What an audacious project, and who am I to take it on anyway? In truth, I didn't know what I was taking on two decades ago, when I read with a mounting sense of affront Susan Brownmiller's Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape. "Speak for yourself, sister," I kept muttering as I found my consciousness raised less to the crime of rape than to a cult of female victimhood. For Brownmiller's "typical rape victim," 1 all baby-doll helplessness and ripcord vulnerability, betrays a psychological incapacity that the author herself decries, never acknowledging, however, how it reflects a peculiar American triumph of image over integrity -- a culture of makeovers and "falsies" and Little Miss beauty pageants, which in a graduate school paper on the rhetoric of rape I attacked with vigour and even some pride in my own foreign birth. My forthright British mother, it seemed to me, was a good part of why I was no victim, even if a feminist "support group" insisted I was "thinking all wrong," for resisting the role. "You're never responsible for any one else's actions," they said, and so how could I take any responsibility for my brush with male violence? Was I saying the man was right? No, not right, and yet not, I thought, an intended rapist (or a successful one either). It was a messy scene that made its way into the paper my instructor found so "awesomely honest"; and how nice not to be told that it should be excised "from any scholarly work." But I bridled at my instructor's final comment: that if Brownmiller was "too condescending" to women, I was perhaps "not ... condescending enough." 2 Surely I wasn't that different from other women, and surely the message that so affronted me was an enfeebling one for all of us!

Indeed Brownmiller's description of rape as "nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" (p.6) affronted other grad students too (though perhaps we were all "in denial," and wasn't my query, "do you live in fear....?" almost guaranteed to provoke the desired response?). My instructor later commented that, I was perhaps "shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun," 3 and Brownmiller was an easy target. But she also proved an unexpected challenge, her "masculine ideology of rape," 4 like her "myth of heroic rape," reminding me of some "rapist" old ballads -- as popular feminist rhetoric might describe them -- that I didn't think were about rape at all. I'd never given much thought to what they really "meant" -- least of all at twenty, still pulling back from real men, indeed "fiercely protective" of myself (I'm told), as I reveled in fuzzy erotic fantasy. I couldn't have analyzed back then what so delighted me in those old ballads, especially ballads of cocky virginity; I simply sang them. But today I hear echoes of a hoary erotic myth that has long haunted the Western imagination and never quite conformed to the polite social code or, for that matter, to the code of logical academic thinking. And defending that myth of strong lovemaking in academic terms, especially defending its tauntingly contradictory, central female player, has led me into deeper waters than I ever intended -- into the ballads, into avenues of dusty scholarship, into myself. "My, this is deep," I heard when I handed around pages of a manuscript then entitled "The Lady and the Lusty Smith: a myth we can still applaud?" From which I concluded that people couldn't tell what the hell I was talking about.

Wendy Shalit, writing as she says to restore a "lost moral vocabulary of sex," pointed the way to my true focus. It all clicked into place as I read A Return to Modesty and wondered that Shalit and I could have at once so much and so little in common. For I cannot see the scene she opted out of in grade school as normative; I cannot blame the "disenchanting of sex" (which she associates with an "increased sexual brutality among children" and a rash of self-mutilating, anorexic or bulemic young women) on sex ed classes, When the subject came under attack in West Virginia, I saw only benighted people calling books about where babies came from "dirty"; I never dreamt that school children might some day be expected to discuss orgasms and sexual techniques, to answer (in the fourth grade yet!) questions like "what is 69?" I still can't quite believe it (and I would have yanked my kid out of that class too!). Yet Shalit's stories compel belief. A misguided, late-night visit to her camp debate coach in an earnest attempt to convert him to free-market principles rings true, as does her "instinctive pulling back" when the evening takes a sexual turn ... and telling only half the story to her teenage friends afterwards, so as not to seem a "weirdo" (p.186). Clearly, there may be strong social pressure to have (or pretend to have had) sex today, to make it casual, uncomplicated, "no big deal," and I agree with Shalit that there are unhappy emotional consequences, especially for girls, in a brave new world, which I too find sadly lacking in sexual feeling.

Except that my sense of "disenchantment" runs deeper. Why, I wondered decades ago, did sex manuals remind me so depressingly of gourmet cookbooks? And am I alone in disliking the way "hitting on" has replaced "making a pass"? -- hearing in the modern idiom a loss of some minor pervasive magic to which Shalit is curiously blind? For following the lead of her patron philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whose writings on the subject of women and children have always raised my hackles), she urges us to promote and protect an image of morally uplifting, sweet femininity that seems, well, a little too sweet, too civilized, to be quite real. She misses something vital, I think, not just to our understanding of erotic myth as it plays out in folk balladry but also to the sexual magic that plays, or fails to play, a part in contemporary human life. Like the magic I caught on late night television during an interview with Françoise Gilot, ex-mistress of Pablo Picasso (and author of Life with Picasso).5

"The mouse doesn't mate with the lion," said Gilot and for a moment looked decades younger than her 70-odd years. It happened again and again as Gilot made clear that she was no victim, having confounded Picasso by finally leaving him but expressing no regret for the years she'd devoted (or the two children she'd borne) to a supreme egotist. Gilot evidently confounded and fascinated Picasso from the start, even as she confounded her American interviewer. "So what was it like, living in Picasso's shadow?" he asked, and with another flash of the eyes and rolling back of the years Gilot, a painter herself, answered that she'd never lived in the great man's "shadow" -- that she saw her experience as an "apprenticeship" and was not unhappy, moreover, to have been spared the "premature fame that comes to so many American artists."

I couldn't quite analyze what happened when she made these provocative remarks and looked disconcertingly younger. Younger and, in a magical way, "sexy." I can't say how I suddenly saw in her the young woman to whom Picasso had been immensely attracted. The transformations were too subtle, too fleeting -- like flashes from within, as if the interviewer's "dumb questions" were striking sparks of defiant animal energy from the bedrock, distinctly un-mouselike spirit of Françoise Gilot.

No, I cannot explain it, but that transformative animal magic is what I miss in Shalit and cherish in erotically incorrect folksong; indeed it's just what the puzzling ballad of the lady and the lusty smith, or "The Twa Magicians," would seem to be all about. To be sure, at times Shalit approaches the same mine-laden terrain, as when told how "provocative" she is and protesting, "no, I'm not; I always keep my raincoat on, even in class." 6 (p.48) And so? Yet she steers clear of the uncomfortable subject as she shuns the very word "provocative," keeping to high erotic decorum with a statement that settles matters, it seems to me, just a little too neatly. "Modesty," Shalit says, "is prudery's true opposite because it admits that one can be moved and issues a specific invitation for one man to try." (p.182) One man and full-blown, "invited" courtship or nothing? No female response at all? I find it hard to buy this picture. It has no room for the spirit in which I rambled through France at twenty, reveling in a wonderful sense of aliveness and a game that was more than a game. No room even for the revelry of simple heterosexual encounter as Virginia Woolf contrasts it to "the company of buggers," i.e., her brother's gay Cambridge friends.

"They still excited me much more than any men I met in the outer world of dinners and dances," says Woolf, "and yet I was, dared I to say it or think it even?--intolerably bored. Why, I asked, had we nothing to say to each other? Why were the most gifted of people also the most barren? Why were the most stimulating of friendships also the most deadening? . . The answer to all my questions was, obviously--as you will have guessed--that there was no physical attraction between us.

"The society of buggers has many advantages--if you are a woman. It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel . . . in some respects at one's ease. But it has this drawback--with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest; one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged in all the colors of the rainbow."

(Moments of Being, p.172)

What a lyrical accolade to sexual difference (from the author of Orlando yet!) To sexual difference and a "show-off" game that escapes Shalit's earnest moral vision even as a whole folk world of intense erotic interest escapes the feminist focus on sexual oppression. It has not, however, escaped quite all feminist attention. So Germaine Greer (in Sex and Destiny) comes to an abrupt reappraisal of the 16-year-old Calabrian peasant girl whom for weeks she's been trying to coax into a bikini. They're sitting together on the beach when a "half naked young man on a huge gray horse" rides down to stare at them -- at Greer, no doubt, who is wearing a bikini, but as he rides off, it is Rosetta who betrays a powerful sexual response.

"'Avete visto,' she said, digging her stiff finger so far into my thigh that the mark remained for days. 'Avete visto? Avete visto?' At first I misunderstood, then I realized that she was referring to a specific part of the young man's anatomy. I, a veteran of ten years' campaigning for sexual freedom, found myself blushing. Then I realized that sex was in the air that Rosetta breathed. . . . The virgin Rosetta, with her sturdy hairy legs, and her faded print dress, and the dark tan that ended at her elbows and knees, had more confidence in her female sexual power than I would ever have."

(Sex and Destiny, p.112)

It's a refreshing confession, and an intensely physical sense of sex here too -- a steamy extension of Woolf's "delightful" game? For Greer, too, breaks with neat moral rules as she speculates on an "older world" where "a woman does not have to be sexually capacitated by falling in love." (p.115) At the right time and under the right circumstances she is already "aflame," Greer says, and I thank her for putting into dignified language a state of mind that took a long time for the romantic in me to own. Or should I say the fallen romantic? For at forty, invited to inspect hedgerows and Percheron horses and hundred-year-old grape stocks on a shoestring trip back to rural France, I began to feel more and more "vulnerable," which is to say more and more like a bikini-clad Rosetta, possessed of a female sexual power that I wasn't handling very well. Saying no and all night long repenting of it, or saying yes and suftering a morning-after attack of acute virtue and the sudden desire for a quick getaway, or more painfully yet, having the wild wish not to leave, ever, someone I couldn't even put a name to. . . It was all part of the same upsetting sexual muddle. My muddle. My feeling of runaway sexual power. And it got me into just the sort of real trouble I'd pooh-poohed twenty years earlier.

Back then, on my first trip over, I told my mother in a long letter home that I wouldn't have hitchhiked alone when I started, but now, I carefully explained to her, drawing a fine line between danger and mere indecorum, I wouldn't hitchhike alone in Italy (or maybe southern Italy). I explained that French drivers were fun in this marvelously civilized way that did wonders for my command of the language, and as for the occasional boor, well, as long as I wasn't afraid to get out of the car in any weather, as long as I wasn't afraid of cold or wet or hunger, then nothing bad, absolutely nothing, could happen to me. And it didn't. Secure in my walled world -- a world where others might "sleep around" but sex, for me, waited on "true love" -- I played the merry game and shivered at hints of deeper magic.

But forty was different, and it wasn't just that as avowed mother-of-four I'd put the virgin vagabond definitively to rest. It was the trickery of "love" itself that was so disconcerting, and had been for a long time -- the yearning and the self-deception, caught up in one another and always leading back to that nineteen-year-old family tragedy: my brother's drowning in a cold Canadian lake. His drowning and my kicking free.

There was no thought to the act. All I could tell my father afterwards was "I tried to save him." His firstborn, his disciple in science. And this brother of mine had surely wanted to live -- to save himself -- as we sank together and the water grew dark, and his hand still gripped my ankle. That grip . . . so hard, so vise-like, like his arm across my chest the morning before, when I'd woken early and tried to crawl out of my sleeping bag to go pick wild raspberries -- tried to slip away and felt his arm tighten around me. So I'd lain there wondering instead. Wondering just who my sleeping brother thought he was holding, wondering if he were dreaming of his sweetheart who'd gone back to Norway, wondering what it would be like to be his Solveg and to be loved with such strength. I lay there and wondered about love . . . and a year later in a torrent of desire told myself that I loved the man I welcomed into my body, the man with whom I almost immediately conceived a child. I couldn't imagine not giving birth to that child, and yet, even then, I wasn't altogether sure I should be marrying its father. Even then, a part of me looked at him with cool, disrespectful eyes; even then, I wished he could hold me in a stronger embrace. Or soon, that he could just hold me instead of turning cold and "rational" when I woke in the middle of the night crying.

So the romantic illusion was strained from the start, though it took me a long time to question the whole idea of the thing -- my whole idea of myself. Had I been trying to wipe the slate clean with "love"? Was this really me, at forty, having "mere sex" that wasn't "mere" at all? I came back from France at once the fallen romantic and a deeply impelled one, singing under my breath on the plane home, over and over as if to sing myself into a state of yearning for the man awaiting me, "Ah, je l'attends, je l'attends, je l'attends, celui que j'aime, que mon coeur aime." 7 A willed delusion, this "he whom I love"? For I confess to feeling let down at our studied lovemaking, and I cannot answer when he says, "teach me, just tell me what you want me to do." Surely we once both rode a simpler, stronger wave. And am I still yearning for it? Yearning for the enchantment that led to such mismatedness? Ah, but it has led to mountaintops too...

I trust my small granddaughter will have a chance at them, as I also trust that her life will not be ruled by erotic myth -- that she'll manage to be sensible about sex without rendering it tame and trivial, as feminist accounts of their "liberated" early sexual experiences have often struck me. Not that I'm really worried about little Erin; she already has a gratifyingly warrior spirit. And not that I'm so foolish, in any case, as to think I can argue anyone into sexual "enchantment." Still, it seems no coincidence that at a bastion of liberal arts education like Oberlin College there are now said to be three main groups: straight men, gay men and gay women. Where sexual feelings are subject to intense ideological self-scrutiny, in other words, the "feminine" is in full retreat -- and for good reason, which to my mind is also ideologically mistaken reason. Thus, knowing only the enfeebled erotic myth and an enfeebled, Barbie-doll "femininity," many young women of independant mind naturally reject sex-as-they-know-it, or rather, sex as the oppressive "social construct" they have learned to recognize in enlightened classroom discussion on the topic.8

It might freshen the air to take a good hard look at the "social construct" -- and yes, it is a social construct, an act endowed with serious human meaning -- that folk balladry is actually inviting us to celebrate.