Most of what
happened to me in my childhood happened in the den.
We called it
the “den”, not the “TV room” or “family room” (the inference being it can't be a family room without at least one TV), for reasons unknown, except that
maybe in the ‘60s, that was what you called it.
It had a
pullout sofa-bed, a black-and-white TV, an ancient ironwork-sided sewing
machine, and an “imprinting machine” (my Mum did imprinting, personalizing
leather goods and even pencils for my Dad’s stationery store) with drawers full of magical
gold foil that I was forever tampering with.
But most of
all, it had books. Seemingly
thousands of them, I always thought, though I now remember just one solid wall,
and another with (? Did I transpose this from my older siblings’ ever-changing
university digs?) brick-and-board bookcases.
Lots of these were in German. My sister studied German in university for reasons that are now a complete mystery to me. Why? There was not even the remotest connection in any part of our family to
I would often
hear the wailings of Lotte Lenya on the stereo when I came home from school,
which was very embarrassing when I brought a friend home. But I digress. In
those brick-and-board bookcases, there was Goethe, there was Schiller, and
there was a feeling I was just supposed to accept this as “normal”, because my
sister (13 years older than me) said it was.
To my 10-year-old delight, there were a few dirty books (hers, I assume) strewn amongst the dull novels in the den: A Rage to Live by John O’Hara (“oh, darling, you’re in me and I’m all around you, just in time, time, tme”), Sons and Lovers (“I will always remember that evening when the peewits called”), and even Cocksure, a mildly gamey book by Mordecai Richler, which thrilled me because it had the word “bastard” in it. All this mulled around and around in my mind. I was beginning to formulate, or even come up with a formula, for what sex meant.
It surely
meant simultaneous orgasm. If you had anything else, it was dirty and even
frightening, and definitely “wrong”. You were not normal. This was especially true if you were married.
It meant
forbiddenness. It meant crossing barriers of class, power and station (Lady Chatterley’s Lover). This was
definitely stuff I wasn’t supposed to be seeing.
Then I
discovered it, nestled dustily right against the volumes and volumes of Goethe
and Schiller: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF
SIGMUND FREUD!
Now I was off
to the races.
Now I learned. I learned about penis envy. I
learned about polymorphous perversity. I learned that women were inferior
beings. I learned about latent homosexuality. I learned about vaginal orgasm. I learned.
I learned
about stuff, then believed to be crucial to understanding human nature, that is
now so dusty and obsolete that nobody even thinks about it any more, let alone
talks about it. When you think about it, it is remarkable that so many people accepted without question theories that had never been proven clinically, or
any other way. It was simply the truth.
The one
hangover now is “anal”, which means, I don’t know, uptight or something. It did to
Freud, too. An anal personality, anal retentive. Holding in your poo for some
reason, though I couldn’t tell why, maybe because you were constipated or
couldn’t get to the bathroom.
These were the
golden days. These were the days of “perversion”. Do you remember perversion?
Back then, anything that wasn’t simultaneous orgasm in the marriage bed was
perversion.
Homosexuality
was the result of a domineering mother and a weak father. Nobody questioned this.
It was the only thing I ever heard about the matter, except for the expressions
“limp-wristed” and “pansy”.
There was still a moral taint on
it, the shadow of illegality that broke the spirit of Oscar Wilde. There was a sense
that it was a sort of blight, that it was impossible to “correct”, and that the
sufferer just had to abstain (I mean, forever) and conceal it completely to be
socially acceptable.
So.
Homosexuality was a mental illness or even a “perversion”. These attitudes, we
now see, were groaningly wrong and must have caused immeasurable grief to
thousands of people.
I didn’t know about a lot of other things,
extreme things such as whips and chains.
I didn’t really know until tomorrow (oops, that’s the future, so I’d
have to know in advance) when this Fifty
Shades of Grey movie comes out. (Note: this was written on February 12. Confusing.)
ANY kind of inflicting of pain or punishment on another person was, in my backward day and with my den mentality, seen as sadism, and therefore “perversion”. It stood to reason, in my mind. Being turned on by experiencing pain, or (worse) inflicting pain was so twisted that I could not understand it at all. But it has changed, and drastically, in a fairly short period of time. At this point in our social evolution, it’s quite OK so long as the other person, the masochist, “gives consent”.
This happened
with Jian Ghomeshi, remember? All his girl friends “gave consent”, so in an
official sense, it was all OK.
Except that
they didn’t. And it wasn’t.
“You can’t
give consent if you are abused,” a very smart person I know (an award-winning
news reporter) told me. Therefore, the woman who had been pounded to a bruised
pulp and had her ribs broken by Ghomeshi hadn’t “consented”, because if someone
beats the living shit out of you and breaks your bones, your abuser cannot use
the legal excuse that you “gave consent”. Even if you did, it's null and void, because presumably you didn't know in advance that you would be brutally crushed.
Or maybe it's not. We’ll find out, won’t we?
The BDSM
“community” insists that the receiver knows exactly what he or she is in for, wants
it, and can get out of it any time, with a signal of some kind. But it seems to
me that sadism is something that can be awfully hard to manage. Doesn’t it
sometimes, just sometimes, go over the edge? By its very nature, I think that
the possibility of loss of control might be part of the thrill.
And what of a
person who “consents” but is deeply masochistic and profoundly self-hating?
I’ve heard of “rough trade”, though I don’t know much about it, and I will
confess that I don’t want to. Brian Epstein used to be found beaten, bloody and
unconscious after such encounters. Was this
“OK” because he had given consent? Or did he, in the first place?
(And if everybody's drunk or stoned and out of control, what does THAT add to the mix? It isn't fashionable to ask these things, but I ask them now.)
(And if everybody's drunk or stoned and out of control, what does THAT add to the mix? It isn't fashionable to ask these things, but I ask them now.)
Such a person (a victim in my view), and I am only putting this out as a possibility, might WANT to be very badly
hurt, even killed. Moreover, it might not be good for them to get what they
want, because it’s too dangerous and they are too psychologically sick. I can hear the screams of protest
right now: wait a minute, that’s impossible! It can't go too far as long as everyone's cool about the "rules". But in the wild and woolly world
of human sexuality, is anything truly
impossible?
Ghomeshi could
argue that she wanted it, even told him it was OK. I don’t know what was going
on there. If his unknown victim (the one with the bruises and broken ribs) claims
it WAS consensual, then we’re really in a mess, aren’t we? Caught in a legal
and sexual murkiness that we may never straighten out.
I have hardly
touched on this Fifty Shades
phenomenon, but I see that some women’s groups are protesting that it glorifies
domestic violence. But hey! Violence is OK (or, at least, playing at violence is OK), even exciting, if you give your
consent. Isn't it? How about if you have a domineering husband who keeps threatening
to leave and pull his financial support out from under you and your children?
Might you be more likely to “consent” in this situation? You’d probably do
anything to save your children, not to mention your life.
“It was just a
sex game gone wrong.” Yes. I know this has been used before. “She wanted it, she asked for it.” What does that mean? How often do
sexual and gender boundaries get blurred and confused? How about
financial/power boundaries? (Christian in Fifty
Shades certainly fits the rich and powerful profile.) How many ways can one
human being make another human being submit, and how is this so different from
slavery? (Master-slave language is very much a part of the “lifestyle”, making
me wonder what black people think of it.)
I have not
heard the word “perversion” in so long, I don’t know where it went. Does it
even exist now, does the concept exist? I know that certain Christian
fundamentalists seem to think that if people are “allowed” to be gay, it will
open the floodgates to having sex with horses: an “anything goes” philosophy.
That’s
horse’s-ass stuff, but I will say, I wonder where all this is taking us. Even
playing at inflicting pain alarms me: why would anyone need to do it, unless they were, in some way, sexually perverted? Hurting someone is wrong. Wrong. Isn't it?
But no, now it’s
stylish, and it’s certainly popular. I just found out that the original Fifty Shades trilogy started out as Twilight “fan fiction’. With all its supposed
restrictions on content, if fan fiction has become this sexually extreme, I
honestly have to wonder what will come next. I wonder what will become of human
boundaries, if there are any, and what will happen to the nature of something
we still insist on calling “making love”.
