Mating in Captivity (24 page)

Nat might have coasted along comfortably in his private meanderings were it not for the fact that Amanda is bothered by the tapes. (Still, he must have suspected that leaving them out in plain view would raise this issue.) “I don’t get the violence. It scares me. It taps into my own vulnerability as a woman,” she says. “I mean, there’s something kind of sick about it all, right?” Amanda sees lustful men with absolute power taking advantage of defenseless women. But Nat is watching a very different movie. When I ask him, “Who has the power here?” he is quick to reply, “The woman, without a doubt.” For Nat, the turn-on is the insatiable woman, the sexually powerful woman who incorporates several men at once. There is neither force nor hurt associated with his pleasure. “She wants it, and she likes it. If she didn’t, it would stop me cold.”

Nat’s explanations are a relief to Amanda in that they make the movies seem less creepy, but she’s still hurt by the fact that the women on the screen are nothing like her. “I can’t compete with these women. If this is what he likes, then how can he possibly be satisfied with me?” she asks. When Amanda watches the movies, she thinks only of what they imply about her, not what they convey about Nat, and she feels rejected.

“I do find these women sexy,” he admits. “I see a girl walking down the street in a bustier and short leather mini skirt and come-fuck-me boots and, yeah, that turns me on. But do I want to spend the rest of my life with that person? No. Do I want to jeopardize my relationship with you to go fuck that person? No. Have I been attracted to those people in the past, have I fucked those people? Yes. Have I had long-term relationships with any of those people? No. I think I can recognize the difference between something I see as a turn-on versus somebody that I actually love. I think I’m mature
enough to handle that concept. My feelings for you are something altogether different.”

I invite Amanda to consider that what excites Nat is precisely that the women in his fantasies are not real. It is the very absence of psychological complexity that fuels his arousal. For if these women were real—if they had feelings, needs, insecurities, opinions—an entire closetful of boots wouldn’t do it. In these fantasies, complex personalities are substantially narrowed down to get just what he wants from them. The women in his pornographic movies must be sufficiently empty (i.e., objectified) to absorb his imaginary projections and fulfill his needs.

Nat conjures up images of the ravenous succubus. For Joni, it’s the cowboys, none too complex themselves. For Daryl it’s the lewd passerby on the beach. For Catherine it’s her husband in the role of a customer. Our fantasies are often peopled with these personifications of unbridled sexuality. With them we can experience simple enjoyment or irrepressible lust, unfettered by the entangling emotions of adult intimacy. These welcome strangers help us sidestep the ambiguities of desire and the contingencies of love. Though they live side by side with love, they’re not a substitute for the real thing.

Heterosexual pornography, predominantly produced by and for men
, concerns itself almost exclusively with what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls “low emotion, high intensity sex.” In part, it meets the need of many men to compartmentalize their sexual and emotional lives, and to separate their secure relationships from their rash urges. But it also serves an additional purpose not immediately apparent. While opponents of porn focus primarily on the aggression and violence of male sexuality, Giddens makes the point that the male potency displayed in these stories is a manifest reassurance against male insecurities—sexual and other. The female characters in much pornography (themselves invulnerable) neutralize
male vulnerability because they are always fully responsive and fully satisfied. The man never suffers from inadequacy, because the woman is in a state of ecstatic bliss that is entirely his doing. She confirms his virility.

While Nat listened to my rudimentary deconstruction of pornography, I had the sense that he would just as soon have been anywhere else. He did not welcome the idea that
Gang Bang 47
was really about male sexual insecurity. But he did identify with the need for an emotion-free zone where sex could be unencumbered and raw, and where all vulnerabilities, inadequacies, and dependencies—his and hers—might be temporarily suspended.

Had the tapes not been out there, I might not have initiated this level of discussion about Nat’s viewing habits. For one thing, Nat and Amanda had not been with each other long; they were still anchoring their life together, negotiating many aspects of their relationship. I sensed that Amanda’s insecurities, prejudices, and aesthetic differences would make it difficult for her to hear about his private turn-ons in a way that didn’t threaten her.

For his part, Nat was not especially responsive to Amanda’s sensibilities. He was cavalier about the effect all these tapes were having on her, and (contrary to his own objections) he was being a bit coy about not understanding what it all meant. His argument that he loved her too much to be able to eroticize her that way was too glib. Exposing one’s inner erotic life demands more sensitivity and tact than Nat exhibited. Likewise, entering the fantasy world of our partner requires more sense of separateness than Amanda was able to muster.

Some people get off on peeking behind the curtain of their partner’s secret imaginings; for others, this is a disaster. It not only fails to enrich but actually hurts their erotic complicity. Inviting someone into the recesses of our erotic mind is risky. When the fantasy is poorly received it can be devastating. But when it’s received in
a way that makes us feel recognized and accepted, it can be richly affirming. While the fantasy itself may not be an intimate scenario, its disclosure expresses and fosters deep love and trust.

At the same time, entering the erotic mindscape of another requires an effort of understanding and a considerable degree of emotional separateness. We may not like what we hear; we may not find it sexy. This level of compassionate objectivity is not easy to achieve, especially with regard to desire. If our partner is aroused by something foreign to us, something other, the temptation is to judge first and ask questions later, if at all. What begins as an open inquiry can rapidly degenerate into a mutually defensive withdrawal. When the erotic mind senses criticism, it goes into hiding. No longer private, it becomes secretive.

I am a proponent of privacy, and I prefer a cautious approach in matters of sexual self-disclosure. Exploring one’s eroticism is not synonymous with making it public; and acknowledging need not mean detailed sharing. There are many ways to bring our erotic selves into our intimate relationships; they don’t all require words or literal exposés. How to go about it will depend on the particular relationship and the compatibility of the partners.

Our cultural taboos about erotic fantasy are so strong that for many people the very idea of discussing it creates anxiety and shame. Yet fantasies are maps of our psychological and cultural preoccupations; exploring them can lead to greater self-awareness, an essential step in creating change. When we cordon off our erotic interiors, we are left with sex that is truncated, devoid of vibrancy, and not particularly intimate. What people fail to see is that dull, boring sexual relationships are often a consequence of shutting down the imagination in just this way.

Our erotic imagination is an exuberant expression of our aliveness, and one of the most powerful tools we have for keeping desire
alive. Giving voice to our fantasies can liberate us from the many personal and social obstacles that stand in the way of pleasure. Understanding what our fantasies do for us will help us understand what it is we’re seeking, sexually and emotionally. In our erotic daydreams, we find the energy that keeps us passionately awake to our own sexuality.

—Alain de Botton
, How Proust Can Change Your Life

The bonds of wedlock
are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, sometimes three.

—Alexandre Dumas

T
HE
T
ALMUD, THE GREAT COMPILATION
of rabbinic tradition, tells the following parable. Every night, Rabbi Bar Ashi would prostrate himself before the merciful God and beg to be saved from the evil urge. His wife, overhearing him, would think, “It’s been a number of years since he has withdrawn from me. What makes him say that?” So one day, as he is studying in the garden, she dresses herself up as Haruta and meets him there. (Haruta was the name of the quintessential prostitute in ancient Babylon. The word also means “freedom” in Hebrew.)

“Who are you?” he asks.

“I am Haruta,” she answers.

“I want you,” he commands.

“Bring me the pomegranate on the uppermost branch,” she demands in turn.

He brings her the pomegranate, and takes her.

When he returns home his wife is tending the fire. He rises, and tries to throw himself in. She asks, “Why are you doing so?”

“Because thus and thus happened,” he confesses.

“But it was I,” she responds.

“I, however, intended the forbidden.”

The moment two people become a couple, they begin to deal with boundaries—what is in and what is out. You choose one among all others, then draw the lines around your blissful union. Now the questions begin. What am I free to do alone and what do I have to share? Do we go to bed at the same time? Will you be joining my family at every Thanksgiving? Sometimes we negotiate these arrangements explicitly, but more often we proceed by trial and error. You see how much you can get away with before tripwiring on sensitivities. Why didn’t you ask me to join you? I thought we’d travel together. A look, a comment, a bruised silence—these are the clues we have to interpret. We intuit how often to see each other, how often to talk, and how much sharing is expected. We sift through our respective friendships and decide how important they’re allowed to be now that we have each other. We sort out ex-lovers—do we know about them, talk about them, see them? Whether aboveboard or below, we delineate zones of privacy as well as zones of togetherness.

The mother of all boundaries, the reigning queen, is fidelity, for she more than any other confirms our union. Traditionally,
monogamy was viewed as one sexual partner for life, like swans and wolves. Today, it has come to mean having one sexual partner at a time. (As it turns out, even swans and wolves only appear to be monogamous.) The woman who marries, divorces, is single for a while, has several lovers, remarries, divorces, then marries for a third time can nonetheless meet the criteria for monogamy provided that she remains sexually exclusive within each relationship. Yet a man who is committed to the same woman for fifty years, but allows himself a one-night tryst in the fifteenth year, is readily consigned to the category of the infidel. If you’ve cheated, you’ve cheated.

As Bob Dylan sang “The times they are a-changing.” In the past fifty years we have opened ourselves to a wealth of new marital and family configurations. We can have straight, gay, or transgender marriages. We can have domestic partnerships. We can be single parents, stepparents, adoptive parents, or child-free. Successive marriages and blended families are common. We can cohabitate and never marry, or we can be in a commuter marriage with only brief stints under one roof. Finely attuned to the fragility of matrimony, we now have prenuptial agreements and no-fault divorce. All these arrangements have redefined boundaries both within the couple and between the couple and the outside world. Yet, however elastic our attitudes toward marriage, we remain unflinching in our insistence on monogamy. With few exceptions—movie stars, aging hippies, swingers—the borders we draw around sexual exclusivity remain rigid.

Our love affair with monogamy arguably comes at some cost.
The Brazilian family therapist Michele Scheinkman
says, “American culture has great tolerance for divorce—where there is a total breakdown of the loyalty bond and painful effects for the whole family—but it is a culture with no tolerance for sexual infidelity.” We would rather kill a relationship than question its structure.

So entrenched is our faith in monogamy that most couples, particularly heterosexual couples, rarely broach the subject openly.
They have no need to discuss what’s a given. Even those who are otherwise willing to probe sexuality in all its permutations are often reluctant to negotiate the hard lines around exclusivity. Monogamy has an absolute quality. According to this way of thinking, you can’t be mostly monogamous, or 98 percent monogamous, or periodically nonmonogamous. Discussing fidelity implies that it’s open to discussion, no longer an imperative. The prospect of betrayal is too dark, so we avoid the subject with practiced denial. We fear that the smallest chink in our armor will let in Sodom and Gomorrah.

Despite a 50 percent divorce rate for first marriages and 65 percent the second time around; despite the staggering frequency of affairs; despite the fact that monogamy is a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out, we continue to cling to the wreckage with absolute faith in its structural soundness.

Historically, monogamy was an externally imposed system of control over women’s reproduction. “Which child is mine? Who gets the cows when I die?” Fidelity, as a mainstay of patriarchal society, was about lineage and property; it had nothing to do with love. Today, particularly in the West, it has everything to do with love. When marriage shifted from a contractual arrangement to a matter of the heart, faithfulness became a mutual expression of love and commitment. Once a social prohibition directed at women, fidelity is now a personal choice for both sexes. Conviction has replaced convention.