The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [122]
I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.
His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me.
I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye not awake my love, until he please.
Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?
Kabbalah, the Jewish mysticism that developed in the Middle Ages, describes mystical joy as sexual, including descriptions of the male and female aspects of God making love to each other, shaking the world with their bliss. Catholicism famously celebrates virgins and celibacy vows, but it is also true that the centuries are filled with descriptions of the erotic ecstasies of nuns. Nuns are celibate and isolated, but officially they are not maidens at all. They are brides of Christ—and they have recorded intense nocturnal encounters with him. Protestantism, too, has some history of seeing sex as a godly approach to happiness; Luther said that ministers should marry and reject abstinence, and he himself married the ex-nun Katharina von Bora.
Still, let’s face it: the more established a religion gets, the more its best interests are served by conservatism, and that often means that religion supports containing sexuality, requiring celibacy, sex only in marriage, limitations on when sex is allowed, and mandating which sex acts are off-limits. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers were jauntily positive about sex, in part because religion seemed so against it. French Enlightenment philosophers connected being free with the body to being free in the mind, and they often used reason and philosophy to talk women out of their knickers.9 The “utopian socialist” settlements of the nineteenth century were economic experiments, but many of them, like the Fourierists and Saint-Simonians, also included a degree of free love. There were also communities set up primarily as pro-sex movements. The best known American sex settlement was the Oneida commune, which flourished in late-nineteenth-century New York. Its founder, Alfred Noyes, asserted that everyone in his group was married to everyone else. They all lived together and had special sex rooms for arranged meetings. It was Noyes who came up with our now common phrase “free love,” though he usually preferred the term “complex marriage.” The community’s original forty-five members grew to seventy-two by February 1850, two hundred fifty by February 1851, and was over three hundred in 1879. In that year, though, the practice of mutual marriage was ended, partly in response to the protests of the wider community, and partly because Oneida community parents found themselves protective of the way that their teen-age daughters were being initiated into the sex life of the community. What you are not expecting me to say is that one of the group’s most sacred convictions was that men should have no orgasms except for procreative purposes, to preserve their personal power. This was considered a more holy way to have sex (again, just for the men—the women could orgasm) and was touted as saving couples from the strain and woe of pregnancies. Noyes’s wife’s four miscarriages influenced this decision. Teenage studs were generally paired with postmenopausal women, so one could practice and the other grin. Overall, the men got variety, and the women got men trained to take their time. Both got a scheduled reprieve from the most powerful detriment to any model of adult sexuality: children. I tell you this story in order to lean a bit on our idea of sexual mores as progressive or regressive. Sure, things go up and down, but we forget that they also change ladders. Nobody seems to plan utopias anymore, and it seems to me that they don’t because they do not really believe that things will ever change. Yet that is the one thing I can assure you. Things will change.