Fire and Knowledge

What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.

–John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), p. 74

At the other end of the row [on the airplane], divided by an empty seat from the man with the newspaper, a woman in a tailored suit is sitting with a legal pad on her lap…. Her taste and bearing are splendid. She is impeccable.

And Andy would like to give her a little peck on her ear. His mind is calling out to her: “Hello, my Tinkerbelle, my winsome, weensy crocodile. Come out! Come out! I know you’re in there somewhere.”

He says to his mind, “Shut up, you dumb bastard!”

–Wendell Berry, Remembering in Three Short Novels (2003), p. 199-200

The egg of a parasite chalcid wasp, a common small wasp, multiplies unassisted, making ever more identical eggs. The female lays a single fertilized egg in the flaccid tissues of its live prey, and that one egg divides and divides. As many as two thousand new parasitic wasps will hatch to feed on the host’s body with identical hunger. Similarly—only more so—Edwin Way Teale reports that a lone aphid, without a partner, breeding “unmolested” for one year, would produce so many living aphids that, although they are only a tenth of an inch long, together they would extend into space twenty-five hundred light-years.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 167

Fabre says that, at least in captivity, the female [praying mantis] will mate with and devour up to seven males, whether she has laid her egg cases or not. The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of he male insect says, in effect, “No, don’t go near her, you fool, she’ll eat you alive.” At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, “Yes, by all means, now and forever yes.”

While the male is making up what passes for his mind, the female tips the balance in her favor by eating his head. He mounts her. Fabre describes the mating, which sometimes lasts for six hours, as follows: “The male, absorbed in the performance of his vital functions, holds the female in a tight embrace. But the wretch has no head; he has no neck; he has hardly a body. The other, with her muzzle turned over her shoulder continues very placidly to gnaw what remains of the gentle swain. And, all the time, that masculine stump, holding on firmly, goes on with the business! … I have seen it done with my own eyes and have not yet recovered from my astonishment.”

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), pp. 57-58

Naomi Wolf talks about “The Porn Myth” — pornography isn’t turning men into psychotic rapists, but rather turning them off to normal sexuality. An excerpt:

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention….

Does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity?….

The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity….

If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.

On the one hand Nature pushes us on to [sexual desire], having attached to this desire the most noble, useful, and pleasant of all her operations; and on the other hand she lets us accuse and shun it as shameless and indecent, blush at it, and recommend abstinence. Are we not brutes to call brutish the operation that makes us?

–Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Some Verses of Virgil” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 94