INTRODUCTION TO SATYRICON USA
We have complicated every simple gift of the gods.
Diogenes, c. 456 BC
As the first century of Christianity was coming to a close, Gaius Petronius Arbiter, governor of Bithynia, purveyor of taste at Nero's notorious parties and 'a scientist of pleasure,' was accused of conspiracy. Petronius severed his veins and then bandaged them to relish his death; he dined, joked with friends, recited frivolous poems, made a list of the emperor's debaucheries and sealed it for posterity, and dozed off, so his death would look natural. Before he fell asleep, legend has it that he wrote the Satyricon in his bathtub. Out of its 2,000 pages, some 250 survive.
Petronius liked the chaos of human sexuality and blamed the GrecoRoman separation of mind and body, which our culture has inherited, for the persecutions of his protagonist Encolpius (Crotch) by the god of lust. The Satyricon is a satyr's Odyssey: the hero suffers the wrath of Priapus in brief erotic episodes. The book is also a subtle denunciation of a Rome turned narcissistic through the loss of its Republican values to the lure of Mammon. The writer depicts an everyday reality of pimps, moneylenders, soldiers, courtesans, slaves, a multicultural world where witches talk in poetry, whores are powerful priests, and professors dress in drag: "a landscape infested with divinity." "It is simple realism and nothing more," Petronius wrote.
The extant Satyricon opens with Encolpius complaining that schools shield us from reality; ignoring his professor's retort, he runs away from College, but he can't find his own house anymore, and this confusion is the outset of his orgiastic adventures. This was pretty much my experience with this book. Having been in Universities since the age of 15, I left them in 1995 to write it—driven by a desire to compensate for the sensational sleazy confessions that had become the norm of our sexual discourse, and to understand the source of our fascination. My research took me on a surprising rite-of-passage roadtrip through America. It was a home I didn't quite recognize. In school I had learned and taught that America was becoming frightfully neoconservative and then that America was becoming reassuringly politically correct. I found neither to be accurate. What I encountered were mostly old, confining sexual mores going by new, emancipatory names. So that became my subject: the tricky disguise of our self-denials as sexual excess.
"What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence." Wittgenstein
"My most memorable sexual experience," I told a congregation of upper-middle-class wives in Providence R.I. one cold weekend afternoon, "was during Easter in Crete." The women ran a social group dedicated to unshackling their sexualities by 'mutual sacred exploration'. I'd been invited by the 230 lb. wife of a surgeon, mother of schoolchildren and interior decorator. We'd begun by evoking Isis, Aphrodite, Cybele, dipping our fingers in bowls of oil, casting from our bodies impure fears, and squatting round a candle-festooned table holding hands. As a warm-up to their bonding sexploration, they went round the circle evoking positive sexual experiences to draw strength and inspiration."To tell our stories is to come out of isolation and honor pleasure as a gift from God," the hostess urged. The attention of the listeners, the fuming incense, and the joint confirmation that followed every telling, made the tales more weighty than they were.
I was visiting a friend whose house overlooked a church," I said. "As crowds gathered in the pavilion and priests in golden robes sang byzantine psalms and passed the holy flame, we two stood on the balcony over the congregation and he kissed me. The sex was a surprise. By the time the priests sang the resurrection hymn, 'Christ has risen from the dead, stepping on the death of death, giving eternal life,' his arms were around my hips, and my body leaned off the balcony. The crowds were kissing, cheering, shooting fireworks; the bells of every church were ringing. I felt that I had risen from the dead, I was stepping on a little death of death, and I was eternal."
The women sat still. They had been raised in families where sex was equated with sin, yet they felt a reverence for sex as a source of life. The hostess beamed and said this was what the group strove for: to return meaning to sex without being trapped in tyrannical clichés. The decorator, resplendent in her white reclining nudity, said this was everyone's sexual agenda at the end of our millennium: to make sex sacred, and thus morally free. "For me, sex is a manifestation of spiritual need," I assented. "I can't actually explain it." And that is my theory of sexuality.
After chanting an ode, the hostess extolled us to "reconnect with our neglected bodies, renounce memories of fear or shame, and assist each other's sexual journey, knowing that the soul's hunger for ecstasy is as real and urgent as the body's hunger for pleasure." The complexity of the emotions pulsating about the dim room, the haphazard crisscrossing of wants and wills, oppressed me. This was the world I'd undertaken to record. Some women wept as if in the bowels of despair. Others held them. Then their soothing touches turned fingertip-light and sneakily erotic, their faces determined. Some convulsed, some danced lewdly, some rolled on the floor, kicking and laughing. It occured to me that 200 years ago every woman here would have been burned. And yet I had the sense that ritual was another protective device used to circumscribe our sexual conduct and save us from disappearing into each other, like inside imagined black holes.
It was early 1996. America's sexuality felt liminal and exuberant. Fertility drugs, sperm banks, in-vitro walk-ins had divorced sex from procreation. Coital pleasure was seen as an end in itself. People demanded gratification. Gays, lesbians and transsexuals were 'coming out,' expos-ing families and colleagues to multiform sexualities. Young people fetishized lived-in, pierced, tattooed flesh. Older people drove across country on cyberdates. New Agers did tantric yoga. Our fear of death-by-sex had subsided and, in typical millennial style, death-and-sex had become recreational kink. Movies glamorized hot-wax sex, car-crash sex. Porn videos were swapped in school buses and watched at slumber parties. Academia was plundering sexual testimonies for topics, and scholars denounced the veiled body as analogous to covert government actions, and conferenced on S/M. The feminist shibboleths that the personal is political and secrecy is oppres-sion had touched America's individualist nerve. Old sexual contracts were breaking down, rendering our neatest fixed preconceptions obsolete.The next phase of the sexual revolution was expected to shift the homo-hetero dichotomy toward an inclusive 'polysexuality'. It seemed concei-vable that in our lifetime Catholic priests would marry, housewives would swap dildos like recipes, and sex would be seen as a celebration of life rather than a harbinger of trauma, disease, etc.
At the same time, a new type of sexual repression had surreptitiously emerged. A 6-year-old boy in Lexington, N.C. and a 7-year-old in Brooklyn, N.Y. were suspended for sexual harassment after kissing female schoolmates on the cheek. 81% of polled 8th to 11th graders felt they had been sexually harassed. Antioch College in Ohio published a code of sexual conduct for students that required verbal consent at every stage of intimacy. Army recruits, corporate suits, and Mitsubishi factory workers in Normal Ill., were made to attend sexual ethics seminars. New Haven masons were warned to abide by a 'five-second rule': if they looked at a female colleague for more than five seconds it could be sexual harassment. An executive was fired for recounting a Seinfeld episode to a female colleague. A Nebraska graduate student was forced to remove from his desk a photo of his wife in a bikini. The Supreme Court allowed an Arkansas woman to take the U.S. President to court on uncorroborated charges of sexual harassment; as she had not been fired, demoted, or deprived of benefits, her real charge was impropriety.Having shed the strangle-hold of sin, America was devising more sexual rules than were proscribed at any time in this century, all in the name of liberation. The ever broader definitions of rape signaled a compulsion for regulation that followed each moral deregulation. Caught in the old struggle between the need to satisfy our desires and the need to test our souls, or between the needs of the individual and of the species, we set ourselves new principles of conduct—which we had to violate, for we still understood sex as transgression. Our mushrooming draconian guidelines were redefining the private desires of citizens as issues of public legal control, marking the reincarnation of America's inherited puritanism in a modern tolerable garb, and solidifying our desires into traps.
Until that night in 1996, I had considered our current restrictions the expected extreme vacillations of a culture in the process of finding a less coherent and more tolerant moral balance. We still had no philosophy, theology, pedagogy, or literature of sexuality. Our morality was an incoherent collection of contradictory archaic views bequeathed to us from eras otherwise forgotten. We were inventing a new ethos, and were bound to falter and exaggerate until we became carnally literate. I tried not to mind the emptiness at the heart of our sexual demystification. But I felt our outspokenness was not a victory for oppressed sexualities, nor a discussion of our sexual options; it was a frustrating struggle to conquer, even deny, nature. Our candid articulation had become a repository of tropes and dictums that justified repression, and our vast sexual discourse only reinforced our awareness of sex as danger. I worried our new byzantine structures bent the scales too much on the side of 'fairness' and 'reason.' Sex was associated with gender war, paranoia, a panacea, or a thesis for our general being, so inextricably linked to our sense of self that the simple joys of tactile, olfactory, visual, aural immersion in one another, were becoming skewed or neglected.
It was the time when a Brown University student was expelled on an unfounded charge of sexual harassment, and most polled undergraduates agreed that a mere charge should suffice to incur punishment. As I passed that venerable University citadel, I felt that, by taking no stance, I was implicated in a witch-hunt. I realized our new openness was dividing rather than unifying us, pitting our grievances against one another rather than against the system that bore them.
"You think we don't know about sex out here, but we know all there is," a Mennonite elder told me a few months later in Sugarcreek, OH. "We don't discuss it because we have no need to. We all know what to do." The land was rolling gold-green and fertile and his as far as the eye could see. We were rocking in wooden chairs, digesting a lavish lunch. He said he saw no need for anyone to interfere with what people did in private. I asked his granddaughter, a young nurse who mostly stared at the vast sky, if she knew all she needed to about sex. "My girlfriends and I?we know all about it. We don't do it, because we don't want to be taken advantage of. Having my own voice is more important to me than having sex. My boyfriend understands." "She's a feminist," grampa grumpled. Her modern logic kept her as chaste as her faith would once have.
"It takes a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange so far as to ask for the 'why' of any instinctive act." William James
I began my research intrigued by America's growing sexual fringe. What interested me was the prospect, inherent in every society, that in time the social margins will expand enough to become the status quo. I interviewed many paraphiliacs, looking for the source of their commit-ment to nonmainstream pleasure. I soon realized I had exaggerated their differences. Most struck me as the Masons or Dungeons&Dragons' buffs of previous generations.What they did in private might qualify as 'abnormal', but they did not. For some, sexual aberration was like a cruise: an adventure. For many, deviation provided a means of sculpting a self out of a homogenized world, so they embraced it. For most, sexual eccentricity was just a way to be and feel interesting.For all their talk about overcoming limits, they were looking to escape the drab frustrations of ordinary life, and sex is the one fool-proof way humanity has had to feel whole, incandescent, and alive.
I met transvestites who serviced Hassidim merchants on their way to work every dawn because the Hassid faith forbade sex with women but not ex-men; I met sex-addicted priests and Christian virgins who were anally promiscuous; I met teens who studied mortuary science because they had come to realize, after an average heartbreaking love life, that the dead held more romantic allure; I met models who believed abstinence made them attractive, men who could proposition pretty women but were paralyzed in the presence of plain ones, businesswomen who served their menstrual blood in meatloaf dishes at dinner parties to find mates, lesbians who bled themselves in orgasm, nymphomaniacs who struggled with sexual aversion; lawyers who paid to be electroshocked during their lunch hour, bankers who dressed as slutty cheerleaders during their lunch hour, professors who liked to be hung on a cross, bagpipers (armpit-sex), genuphallators (knee-sex), furtlers (sex with pictures of celebrities), pygmalionists (sex with mannequins); I attended workshops where burly truckers learned to perform 'sacred spot massage' and sexuality camps where yuppie couples studied felching. In the end, the S/M dungeons I visited were no more libidinally intense and no less hospitable than the bare-walled homes of Amish bishops.
I saw that up close the outrageousness of the most unacceptable sexual practice vanishes into the ordinariness of the human being who engages in it. So whenever I found myself in a state of uncertainty and apprehension, I went by the assumption that, as Plato says in the Symposium, 'where there is mutual consent, there is what the law proclaims to be right.'The less I questioned, the more I was told, and the less I judged, the more I was trusted. The great undersung virtue of the American society is the openness of its people. Strangers confided in me generously, with no guarantee of being favorably presented, out of a genuine desire for commemoration. And despite their serendipitous congruencies, these people couldn't be reduced to systems of reactions or fetishes or aesthetics. Their plethora of sexualities taught me that sex can't be delimited or defined.
I now think sex appears complex only because our genes have conspired to make it unavoidable. The truth is we are not in control of ourselves. Our genes have prefixed our pleasures to ensure our survival. My personal view today is that sex should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted, neither shamefully hidden nor publicly broadcast. I don't believe sexuality must and can be deciphered. My project is not to depict problematic contemporary sexual practices, or trace their evolution, or analyze the ideas that drive them. This book is the record of a long and tentative study.I want to share how I came to think and perceive sex differently than I had before.
My favorite definition of sex is William James' definition of religious experience: 'The mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation [which] has no specific intellectual content of its own... the abandonment of self-responsibility." I think only a dreary mind can't leave mystery alone. My topic is not sex, but America. I intend to discuss what we don't talk about when we talk about sex—starting with the panhistoric assumption that sexual desire is the beast lurking in our social jungle, whose containment is the prerequisite for a moral, stable civilization; and ending with the suggestion that sex is used in our public life as a loud distraction from important political and ideological issues. Because this is not a scholarly book, I have not weighed it down with references to the books and articles that were my invaluable sources.I tape-recorded (openly and with permission) the interviews and naturally occurring discourse in all but the most sensitive cases. What appears in quotes or paraphrase also exists on tape or notepad. I abridged and edited quotes, condensed time and sequence, consolidated locations and characters, rearranged names, ages, occupations—to protect my sources' valued anonymity, and to compose comprehensive archetypes representative of the people I met in each 'scene'. I do not presume to understand any individuals. At best, this book aspires to capture our psychic anatomy in our moment and to illustrate the sexual nerve pulsing across America. In fact, all that I can say will fall short of the subject of sex, and even of what I know of it. The rest is realism, and nothing more...
