How did sex ever get so unsexy?

A collection of dreary "dating books” has inspired a heartfelt protest from at least one reviewer1 -- a plea that we “allow magic to reign lest we color the world gray,” along with a cry for “intelligent reappraisals of romantic love” and a lament that the “dearth of commanding commentary gives audience to idiots.”  Bold words, and I applaud them.  But I wonder if it isn’t time for reappraisal of a more suspect and yet more magical realm: the mine-laden intersection of love and lust.

This site takes a shot at it; thus,

• I explore through power-laden ballads of erotic encounter a myth of magically strong lovemaking.  My starting point is the ballad of the lady and the lusty smith or “The Twa Magicians” (no typo here, “twa” is simply Scots for “two”) -- a ballad sometimes seen as “rapist,” though on both sides of its applauded action, and in ballads sharing much the same erotic assumptions, women of extraordinary energy and wilfulness play starring roles.  In these ballads, the celebration of masterful male force and female “defeat” as part of a core sexual mystery does not appear to be in any way a celebration of female degradation, but of something more interesting and altogether more life-affirming.  A celebration not of rape but of rapture.

• The larger context for my project is an erotically heightened world of spontaneous animal delight (the so-called “pastoral”) which polite society has long taken for man's special domain, woman entering it only as hapless object-of-desire.  Its special focus is the cocky virgin, whose contradictory sexual feelings (betrayed in flaunted sexual resistance) seem to me both natural and a vital part of the applauded erotic narrative.

• In realistic terms, my defense of this animal world and its warrior values doesn’t mean that I dismiss rape or the anguish of real rape victims (and any man who thinks I am encouraging “pushiness” should skip to “Pastoral Misadventure” for a sobering reality check).  It’s just that I see both sexes normally having good reason to avoid any such ugly conflict—that, as balladry suggests and my own unsought field experience confirms, the pastoral “power problem” is sometimes a problem of sexual theatre which an image-conscious age mistakes for (and may well convert to) oppressive reality.

• Historically and in polite literature, it is also a problem of pastoral “enclosure”—a myth of sexual enchantment turning indeed to the shape of oppression as the “feminine” is both elevated and enervated.  So privileged, polite “femininity” has come to mean something more fragile, more fearful and naturally more prone to victimhood than its folk counterpart.  And so, in the grip of misconstrued myth, radical cultural feminism has invested an act most women want to approve with a meaning--sex as rape--they cannot possibly approve.  For thinking, heterosexual women this cannot be a happy ideological state of affairs.

For a personal introduction to the project, click here.  Or to jump right into the meat of the ballads, go to:

This site is under perpetual reconstruction. Click here to comment. For a less scholarly site, of footloose foreign travel which I'd like to think I undertook in the spirit of my favorite ballad heroines, click here onto Leavetaking