"She made me do it" Pt.II

So there were two in the Garden, we are told, basking in the perfection of the loving approval of their creator. This loving approval, however, was not unconditional - for in the middle of the garden there was a tree of whose fruit they were forbidden to eat. And the serpent, the subtlest of all the creatures, wished to destabilise this near perfection and therefore sought to get them to break the tenancy agreement. But he could see that Adam was too upright, steadfast and - well - honourable and downright manly to be swayed by his silver forked tongue. luckily for this serpent, however, the creator had added to his original creation and this second creature was far more pliable. She listened to the seductive whispers in her ear and ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And the persuaded her man to do the same. And when the shit hit the fan and the divine question came, Adam pointed to Eve and whimpered, "The woman did give me and I did eat!".


Poor petal! How could he resist? After all, he implied "we both know what women are like". His erstwhile good buddy, Jahweh/Elohim, going along with the rules of this newly inaugurated male club, agreed and cursing the woman with the pains of childbirth and a monthly messiness, evicted his creatures into the harshness of the hitherto "good" world he had created.

And here we are all now. Saints and sinners, pornographers and hellfire preachers, arms manufacturers and starving children - all sitting waiting for this sinful world to explode into the final glory.

Of course, we are all educated heirs of the Enlightenment (except, of course, for all those rather comical but also sinister and dangerous fundamentalists) and have long left all this nonsense behind. Haven't we?

I would like to think so, but I have severe doubts. Because, no matter how it is glossed nowadays, we still know, deep in our collective psyche, that the cause of all our problems is sex. That fascinating alluring yet terrifying instinct over which we have little, if any control once it is unleashed. And women are the beings that embody sex. And therefore have to be controlled. Women are not rational beings for their wandering wombs (nowadays we say hormones, but the effect is the same) cause them to become hysterical. They are also voracious and in this voracity are naturally opposed to the good running of society- for to quote the author of the Malleus Maleficarum (The hammer of the witches) -

all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.

Many have recently disputed the degree of authority with which this ludicrous but repulsive tract was invested but it is undeniable that this often quoted sentence reflected a widely held, if not universal,male view of women's sexuality. And this is particularly dangerous because of one inescapable fact. No man can be absolutely sure of paternity unless he takes very severe measures to ensure it. And entire societies have been built to try to control this danger.

Which, of course, manifests in controlling women. Much of what we term morality is, in fact, aimed at nothing other than ensuring that each woman makes their genitals available only to one person. She often has little say in this with that person being decided on by her male relatives - who, prior to her marriage, own her "honour" which is then passed onto the husband. Even today, in the west, the bride is still often "given away" at her wedding by her father. Who other than the legal owner of something is able to "give it away"?

We have moved, we think, a long way from the inability of a woman to own her own property. But, in fact, there are many ways in which she does not even own her own genitals. Leaving aside those cultures in which they are mutilated, we have societies in the more "advanced" world which still believe that they can dictate how she gives herself pleasure. Not so long ago, in Texas, a woman called Joanne Webb was arrested for selling a vibrator to two undercover narcotics police officers. What was particularly telling in the report was the fact that what made her action illegal was that she described how the vibrator was to be used- as a means of receiving genital pleasure. Were she to have told her customers to massage, for example, the neck, with it or simply keep on a shelf it as a "novelty item" then no crime would have been committed. The vibrator, incidentally, was invented about a century ago in order to assist doctors who specialised in relieving women of the "symptoms of hysteria" by inducing orgasm. The doctors, of course, were committing no crime and were, no doubt, profiting greatly. And before we revel in our cultural superiority concerning genital mutilation it is worth remembering that is not so long ago in the West that clitoridectomies were performed in order to prevent masturbation. I am not sure if they were performed by the same doctors who were using vibrators on other patients but I would not be surprised.

Both genital mutilation and this Texan case are about one thing - the control of women's pleasure. Because, as we all know, carnal lust is "in women, insatiable". The other side of this is, however, that men are somehow incapable of withstanding the effects of this lust. That the lust sort of leaks out of the woman and is transferred to those powerless being who possesses penises that react to this leakage and force their owners to partake of regrettably unpleasant and undignified acts. "She was asking for it!" may no longer be the absolute defence it was but is still a significant factor in acquitting men from acts of rape - which is why women's sexual histories become a factor here. A nun is far more likely to be believed than a prostitute - most women fall between these two extremes but their credibility will be largely determined by the place they occupy on this line.

For we still live in a world dominated by the virgin/whore duality. The two Marys, the madonna and the magdalen, remain the models by which women are judged.

The former, lest it be forgot, conceived without penetration and, equally importantly, without sexual pleasure. She also remained intact throughout the birth process and at no point in her life, we are assured, felt the pains of "carnal lust". The Magdalene on the other hand, had felt this pangs and had yielded to their insatiability. Her lot, therefore, was to be a perpetual penitent - gaining absolution through abasement. Peter Mullan's powerful film The Magdalene Sisters shows how this brutal logic was played out in women's lives in a late twentieth century Western democracy.


For the human male must be protected from the weakness of women who seek to indulge their unholy lust. This is the way, by not just a heritage of the Abrahamic faiths. The Buddhist Sutta Pitaka chapter 5, for example, reads

Ananda : How are we to conduct ourselves with regard to womankind?
Buddha: As not seeing them Ananda,
Ananda: But if we should see them, what are we to do?
Buddha: Not talking Ananda.
Ananda: But if they should speak to us Lord, what are we to do?
Buddha: Keep wide-awake Ananda!

The same logic is at play here. Men need ever to keep alert about the dangers of women's sexuality. For men are well nigh powerless to resist it and need structures of control to protect themselves from the overwhelming urge to penetrate. Human beings have constructed many ways to shield men from this - from the all-enveloping clothing of some societies to to strict segregation of the sexes in others. Women, in all societies that I am aware of, are the ones who are thus restricted in their freedom. When a predatory rapist or sex killer is on the streets, for example, it is unaccompanied women who are advised to keep off the streets. Surely, it would make more sense to ask all unaccompanied men to explain their presence on the streets, but this is never done.

At the root of all this is the belief that men are unable to resist the allure of women. That we are unable to take responsibility for our own desire and that women must be held to account for it.

"The woman did give me, and I did eat"

Suddenly, I feel old....

..... and as if the world has passed me by. The BBC online magazine has this story of something I had never previously inagined:

Wife walks in and finds husband in an compromising position on the sofa with another woman. Wife feels betrayed. Wife files for divorce. Marriage ends.

It's a familiar scenario in soap operas, but for one married couple it was all too real. Sort of.

Amy Taylor and David Pollard met in an online chatroom in 2003, got married and shared their interest in Second Life, a virtual world in which users create avatars to interact with each other.

But the marriage ended after Ms Taylor's online character saw her husband's avatar having sex on a sofa with a female prostitute.

There is more here but my mind is just too boggled to continue now. I may come back to it later.

"She made me do it!"

It has been a lot longer than I intended since I last posted. Part of that has been due to having had a very busy and exhausting first weekend with the new intake on the Priest/ess training. Tiring it was indeed, but also very wonderful and rewarding. I am really looking forward to the year ahead.

I have also been feeling the effects of what seems to be a very low grade cold - just feeling a little under the weather and not very creative. Which is perhaps why I was especially shattered at the beginning of the week.

Anyway, I am still feeling a bit off - but will post nevertheless. Because, although I have not been feeling particularly creative, I have been doing a fair bit of reading and a lot of thinking. It will be no surprise to any that have read my earlier postings that much of this thinking has centred on sexuality and gender. One of the major things that has struck me over recent weeks is how difficult I find it to come to any sort of firm conclusion about any of it. For example, I cannot help but agree with the anti-porn activists about the deeply misogynist nature of much that is available. I will not go into details here except to say that much of the representation is of the degradation of women . I accept that this judgement is highly subjective and also that the acts are fantasy and that the women involved have given consent and have been paid for it. But I do worry about the fact that there is a market for this type of material.

I realise that my reactions are not evidence and I do not cite them as such. However distasteful I may find some of this material, moreover, I do not see it as having any causal effect - it is simply reflecting and serving a spectrum of desires and attitudes that are already present within the human species. There are numerous assertions made by campaigners that there are links between the "pornification" of society and the prevalence of violence against women. I do not necessarily accept them. For example, the same time period that they are talking about has also seen an increase, albeit not large enough yet, in women taking leading positions in all forms of human endeavour from science to politics. Porn is not a cause of this either. I could also point to the relatively more servile position of women in societies that have stricter control of porn, such as, say, Saudi Arabia, and assert that porn could have a positive effect on women's position. It would, however, have little validity.

Much of the anti-porn rhetoric implies that porn is responsible for creating a moral justification for negative attitudes about and violence directed at women. It is not. These attitudes and violence were rampant long before the internet was invented and the first blue movie shot- all that porn has done has been to make money from something that already existed. Rape has been seen as a normal part of life for millennia - in fact marital rape was only made a crime in Britain by the government of Margaret Thatcher. The rise of the awareness of domestic violence has, similarly, only come about during recent times - previously it had been accepted as something between the couple concerned and certainly no business of the police or the courts.

The problem is not porn. The problem is misogyny. Ren posted a story recently about an "honour" killing in Pakistan. This cannot be laid at the door of porn. Neither can the genital mutilation of young girls in many parts of the world nor the excesses of the churches who locked up "fallen" women and used then as slaves. It cannot be blamed for the rape of millions of women by soldiers from all armies. It cannot be blamed for the slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson, who raped - for what else can it be as property cannot refuse? - the women they owned.

A few years ago there was a call from politicians for a return to the "Victorian values" of family and morality and away from the permissiveness of the 60s generation which was leading, they asserted, to the decline of western civilisation. However, even a cursory glance at that history will reveal that the morality was nothing more than show. Estimates of the number of prostitutes in London would put it at around 3% of the entire population. These were by no means all women but many were young girls. To quote from F Rush The best kept secret- sexual abuse of children

"There were never enough 'voluntary prostitutes' to meet the voracious Victorian demand. Consequently, enterprising entrepreneurs established a system of obtaining 'involuntary prostitutes' Men who wanted sex with little girls were prepared to pay a good price, and a standard pricing system brought about twenty pounds for a healthy working-class girl between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, a hundred pounds for a middle-class girl of the same age; and as much as four hundred pounds for a child from the upper class under age twelve... " (Rush 1980, p.64).

All this before the internet. Long before Hugh Heffner or Larry Flint were even born. In fact, for most of the history of western civilisation the primary ethos has been the subjugation of women and the denial of their rights to assert their autonomy. Mythologically, it dates from a curse in a garden after Adam had made that original, classic, claim. "She made me do it!"

There are many men out there who hate and fear and want to harm women. They do not need porn to give them permission. Anything will do. The bible, for example, has been very effective in this regard for centuries. Which is one of the many reasons that I am uneasy and suspicious when feminists make common cause with the bible belt preachers as some have in the porn debate. For the enemy's enemy, far from being a friend, may prove equally or even more murderous. Think Hitler and Stalin.