The Governesses by Anne Serre

Source of book: borrowed from the library

 

I ended up reading this book because another book by Anne Serre made the International Booker longlist. That one looked interesting to me, but, like most of the other books this year, was too new to make it to any of our local libraries. However, I did see The Governesses, which appeared to be her best-known work. Since it was short and potentially oddball, I figured it would be a fun contrast read to the rest of my current pile.

 

And weird it is. I really am not sure what it means - although it clearly has plenty of metaphorical stuff going on. It feels like an alternate universe, somewhere that is much like our own, but with some deep supernatural reality that ours lacks. 

 

The basic idea is this: an isolated country estate with a few adjacent neighbors. The parental couple with some unknown (but large) quantity of boys as offspring. Or something. They hire three governesses: Inez, Laura, and Eleonore, to look after the boys. 

 

There are also the little maids who live upstairs in the servants’ quarters, and an old man who watches the governesses with his telescope. 

 

And the goings on are…interesting. The governesses are clearly terrible at their actual job. They would rather sunbathe naked, or wander around the extensive park of the estate. 

 

To say nothing of what happens if a “stranger” happens by. A male stranger. Who is carefully baited into the woods, and then drained of his life force by an hours-long orgy that nearly kills him. But leaves him dreaming of the governesses. 

 

Not that much happens in the book until Laura becomes pregnant, and gives birth to yet another little boy, who will join the rest. This starts a series of events leading to a mysterious conclusion. 

 

Are the governesses terrestrial naiads, lying in wait to devour unwitting men? (Perhaps the Melusines of French mythology?) Are they the Graces, as the boys think them? Are they the Fates? Are they somehow enchanted prisoners of the estate? Part of feral nature? It isn’t clear, and the ending never answers the question. 

 

In an interview, the author said she wrote the book from the subconscious, and also that the surrealists have been a big influence on her. This makes sense in the context of the book. Very surreal, very dreamlike. 

 

She also noted that her own rather unexpected sexual awakening as a teen was written into the book - the feral desire that is somehow also innocent. 

 

One could, perhaps, read into the book any number of female experiences. It is very much from a female perspective throughout most of the book, with brief exceptions for the father and the old man. Mostly, it is an observation of the governesses from the inside. 

 

I can’t say I have read anything quite like it. The language, as translated by Mark Hutchinson, is beautiful, carefully chosen, and evocative. It is all about mood, small details, observation, experience. Rather than try to analyze it, I would recommend letting it wash over you. There is little plot, the story is short, and it doesn’t have to have some deeper grand meaning. 

 

One idea I do want to highlight is the contrast between the yearning of the governesses to find partners, and the way the parents of the boys wish to marry them off. Compare these two passages:

 

Oh, if only they could leave! Run off with this man who has happened along, using him to pass through the gates and loving him because he can take them to a place where their bonds will be ever so gently loosened at last. So that, one day, each of them will be able to live and speak in her own name, be alone in the world, and free of the others at last.

 

And this one, about the attempts to make the governesses “presentable” to society:

 

By clipping their wings, arranging a lock of hair, correcting a facial expression, adjusting their bodies, and persuading them to rein themselves in and be a little more accommodation, Madame Austeur is hopeful of securing a happy future for them. It wouldn’t take much, she says to herself, as she closes her notebook. 

 

One could see in there a social critique - a generation gap perhaps. 

 

A significant reason I make a point of reading books in translation is that every language has its own flavor - even when translated. Every country has its own literary tradition and feel. It is a good thing to have variety in literature, in perspectives, and in sensibilities. 

 

The Governesses is an intriguing book, a quick read, and one that makes me want to read Serre’s other books in the future. 

 

Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

Source of book: I own this

 

This is my selection for Women’s History Month this year. 

 

Back in my embarrassing Rush Limbaugh days, Andrea Dworkin was the poster woman for “Feminazis” - those man hating, unattractive, bitter, angry creatures of myth that were the only alternative to accepting patriarchy. 

 

As one who reads quite a bit, and did back then as well, I already had some doubts about whether Dworkin was really as described - political discourse tends toward straw manning anyway, and I eventually realized how dependent the right wing was and is on this technique. 

 

But my true interest in Dworkin really started just over a decade ago. And no, it wasn’t primarily that I started reading feminist texts for Women’s History Month.

 

It was actually because patriarchist and white supremacist “pastor” Doug Wilson caused a big kerfuffle with a statement about sexual intercourse that sounded….exactly like what Andrea Dworkin supposedly said about sex. And you know, there is a striking similarity. Here is Wilson: 

 

In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.

…

Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine.

…

True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.

 

You can read the whole thing and some good commentary on the late Rachel Held Evans’ blog.

 

And here is Dworkin:

 

Intercourse is commonly written about and comprehended as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, because of which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relation to her - over and inside her - is his possession of her. He has her, or, when he is done, he has had her. By thrusting into her, he takes her over. His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him; he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her in the fuck. 

 

Wow.

 

It is unmistakable that both writers use the same terms, the same ideas, the same basic view of what fucking means in our culture. 

 

There is a difference, of course. Dworkin finds this status quo to be morally unacceptable, abhorrent to women, and degrading. 

 

Wilson finds it necessary to get his little rocks off. 

 

Of course, Wilson is an evil man to the core, and every time he opens his mouth it is to do something horrible. From his defense of slavery to his AIDS denialism to his protection of a pedophile from justice, leading to the further sexual abuse of an infant. He’s that kind of awful. 

 

And, to be fair to Dworkin, there are indeed a LOT of males out there in our culture who are every bit as predatory in their approach to sex as Dworkin describes. Sadly, we just put a bunch of them in charge of our government. I’m not kidding. Being a sexual predator seems to be a job qualification for the Trump administration. 

 

So, with that preface, let me explain my choice of this book for this year’s Women’s History Month selection.

 

As Ariel Levy puts it in the foreword:

 

There are many more people who have strong feelings about [Dworkin] than there are people who have actually read her work.

 

Having read Intercourse, her best known and most controversial book (at least in right wing circles), I can say that I definitely have opinions about the book - there are some things I disagree with, but many many more that I agree with. 

 

Also, with the exception of one chapter - which I quoted from above - this book is not at all what I was expecting. The first half is actually all about literature: she analyzes the works of five male authors and how they portray female sexuality. 

 

Later chapters too bring in a lot of literature, which is fascinating - Simone de Beauvoir also discusses authors and how they write about women in The Second Sex. This is an interesting approach, one that probably resonates best with literary sorts like myself, and less with sexist dicks like Limbaugh and Trump and Wilson. 

 

The book also discusses law and history, particularly the Western version, and brings out how all too often, subjugation of women is deeply rooted in toxic theology. Dworkin is well informed and quite interesting in her discussion of all of these. 

 

So, I actually enjoyed this book for reasons I did not anticipate. 

 

Let me also note that Dworkin the person was controversial across the political spectrum. The right wing needs little if any explanation - any woman who challenged the patriarchy was and is their enemy. 

 

But the Left is more interesting. Dworkin was opposed to pornography, and worked to get laws passed banning it. These were overturned quickly by the courts, but the whole movement meant that Dworkin had to work with right wingers opposed to any form of female equality. This was seen as a sellout, but also a deep division within feminism itself. As the foreword points out, this seems relatively quaint these days, as porn is far more ubiquitous than in the 1980s, and less clearly a feminism issue. (Ditto for sex work generally, which can be exploitative, but tends to be more so when it is suppressed and driven underground. That topic is beyond the scope of the book or this post.) 

 

Dworkin was also accused by other feminists as being a “man hater” - the same epithet used by the right. This is not entirely accurate, but it is understandable. She certainly pulled zero punches when it came to calling out bad male behavior, and she (accurately) noted that patriarchal culture taints everything, and even effects the way good men think and act, even if they try to fight against the current. 

 

She also was sexually complicated herself. Her long-term partner, John Stoltenberg, was a man. He was gay, and after his death, partnered with another man. (And the two of them were non-monogamous during their relationship.) Dworkin considered herself primarily a lesbian, but had sex with men as well. This despite her view in this book of intercourse as inherently tied up with hierarchy. 

 

So yes, a bit of a prickly, complicated, yet fascinating person. It also helps to understand her history of being sexually abused since childhood, as this does color her views. Which is perfectly understandable. 

 

In fact, what I would say my biggest disagreements with her all stem from my own experience of mutually satisfying, consensual, loving sex with my own partner. I find this more achievable than she did, and so I am more optimistic about the future of intercourse in a feminist world. 

 

[Side note here: in my experience, the idea that feminists hate men is so obviously and ludicrously false. Of the heterosexual (or bisexual) feminist women I know, many of them are incredibly devoted spouses. I can’t find it now, but there was a study recently that found that feminist women actually have higher opinions about men than anti-feminist women. This may be because the kinds of men who prefer feminists as partners are a lot more emotionally mature and thus easier to live with…)

 

So, with that, let’s dive into some quotes and ideas. 

 

Dworkin is nothing if not snarky and acerbic, which is probably why she is used as a poster-feminist by the right. She does not try to play nice. She does not “put a feminine softness” into her writing. Her words are weapons, and often razor sharp. Which is actually something I enjoy. I prefer witty women who can sling words. 

 

One final note here: the title is “Intercourse” - something you can print on a book without fully risking obscenity charges. Specifically, however, she is referring to one particular sex act: the penetration of a vagina by a penis. Throughout, she usually refers to this as “the fuck.” It is clear that this isn’t sex generally, which embraces a whole constellation of acts and experiences, but specifically a penis penetrating a vagina. Keep this in mind throughout. 

 

Her own preface (written for a later edition) has some real gems. Such as this one. 

 

Intercourse is still being reviled in print by people who have not read it, reduced to slogans by journalists posing as critics or sages or deep thinkers, treated as if it were odious and hateful by every asshole who thinks that what will heal this violent world is more respect for dead white men.

 

Oh wait, that’s the MAGA project, right? And the right wing and Fundie position as well. All those women and minorities and young people - they are what is ruining the world. 

 

Dworkin describes her book in stark terms. 

 

In formal terms, then, Intercourse is arrogant, cold, and remorseless. 

 

She also notes that in some cases, men will actually like the book. I noted this line, because I was curious as to whether it would apply to me. And I think it does. 

 

Of course, men have read and do read Intercourse. Many like it and understand it. Some few have been thrilled by it - it suggests to them a new possibility of freedom, a new sexual ethic: and they do not want to be users. 

 

This is in contrast to the men who have never experienced sexuality as anything other than dominance, and who thus see the end of patriarchy and male dominance as the end of sex itself. Doug Wilson is clearly this kind of a man. As are Trump and Musk and others of their ilk. 

 

I will point out later in the book where I think her sexual ethic very much matches mine. I came to many of the same conclusions as she does through my own experience, reading, and thinking. 

 

I will mention here that the preface also talks about what she sees as the negative effects of the Sexual Revolution, namely that there is pressure put on females to be always available for sex. She sees this compulsory sexuality to be just another manifestation of patriarchy, and I tend to agree. For a more detailed discussion of this idea, I recommend Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen, which I read earlier this year. There are actually a lot of overlapping ideas and discussions for these two books. 

 

As I noted, I don’t really agree with her views on porn and sex work. Not because I am here to defend porn use of sleeping with sex workers, but because I think there is ample evidence that criminalization actually leads to greater exploitation and violence towards women. A woman with her own Only Fans account is far less exploited than one dependent on a violent pimp for protection from the law. (Charles Dickens got it, by the way, focusing on Fagan and the way the law failed to protect women, rather than calling for the arrest of Nancy…) 

 

With that introduction from the author, any guesses as to where the book starts its discussion? 

 

That’s right, she dives in with The Kreutzer Sonata!

 

Did you see that one coming? Neither did I, and I am the weird person who not only has read that Tolstoy novella, but considers it one of the most influential books I ever read. 

 

And man, does Dworkin do a fantastic job of discussing it. 

 

For those not familiar with it, it is the story of a man who murders his wife when he catches her cheating on him. He is acquitted (because of the law of the time that allowed a husband to kill his wife and her lover with little if any consequence), but he feels tremendous guilt. 

 

Not because he killed her. But because the murder started when he had intercourse with her. 

 

As I said, influential. This was one reason I knew that I needed to talk with my future wife a lot about sex and expectations and her needs. I did not want sex and marriage to be like Tolstoy portrays it. 

 

The sad thing is, not only did Tolstoy have this really fucked up view of sexuality - he believed that humans should stop having sex altogether - he was far too much like the protagonist of the story. He was a horrible husband, brutal and dismissive of his wife. And he never lived up to his goals. He kept going back to her, fucking her, impregnating her, and then hating her afterward. 

 

The repulsion, Tolstoy insists, requires scrutiny and, ultimately, disavowal; the sex act that causes it needs to be eliminated. The radical social change demanded by Tolstoy in this story - the end of intercourse - is a measured repudiation of gynocide: in order not to kill women, he said, we must stop fucking them.

 

Say what? That really is the weird thing about Tolstoy - and indeed about so many of the writers and others quoted in this book. 

 

I personally cannot understand having sex with a woman and then feeling repulsed by her, grossed out, filled with hate. That’s just….I don’t even know what to say. 

 

No, I do not find female bodies gross. At all. They are beautiful and desirable. I do not find menstruation to be a turnoff - it’s just natural. I do not find female genitals ugly. Quite the contrary. 

 

And really, my overwhelming feeling after having sex is love, closeness, a desire to snuggle. I simply cannot identify AT ALL with the kind of man who feels repulsion, disgust, or hate. I will never understand that. 

 

Throughout the story, Tolstoy equates fucking with violence and murder. But it is more than that. He cannot see her as an actual human, a full person. She seems most human only when she is being stabbed to death. 

 

In this story of killing, the killing begins when the man starts using the woman up; pillaging her physical resources of sex and strength. He is calloused to her well-being because her well-being is not compatible with his fucking - and it is the fucking he wants, not the woman as a person.

 

This will be a theme throughout the book: men wanting to fuck, but not caring about the woman as a person. This is, in my view, backwards. Seeing and treating a woman like a person and caring for her needs will actually lead to better intercourse - and more of it. I mean, don’t we all do more of what we find pleasant and less of what we find unpleasant, given the choice? 

 

Tolstoy had no idea what he was missing, in my opinion. He had a wife he could have loved, rather than dehumanized. He is weirdly like Kerouac, having fairly good self-awareness of his flaws, but lacking the ability or will to change them. 

 

That said, I know there are all too many men out there like this. How did poor Sophie feel about all this? I mean, she was the devoted wife, who transcribed for him, bore a lot of children, many of whom died in infancy, managed his estate, published his books, and arguably did more for him than he did for himself or her combined, and put up with him for decades.

 

We have her journals, and they paint a sad picture. She said she hated “his coldness, his terrible coldness” toward her. She hated that he would only show interest in her when he needed something or wanted to fuck, and treated her with indifference the rest of the time. What she really craved, she said, was “warm gentle affection.” 

 

Is that really too much to ask? Here, I am 100% with Sophie. I do not ever want my partner to feel she is being starved of warm gentle affection, that I am only interested in her when I want sex. A full relationship is so much more satisfying.   

 

Overall, this chapter on Tolstoy was my favorite of the book, simply because finding someone else who cares so deeply about a book that is meaningful to me is wonderful. But there is a lot more to come. 

 

The next chapter is all about Kobo Abe, who I confess I had never heard of, let alone read. I might have to remedy that. Even if I hadn’t read his works, though, there are some interesting ideas in this chapter as well. The opening paragraph is interesting. 

 

Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop-culture magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close. 

 

This is one of the passages where I wonder if her history of being abused is a factor. This seems a rather unpleasant experience of sex and relationships. It isn’t wrong so much as it isn’t universal. It hasn’t been my experience. Yes, it can be emotional and even sometimes feral. But not like that. Perhaps my female readers can comment on how much their own experiences felt like this or not? 

 

I am not able to comment much on the books discussed in this chapter as I am unfamiliar with them. However, there is one line from The Face of Another that I found quite good. This is from the protagonist’s wife to him.

 

You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger for you is simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.

 

Unlike Tolstoy, Abe seems more capable of writing from the woman’s viewpoint as well. I am kind of intrigued by the quotes and might have to try one of Abe’s books, although The Woman in the Dunes sounds a bit disturbing and rapey. (Which is the point of the discussion.)

 

One of Dworkin’s points in this chapter is this:

 

The violence that men dream and the violence that they do ensures that they are lonely forever.

 

One can see this in incels, but also with the many, many men that fail to connected with others, particularly their partners, but even with friends. This is indeed the male half of the tragedy of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. It severs men from human connection. 

 

The next chapter discusses Tennessee Williams, of all people. I wasn’t really expecting that, because Williams was, well, GAY and all. But on closer examination, he wrote a lot about heterosexual power dynamics as well, and quite well about dysfunctional heterosexual intercourse. 

 

Williams famously wrote detailed instructions for his plays, delineating the characters in depth. Stanley, in A Streetcar Named Desire is described thusly. 

 

Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of his life, such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer. 

 

I was reminded of something recent with that description, J. D. Vance’s awkward equating of manliness (the masculinity supposedly lost in our time) with among other things, making jokes with the guys. 

 

I suspect that what Vance has in mind isn’t the fast-flying puns and dad jokes that a few friends and I enjoy. Rather, Williams has the right idea in his “heartiness with me”: the appreciation of “rough humor.” In other words, sexual jokes demeaning to women. 

 

To be clear, Stanley is not the hero of Streetcar. He is the villain, using and abusing women, even raping them and leaving them to commit suicide. This is the natural behavior of those who embrace this kind of “masculinity.” 

 

The next chapter examines another gay author: James Baldwin. Again, this is an unexpected yet perceptive choice. Particular attention is paid to two books: Giovanni’s Room, which I have read, and Another Country, which I have not - but now really want to read. Both books, especially the latter, address the way race and gender intersect with sexuality. 

 

There are a few quotes from Baldwin in the chapter that I think are crucial truths. 

 

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.”

“People pay for what they do, and, still more, what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.” 

 

This is true in the sense of sexuality, for sure. Hating women the way so many men do leads to living lives that are lonely and sad and disconnected. It also holds true for other relationships, as I have all too much experience with my own parents and other right-wing former friends. In the book, Dworkin describes it as this:

 

And in this morality, when fucking is hatred, when fucking is revenge, then fucking is hell: a destruction in violence and suffering of self-knowledge and self-esteem; the destruction of a human being, someone else perhaps, certainly oneself. 

 

The final chapter expressly about literature examines the more fantastic stories of Isaac Bashivis Singer. Speaking of which, that author was the subject of my very first book post on Facebook, which eventually led to this blog. 

 

As I mentioned, it is the supernatural stories that are discussed here, with their really weird sex stuff. It is this chapter that contains that quote that I used to open this post, which parallels Doug Wilson’s ideas. The chapter is entitled “Possession,” which is fitting because the stories are about humans being possessed and/or fucked by supernatural and often malevolent (but not always) beings. 

 

The chapter also quotes someone who came decades before Wilson, Theodore Van De Velde, who, in his advice book, Ideal Marriage, seems to have shared Wilson’s belief that sex is all about male aggression and possession of a woman. 

 

Dworkin also perceptively points out that when it comes to gender roles, the terms “God” and “Nature” are largely interchangeable. Both preachers and naturalistic advice givers tend to simply reify existing patriarchal ideas using the deity of their choice. 

 

The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation: colonizing, forceful (manly) or nearly violent; the sexual act by its nature makes her his. God made it so, or nature did, according to the faith of the explainer of events and values. Both conceptual systems - the theological and the biological - are loyal to the creed of male dominance and maintain that intercourse is the elemental (not socialized) expression of male and female, which in turn are the elemental (not socialized) essences of men and women. 

 

Ah yes. It all comes back to gender essentialism in the end, doesn’t it? And pity the poor man or woman who fails to exemplify the essentialism in every point. 

 

Dworkin goes on to question why we even call it “penetration” rather than “envelopment” - and she also notes all of the phobias regarding loss of the penis within the vagina. It is the assumption of male supremacy which gives this meaning to the fuck, not the other way around. 

 

Remarkably, it is not the man who is considered possessed in intercourse, even though he (his penis) is buried inside another human being; and his penis is surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist shutting tight and release with a force that pushes hard on the tender thing, always so vulnerable no matter how hard. He is not possessed even though his penis is gone - disappeared inside someone else, enveloped, smothered, in the muscled lining of flesh that he never sees, only feels, gripping, releasing, gripping, tighter, harder, firmer, then pushing out: and can he get out alive? seems a fundamental anxiety that fuels male sexual compulsiveness and the whole discipline of depth psychology. The man is not possessed in fucking even though he is terrified of castration; even though he sometimes thinks - singly or collectively in a culture - that the vagina has teeth; but he goes inside anyway, out of compulsion, obsession: not obsessed with her, a particular woman; but with it, getting inside. 

 

There is more - and Dworkin makes a good case. I mean, we males get our life force sucked out of us by a woman, then we shrink, fall back exhausted. So why does culture insist that the fuck is possession of a woman? It is a curious artifact of male supremacy. 

 

So, instead of intercourse being something mutual, it becomes all about power.

 

For women, being sexually possessed by men is more pedestrian. Women have been chattels to men as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women. He owns you; he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of the ownership: he owns you inside out. 

 

She also talks about the female experience of this cultural reality. 

 

Therefore, women feel the fuck - when it works, when it overwhelms - as possession; and feel possession as deeply erotic; and value annihilation of the self in sex as proof of the man’s desire or love, its awesome intensity. And therefore, being possessed is phenomenologically real for women; and sex itself is an experience of diminishing self-possession, an erosion of self.

 

Here, I am unqualified to express much of an opinion, although I can say that as to the male side of things, I haven’t ever experienced sex as “possession.” I find it to be about mutual pleasure, the melding of two into one flesh, and about deep connection. 

 

But how about women? What do they experience this as? I suspect from what many women have gone on the record as saying regarding Wilson and the other theobros that they do not find possession to be erotic at all, contrary to his claims. So I would be curious to hear female perspectives on this. Obviously, human sexuality is a broad spectrum, not a binary or black and white. 

 

As I have noted a few times now, my main disagreement with Dworkin is based on my experience. But she is right about the culture in general, I would say. Particularly conservative subcultures here in the United States. 

 

In this chapter, Dworkin also notes that for all our claims that sex is a personal matter, it really isn’t. 

 

Each act of possession is sensual and singular; but possession also has a communal dimension to it, the community regulating, to a staggering degree, the social and sexual boundaries of possession - the meaning of the fuck, the degree of public complicity in maintaining each erotic relationship, what aspects of possession can and cannot be shown or acknowledged in the public realm, the role of the fuck in controlling women. 

 

I can surely attest to this having grown up in a Fundie subculture, and finding as an adult that all too many people seemed to think they had a say, not so much about my sex life per se, but about the meaning of my sexual connection to my wife, her body, and our public affection. It was a bit surprising. And it very much was all about the control of women. 

 

After these first five chapters, Dworkin then moves to a couple of chapters more broadly about culture, grouped as “the female condition.” The first is on virginity, and focuses a lot on Joan of Arc. There are definitely some interesting ideas in this section, particularly about the relative privileges of male and female, and the desire of many women - Joan and my wife included - to take on the power and role of a man in society, rejecting female subservience. 

 

One interesting note is this one, which we word nerds knew already, but many fail to appreciate:

 

Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebellious and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. 

 

It is rather interesting that my wife and I got married fairly young. She had no particular interest in getting married before she met me. Most likely, she could have lived a long and happy life as a single woman working in the medical field following her calling. But we fell in love. And she recognized that I saw her virtue in the original meaning, and admired it. We were a match that defied gender roles. 

 

Joan was not so fortunate. Her father tried to force her into a marriage at 16, which she refused. The man was apparently so put out he sued her in court for “breach of promise.” (That’s an arcane law school topic if there ever was one.) Just like Taylor Swift in our time, she fought back and kicked his ass in court. 

Her virginity was part of her power in another way, which is interesting. 

 

It was common belief that the devil could not make a pact with a virgin; and so virginity would put Joan on God’s side…

 

Joan was able to survive as long as she did because of the freedom that her virginity gave her. 

 

Because she found a way to bypass male desire, Joan’s story illuminates and clarifies to what degree male desire determines a woman’s possibilities in life: how far, how fast, where, when, and how she can move; by what means; what activities she can engage in; how circumscribed her physical freedom is; the total subjugation of her physical form and freedom to what men what from her.

 

Dworkin also reminds the reader of something I have talked about many times before. There is something inherently cruel and morally bankrupt about the doctrine of hell and salvation as it became once Christianity became a tool of Empire that was so amply illustrated by the Inquisition. 

 

Torture was frequently used to get a confession of guilt, since the confession helped to save the person’s soul and saving the heretic’s soul was the Church’s divine purpose in these proceedings. 

 

I believe that the core problem is that “salvation” and indeed Christianity in general has come to mean “believe the right things, and adopt patriarchal culture” rather than following Christ. On a related note:

 

When women rebelled against the Church through sex, the Inquisition killed them for that. When this one woman rebelled through dress, the Inquisition killed her for that. Virginity could not buy her life, because the issue was not ever - and is not now - to have sex or not to have sex; the issue was compliance with inferior status. 

 

Exactly. I really came to understand this with the rejection of my wife by my parents. The issue wasn’t what it was on the surface - clothing, career, appearance, and the other stupid issue - it was always about her unwillingness to comply with her inferior status, to “act like a woman.” Likewise, that is what MAGA is about - putting women (and minorities of all kinds) firmly back in their place. 

 

And also related to this is the idea that males serve as mediators between God and females. This was expressly taught by Bill Gothard and so many others. My wife, like Joan, never accepted this. Dworkin explains:

 

She would not give over her direct relationship with God to the priests; she would not give over her direct relationship with God’s will to the Church; she would not give over her private conscience to Church policy or Church practice or Church politics. 

 

Exactly the point, once again. Women must be free to follow their own consciences, not outsource them to other people who just happen to possess penises or (like my mother) adopt patriarchal beliefs as God’s sole truth. My mother in fact never forgave my wife for refusing to defer to my mother’s wishes instead of her own conscience. 

 

I think this is the part of the book that I agree with the most. Ultimately, all the sex stuff - the double standard, the rules, the assumptions - are just expressions of the same belief that women must embrace their inferior status in society. 

 

The other chapter in this section is “Occupation/Collaboration,” and further looks at the social issues. Dworkin argues that intercourse is incompatible with privacy. In order to be entered, one must have one’s bodily boundaries violated. 

 

There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered…A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. 

 

While I am unsure if I agree with everything in this section, I think that it does apply quite well to a certain kind of male - think Trump and his ilk of course, but “bros” generally. I’ll quote a few bits. 

 

Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible. The context in which the act takes place, whatever the meaning of the act in and of itself, is one in which men have social, economic, political, and physical power over women. Some men do not have all those kinds of power over all women; but all men have some kinds of power over all women; and most men have controlling power over what they call their women - the women they fuck. The power is predetermined by gender, by being male. 

Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society - when pushed to admit it -recognizes as dominance. 

 

That is perhaps the most stark version of the argument she makes. Not that all fucking is rape, but that society sees it as an expression of dominance. And here is yet another way that this book identifies the Trump sorts:

 

Intercourse is frequently performed compulsively; and intercourse frequently requires as a precondition for male performance the objectification of the female partner. She has to look a certain way, be a certain type - even conform to preordained behaviors and scripts - for the man to want to have intercourse and also for the man to be able to have intercourse. The woman cannot exist before or during the act as a fully realized, existentially alive individual. 

 

Note Trump’s division of women into “fuckable objects” and “nasty women I don’t think are fuckable.” 

 

In contrast, I know a lot of men (myself included) who do in fact see our female partners as fully realized, existentially alive individuals before and during sex. It would seem weird to me otherwise. 

 

It is after this that Dworkin finally starts to reach toward what I see not as merely an ideal for sex, but indeed the bare baseline of what sex should be.

 

Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this sense: women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love.

 

I mean, isn’t that truly beautiful? That’s what I want, and what I aspire to create in sex with my wife. Dworkin further envisions “a mutual lying together in pleasure” - that is, the “egalitarian pleasure fest” that Doug Wilson eschews. She also sees the ideal sexual encounter as being much more than intercourse - and I totally agree. Even if culture seems to think otherwise most of the time. 

 

The culture romanticizes the rapist dimension of the first time: he will force his way in and hurt her. The event itself is supposed to be so distinct, so entirely unlike any other experience or category of sensation, that there is no conception that intercourse can be just part of sex, including the first time, instead of sex itself. There is no slow opening up, no slow, gradual entry; no days and months of sensuality prior to entry and no nights and hours after entry. 

 

There is so much to unpack in this small passage, which I think is my very favorite of the book. Yes, there is SO MUCH stupidity in how our society talks about “losing her virginity,” from the expectation of pain to the “nothing is like the first time” to the idea that there is something particularly unique and incomparable to that first penetration. All of these are bullshit on a stick. 

 

First, pain during first intercourse is not inevitable, and can largely be avoided by proper foreplay and lubrication. Seriously. How many women have needlessly suffered on their first night. 

 

Second, first intercourse can be really good. But it is never going to be as good as it will become with practice. In fact, I would say that having a sense of humor is the most important thing to bring to one’s wedding night (or whenever that first act is done.) You are novices. You can do a good job with preparation, but to become truly good at making a partner’s body sing, you need to spend hours getting to know it and practicing. Trust me on this one. 

 

Third, I LOVE Dworkin’s description here of the slow development of intimacy. Without disclosing exactly what we did, when, and how, I will say that my wife and I took the time to do things right. (And I don’t mean we followed the puritanical sex rules of our religious subculture - we didn’t.) 

 

And by that I mean that we took months - more than a year in fact - to gradually increase our level of physical intimacy from that first kiss to full vaginal penetration. Lots of sensuality, lots of gradual “opening up” of our bodies to each other. And I made sure that she orgasmed first, nearly every time. “Intercourse” - penetration - “the fuck” - was not the center of everything. Mutual pleasure was. 

 

And looking back, I have absolutely zero regrets about what we did, when we did it, or how we did it. It was beautiful and pleasurable and mutual. That’s how sex should be. 

 

I suspect that if more men approached sex like this, women would be a lot happier. (And actually, maybe this is why egalitarian marriages seem to stay together better and be happier than patriarchal ones…) 

 

That said, there are, unfortunately, still a lot of men who behave badly. Dworkin notes that intercourse is no longer necessary for reproduction - artificial insemination and in vitro techniques work just fine without a penetration by a penis - but the underlying meaning hasn’t gone away. 

 

Existence does not depend on female compliance, nor on the violation of female boundaries, nor on lesser female privacy, nor on the physical occupation of the female body. But the hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the expression of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires no passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating the arrogance of those who do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women…

 

Again, so many men seem to be like this. They want to fuck, but openly hate women. This is the whole “manosphere” in a nutshell. 

 

I was intrigued to see that Dworkin did find one “sexual liberationist” male who she believes actually abhors rape. Wilhelm Reich opined that in addition to freedom to have sex, a woman also needed “an undisturbed room, proper contraceptives, a friend who is capable of live, that is, not a National Socialist…” 

 

Ouch. Yeah, that tracks though. Nazis - Fascists in general actually - are incapable of love, because they require hierarchy, in which love cannot exist. 

 

Dworkin later looks at the ways that certain women become enforcers of that sexual hierarchy, and this too matches my experience. 

 

Being an object for a man means being alienated from other women - those like her in status, in inferiority, in sexual function. Collaboration by women with men to keep women civilly and sexually inferior has been one of the hallmarks of female subordination; we are ashamed when Freud notices it, but it is true. 

 

This too has proven true in my experience. My wife has been targeted in large part not by men, but by women desperate to keep her in her place along with them. 

 

The final section is also two chapters, and is entitled “Power, Status, and Hate.” The first chapter is all about the law. I will mention here that Dworkin is pretty hostile toward organized religion in general, and specifically American Christianity, which she sees as hopelessly rooted in ancient cultures that viewed women as chattel.

 

She is not wrong. 

 

I have written here and there about this. I’ll recommend Unprotected Texts for an actual scholarly read about what the Christian and Hebrew scriptures actually say about sex - it isn’t what we were taught. And also Sex and the Constitution for information about the Anglo-American legal approach to sex. I’ll just hit a few highlights of this chapter. 

 

Understanding literally anything the Bible says about sexuality requires understanding that women were legally chattel. No different from donkeys, oxen, or slaves. If you don’t start there, the rest of it seems weird - and indeed thoroughly evil and immoral in many places. We do not, these days, think it morally acceptable to buy children to use as sex slaves, for example. But the Bible never condemns that. So maybe trying to use that book as an instruction book for sexual morals is…of dubious value. 

 

I think this particular chapter is one of the best I have read on the subject. Dworkin pulls no punches. She says it like it is. 

 

For example, why was a man legally able to rape his wife well into my own lifetime? 

 

The state can manage a sudden and sensitive respect for privacy when it functions as a prison cell for a woman or child or a slave or any civilly inferior person. A woman, for instance, inside a man’s privacy, will never be able to reach or invoke the law even if he is breaking it on her body. Privacy in sex means that a man has a right to shield himself from state scrutiny when sexually using civil inferiors.

 

And this one:

 

Society justifies its civil subordination of women by virtue of what it articulates as the “natural” roles of men and women in intercourse; the “natural” subjugation of women to men in the act. God and nature are not enemies in this argument; divine law and sociobiologists, for instance, agree on the general rightness of male dominance. Nature, however, cannot be counted on. Women do not know how to be women, exactly; men constantly fail to be men. The rules governing intercourse protect errant human beings from the failures of their own nature. “Natural” women and “natural” men do not, alas, on their own, always meet the mark. Nature and pleasure do not always coincide. Male dominance is not always so certain or so easy. Women not natural enough resent the presumption of natural inferiority. 

 

Yeah, snarky, but well put. We claim “this is natural” while exerting tremendous social and legal pressure to punish those who don’t fit “nature” sufficiently. That has always been the issue for my wife and I within patriarchal subcultures. I am not enough of a “man” for them. And she is too much of a “woman” for them to handle. 

 

Another facet of this is the toxic masculinity that primarily defines “masculinity” as “dominance over women.” It leads to a paranoia that a man might be too much like a woman in some way, thus narrowing his world until there is little left except an exercise of raw power and abuse. (I hope to write about that someday.) 

 

Masculinity itself means being as differentiated from women as it is possible to be; and so the laws regulating intercourse in general forbid those sex acts that break down gender barriers and license those sex acts and conditions that heighten gender polarity and antagonism.

 

This leads into a really great discussion of why homosexuality and gender minorities are such a threat to patriarchy - and why they have been so brutally punished in patriarchal societies. I recommend reading this chapter for for anyone who has wondered what the real roots of anti-LGBTQ rules are. 

 

[Related: laws against “sodomy” have always also forbidden oral and anal sex between heterosexual partners. Why? Because a man has an anus and a mouth, but not a vagina. Any sex that doesn’t express the gender polarity is thus forbidden.] 

 

Also discussed in this chapter are the few (very few) laws that govern male sexual behavior. These are all rooted in male supremacy as well. Don’t fuck another man’s property. Don’t treat a man like a woman by fucking him. As Dworkin notes, the spread of religious fundamentalism and right-wing movements like MAGA are primarily about undoing the civil and social advances women have made and to reestablish male power. That these movements also intend to use the law to reduce male/male conflicts over their female chattel is unsurprising. 

 

The final chapter is “Dirt/Death.” In it, Dworkin explores both the idea of female bodies as dirty, contaminating, gross; and the instinct of male power to murder women. It is not a pleasant one, but it is a worthwhile read. With the obvious “not all men,” it is all too accurate, and feels borderline terrifying in the Trump era. We have put the most brutal, stupid, and violent men in power, ones determined to subordinate women by whatever means necessary. 

 

The opening paragraph is excellent.

 

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view” that some people with soft skins find “offensive.” It is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. 

 

Also good is this:

 

Dirty words stay dirty because they express a contempt for women, or for women and sex, often synonyms, that is real, embedded in hostile practices that devalue and hurt women…Dirty words stay dirty because they express a hate for women as inferiors, that hate inextricably, it seems, part of sex - a hate for women’s genitals, a hate for women’s bodies, a hate for the insides of women touched in fucking. 

 

And this:

 

But for sex not to mean dirt - for sex not to be dirty - the status of women would have to change radically’ there would have to be equality without equivocation or qualification, social equality for all women, not personal exemptions from insult for some women in some circumstances. The next question - a real one and a fascinating one - then is: with women not dirty, with sex not dirty, could men fuck? To what extent does intercourse depend on the inferiority of women? 

 

For the Doug Wilsons of the world, the answer is no. If women are not inferior, men could not fuck. Inferiority is an “erotic necessity.” 

 

Whatever for the Doug Wilsons of the world, I at least have found that lovemaking (not mere fucking) is perfectly compatible with equality. It is a turn on, actually. 

 

Dworkin goes on to connect this to racism as well. Which is on point. The fetishization of minority women, the lynching of black men - it’s all connected to misogyny and hatred of “inferiors.” 

 

Unmanning the man is the primary goal of racism, the institutionalized rapism of the continuing assault on his manhood resembling nothing so much as prison rape, the only common form of man-on-man rape. 

 

This dynamic is clear enough in a quote from Hitler in the book, where he calls Jewish males “sexual savages,” rapists by nature. You can fill in Trump here with his slander of Hispanic immigrants, or the long history of panics about black men supposedly obsessed with raping white women. 

 

So, at the end of the book, there are a number of takeaways. Our culture has misogyny deeply embedded in it - that much is beyond obvious in the Trump Era. Sexual intercourse - penis in vagina - fucking - has, whether we like it or not, a connection to power and dominance in our culture. This is not its only possible meaning, but it is the dominant cultural one. Only by separating power from sex through radical equality of the sexes can fix this, and restore sexuality to the egalitarian pleasure fest that would be better for women - and men. 

 

[Doug Wilson and Trump and the rest can go fuck themselves - it’s the only fuck they can be trusted with.] 

***

A good additional read, by Dworkin's long term partner. 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

Source of book: I own this.

 

Many years ago, my wife and I visited the Huntington Library when they had on display a selection of William Blake’s illustrations for Paradise Lost. Although we all likely had to read “The Tyger” - his most famous poem from Songs of Innocence and Experience - fewer people realize how great of an artist he was as well. One of my several copies of Divine Comedy has the Blake illustrations, and I can attest that they are stunning in person. 

 

A couple of years ago, the Getty had a temporary Blake exhibit, and it worked out to take a day off work and combine that with an LA Phil concert. One of the works displayed was the original of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The pictures were, of course, amazing. The text was a bit odd, but intriguing enough that I went ahead and found a slim paperback volume that had reproductions of the art along with a printed version of the text to make it easier to read. 

 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is fairly brief, with a succinct argument in favor of Blake’s own mystic and even revolutionary views on religion and philosophy. It was largely written as a response to Emanuel Swedenborg’s book of theology, Heaven and Hell. I didn’t go back and read that book, but glanced at a bit of Wikipedia regarding the author and his views. For his time, Swedenborg was himself a bit of a progressive in some ways, and in other ways seems to have been a proto-Joseph Smith with his visions of angels and claims of direct inspiration. 

 

In any case, Blake disagreed strongly with Swedenborg’s idea that good and evil were completely black and white, totally separate. Blake, rather, saw lines as blurry, and also that God must have created evil if he created everything, which, well, is basically a sticky wicket for monotheism. Swedenborg, like Blake, seems kind of interesting as person as well, so I might have to do a little reading there some day. 

 

So, on to the book. Unlike Songs of Innocence and Experience, this book isn’t strictly poetry. It has poetry to be sure, but also some prose. And a lot of art. It is a hybrid work in that sense. 

 

I’m not going to try to summarize the book at all - I recommend reading it for yourself. Because the art and the poetry and the ideas are all facets of its meaning, I think it really has to be experienced as a whole. 

 

That said, I will quote a few lines that I thought were particularly interesting. They are, alas, out of context, but perhaps a taste will be enough to get people reading this book.

 

First is the introduction, a poem that echoes Biblical prophetic poetry. 

 

THE ARGUMENT

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air, 

Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

 

Once meek, and in a perilous path 

The just man kept his course along 

The Vale of Death. 

Roses are planted where thorns grow, 

And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees.

 

Then the perilous path was planted, 

And a river and a spring 

On every cliff and tomb;

And on the bleached bones 

Red clay brought forth:

Till the villain left the paths of ease 

To walk in perilous paths, and drive 

The just man into barren climes.

 

Now the sneaking serpent walks 

In mild humility; 

And the just man rages in the wilds 

Where lions roam.

 

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air, 

Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

 

A later section is entitled “The Proverbs of Hell.” There are two pages of them, but I will highlight a few. These two echo the Bible - the Proverbs.

 

In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

 

I love that one. The application of the cycle of growing to knowledge. 

 

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

 

This one is a direct pushback against centuries of “christian” theology that explicitly taught that female bodies were shameful and dirty and defiling to a man. 

 

The cistern contains, the fountain overflows.

 

That too is a good one. Be a fountain…

 

Think in the morning, act in the noon, eat in the evening, sleep in the night.

Not bad advice in many cases. Definitely think before acting. And after acting, refresh body and soul. 

 

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

 

Oof. I think that one may be a bit too accurate. And this one, which is a pretty good description of projection. (See: MAGA)

 

As the air to a bird, or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.

 

There is later a passage discussing the Prophets, imagining a conversation with Isaiah and Ezekiel (two of my favorites.) Blake asks a question that I too have pondered. 

 

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them, and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answered: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception: but my senses discovered the infinite in everything; and as I was then persuaded, and remained confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.”

 

 

I mean, isn’t it plausible that the ancient writers didn’t think they were writing a book that would later be venerated as the very words of God? That maybe they were, like writers now (including, perhaps, me) who are just trying to tell truth as we see it and believe it? And Isaiah’s righteous indignation at the mistreatment of the poor can indeed be seen as the voice of God, not because of a literal voice, but because of the nature of God as defender of the poor?

 

A later conversation occurs between the author and an angel. Perhaps the best line in the book is this one:

 

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

 

The book ends with another profound observation, with I think theologians and politicians (and all of us) would do well to ponder. 

 

One law for the lion and ox is Oppression.

 

This was definitely a fascinating book, and one I may return to from time to time just to savor the proverbs and ideas. 

 

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Source of book: I own this

 

Back in 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic, our book club went to meeting on Zoom for safety and legal compliance. Somehow or another, we ended up reading Parable of the Sower, which felt disconcertingly relevant. 

 

Well, here we are again. We decided to read the sequel, Parable of the Talents, which just happens to have a demagogic president who wraps himself in the flag and violent fundamentalist religion. And literally uses “Make America Great Again” as his slogan. 

 

Likewise, you can find out of control wildfires in the Los Angeles area, driven by climate change, people losing themselves in virtual reality and AI, and even measles out breaks in….wait for it…March of 2025. Not to mention a pointless invasion of Canada. 

 

Octavia Butler died in 2006, and this book was published in 1998. So yes, she was a bit of a prophet. 

 

Not that MAGA is a new slogan. All Trump has done is recycle all of the old KKK rhetoric and slogans from a century ago. After all, the Klan never went away. It just rebranded under names like The Heritage Foundation. And, it has become clear, Evangelicalism. (“Christian America” as the book calls it…)

 

Ursula Le Guin pointed out in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness that ““Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” In this sense, Butler had no need to “predict” the future. All she did was notice the here and now, reimagine it. 

 

The two “parable” books form a series and should be read in order. They follow the continuing adventures (if that is the right word) of Lauren Olamina, the founder of the Earthseed cult during a time of incredible social upheaval. The second book references the events of the first book a lot, so I strongly recommend reading Sower before Talents.

 

The story picks up in Mendocino County, coastal northern California, where the group has settled on Bankole’s family land. They have built a community - Acorn - where they subsist on what they can grow or barter from nearby towns. 

 

But there is a threat. Violent religious fundamentalism (think Christian Al Qaida…or Doug Wilson perhaps) has found common cause with politician Andrew Jarret, who becomes president on a platform of restoring order and America’s greatness. He claims the crusader gangs that are out to exterminate other religions (including more liberal Christians) aren’t under his orders, but that seems unlikely. 

 

I hesitate to say more than that, because the plot twists are an important part of the experience of the book. I guess I will just hint that there will be some thinly veiled explorations of things from US history that many of my fellow white people would rather forget or deny. 

 

As I put it during our meeting, there is nothing in this book that Americans haven’t already done. Nothing. We just did it to “other people.” 

 

So, you have a peaceful village razed, its inhabitants enslaved, and attempts made to convert them to the “true faith.” 

 

You have a form of enslavement all too typical in our history, with regular rapes and beatings. 

 

You have “fine upstanding” white males with wives and children who also moonlight as slave guards and get orgasmic from their abuse of women of color. 

 

Yep, it’s all there. 

 

Like the other book, however, there is still a significant amount of hope. The human spirit lives on, despite those who sear their consciences and give themselves over to the abuse of others. 

 

The book also focuses on the life of Lauren’s daughter, Larkin (aka Asha Vere), who is stolen from her by Jarret’s raiders as an infant. 

 

Larkin never buys into the whole “Earthseed” idea - that of dispersing human civilization to the cosmos. And, interestingly, this is the one part of the book that seems most like a Musk wet dream. It is one thing to believe in “God is Change,” and quite another to strive for that heaven away from earth in outer space. 

 

The book itself explores that tension a lot, as the competing voices of Lauren and Larkin wrestle for control of the underlying narrative. 

 

There are so many great lines in the book. I found that Butler’s vision of fundamentalist religion was so very much in line with my own experience - and even more for my wife with the cult she was raised in and their terror of children reading books. (Her parents weren’t like that, but others very much were, and my wife was shunned in part because of her desire for a life outside of the cult.)

 

The book is psychologically perceptive, and the characters are complicated and nuanced. Even the best of people have flaws, and many more are a mix of good and bad. Hard times don’t always bring out the best in everyone. 

 

I did take a bunch of notes. I wish I could remember all of our discussion - we had a really good one this time at our club, including a couple of new participants who happen to be friends of mine. I’ll share a few of the things that stood out to me, though. 

 

First comes from the introduction by Toshi Reagon. She contrasts the Earthseed people with the Jarret people in a key way. If you believe in something beyond yourself, and can envision a future, you can work to create it. If you can accept and embrace change, you can work within it. Not so much for MAGA in fiction and in real life. 

 

But if you are not, you might find yourself in a oneness of fear and hatred, only wanting and serving one thing. You might think you own the elements themselves and all other living creatures must bend to serve your narrow-minded vision of domination. You might look at the map and, as slave masters did centuries ago, think it is a plaything for your pleasure only. You will never learn. 

 

Reagan quotes one of the “Earthseed Scriptures” - the poems written by Lauren in her book of the religion she founds.

 

Embrace diversity

Unite - 

Or be robbed,

ruled 

killed

By those who see you as prey.

Embrace diversity

Or be destroyed.

 

The prologue, in the voice of Larkin, is fascinating. In it, she expresses her frustration with who her mother was. 

 

I’ve never trusted her, though, never understood how she could be the way she was - so focused, and yet so misguided, there for all the world, but never there for me. 

 

This is a fascinating line. I think it holds true for many - probably most - of the children of great people. You know, the ones who change the world. Great artists, thinkers, writers, musicians, leaders. The kids tend to come second to the “great cause” which consumes them. That is what Larkin expresses here, and is a thread that runs through the entire book. As she points out later, Earthseed was Lauren’s favorite child, and Larkin would never have been her passion. 

 

Darkness

Gives shape to the light

As light 

Shapes the darkness.

Death

Gives shape to life

As life

Shapes death.

The universe

And God

Share this wholeness,

Each

Defining the other.

God

Gives shape to the universe

As the universe 

Shapes 

God. 

 

Near the beginning is also an interesting musing on The Pox, the mysterious disease that ravages the country before the first book. Bankole, the old doctor, has a perspective that fits all too well the experience of Covid, and will likely define the next pandemic even more, given Trump/Musk’s gutting of public health. 

 

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that this is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. 

 

This is actually the MAGA and DOGE goal. Make like far worse for the masses of people, while transferring ever more to the obscenely rich. Who needs education? Who needs a living wage? Who needs public health or even access to healthcare? Who needs a planet, for that matter? There is money to be made and who cares about the rest…

 

There is another harrowing line later, when it becomes clear that Jarret will likely win. Lauren understands that even if they try to build relationships with the people that surround them, that will not save them if things get violent. 

 

I doubted that would prove true - at least not on a large scale. We would meet more people, make more friends, and some of these would be loyal. The rest…well, the best we could hope from them would be that they ignore us if we get into trouble. That might be the kindest gesture they could manage - to turn their backs and not join the mob. Others, whether we thought of them as friends or not, would be all too willing to join the mob and to stomp us and rob us if stomping and robbing became a test of courage or a test of loyalty to country, religion, or race. 

 

There is something appealing about the Earthseed religion (as Larkin later notes) and I would be rather down with the mutual aid parts of it, even if I didn’t buy into the space seed stuff. This line, perhaps, is the best argument in favor of such a religion. 

 

“It means that Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. To us, that makes it the most powerful reality, and just another word for God.” 

 

Or, perhaps this one:

 

Beware:

At war

Or at peace,

More people die 

Of unenlightened self-interest

Than of any other disease.

 

The appeal of the community is genuine, and I thought this was a particularly interesting way Lauren describes her goal. 

 

“I was building a community - a group of families and single people who were still human.”

 

That’s one of the things I love about our book club. It really is a community that is still human. We don’t always agree on everything political, but we are committed to human empathy and reason and mutual care. 

 

Lauren further describes her “scriptures” in a way I wish we would view all sacred writings.

 

“I didn’t make it up. It was something I had been thinking about since I was 12. It was - is - a collection of truths. It isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t the only truth. It’s just one collection of thoughts that are true.”

 

Another line sure seemed appropriate to our own times. As America (in the book) lurches toward a catastrophic and pointless war with Canada, Lauren notes:

 

It shouldn’t be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction. 

 

I also made a note about the way that Jarret’s government removed children from families, usually because they were poor or homeless. And also because their parents were considered “heathens.” 

 

This is actually an accurate description of the reason that the Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted. Roughly half of all Indian children were being removed from their homes and placed in foster homes. Both because they were poor, and because that way their culture and religion could be taken away from them. As I said, nothing in this book hasn’t already been done. 

 

Further expanding this idea, Lauren notes that “a lot of people are convinced that cracking down on the poor and different is a good idea.” (That’s MAGA in a nutshell.) In a nod to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, she notes the way children can be made to fabricate memories and falsely accuse their parents of abuse. 

 

The crusaders deliberately divided siblings because if they were together, they might support one another in secret heathen practices or beliefs. But if each child was isolated and dropped in a family of good Christian Americans, then each would be changed. Parent pressure, peer pressure, and time would remake them as good Christian Americans.

 

As Larkin puts it, “so much evil done in God’s name.” And also, “Breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.” After the enslavement episode, Lauren talks about the difficulty of trying to “put ourselves together as respectable human beings again.”

 

There is so much in Larkin’s “reeducation” experience that sounded familiar.

 

Quiet was good. Questioning was bad. Children should be seen and not heard. They should believe what their elders told them, and be content that it was all they needed to know. If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad. 

 

I have experienced this - and, oddly, increasingly so as I got older and my parents descended into moral stupidity. Stupid faith became mandatory, while thinking and questioning became bad. This next passage also resonates:

 

There was a mindless rigidity about some Christian Americans - about the ones who did the most harm. They were so certain that they were right that, like medieval inquisitors, they would kill you, even torture you to death, to save your soul. Kayce [Larkin’s foster mother] wasn’t that bad, but she was more rigid and literal-minded than any human being with normal intelligence should have been, and I suffered for it.

 

That feels right for my parents. Not bad enough to kill, but willing to kill the relationship with their child rather than consider change - too rigid and literal-minded to embrace even normal intelligence. 

 

Yet another bit that sounded so much like my wife’s cult experience was this one.

 

It was as though my teachers believed that all the possible stories had already been created, and it was a sin to make more.

 

And this description fits exactly the “Culture War Christianity” I was raised in, and is currently viewing Trump as their lord and savior. 

 

The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven. Yet sometimes now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don’t think about order and stability or greatness…I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life. 

 

The Jarret parallel to Trump is also far too accurate for comfort. (Although Jarret seems to lack the racial hatred which drives Trump and MAGA - it’s genuinely about religion for Jarret.) But the things people project onto both is similar, as is the truth about what they both are at heart. 

 

The religious sorts see Jarret as a “man of god.” Others see him as standing for “order, good jobs, honest cops” - law and order. 

 

Those who are not of his camp hate and fear him - and rightly call him a hypocrite. But who sees him the most accurately?

 

The thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver.

 

The book also describes the catastrophe of the war with Canada. 

 

Much blood was shed, but little was accomplished. The war began in anger, bitterness, and envy at nations who appeared to be on their way up just as our country seemed to be on a downward slide. 

 

And also, climate change meant the US was dependent on Canada for food. Just a stupid war. This ultimately led to Jarret’s downfall. 

 

In less than a year, Jarret went from being our savior, almost the Second Coming in some people’s minds, to being an incompetent son of a bitch who was wasting our substance on things that didn’t matter. I don’t mean that everyone changed their feelings toward him. Many people never did. 

 

And, as Lauren rallies her people again, even as she knows they must split up to stay safe, even with the true believers choosing delusion, this will pass. 

 

“Not everyone in this country stands with Andrew Jarret. We know that. Jarret will pass, and we will still be here. We know more about survival than most people. The proof is that we have survived.”

 

Late in the book, Lauren notes that with time, the popularity of Jarret’s religion has faded. What is left has settled into being just another denomination. Earthseed, meanwhile, continues to grow because it offers what Christianity can’t - or won’t. 

 

But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U.S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry. 

 

I think we are seeing the start of this right now. Trump and Elon’s kind of “governance” is bad for business, bad for the Constitution, and really bad for most Americans. People are starting to wake up to that, and more will, particularly if the goal of ending Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid succeeds. 

 

While predicting the future is a fool’s game, I do believe that someday, Trump and Elon will be gone - probably dead or fled to Russia - and the American people will still be here. No one, no matter how powerful, can succeed in declaring war on most of their own citizens. 

 

Lauren ends up teaching wherever she goes. I definitely identify with that. Had I not been forced into law school because it was the only cult option, I likely would have become a teacher. These days, I teach for the local law school, for an adult class through our local community college, and find a lot of my practice is about education. 

 

Lauren says, “It seems I’ve always taught.” And so have I. I too taught my younger siblings. I am literally the reason they got an education in math and science during high school. But wherever I go now, I find myself educating. It is who I am. Even this blog is an attempt at education - and not in the sense of lecturing, but in enlightening, and encouraging learning through discussion and reading. 

 

Here is another poem that really spoke to me:

 

All prayers are to Self

And, in one way or another,

All prayers are answered.

Pray,

But beware.

Your desires,

Whether or not you achieve them,

Will determine who you become.

 

Prayer has always been a fraught topic for me. Maybe part of it is that my mother buried herself in prayer, and never understood why I couldn’t do the same. Definitely part of it is how Evangelicals treat prayer as a begging session. Just pester the Old Guy Upstairs enough, and you can manipulate him into loving you more than he does other people. 

 

I mean, that’s “the power of prayer,” right? God treats you better than other people. This always bothered me. And it certainly seemed to be a bad basis for a relationship. 

 

To be clear, I’ve always talked to God and the universe. Still do. But like Lauren, I think that the power of prayer is what it does to us. It helps us focus and think and sustains our determination to act. We pray. And we act. 

 

Toward the end of the book, Lauren ends up with a companion, Len, who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing, but with parents who played favorites and essentially abused and neglected her. 

 

This stemmed from the fact that she, like Lauren, is a “sharer.” This physical hyperempathy comes from the use of a performance-enhancing drug. In Len’s case, both parents used it. This exchange is illuminating. 

 

“Oh my. And you were the evidence of their misbehavior, the constant reminder. I suppose they couldn’t forgive you for that.”

She thought about that for a while. “You’re right. People do blame you for the things they do to you.” 

 

I think this is true about my parents, although I am not sure I entirely understand why. Certainly they bear some guilt for having denied me my own self-determination as to college and career. The way forward I ended up finding involved my wife working to have the steady paycheck and benefits so I didn’t have to grind out billable hours and never see my family like so many young lawyers do. 

 

Perhaps this is one reason my wife and I have been blamed so much. Why we have been scapegoated in our family as the black sheep. We are the constant reminder of what my parents did. And they can’t forgive us for that. 

 

I also want to mention another way that the American society of the book and MAGA line up really well. MAGA and the American right wing generally have never gotten over Brown v. Board of Education, and have been working to undermine and even destroy public education for decades. In the book, they get their way, and education is no longer free. Either you pay a private school, or you homeschool. With predictable results.

 

“So,” Nia said, ‘poor, semiliterate, and illiterate people become financially responsible for their children’s elementary education. If they were alcoholics or addicts or prostitutes or if they had all they could do just to feed their kids and maybe keep some sort of roof over their heads, that was just too bad! And no one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them.”

 

I know people who think this way. Hell, I was raised in this subculture. As if we weren’t all in a society together. 

 

For right wing homeschoolers of my generation (and following), there is a genuine hostility to the very idea of public education. In part, this is based on the problem that reality skews to the left - it turns out that white males aren’t the undisputed superior humans, for example, and LGBTQ people exist as a part of nature. So any reasonable education that isn’t religious and ethnosupremacist indoctrination will be problematic for inveterate bigots. 

 

But there was something else, just barely below the surface. White conservative homeschoolers burned with resentment that their tax dollars were, as Confederate Robert Lewis Dabney put it, being used “to give a pretended education to the brats of the black paupers.” It really was just racism the whole way down. 

 

Larkin, despite growing up in Christian America, eventually loses her faith. I fully understand this, and it is an ongoing journey for me. 

 

But the truth is, I had lost whatever faith I once had. The church I grew up in had turned its back on me just because I moved out of the home of people who, somehow, never learned even to like me. Forget love. 

 

Ultimately, I have come to feel this way about my birth parents. I don’t think my mom ever liked me. Certainly not after I hit puberty and stopped being a little kid. There has been plenty of empty claims about love, but loving actions toward me and mine have been absent. 

 

As with Larkin who never saw her foster parents again after she left home, when I became estranged from my parents five years ago, they never bothered to pursue me. The most I have gotten is some threats of hell and blame for her own actions from my mom. It has been complete radio silence from my dad. I guess I never really mattered, did I? They never even learned how to like me for who I was. 

 

I’ll end with one line about Len, who seems kind of like me in a number of ways, not least her personality. 

 

Len is a likeable person to work with. She learns fast, complains endlessly, and does an excellent job, however long it takes. Most of the time, she enjoys herself. The complaining was just one of her quirks. 

 

At its core, the book is a uniquely African-American perspective. Which, I think, is why it is hopeful in the worst of circumstances. They have already lived this. As one of Carson McCullers’ (black) characters puts it, “So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been.”

 

 We white folk feel panicky because we really haven’t experienced this. We have been carefully protected and insulated from the effects of our systems of oppression and inequality. Which means that, like Len, we will have to work a bit harder to build the necessary resilience. 

 

As The Parable of the Talents asserts, the battle between good and evil never really ends, but it can be fought, and good can succeed. You need that seed. And you need to use your talents. May people of good will do it together in our time.