherent in all living things, not only in the female of the species. We could go beyond the trap of patriarchy, the rosy pseudomythology of supposedly perfect ancient matriarchies, and try to create a world in which sex was not allied with death and therefore did not have to be discarded in the discarded body of a woman.

But as yet we do not have such a world. We are still dealing with the ignominious world of patriarchy, whose tentacles have entwined themselves around all our minds. Sex, in this world, is death, is woman, is disease.

These false ideas have been reinforced in our time by the plague of sexually transmitted diseases that announced itself right after the sexual revolution. A causal connection was made between sexual freedom and disease, a causal connection we never stopped to question. The sexual revolution was made the cause of AIDS because such causation fitted in perfectly with our puritanical notions of retribution for pleasure. Whether the AIDS virus evolved “naturally” or was deliberately invented by a governmental germ-warfare lab to squelch homosexuality and free sexual expression by heterosexuals, it has become a political force to be reckoned with. (See David Black’s challenging book
The Plague Years
, published in 1986, for a study of the way AIDS fulfills our sexual stereotypes.) Sex has again become the root of all evil—and with it has come a ferocious backlash against women, against gays, against blacks, against Hispanics, against all those who do not conform to a white male ideal of sexless and bloodless spirituality.

Even though Miller was trapped in a misogynistic worldview, he was still able to see spirituality in woman; he was still able to see sexuality as a force for life as well as death. Though he can express almost textbook vignettes of misogyny and does so in
The World of Lawrence
, he can also accept fecundating female sexuality, as in his essay on Anaïs Nin, “Un Etre Etoilique,” and elsewhere. Miller is, in fact, perfect proof that male rage is part and parcel of patriarchy, that the need to dominate and symbolically or literally kill the mother is at the root of all patriarchal evil.

Miller understood that fear of sex projected onto the woman was one of the ills of society. He struggled with this fear and then transcended it. Again, he says this of himself, using what he writes about Lawrence as a code:

… Strindberg remained a misogynist whereas Lawrence (perhaps because of his latent femininity) arrived at a higher or deeper understanding. His abuse goes out equally to man and to woman; he stresses continually the need for each to accentuate their sex, to insist upon polarity, so as to strengthen the sexual connection which can renew and revive all the other forces, the major forces that are necessary for the development of the whole being, to stay the waste of contemporary disintegration.

Both sexes, Lawrence felt, Miller felt, were equally to blame for the sexual degradation of modern life.

… and the real cause lies deeper than this surface war between the sexes…. The real cause issues from the evil seed of the Christian ideal …

In this
aperçu
, Miller shows himself in perfect agreement with such feminist thinkers as Mary Daley, writing in
Beyond God the Father
and other books, who analyze the whore/Madonna split in our culture, a split that has fed the fires of unending sex war between woman and man, and has led to a puritanical rejection of both sexuality and woman as being merely screens for death.

A new paradigm for the sexes is needed, one that sees women and men holistically rather than as battling armies. Such paradigms exist, but they have been deliberately buried for centuries, first by Judeo-Christian brainwashing—and now by Moslem brainwashing.

No one is really looking at the problem in terms of root causes. It is our own worldview that we must change, preparatory to changing the world. This is why I fear that the reductive, antisexual view of Miller’s work—whether by male chauvinist prudes or feminist prudes—is merely another symptom of the distorted worldview he was seeking, above all, to change.

When he looked at Lawrence, Miller understood himself:

His hatred of his own mother, of her influence, and the Church’s influence, is the admission of defeat at women’s hands.

He also revealed his own definition of sex by revealing Lawrence’s:

a sensuality rooted in a primitive apprehension of one’s relation with the universe, with woman, with man. Sensuality is the animal instincts, which he wanted to bring out again; sexuality, the false cultural attitude which he wanted to overthrow.

Perhaps we should call it Sex (with a capital
S
) to differentiate it from the smarmy world of porno parlors and stroke books with which, in our puritanical, sexomaniacal culture, it is nearly always confused.

Anyone who writes about sex in a puritanical, sex-hating, sexomaniacal culture falls into the trap of being equated with those who peddle the frivolous titillations of sex-for-sale. Once a writer says “sex,” the reader projects his own view of sex upon the word. Changing definitions is always the hardest task for any writer. One is often accused of exactly what one is attempting to change.

This was the case with Lawrence, with Miller, with Joyce. Joyce and Lawrence have been rescued by the academics, but Miller has been caught in a trap of timing: first he was unprintable; now he is politically incorrect.

Unfortunately, there is a strong anti-sex tendency in contemporary feminism, a tendency that fits in nicely with the differently rooted anti-sex tendency of puritanism and reactionary politics. It is ironic that a contemporary feminist movement that began with such free spirits as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger—whose sense of sex as life force was not so different from Miller’s or Lawrence’s—should now have evolved such an anti-sexual cast.

How on earth did this occur? How on earth did rejection of the penis, the equation of all maleness with violence and rape, and the deep mistrust of heterosexuality become dominant themes during the second wave of the feminist movement? How did a movement rooted in the same libertarian ethos as anarchism and free love become, fifty years later, a sort of anti-sex league?

There were various reasons. First, it was historically necessary to liberate both female and male homosexuality from stigma and to raise consciousness about the omnipresence of rape and violence against women in our culture. These were—and still are—worthy aims. But a false causal connection was made between heterosexual maleness and rape. Because male heterosexuals are often rapists, maleness itself was equated with rape. This would only be true if patriarchal attitudes were immutable forces of nature, the very forces of nature modern feminists seek to dispute. Feminists, who claim that all men are rapists, are thus caught in a tautological trap. But as a result of their equation of maleness with rape, only lesbianism or impotence became wholly acceptable politically. Any man was guilty of rape until proven innocent. Not only did this
reductio ad absurdum
serve to alienate from feminism millions of women who continued to sleep with men, but it also, sadly, made feminism appear to be a fringe ideology rather than the belief of the majority of both women and men, which, in fact, it is. This unfortunate misrepresentation has been more useful to the enemies of feminism than to its proponents.

In a sane world, lesbianism would not be seen as superior to heterosexuality, but as another, equal, choice. Just as male homosexuality would be one viable choice—neither penalized by tax laws nor property laws—lesbianism and lesbian motherhood would both be given full legal protection. But political belief would not rest only on one’s behavior in bed, in love, in pair-bonding. The personal
is
political, but politics has a rainbow of colors, including shades of gray. By identifying itself so uncompromisingly with the lesbian nation, feminism unwittingly played into the hands of the evangelical right wing.

Of course, it is easy to understand why lesbian feminists are freer politically than women who live with men, are freer to choose their lives, even under patriarchy. They need not please or pander to men—an admirable independence. They are outsiders with nothing to lose, so they cannot easily be co-opted by patriarchal attitudes. Heterosexual women are always in danger of being sold out by their sexuality.

But by linking politics with sexual orientation, the second wave of feminism fell into a trap: in a sex-hating, woman-hating culture, it was unknowingly reinforcing the same Judeo-Christian dualism that excoriated women’s fertility because of its association with death.

If women want to be truly free to embrace all options, they must abolish dualism first. To insist that all men are rapists, all penises violent organs, and only like-minded lesbian lovers are capable of a peaceable queendom, is to fall hopelessly under the influence of the dualistic heresy.

Two sexes are posited, one good, one bad. The patriarchal paradigm sees men as good, as pure, as spiritual, and sees women as vessels of mortality. The matriarchal paradigm sees men as violent killers, armed with clubs and cocks. Neither paradigm is new, hopeful, or has a prayer of defeating dualism. Both paradigms continue the age-old war.

Let us try to imagine a new paradigm. Imagine a culture in which sexual orientation and politics were dissociated, in which women might bear children parthenogenically, by artificial insemination, or even the old-fashioned way, with a known father with whom they cohabited. Just as health care and styles of birthing vary, people would be able to choose natural uterine birth, artificial uterine birth, or eventually father-birth by means of soon-to-be-invented artificial wombs.

Suppose that men and women could also choose various forms of pair-bonding, of differing legal weights—a suggestion Margaret Mead made years ago. (People would marry for different lengths of time depending on their intention to bear children or not. There would be three degrees of marriage: one for students or beginners in life, one for householder-parents, and one for older people whose children were grown.)

Suppose that lesbian women and gay men could have the identical three degrees of marriage. Then imagine that gender became totally neutral as an economic and legal issue, that men and women (gay or straight) were finally totally equal under the law.

People would form pair-bonds out of desire rather than economic and legal need, and children would be equally parented by all sexes. Men would not need to escape the mother, and women would not fear domination or abuse by the father. Eventually, we would have a variety of forms of child-rearing. Father-reared children would be as numerous as mother-reared children. Children of gay couples would suffer no stigma, and eventually we would have a society of immense diversity. No child’s right to love and security would depend upon conformity to outmoded ideals of the patriarchal family. The truth is we cannot afford the luxury of patriarchal ideologies. We must accept sexual diversity and learn to nurture all the too-numerous babies born on this fragile planet.

This will take an immense revolution in consciousness, but nothing
except
such a revolution can save our world. We can no longer afford nostalgia for patriarchy, with its unwanted and abused children no one has time to rear with love. It is essential that we become a multisexual society, one that accepts all varieties of parenting. We must also foster the idea that not everyone need be a biological parent. Some women and men are clearly much happier being childfree.

In truth, Miller’s cosmic view of sex has never been more needed. We have gone through a decade of backlash against the sexual revolution, against women’s rights, against gay rights. During this decade we have also experienced a population boom and a widespread attack on reproductive freedom. Now the tide is beginning to turn. This decade has already become one of social ferment, of feminism and change. Let us not make the mistakes we made in the last such decade—the sixties. Let us not equate sexuality with a narrow promiscuity, but rather learn to see it in a cosmic Millerian sense. It is critical that we expand rather than narrow our notions of sexuality. And Miller can guide us. Sexuality can be an attitude, an openness to the world, to the cosmos beyond.