In my last post, I think I broke some new ground – for myself anyway – in understanding polyamory vs monogamy and male and female attitudes to sex and relationships.
This theme continues to reverberate with me and become clearer. I think I can express it this way: women, the feminine principle, the earth, Shakti (let’s stick with Shakti) invites men, the masculine principle, the sky, Shiva into depth, uniqueness and emptiness, whilst Shiva invites Shakti into breadth, universality and expansion to plenitude.
Each, in other words, invites the other into the space where he or she is at home. Women tend to cling to monogamy because in the absence of commitment they cannot bring Shiva into depth; men tend to cling to keeping their options open because in an emasculated sexual role they cannot bring Shakti into plenitude. More concretely, men need total presence to receive Shakti, and women need total surrender to receive Shiva. A sexually realized man is totally bound to the earth; a sexually realized woman is totally released into the sky. The man, regardless of the number of his sexual partners, has a quality of connection with each of them which is infinitely tender and real. His natural polyamory is complemented with presence. A sexually realized woman experiences her sexuality directly, not vicariously through a male agent. She is available and present to all those who can recognize and honor her essence. Her natural sense of sacredness is expanded into infinite space. In this way, the infinite and the infinitesimal, the empty and the full, presence and surrender, devotion and celebration, earth and sky, come together and fuse as only seemingly opposite aspects of one single reality.
I absolutely get it.
The man’s task is to allow the woman to occupy a space in which she is completely sexually empowered. Women are afraid to go there, but it is where they need to go to realize their sexual destiny. And vice versa – men are afraid to plunge into the depths, but that is where the treasures for them lie.
I think we all know how men fall in love – what an infinite horizon opens up to them in a single woman at that time, so unexpectedly and so irresistibly. This is the feminine principle at work when it meets the male. But how do women fall in love? Do they? That this kind of question needs to be asked at all should, I hope, be shocking, but I do not think I am simply ignorant, I suspect I just dare to ask the kind of questions that no-one else does. I have read books written by women on the subject, women’s magazines, and experienced a fair slice of life myself, but still the content and very existence of an experience called “falling in love” on the part of women remains utterly evasive and unsure. I now think it is a chimera, a projection and distorsion, and that we need other words which meet and honor a woman’s experience on her own terms.
In fact, a man first feels sexual attraction, and then falls in love. A woman, however, first feels love. More rightly we might say that she then “falls in sex”. Men’s pornography is all about sex, but their experience is about love. Women’s pornography – romance novels and the like – is about love. But their experience is about sex. Women – I am talking of course in their natural state, when shame and repression are absent – are as overwhelmed by sexual feelings as men are overwhelmed by feelings of love. This shows that this is where we need to go to become complete. Men need to abandon to love, and women to sex. Indeed, there is nothing exceptional for a woman in feeling love for a man, and for this reason it may go unremarked and in any case is no marker of a necessary life change – however, falling into sex is clearly so marked – women who fall into sex will end perfectly viable relationships on the strength of their experience. For men it is the opposite – feeling sexual attraction to a woman is in no way remarkable, we feel it all the time, and it tells us nothing of permanence, nothing life-changing. But falling in love is different.
Free men, though, who have embraced and know what a women is, can freely fall in love, as I do all the time (though no-one believes me and many would label it a neurosis), experience all the emotions that go with it, and yet not feel in any way that it necessitates disruptive change in their life: just as free women can enjoy varied sexual experiences and not find that this destabilizes their attachment universe.
This is very lovely as an expression of what you feel, and what you hope to experience.
But your categorical imperatives make me wonder, as Joan Rivers would say, “What am I, chopped liver” (only you have to say “liver” as “livah” or it doesn’t work).
Well,sometimes I am sky,and sometimes — really at the same time — I am depth and uniqueness and emptiness and plenitude. And I have most often fallen in love before I experienced any sexual attraction. And I don’t need a woman to experience any of this.
So am I somehow not a man in your definition? Just a freak of nature?
Or could it be that there is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio?
with affection,
Peter
You misconstrue my genre and intentions, Peter: and as a consequence don’t ask of me any question I can reasonably answer, or indeed grasp. Here is no philosophy, just a poetic attempt to make sense of my world, using the poetic categories known to me. I think you really should be less demanding. The mind is such a small thing, not suited for such lofty purposes.
A postscript: “falling into sex” is not quite what I want to say. Rather it is falling into an aspect of sex, say sex-as-expansiveness, into the plenitude of female sexual experience. The love/sex dichotomy is not really right because both love and sex underpin both sets of experience. I hope my words still get something across, but I would still like to put it better. I think as men we start with love/sex as expansiveness, as transcendence or numinosity (conveniently but hopelessly termed lust), and then, when we encounter the feminine, move into love/sex as stillness. Our starting point remains an aspect of love, as it is an aspect of sex. Just we got to shape the language (or we think we did – in our benighted state of self-knowledge and in the distorted image we see in the mirror and then internalize).
Whereas women start with love/sex as presence, and through the masculine discover its numinous dimension.
These are not, perhaps, intrinsic differences between men and women, and in any case not of the fundamental nature it may seem I am suggesting. Rather, they express our state of alienation when love and sex are absent or not fully expressed. It is in this instance that male sexuality fails to express its latent depth and female sexuality its latent expanse. The dimensions which are then expressed are those which are self-nourished, and those which are underexpressed are those which are other-nourished. Men have no need of actual relationships to know sex as lust, but we need actual relationships to know it as love. For women, this situation is reversed: sex as love is understood intuitively, but sex as lust only in the context of actual relationships. In a healthy world, there would be all the relationships needed for also this part of our personality to come to full expression. In the world as we know it, this is not the case.
I apologize to my readers and friends who are of neither gender (that’s all of you, it seems 😉