BACK IN NEW FIRE
YOU KNOW THIS LOVE story. A gallant knight espies a fair maiden in the distant window of a forbidding-type castle. Their eyes meet — smokily — across the withered heath. Instant chemistry. And so good Sir Knight comes tear-assing toward the castle, brandishing his lance. Can he just gallop up and carry the fair maiden off? Not quite. First he’s got to get past the dragon. Right? There’s always a particularly nasty dragon guarding the castle, and the knight’s always got to face and slay the dragon if there’s to be any carrying off. But and so, like any loyal knight in the service of passion, the knight battles the dragon, all for the sake of the fair maiden. “Fair maiden” means “good-looking virgin,” by the way. And so let’s not be naive about what the knight’s really fighting for. You can bet he’s going to expect more than a breathy “My hero” from the maiden once that dragon’s slain. In fact, the way the story always goes, good Sir Knight risks life and lance against the dragon not to “rescue” the good-looking virgin, but to “win” her. And any knight, from any era, can tell you what “win” means here.
Some of my own knightly friends see the specter of heterosexual AIDS as nothing less than a sexual Armageddon — a violent end to the casual carnalcopia of the last three decades. Some others, grim but more upbeat, regard HIV as a sort of test of our generation’s sexual mettle; these guys now applaud their own casual sport-fucking as a kind of medical daredevilry that affirms the indomitability of the erotic spirit. I cite, e.g., an upbeat friend’s recent letter on AIDS: “… So now nature has invented another impediment to human relations, and yet the romantic urge lives. It defies all efforts — human, moral, and viral — to extinguish it. And that’s a wonderful thing. It is, in fact, possible to be encouraged by the human will to fuck, which persists despite all sorts of impenceddiments. We shall overcome, so to speak.”
Cavalier sentiments, etc. But I can’t help thinking some of today’s knights still underestimate both AIDS’s dangers and its advantages. They fail to see that HIV could well be the salvation of sexuality in the 1990s. They don’t see it, I think, because they tend to misread the eternal story of what erotic passion’s all about.
The erotic will exists “despite impediments”? Let’s go back to that knight and fair maiden exchanging lascivious looks. And here comes the knight, galloping castleward, mammoth lance at ready. Except imagine this time that there is no danger, no dragon to fear, face, fight, slay. Imagine the knight’s pursuit of the maiden is wholly unimpeded — there’s no dragon; the castle’s unlocked; the drawbridge even lowers automatically, like a suburban garage door. And here’s the fair maiden inside, wearing a Victoria’s Secret teddy and crooking her finger. Does anyone else here detect a shadow of disappointment in Sir Knight’s face, a slight anticlimactic droop to his lance? Does this version of the story have anything like the other’s passionate, erotic edge?
“The human will to fuck”? Any animal can fuck. But only humans can experience sexual passion, something wholly different from the biological urge to mate. And sexual passion’s endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life — not despite impediments but because of them. Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double-edged character — meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose.
History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalric chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… from the Victorians’ dread of the body to early TV’s one-foot-on-the-floor-at-all-times rule; from the automatic ruin of “fallen” women to back-seat tussles in which girlfriends struggled to deny boyfriends what they begged for in order to preserve their respect. Granted, from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel. But we need to realize that they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically, human sexuality has been a deadly serious business — and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose.