The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [83]
And now I am doing what I’ve often longed to do, what my education and cultural conditioning have trained me not to do: to bring the nun and the whore together, only to find that they agree. The designation might seem brutal: Andrea Dworkin is not a whore, nor am I. But we were both formed sexually in the maelstrom of the 1960s, at Bennington College, and the point I am making is that the great lie (or lay) of sexual liberation expected us, conditioned us, to play the whore. This is not an idle metaphor. I knew a Williams boy—no doubt destined for great things in the corporate world—who regularly solicited at Bennington for his thriving business as a pimp. And a few years ago, when the movie Pretty Woman was a hit, a bright and gifted fourteen-year-old girl I know attended a school Halloween party as the “pretty woman” character—a prostitute—and her parents, teachers, and friends considered it cute, not worthy of discussion.
I am grieving now for the girl I was back in the 1960s, who struggled with cultural definitions of a woman as someone attached to a man; who had to contend with a newly “liberated” definition of sexual freedom as that which made me more sexually available to men. My response was to cloister myself—at Bennington, in the mid-1960s, this was no mean feat—to keep to myself and read a lot of books. Some of my friends responded by throwing themselves at men, often throwing themselves away. I grieve for the suicides, and for the girl I knew who survived, but with mutilated genitals. She had cut herself with a razor blade in a desperate attempt to rid herself of an exceptionally cruel and manipulative boyfriend. It took me a long time to see that with the peculiar logic of the mad, she had done something powerful (from the Latin “to be able to do things,” to achieve a desired end). By damaging the only part of herself that was valuable to her boyfriend, she managed to break with him, and also received the psychiatric help she needed to become her own person.
I think of this girl as a virgin martyr, although she was not a virgin by the dictionary’s definition. And she did not die, not literally. She may represent another kind of virginity, what Dworkin has termed “the new virginity, a twentieth-century nightmare,” based on the belief that “sex is freedom.” Now, Dworkin writes, the blood demanded of us is “not the blood of the first time [but] the blood of every time,” expressed in increasingly violent images in both pornography and the fashion industry, and in bodily mutilation as fashion, with eleven-year-olds asking their mothers if they can pierce their belly-buttons, a practice that until just a few years ago was one of the more arcane forms of sado-masochism.
What might it mean for a girl today to be as the early virgin martyrs were and defy the conventions of female behavior? She would presume to have a life, a body, an identity apart from male definitions of what constitutes her femininity, or her humanity. Her life would articulate the love of the community (be it a family, a religious tradition, Christian or otherwise) that had formed her, and would continue to strengthen her. And she would be virgin, in the strongest possible sense, the sense Methodius had in mind when he said of St. Agatha: “She was a virgin, for she was born of the divine word.”
What about the virgin martyrs? Do they set women back? Do they