One of the great sexual gods of the Greeks was Dionysus, who was dismembered.
Tradition says he is the affirmation of life and death in one act. If sex is saying yes to life,
as I suggested earlier, it includes a willingness to suffer and fail. One reason we may be
motivated to control our sexuality excessively is to avoid the pain of too much vitality.
There is a way, then, that saying yes to pain is being open to life and therefore to
sex. In sex we are vulnerable. In sex we limit ourselves to intimacy with a certain person
or certain people. Especially in marital sex, which can be ever-deepening and pleasurable
at many levels, we may find pleasure in limitation. Deep, meaningful bondage can be
pleasurable, a pleasure that can be ritualized in S/M lovemaking. If it is not deep,
bondage is simply painful and depressing.
As a therapist I worked with several couples who were experimenting with S/M
games. Sometimes, it?s simply a matter of ritually acting out power issues. In these cases,
I feel S/M is dangerous, an indication of their failure to be vulnerable (which means
woundable) in their ongoing relationship. Still, I do think it is possible to play at S/M
without these dangers.
So, when my namesake Thomas More wears a hairshirt, I think that practice is
part of his sexuality. Biographers say he imagined it as a way to control his strong
passions. Well, I would imagine that he got some pleasure from that discomfort, at least
the pleasure of his spirituality which in his case I believe was largely sexual. Except for a
period in which he became a rabid prosecutor of heretics, he was by all accounts a loving,
pleasure-seeking man. I lived as a celibate in a religious community for twelve years,
during my teens and twenties no less, and I never felt anti-sexual. I was a sexual person
then, even though I didn't have what we call an active sex life. Once we begin to include
our emotional lives and our total way of living as a part of our sexuality, it doesn't make
much sense to ask if one practice is sexual and another isn't. It all depends on how and
why we do it.
I have written a book, Dark Eros, about sadomasochism. In it I say
that self-denial and excessive subjugation to others are symptoms of our failure to be
vulnerable, open people, and the ultimate openness is to be vulnerable to what life wants
us to be. So one way of reading fasting and flagellation is to see them as efforts to stop
controlling life, to be affected and influenced, and to let life itself have the upper hand
and make us into whatever it wants us to be. This philosophy seems to me to lie at the
heart of the Gospel message and is embodied beautifully in the life of Jesus, right up to
the crucifixion. It is a challenging way to live, it is profoundly masochistic, and it is
entirely pro-sexual.
|
|
 |
|
