Revolution Below the Belt

As Robert Lindner, author of The Fifty-Minute Hour, once pointed out, the sexual revolution of our time has been mostly abortive. Though society in the last 20 years has taken a more tolerant, not to mention sensible, view of such things as premarital intercourse, sex techniques, homosexuality and obscenity, it would be naïve to assume that this constitutes anything more than the kind of liberal reform that followed the equally abortive revolution of 1905 in Russia. Viewing sex as a social fact rather than a personal sin is certainly an advance of sorts, but it is more indicative of a change in terminology than in point of view. A "healthy" attitude toward sex is probably as much a part of the mood of the New Frontier as the late President Kennedy's physical fitness program, but this is as different from a recognition that sex may be one of the last frontiers as 1905 was from 1917. Despite such diverse breakthroughs as Kinsey, Lolita and Enovid, the authorities still remain to be overthrown, for the simple reason that the authorities are internal.

An ideal illustration of this sort of psychological ground giving (as opposed to ground clearing) is the continuing legal argument over the censorship of literature. Viewed superficially, it would seem that the door to the boudoir is at least ajar, if not wide open. Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Howl, all heretofore the object of suits, may now be published openly in the United States, and the precedents established in their cases seem to have defined for some time to come the differences between what is called "erotic realism" and hard-core pornography. And yet the deciding factor in each of these cases, the factor attested to by all the expert witnesses and referred to in most of the judges' rulings for dismissal, was not the thorny question of the artist's inalienable right to deal with erotic desires, but its precise opposite--that, because the books under consideration did not, in fact, arouse erotic desires, they could not be legally banned. The courts listened to a parade of intelligent men--literary critics, college professors and novelists, all with presumably normal sex lives--solemnly testifying on the assumption that the arousal of sexual desires by a book was somehow socially reprehensible, but that in the case at issue it hadn't happened. At least, not to them. Honest.

Progress? Yes, of sorts. The author's right to take the reader into the bedroom has now been established by law, but only so long as he carefully separates behavior from emotions. His skill may be employed to describe, but never to evoke. He may write with the hands of a surgeon, but not with the eyes of a lover (the results of which sometimes make one long for the old asterisk fade-out that at least left one's own imagination free to roam). The point is as simple as it is fatuous: Though there is nothing wrong with describing everything from cunnilingus to pederasty, there is something very wrong indeed about arousing the desires which make this behavior comprehensible.

Of course, it should be clearly stated that very few of the witnesses in these cases accepted, in private, the assumption on which they testified in public. As Dickens said, "The law is a ass," but it is still the law, and it states that books appealing to prurience are bad books and may not be published. The idea that prurience is bad is one of those ideas that only applies to other people; leave anyone (who believes it) alone with a work of out-and-out pornography, and you will soon see how deep the conviction goes. The fact of the matter is very simple (though no one would be caught on the witness stand admitting it), and that fact is that words do have the power to make us realize that we are desirous, just as they have the power to make us realize that we are hungry, and (if they are ill-chosen words) that we are sleepy. But the question still remains: So what? Even the libertarians and the petition signers seem to be stymied by this, because they always carry on their arguments with the book-burning maiden ladies and literary police sergeants (who, it seems, never read anything but dirty books) in terms of what constitutes erotica, not what's wrong with it.

Equally, parents and educators like to think of themselves as being very enlightened for distributing among the young all manner of do-it-yourself sex manuals which, like all their brethren in an America that seems obsessed with keeping idle hands busy, tell you in tedious detail what to do, but never why. These chatty volumes leave almost nothing to the imagination, but carefully avoid touching on the earthier emotions without which the more acrobatic aspects of sex must seem to the young and inexperienced about as sensible as a trapeze act to a blind man. The anatomical drawings in these books, complete with helpful arrows and Latinate words, seem deliberately fashioned to prepare the 15-year-old for the operating room, rather than the seduction couch or the marriage bed--unlike the Japanese pillow books which proceed on the idea that you don't have to know it's called a vagina, you only have to know what to do with it. As a consequence, young men memorize the graphs on the minimum amount of time to be devoted to foreplay, and young women know that females were given the inalienable right to orgasm along with the right to vote, and both are prepared for everything but the thrilling and unsettling emotions for which all the positions, techniques and variations are only physical expressions.

Most older readers will have had the bizarre experience of overhearing teenagers, who have yet to make even the most abashed, back-seat-of-the-car love to one another, solemnly talking about masturbation or copulation, and have probably crept away, not wanting to embarrass them, and prided themselves on the liberality of modern society--though if they had been caught reading a book which shamelessly celebrated these activities for teenagers, intervention would have been immediate. For the parental attitude boils down to this: Healthy young people are expected to like necking just as they like steak or tennis--because it's invigorating, nutritious and therapeutic. In other words, it has redeeming social value, like chaperoned rock-'n'-roll sessions, or policed drag-strip races. It is a harmless release for youthful energies, which, it is clearly understood, should never be taken to mean that the energies thus released will be allowed to move from the level of foreplay to that of fornication. So fantasy is tolerated and even encouraged, while the reality of sex remains under the same old injunctions.

Why? It's not really a question of morality, for though sex was once the evil half of the moral Manichaeanism of Western consciousness (the Mr. Hyde that lay like a coiled serpent in the breasts of all Jekylls who were not vigilant, the loathsome portrait in the attic mirroring the scarlet sins that did not show on Dorian Gray's daytime face, the satanic Svengali force that would hypnotize and enslave the better, or Trilby, angels of our nature), times have changed radically, and very few sensible people, from Smilin' Jack to Smiley Blanton, speak ill of sex any longer. Indeed, if anything (other than democracy and, perhaps, Albert Schweitzer) is thought to represent the good, the true and the beautiful by most young sophisticates, it is probably "healthy" sex. It is viewed as the most natural expression of love--a sort of epoxy glue, one drop of which will support two tons of anxiety and ethnic difference; and the day cannot be too far off when we will be reminded, on subways and in buses, that "The Family That Sleeps Together Keeps Together." Probably as many mothers worry about whether young Bobby is experiencing a healthy feeling of competition for their favors with his father, as worry about whether he will be able to get into the college of his choice; and I have seen young marrieds go off by the station-wagonful to see Never on Sunday, and sit around afterward enthusing wistfully over how simple, straightforward, and nonneurotic sexual love could be, as evidenced by this incarnation of that sentimental folk figure, the Good Whore who is as gay and wise and reassuring as--but the conversation broke off at this point, because everyone realized that they were just about to say "as mother should have been." I have listened to young matrons, freed from drudgery by appliances and from children by prep schools, confess that they knew they must be maladjusted because, though they loved sex and grabbed all of it that they could get, they still, damnably, thought of it as "dirty," instead of "beautiful and uplifting." When reminded that you could think of farming the same way, but that this didn't mean that all 4-H clubbers were slovenly, they looked at me as if I were suggesting that their husbands openly cheat on their income tax, instead of merely padding the expense account. You come upon this "healthy" attitude toward sex in the laissez-faire obscenity of cocktail parties and country clubs; in the latest Reader's Digest article on How to Be a Mistress to Your Husband (the key to this seems to be a nap in the afternoon); and in the statements of Bennington girls that sex is the natural adjunct to a love relationship, even if that relationship doesn't result in marriage.

On the surface of it, all this sounds very advanced indeed. Certainly our grandmothers would be shocked by it (the usual rule of thumb by means of which we congratulate ourselves on how emancipated we have become), and undoubtedly they would conclude that the revolution has arrived, and all authorities have been swept away. But then our grandmothers operated on the old-fogy idea that sex was a necessary evil without which marriage would be incomplete, because it would be childless. The fact that we operate on the young-fogy idea that sex is a necessary good without which love would be incomplete, because it would be childish, does not occur to us, much less that it represents no radical step forward. The difference between saying that sex is all right when sanctified by marriage, and saying that sex is all right when sanctified by love, indicates a greater subtlety of justification, but not an abandonment of the notion that sex somehow needs to be justified. Both ideas assume that sexual energy is volatile, anarchic and potentially dangerous when not restrained by a "higher" emotion, and both ideas assert that the problem posed by sexual energy is primarily the problem of controlling it.

With the exception of a few wise men, like Gandhi, and a few wild men, like Mailer, no one talks about abstinence any longer as the simplest method of control (and it is interesting to note that neither of these men assumes that sex is destructive, only distracting), but people do talk endlessly about such things as moderation, proper outlets, normal identifications and responsibility, all of which unconsciously equate sex with alcohol, narcotics, overeating and the other forms of self-indulgence by which we sometimes compensate for anxiety and inner turmoil. The fact that the very inner turmoil out of which we overindulge more often than not results from the suppression of sexual energy, rather than its liberation, does not seem to have occurred to them.

The reason? The reason is baldly simple: Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still assume that sex is the antithesis of the spirit (admitting that we have "feet of clay" is very different from trying to walk on them); that it is somehow animallike (whether we view it as a tiger or a tabby cat doesn't materially alter the assumption); or, at the very least, that it is merely the physical acting out of psychological needs (why it so rarely occurs to anyone to view these very psychological needs as merely the acting out of our dammed-up sexual energy has always been a mystery). At the bottom of it, all our attitudes rest as squarely on the old Christian dualism of mind versus body as did the rather more austere injunctions of Saint Paul--which, at least, constituted a hardheaded counterrevolution that kept the issue clear.

The fact that there is still something grievously wrong with our sexual attitudes is as plain as the type face in our newspapers, a good deal of which these days is taken up with statistics on divorce, promiscuity among the young and sex crimes, while the best part of what is left is used to advertise books, movies, plays or TV shows that seem obsessed with sex in a way that not even the most uninhibited sensualist would call "normal." Some social observers profess to be alarmed by this, and their explanations, when they offer any (and mostly they treat the phenomenon like an outbreak of polio, about the nature of which it is unnecessary to say anything), range all the way from the ringing of moralistic fire whistles over the passing of 19th Century values, to the twitter of psychiatric jargon describing the whole thing as a hangover from these very same values. The conservatives assume that all the commonality wants is titillation, the liberals assume that all the commonality gets is titillation, but both assume that there is no valid, internal reason for the preoccupation in the first place.

Nevertheless, the astonishing success of movies such as La Dolce Vita (which took anything but an American Legion, or even a Great Books Club, view of contemporary sexual life) cannot be explained solely on the basis of the degradation of, or our distortion by, an outdated moral code. What this success clearly indicates is a troubled awareness of the rigidity of current sexual attitudes, and a willingness (heretofore unknown in America) to treat the matter of sex as if it were a crucial key to individuality, as well as a social or psychological phenomenon. Some of the critics of La Dolce Vita, for instance, viewed it as a symptom of moral decay, rather than as an analysis of it; others felt that the eruptions of sex in the film indicated the degeneracy of the characters, rather than their despair; but few seemed to realize that what they were viewing was nothing less than the mirror image of their own phantom faces, paralyzed by the ambiguity of limitless (continued on page 130)Revolution(continued from page 68) material affluence in a morally impoverished world, helpless to discover any pursuit that did not end in compromise, apathy or futility, and thus deprived of any way to experience their uniqueness, except through their own flesh. And the fact that the film could not maintain the courage of its insight (as, for instance, La Notte did), and fell back on baldly moralistic symbols and exaggerations which denied the dignity of the search, seems to have escaped almost everyone.

The same sort of myopia overcame the critics of such "unnormal," sex-dominated works as Suddenly Last Summer, Tropic of Cancer and Lolita, to mention only the first examples that come to mind. Their success was attributed to simple prurience on the part of the audience, and their creation to complicated maladjustments on the part of the authors, but the possibility that like need might be calling to like need was mostly dismissed, and what this indicated about the progress of the so-called sexual revolution was not discussed at all.

For, like it or not, we are not quite ready to admit that there is a growing restiveness everywhere now concerning the internal authorities that, while they do not prevent us from indulging in sex without guilt, nevertheless compel us to justify it in any number of nonsexual ways; there is a growing suspicion that sex may constitute one of the few remaining experiences in which Jung's process of individuation can still occur; and there are disturbing signs that the psychic attritions of our time may have brought us to the brink of a sexual 1917 at last, as we shall see.

• • •

As all totalitarians discover when they allow themselves to speculate on the dynamics of control, the cheapest and most efficient way to disarm resistance is to internalize the censor, to build the Secret Police into every individual. Once this is accomplished, the state can, indeed, "wither away," as Marx believed it should and would, because (like the mite of grace that everyone swallows with the symbolic body and blood of Christ) the state will then have been miniaturized, mass-produced and distributed to all for free, making deviation impossible and exterior authority unnecessary.

That this internalization of authority is the ultimate aim of many psychiatrists, as well as most Communists, only indicates how complex modern life has become--so complex indeed that there is less and less room in it for the autonomous individual. The establishment of authority is almost always idealistic in the beginning, but because it stems from the assumption that man is basically disruptive and anarchic when left in Hobbes' state of nature, it always ends up in the most cynical kinds of expediency. Whether one attempts to control society in the name of the intellect (as Marxism does), or whether one attempts to control the intellect in the name of the society (as Freudianism does), the result is mostly the same: a monolith of layers of control, one series backing up the other, until the font of resistance, deep in the psyche, has been reached and (so goes the squalid little hope anyway) sealed off. The ingenuity of totalitarians in putting fingers in the dike is only exceeded by their stubborn refusal to see that there are only so many fingers available, and that eventually the underground man, made raw to his human predicament by these very controls, breaks through in the form of the psychopath or the rebel.

There is probably no better illustration of this internalization of authority than the sexual attitudes described above, attitudes which continue to regulate behavior even though the morality of which they are a result has "withered away." But deep inside man there is something that "doesn't love a wall," and in an age that is characterized by walls that cut as deep into consciousness as they do across continents, that something is growing ever more rebellious, exacerbated and desperate. It is starting to question the very nature of sexuality, just as the American colonists questioned the nature of liberty. It is indulging in self-defeating extremes of libertinism, just as the Jacobins plunged into self-consuming extremes of license. And here and there, the outraged frustration (which turned the 1905 revolutionaries of Russia into 1917 terrorists) is exiling that something to the bitter streets and dark cellars of sadism, perversion and other forms of sexual outlawry.

Common to all these reactions are the convictions that sexuality has an intrinsic validity (in and of itself) that finally transcends the uses to which it is put. That sex is not just a kind of visceral valentine you give your beloved, nor something as fleeting and emptily symbolic as a handshake. That it is not so much a specific emotion directed at a specific person, as it is an objectless, steadily coursing flow of energy out from the centers of the being which, like an underground stream, can surface in an infinite variety of places, in an infinite number of ways. The homosexual pool is different from the heterosexual river only in that it has been dammed, but both rise from the same dark, subterranean watershed, ceaselessly flowing, seeping, searching its level. "In everything living," Wilhelm Reich wrote, "sexual vegetative energy is at work." Or, as D. H. Lawrence enjoined much earlier: "Accept sex in the consciousness, and let the normal physical awareness come back, between you and other people. Be tacitly and simply aware of the sexual being in every man and woman, child and animal."

Outlandish (or outright mystical) as these statements probably sounded in their day, an approximation of the insight they contain typifies the new consciousness of sex. The current attitude of homosexuals toward their predilection is one example. Second only to the Negro or Jew, the homosexual was once the favorite whipped boy of the liberals, who always told you that they defended him from persecution, despite his anomaly. But this Don't-let's-be-beastly-to-the-fag-gots attitude (like its counterpart concerning the Germans) is actually based on the spurious magnanimity that overcomes insecure people just after they have thought, "I may not be perfect, but I'm better than you, and just to prove it I'll be nice to you"--with the result, in this case, that the homosexual acted more pansyish than ever, just as the Negro before him had acted more Uncle Tomish. For the outcast instinctively knows that when he is accepted with such a show of tolerance it is his very outcastness that is his meal ticket, and so he emphasizes it, secretly mocking his benefactor with the caricature, and waiting for the day of unmasking.

That that day is probably upon us is indicated by such statements as this one by Allen Ginsberg: "I sleep with men and with women. I am neither queer nor not queer, nor am I bisexual," which would have seemed gibberish to the humorless liberal of yore, whose strong suit was never satire-with-a-straight-face, and who, lost without labels, would have wondered what, indeed, Ginsberg actually was, then. To which Ginsberg would have replied (as he has): "My name is Allen Ginsberg and I sleep with whoever I want." This sort of Marx Brothers candor is always called "tasteless" (for which read "too pertinent") by the critics, but the fact that Ginsberg's work is singularly free of the rococo hints and minces and stifled sniggers of homosexual poetry of the past, and that he can write about women as women, rather than as so many emasculators-in-skirts or fags-in-drag, is a sign of how liberating a simple admission can be. Think of how many tedious pages of "decor and sensibility" we would have been spared if Ronald Firbank, for instance, had been allowed to make the same statement. Think of what his bizarre talent might have accomplished had he been able to admit to himself that he was homosexual, but so what?

It is not so much that society has treated homosexuality as a stigma, as it is that the homosexual himself has felt this way, that accounts for the effeminate aura of Firbank, who rarely writes overtly about homosexuality, as contrasted to the masculinity of Genet, who deals with it as candidly as if it was no more shameful than a penchant for bosomy blondes. Behind the one stands the feeling that sex is The Flower Beneath the Foot, something ambiguous, perverse, furtive and theatrical. Behind the other is the conviction of Genet (among others) that sex can fructify and even ennoble, that it is a recharging of the identity, and ultimately an illumination. The homosexual of the past never got beyond the object of his desire, and his felt necessity to either disguise that object or justify his choice of it with windy drivel about the Greeks, whereas today's homosexual realizes that it is not the cup that gives sustenance, but what is in it.

In so far as Reich and Lawrence asserted that the important characteristics of sexual energy are its primacy, creativity and undifferentiated flow have they been unique harbingers of this revolution. Almost no one talks seriously about Reich these days, and to my knowledge no exhaustive, head-on, point-by-point refutation of his theory of sexual energy exists in English, but many people, particularly artists, feel that though he may have been scientifically wrong, he was "poetically" right when he stated that "sexuality [is] nothing else than the biological expansion from center to periphery. Conversely, anxiety [is] nothing but the reverse direction from periphery to center. Sexuality and anxiety are one and the same process of excitation, only in opposite directions." In this statement, sweeping and oversimplified as it may sound to psychiatric lint pickers, may be found one reason for the persistent sexual preoccupation of our age of anxiety. For when everything else is pulverized, uncertain and relative, the consciousness automatically turns back to the cohesive, unequivocal absolute of sexual energy for relief, making (at one and the same time) a denial and an affirmation.

During the Cuban crisis of 1962, for example, my wife and I were certainly not the only ones who found themselves obsessively making love during the three most perilous days (and also, in our case, making bad jokes about the beneficent effect of all those released orgones, that were really no more idiotic than the jokes people make to explain a binge of wine drinking in France, or a spate of intensive moviegoing in New York). Critics may feel that the inclusion of a detail like this is unnecessary, tasteless or dull-dull-dull (the accredited ploys for dealing with the erotic confessional), but then they probably also felt that the overdrinking which the anxieties of the Munich crisis brought out in people, who were caught in the double bind of total concern and total helplessness, evidenced nothing but irresponsibility, and so they are incapable of knowing how far history and its dementias have brought us. They would undoubtedly find Lawrence's diagnosis, made ten years before Munich (not to mention Hiroshima, Hungary and Havana), incomprehensible: "When men and women are physically cut off, they become at last dangerous, bullying, cruel. Conquer the fear of sex, and restore the natural flow. Restore even the so-called obscene words, which are part of the natural flow. If you don't, if you don't put back a bit of the old warmth into life, there is a savage disaster ahead."

That savage disaster had already occurred when Lawrence wrote. Mechanistic modern scientism, after destroying the old absolutes of organized religion, and then the new relatives of moral convention, went on to create the weaponry which in our time has expressed, in violence, our thwarted inability to live in the spiritual wasteland that is all that remains. Cut off from God, adrift in the baffling collectivism of a society that is itself adrift, pulverized by wars whose only noticeable result is the further loosing of inner anxiety and the concomitant tightening of outer control, mass man is finally orphaned from himself as well; all experiences are stereotyped and explained away; all mysteries are revealed as manifestations of misunderstood drives; until the old rationalist aim (the happy man in the sane society) is finally achieved, not by the light of reason, but in the dark of schizophrenia--with the clammy result that man has never understood himself more, and experienced himself less. He lives by second hand, he watches himself living, he goes through his emotions like Dr. Frankenstein observing his monster; and all the while he struggles to believe that if you cannot abolish the instinctual beast by the imperatives of morality, you can at least tame him by the explanations of science.

Increasingly, he fails in that struggle. And increasingly he falls back on those few experiences which involve what Mailer has called "the connection of new circuits"--experiences which, because they finally elude reason, ultimately escape time (the ticking mind of life), and thereby abolish for a moment the insect loneliness and cogwheel futility that are perhaps the most typical modern emotions.

Once love was one of these experiences. But love, like honor, faith and chastity, has not come through the storms of our century intact. Whether it was the emotion, or the term, that has proved too vague and general for our age of genocide and overkill is not really important, but love seems to have joined such other "secondary experiences" as truth and beauty, whose cerebral character gives them connotative but not descriptive value, i.e., truth is ultimately one's idea of truth. But then one thing that typifies the 20th Century is a weariness with language (and the distortion of reality that it entails), for, as Arthur Adamov (one of the leading playwrights of the Theater of the Absurd) says: "The words in our aging vocabularies are like sick people. Some may be able to survive, others are incurable." The degree to which love, as a word, has become "incurable" was perhaps most starkly illustrated by the final interchange between the husband and wife in La Notte. Having reached that emotional impasse out of which even infidelity offers no exit, she (who no longer loves him, and knows it) nevertheless begs him, "Say the words! Say the words!" to which he (who no longer loves her either, but refuses to admit it) can only reply, "I can't, I won't!" And, for the first time in the film, the dead wall that seals them off from each other produces, a despair immense enough to arouse desire.

But when sexual desire becomes a sort of last stand against the dead wall in the mind (which can, literally, take the ass out of life), strange things often occur. The internal censor is challenged on its own ground by such flagrantly thrown-down gauntlets as Lenny Bruce's habit of sometimes starting his night-club act with a meaningless stream of sexual and ethnic obscenities, "just to clear the air," to exorcise these words of the dangerous power they possess when left unsaid, an example of shamanism in reverse that is unfailingly misunderstood by police department anthropologists. Bruce has been known to do routines on masturbation, psychic impotence and most of the esoterica of the erotic life, and a citizen of the calmer times that are bound to come (if any times come at all) will be able to learn more about the sexual preoccupations and dislocations of this age from his work than from any number of humorless Kinsey reports.

The outrage of club owners, and the embarrassment of audiences, are the best testimony to how penetrating and accurate his perceptions are. Far from being "sick," his is a mind that is as mordantly, even obsessively, "healthy" as a latter-day Luther, who may rise to shock, but never stoops to titillate. Far from being "dirty," he assumes that the sexual life is far too important to be left in the damp hands of such genteel pornographers as Dwight Fiske. For the essence of pornography is fantasy (which is socially harmless precisely because it is a substitute for action), and Bruce, as his numerous run-ins with the law indicate, is so concerned with reality that sometimes he is simply not funny at all.

This feeling that the sex life has overriding importance because it constitutes one of the last frontiers, is based on the recognition that the frontier experience has always caused man to transcend himself, whether that frontier was the Mississippi River or the Michelson-Morley experiment. On the frontier, there is a disturbing but ultimately beneficial interaction between man and the unknown, which always results in a widening and a deepening of consciousness, and it is this aspect of sex which Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and others have probed most persistently.

Mailer, who is always accused by the critics of seeing sex in everything, is actually a writer so absorbed by the traditional view of the novelist as philosopher that the worst he can be accused of is seeing everything in sex. There is something almost Jamesian about his intention to find a level of experience on which the most complex states of being can be acted out, and such works as The Deer Park and The Time of Her Time may constitute nothing less than a new fictional genre, in which sexual relations are described primarily to reveal interpersonal attitudes, rather than interpersonal relations being described to reveal sexual attitudes (as was true in the psychological novel of the past that has become all but impossible to write since the War). Far from wanting to reduce life to sexuality, Mailer sees sexuality as one of the only unobstructed avenues back into the richness and creativity of the whole personality. He knows that in an age in which most human endeavors are socialized, mechanized or depersonalized, the bed is one of the last places where the triumphs and defeats, splendors and miseries, commensurate with man's essential stature, can still occur. If anything, Mailer is a puritan (as was Lawrence, as was Reich), who jealously wishes to preserve the fecund possibilities of being from the sterile certainties of the brain; and it is one of the paradoxes of our pulverized age that the unified vision of the puritan is most forcefully expressed these days by men who are continually mistaken for libertines.

Baldwin, on the other hand, is far less ambitious. The value of sex to him lies in its very intimacy; the opportunity it offers to express, and finally anneal, the violence and despair of outcastness; and the best of his work vibrates with the belief that the barriers will only come down when we allow ourselves access to one another across all abysses, sexual and racial. His world is taut with the angry loneliness and fevered curiosities of the isolated, to whom touch itself is the only comprehensive act of communication. In Baldwin's novels, indeed, touching the body of the other (its strangeness, its inviolateness) is treated as the only way to annul its power of intensifying our loneliness simply by being out of reach. If this represents a disturbing exacerbation of consciousness, it also serves to illumine the enormous dimensions of the cul-de-sac in which we are trapped--and going stir crazy.

Portents of riot and jail break are everywhere. More and more people realize that the fight against censorship can no longer be waged on the censor's terms. For the definition of what is--to use the stock phrase--pornographic and obscene (always a misty mid-region of Weir) carries a moral stricture within it, no matter how liberal that definition may be, and it is this very moral stricture that is increasingly being put on trial. There are those, including psychiatrists, sociologists and at least one Supreme Court Justice, who are questioning for the first time the age-old assumption, heretofore accepted by authoritarians and libertarians alike, that out-and-out erotica is rightfully beyond the protection of the law. Far from triggering antisocial acts, the evidence is mounting that the effect of pornography may be precisely the opposite: your average rapist being decidedly not a man who has accepted sexuality as an everyday part of his life. As a result, hard-core 1905ers are fast being forced into the position of having to argue that, yes, the ban on pornography ought to be continued, but only because it is not sexually exciting, and thus has no raison d'être--an example of prejudice torturing logic into syllogism that is classic in its absurdity.

If it is the first sign of a society's maturity when it can see some difference between children and adults (a distinction that has so far been impossible for a nation that has decided most matters of taste by the categorical imperative: would you want your sheltered 12-year-old daughter to do it, see it, read it, think it?), one indication of our coming of age may be that, increasingly, the dispute over pornography is revolving around the problem of how to keep it from the young--a thorny question indeed, but one which we have solved on other levels without closing all the bars or banning the automobile. The day may not be too far off when representations of erotic desire, as an adjunct to that desire, may be as legal as gourmet cookbooks, which have never been under a ban, though far more people have exotic sex every day than are overpowered by the urge to whip up a boeuf bourguignon. The use or abuse of an appetite is ultimately beyond the reach of the censor, as would be immediately apparent to everyone if an attempt were made to blame America's obesity on Clementine Paddleford and her colleagues. Pornography may be caviar for the general, but it is certainly far less poisonous than the garbage served up by Mickey Spillane or Harold Robbins, and perhaps the strongest negative argument for instantly legalizing it is that no one who could obtain the one would ever again be satisfied with the other.

Far more significant, however, are the signs that more and more of us are asking the sexual experience to compensate for the aridity of most other experiences. Nowhere is our era's ambivalence of values and standardization of futility better illustrated than by our preoccupation with aspects of sex that until recently were thought to be forbidden, or at least suspect, even by the most uninhibited. "But to do the forbidden, in order to transgress limits that seem unnatural, is normal and innocent," as Paul Goodman once said, "and if the limits are unnatural it is often necessary and admirable."

The so-called orgy, for example, heretofore a ritual naughtiness for the rich and twisted, has become at least as widespread in New York as Zen lectures and LSD sessions, and, more often than not, the same people attend all three. The Firbankism of the Black Mass, on the other hand, which equated sex with evil, and embraced it because of that, has caused it to fall into disfavor these days, for what we seem to need so desperately now is not a transgression, but a transcendence. It is not a given code of morality that we seek to deny, as much as it is an outlawed conception of being that we seek to affirm, by such excesses. Joyless and mechanical as an orgy may be, it opens up unknown territory where one goes armed only with one's own body; and no mass-observer or visiting-psychologist attitude will get you through it. It seems to hold out hope that if we do not discover unknown predilections, we may at least reinforce well-known aversions, and thereby emerge with a sharper sense of ourselves.

Beyond this, most of us have probably known couples, trapped in the kind of marital desert depicted in La Notte, who made it flower, at least temporarily, by such divergings of the sexual stream as the mutual adulteries of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the erotic charades of The Balcony, or a simple ménage à trois involving one sex or the other. Boredom and satiation are certainly involved in sophistications such as these, but they can best be understood against the background which Mailer has put into the image: "A whore practicing fellatio looks up and says, 'Are you a Communist?'--that's what the modern world is all about in a way." For a crippling drought always awakens dreams of the flood, and in a flood nothing is saved but the barest essentials.

Most modern revolutions have been followed by a period of civil chaos, and there are signs that this sexual 1917 will be no exception. The sudden revival of interest in the Marquis de Sade is as unmistakable an indication of upheavals under the surface of "healthy" sexuality, as the interest in Dostoievsky before the First World War was of similar upheavals under the surface of the easygoing optimism of that time. Dostoievsky, once thought of as the Russian Sade (by people who had obviously never read the Frenchman), established that man cannot be reduced to a mere "organ handle" at the mercy of his "interests"; Sade, on the other hand, established that man would not be reduced to a mere "interest" at the mercy of his organ. But the key to Sade's fascination for people today lies in his conception of the sexual act as the ultimate existential situation. Fearless and consistent atheist that he was, he knew that the only way to experience oneself (in a reality from which the linchpin of a transcendent faith has been removed) was to exert power over others, which, at the bottom of it, meant power over their bodies; which, in turn, demanded the continual lashing of the sexual instinct by the very anxiety to which it is opposed.

That Sade had the courage of his insight, and thereby provided us with a detailed map of the perils of the territory ahead, is exhaustively (and exhaustingly) documented in his works, which describe the relentless progress toward impotence that results from the libertine's forced marches on his sexuality. Nowhere can the tragedy of rationalism be more keenly felt than in Sade, who (alone in that age of reason) was brave enough, and logical enough, to turn rationalism itself to the service of the instincts. He was a veritable Napoleon of sex, but in the psychic debris that our scientific and political Napoleons have so zealously created out of the temples and parliaments of the recent past, he stands as a prophetic warning of the sort of nightmares to which the dreams of reason as the sole reality can lead.

The dislocations of sexuality which can be felt everywhere today (the aforementioned orgy, ménage à trois, tentative forays into Lesbianism or homosexuality, the psychic impotence that is as common to sensualists as it is to prudes), all these may be as much a result of our demand that this one emotion carry the weight of all the failed emotions of modern life, as they are of the so-called "feminization of America," a major cause of which is certainly the breakdown of virility under the burden of being the sole reliable support of the male ego. Nevertheless, there are skirmishes along the frontier that bear watching, such as the upsurge of militant feminist manifestoes, ranging all the way from the NAACP-gradualism of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique to the Black Muslim-extremism of Elizabeth Mann Borgese's The Ascent of Women. Whether these books are a response to the sexual difficulties of men, or are evidence of a female attitude that is the cause of those difficulties, does not matter very much beside the fact that women, like men, are growing restive in their sexual roles, albeit from the other side of the frontier.

What is happening, however, is far more complicated than a simple exchange of roles. If there are more homosexuals, there are probably more sexual engineers as well, and for every feminist, demanding instant equality in the board room, there are probably 50 women experiencing it in the bedroom. The profoundest change is a change in consciousness; in the traditional conception of sex as a charade, in which roles must be played.

Yeats, speaking of another revolution, said: "The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on," as neat a description of a failed revolution as one could possibly hope for. But it is precisely this idea (that sex is power, and power is eternal, and thus we are doomed to struggle over it eternally) that the new consciousness is questioning on all levels, for a real revolution does not merely seek a transfer of power from one hand to another, but a metamorphosis in the nature of power itself. Men and women, when they struggle for sexual dominance, may be engaged in the politics of the coup d'état, but this has nothing to do with the revolution of being which our dehumanized times demand, a revolution which (in these early days) is unfortunately bound to be extremist, antirational, and even dangerous.

The aim of this revolution, however, is not merely to supplant one side of man's nature by another, but to abolish this illusory duality altogether, and to do this, the cannibal mind, swollen to gigantic proportions by centuries of overdrinking, arrogant with the bloodless logic of the computers it has fashioned in its own image, must be drenched in the passions once again. For like a dictatorial regime that controls the police, the army and the press, the mind allows no free elections to the instincts, but instead stages all manner of titillating and harmless circuses to distract them. It is one of the sorry truths of our oppressive era, in which freedom all too often takes the form of anarchy, that such a regime can probably only be overthrown from the darkest cellars of the consciousness. But that the mind alone has failed is as evident on the couches of analysts as in the ovens of Auschwitz, both of which hold victims of the berserk rationalism of our civilization. For what is more rational than a concentration camp, given its assumptions? And what is more rational than paranoia, given its? In each, the mind, like a mad Dr. Huer, concocts solutions which create two problems for every one they solve--on and on and on, until half the world is mad, and the other half is dead.

More and more, something whispers to us that we are doomed to this nightmare of insanity and murder if we do not become whole again. More and more, something whispers that one source of that wholeness lies in the mysterious sexual energy through which we can still experience our uniqueness, even when anxiety has most obscured it. And more and more are we willing to assume (with Lawrence) "that people would [not] be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint," rather than assuming the opposite, as totalitarians of all persuasions have always done. For the essence of the new consciousness, in sex as in everything else, is the simple insistence that man is more creative than destructive. And a more revolutionary creed, given our world, would be hard to imagine.