The Daily Dose

“Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order.”

Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

Does it? Now I haven’t yet read the book from which this quote is drawn, but I came across fragments of it reading someone else’s writing, and I was able to find a few selections online. Despite my lack of material, I weave the tiniest bits of “yes, this works” and “ooh, maybe I can get away with suggesting this” into the fabric of this particular dose of The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words. Just don’t look at the underside- enjoy the well woven illusion.

I’m willing to concede that much that we define as erotic (personally and collectively) goes against the grain of “normal” life. This gives that which we label erotic power. Eroticism often is a sexual carnival in which the rules are overthrown for step right up, step right up for a limited and liminal good time. But it isn’t a free for all. The disorder plays out within certain constraints. Most limited-liminal transgressions act as a relief valve to let off some pressure in the social system. The rules/norms/standards are not changed by the eroticism’s breaking of “the patterns of the regulated social order” (at least not right away- they will eventually shift, but at a glacial pace). The social order is re-affirmed. Here I’m weaving in a little Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner into my covering of the quote by Bataille. It actually is a bit more complicated than that, but my short hand summary will do in a pinch.

I wonder if eroticism “always entails a breaking down.”

Is noticing and enjoying the way your thighs softly rub against one another (pre-chafing when it still feels nice) contra the social order? Or the way a fresh piece of fruit feel in your hand as you bite into it? Or the glorious getting ready to get out of bed but lingering for just a moment more to stretch and soak up a little bit of the cozy covers feeling? Is that transgressive? Does eroticism ever build up instead of break down? It might. I haven’t thought about it enough to come up with any examples. But I have to pose the question. All those moments could be erotic. They could help us expand our definition of eroticism.

I suppose I should not expect a well rounded definition from the author of The Story of the Eye a freak fest of disturbing porn. Bad boys like Bataille really are romantics at heart. Instead of romanticizing flowers and chocolates and communion and warm fuzzy feelings, they romanticize shit and death and pain and isolation and deviance. I may have mentioned it before, but I’m suspicious of romantics- whether they are the happy-happy-joy-joy kind or the wallow-in-their-own-excrement kind.

While I have an appreciation for the grotesque, I find the shit-piss-blood-death romantics even more teeth grindingly annoying than the fluffy bunnies. Perhaps it is because I expect the prophets of perversity to be smarter than the average Joe Schmoe. I expect them to understand that their romantic notions are no more truthful than the happy-happy-joy-joy kind. They hold some of the truth but not all of it. So do the fluffy bunny romantics.

I think what is caught in my craw is Bataille’s use of the word “always.” If he had said “often,” I might have been more willing to nod and pass on by. But that “always” makes his statement troublesome. We need to set a trap to catch that pesky “always” and release it into the prosy wilds (that “always” deserves to live in an oxymoron). Let’s trap it, let’s free his sentence of that vermin, so that it can more closely approximate the semblance of a truth that might possibly tell us something about what eroticism is and what it does in our lives.

I am being pricked by Cupid’s arrow (and my consciousness of not living up to your or my own expectations) to send y’all a little love in the form of the next Daily Dose. We continue our scriptural study of the romance genre. I study the romance genre as I would passages from the Bible because I believe that it has as much, if not more, to tell us about our lives.

Today, we break (into) Hymen’s ring to contemplate the meaning of virginity, to ponder what it means to be unsploit and then sploit and to wonder why what is essentially a mucous membrane has been so damn important.

Before I plunge into our subject, I need to fill those of you not familiar with the subgenre of historical romance in on some important plot elements. In almost every single historical romance, with a few notable exceptions, the heroine is a virgin, and the hero is significantly more experienced. The hero, more often than not, is a rake.

Rake, as used in these novels, is almost but not quite synonymous with slut. Rakes aren’t as dirty as sluts despite the fact that to become a rake you’d have to spend a whole heck of a ton of time with sluts. We could find this troubling, but of course, that was the way is was way back in the day; we don’t have to worry about silly sexual double standards now.

Back to the plot. After many hot tete-a-tetes, the rake pops the heroine’s sweet little cherry. Most of the time, the hero bursts through Hymen’s gate in one, surprisingly easy, thrust. The heroine experiences some pain on the loss of her innocence, but generally, and also surprisingly, not very much. The hero gives service to his lady by removing this culturally and sometimes physically significant roadblock, so the heroine can ease on down the road of sexual satisfaction.

Of course, it isn’t quite so easy. There are repercussions for the loss of innocence. In many versions of this oft-told tale, the piercing of her maiden mucous membrane (versus ones found elsewhere in her body) happens before the knot has been tied. Many wacky shenanigans ensue in which the heroine almost becomes a fallen lady, which would mean that she’d have to join the ranks of the sluts and slatterns who made sure that our rake had sufficient experience to initiate our heroine in such a delightful way. But it all works out in the end, and they live happily ever after in conjugal bliss.

Now it would be easy to mock the formulaic plot devices of historical romance, and a lot of it is, frankly, more than a little disturbing. But I’m certain y’all realize by now that I’m not interested in just setting up straw men to knock down, though admittedly I almost always rough ‘em up a bit.

I would be shirking my duties to truth, if I let you believe that the prominence and importance in these novels of women losing their virginity was solely a function of the historical conditions of 19th Century England, when the vast majority of these novels are set. No, it has much to say about what we think and believe and want now in the 21st Century.

Let’s push a little deeper.

Our question should be why, in this day and age of supposed sexual liberation when young teens are dressed like strumpets by advertisers and told to strut their stuff to sell us shit we don’t need, why is this storyline so common? What makes it so compelling?

First off, I’d like to remind you that smutty romance novels are fantasies. And then I’d like to ask you, who doesn’t find cherry popping hot? Male or female or transgendered, gay or straight or bi, all of us probably enjoy projecting ourselves into either side of the virgin initiated by expert scene. Of course, I tend to like cherry popping scenes that involve older women instructing younger people or the even more luscious initiation of a strap-on to a man bent over a table, but I realize that few if any historical romances will be written with my predilections in mind. (Authors take note, there is a niche in the market that desperately needs to be filled).

Part of the potency of all this, I think, is that for many of us our first few fucks were painfully awkward and/or just plain painful. The awkwardness of fumbling for condoms and lubrication or even the need for them is edited out of pornos, so that we can be carried away. The awkwardness of piercing a woman’s maidenhead or if she doesn’t have one due to an active lifestyle of horseback riding, etc., the awkwardness of just getting into what is generally a very tight space is excised. It can be nice to go along for the ride with the characters and have an easy first time.

Virginity is prominent in these novels, because women still are taught to regret, Sex and the City notwithstanding, their sexual experience. The fantasy is that we would find our love before we tasted the fruit of another (or others), and he would claim us. We would forever belong to him. There would be no pesky memory of previous lovers; there would be no comparisons to be made. Never, that I know of and I’ve read hundreds of these novels recently (see how I sacrifice myself to help save you), does the newly de-virginated heroine go on to find fulfilling lust and/or love with another man.

Part of the heroine’s appeal to the jaded palate of the hero is that she is not like the sluts he regularly cavorted with. She is lusty but not learned; she rarely asks directly for what she wants. (Some of this is that we are lazy and scared of our own desires and do not want to have to ask or tell our lovers what we want/need from them). Women who do ask and are skilled in bedroom games generally are set up as villainesses. Women who are forthright about pursuing the hero for sex will lose him in the end to the less direct, less honest, unskilled heroine.

Perhaps because I identify more with the sluts, I find the prevalence of this particular storyline upsetting. At what point does the heroine become the sexual experienced woman who might disgust the hero? Is it after a few years of marriage, when she’s become skilled at fellatio? Is it when she might actually know enough about her body to tell her husband that he hasn’t quite gotten his tongue right where she wants it?

I may be asking too much. I would like more trashy historical romances that have hot cherry popping scenes and celebrate sexually experienced women who know what they want and get it from a variety of partners without being punished. There is nothing wrong with wanting to imagine the first time as magical and important and life changing. But it would be nice, if we also could envision that the 500th or 5000th time as magical, important, even as life changing.

As my loyal readers know, I aspire to send out The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words every day. Most days, I fail. But I continue to aspire. I get lost for a while and then I pull out my maps, find my bearings and figure out where the hell we’re going to go next. We cannot go back; my breadcrumb trail got et up by critters. We must go forward.

As promised in What is Love?, the first Vermon (video plus sermon) of 2009, I am dedicating the next handful or so of Daily Doses to the scriptural study of romance novels. I will take specific passages and analyze them, as if they were sacred texts, in a d’var torah sort of way. I will build meaning up from a scrap of scripture. I will look at overarching themes. I will search for the moral of these stories. I will seek out what these stories can and cannot tell us about lust and love.

In some ways, these next few Daily Doses are an extended parable, but instead of sowers and talents and mustard seeds, our parable stars hearts and parts and gossiping old biddies (female and male).

Now, it would be easy only to use romance novels as cautionary tales that tell us what not to do. And there is plenty of bad advice we should not take. Some would say that there is nothing redeeming to be found between the covers of “bodice rippers” and their sistren. But I would say there is much that is uplifting, in more than one sense. There are ideas, truths, threads, notions, stories, hopes, dreams and fantasies that can help us find our way through the dark, scary woods of Lust-Love.

Yes, often, these works mark out paths we don’t, when in our right minds, want to follow. But sometimes, we follow those paths despite our better judgment and get lost in the Lust-Love Woods. It is nice to be reminded that we are not the only ones who used breadcrumbs to mark our way back. We all hate it when the story stars a sanctimonious sort that never does the wrong thing. We prefer to see someone flail and fail and finally, after much effort, find her way. It makes us feel less lonely. It reminds us that we all are fools for love . . . and lust. It tells us that we all get lost in the Lust-Love Woods, now and again. We all have wanted, at sometime or the other, to believe in happily ever after, fairy tale love.

I am not a true believer in romance. I do not hold to the notions of “soul mates” or “better halves” or “one love for all time.” I do think that any love that lasts is mighty hard work. But I like a good old-fashioned infatuation story as much as the next person. There is something special, wondrous even, about the unfolding of lust, the budding of love. Just because it isn’t the whole story doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Following the fairy dust trails of infatuation through the Lust-Love Woods might bring a little magic back into our long-term partnerships, as long as we remember that we need to avoid getting trapped in fairy ring circles of fantasy. We should, I think, step into those mushroom-circled fantasies, now and again.

Walk with me for a while. We will follow breadcrumb trails marked out by romance novels. We will get caught in lust dust showers. We will seek out and step in and then out of fanciful fairy circle fantasies of love. Follow me. Let’s lose ourselves for a while in the Lust-Love Woods.