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Sacred
Pleasure:
Your book Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body is a remarkable blend of spiritual myth, politics, and sexual politics, which you show to be intimately related. You plumb the history of the species to understand who we are and offer an alternative of who we could be. You show how who we are is largely determined by a "dominator" script that attempts to keep society together through fear and pain. The alternative you point to is a "partnership" society that relies on the bond of pleasure for social cohesion. Our societies constant linking of the words "sex" and "violence" makes it readily apparent which drummer we are following. How did these words become so interrelated? Riane Eisler: For the whole span of our cultural evolution there have been two basic "attractors." One motivates through pleasure, the other through pain. A society that motivates through pleasure tends to be less hierarchical and more partnership oriented, that is why I refer to such societies as following the "partnership" model. The "dominator" model is rigidly hierarchical, emphasizing the subordination of one group by another. This subordination has to start somewhere, and historically it has started by dividing the sexes. In societies influenced by the "dominator" model, woman is the prototypical subordinate group. Woman, mother, earth-these provide the framework for exploitation that the dominator model extends to everyone else. Although we will never find either model in a pure state, we can look back and see that most of written history carries the "dominator" stamp. Even today, we are conditioned to think the normal way for two bodies to relate is with one dominating the other. This has conditioned men to think of sex in terms of control rather than affiliation and caring, and to even see domination as integral to their basic masculinity or sense of self. At the same time, the erotization of female submission unconsciously programs women to accept subservience and domination. What we find in a society of rigid male dominance, where strong man rule is the prominent feature all the way from the family to the state, is a very high level of built-in violence, mental abuse and fear. You have to condition people very early to accept that as normal. To overcome this conditioning, we have to really understand the politics of the body and become very politically active in every sense of politics, from the politics of intimate relationships to the politics of international relationships, because they are all intertwined. How can society be shifted more toward a partnership model? Riane Eisler: We've had a lot of change already toward a partnership model, or you and I would not be having this conversation. A few hundred years ago, we would be killed just for talking like this. Fortunately, the last three hundred years have challenged, one after another, entrenched patterns of domination-the enslavement of one race by another, the idea of kings having a divinely ordained right to rule, men having a divinely ordained right to rule in the castles of their homes over women and children. But we haven't yet made the breakthrough, and one of the main reasons we haven't made the breakthrough is that these foundational relations-relations that involve touch to the body, our intimate relations, our sexual relations and also our parent-child relations-have not been considered political in terms of the dynamics of power relations in most social justice movements. By contrast, those who want to hold us to a dominator model, they've got it. They're constantly focusing on getting women back to their "traditional" place. They want to go back to controlling sexuality rather than educating people. They understand that if you can convince people that unjust authority is just the way it is, you can control them. And if you do it early enough, you can control them at a basic bodily level. So far, many of the "liberals" seem to be in complete denial. Their concepts of what should be just relationships end when you come to the private sphere. But you believe that this shift could happen in a relatively short period of time. What is Cultural Transformation Theory, and how can it speed up the process? Riane Eisler: Cultural Transformation Theory draws from chaos theory and other contemporary scientific theories that show how living systems can undergo transformative change in a relatively short time, during states of extreme disequilibrium. Since a social system is a living system, these same principles apply. We are finding many beliefs and practices we today recognize as dysfunctional and anti-human stem from a period of great disequilibrium in our prehistory, when there was a fundamental shift in ascendancy from a partnership model of society to a dominator model. And now, in our own chaotic time of escalating disequilibrium, we have the possibility of another fundamental cultural shift, this time in a partnership direction. Until recently, it was thought the species moved in a straight line from savagery to barbarism to civilization. What has happened to change things and how can this influence our view of sexual relations? Riane Eisler: For one thing, we are beginning to discover that our own past offers an alternative to the way we view sex. We are just beginning to put the pieces of this prehistoric puzzle together, but I trace a history of about thirty thousand years when our sexual imagery and sexual stories were very different from what they are now. What initially led you to look at the past for insights into our current sexually dysfunctional society? Riane Eisler: It occurred to me to ask a few simple questions. For example, why, when avoiding pain and seeking pleasure are such primary human motivations, have we for so long been taught that the pleasures of sex are sinful and bad? Why, even when sex is not condemned as evil (as in modern pornography), do we so often find it associated, not with erotic love, but with the marketing of women's bodies or with sadism and masochism, with dominating or being dominated? Then I began to wonder whether this was always the way it was, or was there a time when sex, woman, and the human body were not vilified, debased and commodified? Since written records for our ancient past do not exist, I had to look elsewhere for the answers, and I found them, starting in the cave art of the Paleolithic period. To understand the significance of this art, you have to understand it was not just pretty pictures or even a means to communicate. It was sacred art, and woman's body and sex were a central motif of the sacred imagery. After an extensive examination of the cave art of this period, I couldn't find a single image even remotely associating sex with violence or domination. Then, many thousands of years later, during western prehistory, there was a fundamental shift in how sex was conceptualized. From an act associated with the sacred, with religious rites, with the Goddess herself, sex became associated with male power over women. What happened? Riane Eisler: The societies I call partnership oriented arose primarily in fertile areas. For example, in what is now Europe there were societies that worshiped the Goddess and celebrated sex and birth as part of Her mystery. The dominator model arose in less hospitable parts of the globe, primarily in Eurasia. Their deities were male, often depicted as having axes or halberds as arms (accounting for the double meaning of the I word "arms"). Not surprisingly, their idealization of weapons and glorification of heroic warriors went along with an obsessive preoccupation with death. Then, during the period from approximately 4500 to 2500 B.C.E., massive climate changes forced the proto-lndoEuropeans to leave Eurasia in wave after wave of migration. It was a period of great chaos, natural disasters, and population dislocation. That's when the shift occurred. Unable to resist the marauding warrior tribes, the partnership oriented societies became subsumed and co-opted, although they were not completely lost. Many of their traditions continued to exist, but were reinterpreted to fit the dominator model. From that period on, we began to develop some very anti-pleasure, anti-life traditions. From an act associated with the sacred, with religious rites, with the Goddess herself, sex became associated with male power over women. It became man's duty to control and subdue not only woman, but all that is bodily or carnal. All this put men at war with their own bodies. It also put them at war with women. That was the beginning of the "war of the sexes." In Sacred Pleasure you point out that some medieval Christian theologians thought woman was so base they even debated whether she had a soul. Riane Eisler: That's true. The Middle Ages were a time when the dominator model was powerful. The period saw the most horrible forms of torture. But people still sought solace. And they sought it not only in erotic love, but they also sought it through the alchemical marriage, the mystical marriage. The ancient sacred marriage got co-opted. The mystical marriage became a celebration not of pleasure to the body like the ancient Sumerian "Hymns of Inanna," but a celebration of pain to the body. They still wrote in erotic terms. But they were flagellating their bodies. Lying on beds of nails, cutting their bodies with glass, burning their bodies with hot irons, all in the name of this mystical union with a beloved deity. And the medieval Church, instead of offering these people therapy, canonized them. Something very pathological had happened by that point. You say it is no accident that much of our mystical literature sounds highly erotic. It is not a groping for images to explain the inexplicable, but represents an intuition by mystics that sexual pleasure and spiritual pleasure come from the same source. Riane Eisler: Yes, the human yearning for connection manifests itself with the loved one in pleasure, but also in the yearning for oneness with what we call the divine. The two are the same impulse, and that impulse, as part of a larger human impulse, was recognized already by the ancients. Elements of their partnership oriented view of sexuality carry over even into the Old Testament. Look at the so-called "Song of Solomon." Solomon isn't in it, and neither is God. It's about the beautiful Shulamite, who sings an erotic song to her lover: "He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts," and so on. Though many say the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies is over, you say it's still going on, but we have moved to a second phase. Where has the sexual revolution taken us? Riane Eisler: The current view of the sexual revolution is really a distortion. I think we have to distinguish between a lot of things here, instead of just lumping everything that happened when the lid was taken off sex under this one heading-the modern sexual revolution. The real revolution represented the reclaiming of our bodies; for example, a rejection of the idea that our bodies and sex are dirty and sinful. This revolution has resulted in the battle for reproductive choice, the move against compulsory heterosexuality, and something that Magical Blend is very involved in, the movement toward recognizing that sexuality can have a spiritual dimension. As Reich wrote many years ago, there is a difference between ejaculation and orgasm. The latter, we are now finding, is an altered state of consciousness when it is a full experience. So that's the real sexual revolution. Now as we enter the second phase, the relinking of sex and the sacred continues to be very important, but so is the recognition that a lot of the images coming at us-all of this linking of sex with violence and sex with domination, not only in pornography, but in mass media and in films-represents a cranking up of the volume of dominator messages. The cranking up the volume is part of the dominator's sexual counterrevolution to drag us back. So also is the mechanistic, body-counting approach to sex. Preoccupation with "scoring" is really sexual compulsivity, and compulsivity is something that happens when people can't get what they really want, which is a truly satisfying sexual relationship, a truly ecstatic, altered state of consciousness and, yes, real intimacy. It doesn't necessarily have to be a lifelong bond, but something that happens not just on the purely mechanical level. What role does our current era play in deciding whether we will succumb to a dominator backlash or move to a more partnership oriented view of sexuality? Riane Eisler: We are in a period of such disequilibrium that people are really going to the fundamental issues. We're questioning such basics as what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man. The decisions we make will determine whether our progeny will inherit a society that respects human rights or one that dominates through a hierarchy of pain and fear, because it is in our intimate relations that we first learn how two bodies should relate. Then, unconsciously, almost on a neural, bodily level, we replicate these ideas in our society. The fact that we're beginning to deal with these issues is promising. It shows a momentum toward an integrated second stage, in both the modern revolution in consciousness and the modern sexual revolution. Today we're unraveling the tapestry of our lives. We are sorting through the social threads, the sexual threads and the life threads, to find the partnership motifs that can be picked up and rewoven. There's a Hungarian scholar, Vilmos Csanyi, who has written a great deal on how living systems replicate themselves to survive. He showed that, just as the body replicates cells, societies replicate institutions. The ideas, images and stories that maintain one particular type of society begin in the family. The stories we tell our children and the images we expose them to determine which threads they will pick out, those that replicate the dominator pattern or the partnership motif. This replication of ideas is very important, and that's why those of us who are becoming conscious of the partnership alternative need to replicate partnership ideas and really bring it out to people that there are choices. The dominator model seems entrenched right now. Are you optimistic about a move to a more partnership oriented society? Riane Eisler: Even though I have a long range optimistic viewpoint, it is a guarded optimism in the sense that only if we actively take part in this and really understand the politics of the body, can we change things. The risks are very high now with dominator regressions, even though in modern times they usually only take us back a little before the forward movement toward partnership resumes. It's like a spiral. But the danger in the backward portion of the spiral right now, because of technology, is the risk of what can happen during the regression. Basic survival issues are at stake. I think it's very important for us to keep our minds on the goal, because we will find resistance, both active and passive. A very misleading and pathological image about sexuality exists in our culture, and resistance is part of the dynamic process of change. Successfully challenging and replacing unhealthy assumptions about sex and spirituality requires that we understand how both are interwoven into a larger whole that encompasses economics, politics, family, literature, music and all other aspects of social and cultural life. Only by trying to simultaneously look at how all these elements interconnect, can we see the underlying patterns-and thus move toward more satisfying and equitable alternatives. And if we do? Riane Eisler: I'm not saying it will be a perfect society, but at least violence, domination, and pain will no longer be idealized and even sacralized, as we see in so many of the sacred images we've inherited from what I sometimes think of as a 5,000 year dominator detour.
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