"Tu résistes ou tu te donnes avec toutes tes forces," said a sympathetic driver in one of those all-over-the-map hitchhiking conversations that are so hard to reconstruct afterwards. But I wrote down the comment. It wasn't strictly true, of course, except perhaps in the wholeheartedness of my very confusions. But yes, either resisting or giving yourself "with all your force" -- that's just what I miss in this rush to prescribed modern feminist victimhood, especially in discussions of date rape where women talk about "acquiescing" and then feeling "violated" in the morning or simply wondering, the morning after, if they were only intimidated into sex in the first place. It leaves no room, at least, for that kind of female confusion or for any final confusion, on the man's side, about "no really meaning no." It was indeed my way of negotiating the "dangerous, alluring courtship ritual of sex and seduction" where "signals are not verbal but subliminal," says Camille Paglia (and I suspect she is right) -- my way of venturing into places where she says "smart women" don't go, but at least not doing so as one of those "dopey, immature, self-pitying women walking around like melting sticks of butter" and then, if anything unpleasant happens, "running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee." (She should call the cops on a real rapist, or in the case of a messy "date rape" that she could and should have avoided, pick herself up and resolve never to make the same mistake again, and of course deal with mere boors herself, energetically and directly, says Paglia, whose Italian philosophy of life naturally inclines her, both on and off the printed page, toward "high energy confrontation." She and I, thus far at least, are obviously on the same wavelength!).

Avec toutes tes forces. "With all your heart" (as in "put some heart into it") might be a better translation. For I want no misunderstanding here. What I miss in America's enfeebling "rape culture" is equally missing from its "physical fitness" culture. However laudable the goal of "fitness" for an increasingly fat and flabby America -- however necessary for young women "in our age of sexual liberation, says Paglia (who does not, however, think that these "melting sticks of butter" on American college campuses suffer from muscular decrepitude) -- it's no answer to the charge of mainstream sexual dreariness. Indeed Paglia sees our passion for aerobic workouts as part of the problem. As she responds (in a wide-ranging oral interview) to the suggestion that we need to see more "real women" in porn films and not just the nineteen-year-old blonde, busty female:

I also am tired of a certain kind of California look that's been done to death, but it's not because they're nineteen and busty. I prefer European-type bodies which are kind of fleshy. The flesh is flowing. I think languor is more sensual than "Hey! Let's get this stuff out of the way and I'll take on sex with you and then go out and do my aerobics." The American cheerleader thing -- there's a dead element. In earlier porn, the untoned bodies were lewder, more lascivious. This new, hard Amazonian look -- I'm not sure I like it....

What a jumble of unexpected thoughts! That Paglia, whose first idol was Amelia Earhart, should extoll languor! Yet even as she modeled herself on the intrepid aviator -- even as she saw herself in rebellion against "the coercive role of femininity" -- Paglia worshipped Elizabeth Taylor, collecting at one point 599 pictures of her second idol! Clearly, in her mind, Taylor wasn't socially engineered "femininity" so much as a sensually exciting "universal archetype of woman." As Paglia explains it:

I was suffering sustained oppression in an Age of Perky Blondes. Day after day, I reeled from the assaults of Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, Sandra Dee. All that parochial pleasantness! So chirpy, peppy and pink, so well scrubbed, making the world safe for democracy.

In 1958, Elizabeth Taylor, raven-haired vixen and temptress, took Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds and became a pariah of the American press. I cheered. What joy to see Liz rattle Debbie's braids and bring a scowl to that smooth, girlish forehead! As an Italian, I saw that a battle of cultures was underway: antiseptic American blondeness was swamped by a rising tide of sensuality, a new force that that would sweep my Sixties generation into open rebellion.

(from "Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood's Pagan Queen")

Paglia says that even then -- when "feminism and I [at thirteen!] agreed" and a key article of her fractious feminist faith was that "the sexes are the same" -- even then she recognized, she says, that "Taylor's mystery and glamour was coming from nature, not nurture." In other words, she sensed a mystery of natural sexual difference even as she clung to a dogma of essential sexual sameness. It took over thirty years for her to resolve that conflict, but at midlife Paglia has come to believe -- and believe all the more from her own prolonged and noisy resistance to prescribed sex roles -- that there are fundamental hormone-based sex differences:

Maleness at its "hormonal extreme" is an angry, ruthless density of self, motivated by a principle of 'attack,' (cf. 'roid rage,' produced in male body builders by anabolic steroids). Femaleness at its hormonal extreme is first an acute sensitivity of response, literally thin-skinned (a hormonal effect in women) and secondly a stability, composure and self-containment, a slowess approaching the sultry. Biologically, the male is impelled toward restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness. Biologically, the female is impelled toward waiting, expectancy; her moral danger is stasis.

So that's where "languor" comes in -- as a deeply female quality of waiting, of erotic expectancy? In this context, it does sound not only more exciting than the vvbouncy "American cheerleader thing"; it sounds like the very essence of aliveness. And Paglia's distaste for the "hard, new Amazonian look"? Clearly, female warriors aren't the problem. Paglia is indeed enormously admiring of Spenser's "armed Amazons," Belphoebe and Britomart, classing them "among the most potent women in literature" and implying that they contribute mightily to "the sex and glamour of the armour-infatuated Faerie Queene." But their "glamour" (the old word for "magic") is in who they are -- a shining forth from the depths of their hidden being -- while in our own openness-infatuated contemporary culture, the perfectly toned "Amazonian look" seems all for show. And all surface. What's left to conceal anyway when, properly managed, sex is something on the order of a good meal or on a higher-minded level ("the joy of Presbyterian sex," as Paglia refers to an ultra-liberal report put out by a Special Committee on Human Sexuality of the Presbyterian Church), "an expression of intimacy in interpersonal relations."

One hardly expects life to live up to epic poetry! Sometimes sex is simply a good meal; one hopes it is also an expression of loving intimacy. But the Paglia who worshipped in Elizabeth Taylor a "sexual magic that feminism has never understood and has tried to destroy" sees, too, at the elemental heart of our varied sexual natures a "magical irrationality" that we ignore at our peril and crush (or try to crush) at our loss. So the "dead element" in a pumped up, mechanical sexuality is echoed, Paglia suggests, with a sanitized sexual discourse that banishes all mystery and contradiction, all sense of power and struggle, from a right-thinking "social construct" of sex.

"Hormones are our link to pagan nature," says Paglia, whose view of nature -- nature and "nature's daemonic ugliness" -- seems unnecessarily bleak to me. I for one do not find the gender that nature has imposed upon me "outrageous" nor my physicality "torment." Nor do I feel nearly as defenseless and vulnerable, especially when it comes to potential "erotic encounters," as Paglia insists I should. Is there perhaps a difference between English and Italian traditions on this matter? I suspect so. But nature, I agree, is a "hard taskmaster"; and "at the intricate intersection of nature and culture," sex has indeed (as songs like "Reynardine" or "Broomfield Hill" suggest) a certain untamed "daemonic" quality. I too see in it an "uncanny crossroads"with a force of brute nature, see the deeply erotic in this "realm stalked by ghosts" as deeply impersonal. Except that the deeply impersonal here is personal.

Now this isn't something I intended to talk about in personal terms. I didn't think it necessary to spell out my grounds for believing in "sexual magic," as millions of romance fiction readers so obviously do. My belief in the successful sexual resistance upon which the "unlikely" ballad of "Eppie Morrie" hinges needed explaining; I didn't think my belief in the erotic reality of a ballad like "The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter" did. Or at least, I didn't think so before I read Cristina Sommers' account of how she fell out with the feminist establishment.

Until 1989, I was an academic feminist in good standing. My essays were included in feminist anthologies; I was invited to feminist conferences; my courses were cross-listed with Women's Studies. Then I published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that said something politically incorrect about the famous staircase scene in Gone with the Wind. "Many women," I wrote, "continue to enjoy the sight of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairs to a fate undreamt of in feminist philosophy."

I meant that to be both a lighthearted comment and a serious warning that feminist theorists were out of touch with women. My remark incensed an organization within the American Philosophical Association known as SWIP--the Society for Women in Philosophy. SWIP felt the need to react formally to my heresy and arranged a meeting at which the feminist philosopher Marilyn Friedman read a paper showing once and for all how my views were treasonable to women.

Friedman told the overflow audience that she was stunned by my flippant reaction to Rhett's rape of Scarlett. For in her eyes there was no doubt whatsoever that Rhett raped Scarlett that night. Indeed, Friedman compared Rhett Butler to the sociopathic murderer/rapist Richard Speck.

I suggested to the audience that feminist philosophers ought to reflect on the difference between being raped and being "ravished." It is a critical difference--quite clear to the millions of women who read romance fiction. It is behind the commonsense conviction that Rhett Butler is in no way akin to Richard Speck. The SWIP audience stared at me in angry incomprehension.

I had crossed a divide .....

I crossed it long ago and have probably lost the SWIP crowd for good. But I hate to give up on anyone. Besides, just as I have solid grounds for identifying with the invincible ballad heroine of "Eppie Morrie," there's more than mushy romantic feeling behind my reading of "The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter," which hinges on a single sexual encounter with a total stranger in a wood. It's an encounter that ballad buffs who admire the rest of the song, or at least admire the chuzpah of its spunky heroine, often dismiss as rape even as they dismiss "love" as a motive for her subsequent action. How could she possibly want to marry the man except as a practical "salvage" operation? Even seeing her as the subject of strong lovemaking, how could she so foolishly think to build an lasting relationship on "mere sex"? Surely women are smarter than that!

In point of fact of course, the scenario with which I'm identifying here is extremely unlikely; worse, it's the stuff of pulp fiction that doesn't even rise to the level of a Harlequin romance. Thus in writerly terms (remembering my recent conversation with an academic feminist who dismissed the "staircase scene," indeed all of Gone with the Wind, as "stereotypically" bad literature and who seemed to think that she could similarly dismiss its sexual feeling), we might call the whole ballad an "unsupported" erotic cliche. But the cliche only exists because to a great many women, however unlikely to happen, it's a believable dream. As anonymous pastoral adventure, moreover, it was part of my own sexual "muddle" when I vagabonded through France at the age of forty -- when I did find myself acting and feeling as I would not have believed possible twenty years earlier.

In short, I've been there. So perhaps I do owe the ordinary reader something more than a tantalizing reference to my muddle and its crazy sexual "enchantment." Perhaps I do need to revisit -- to explain to myself, if I can -- that "wild wish not to leave, ever, someone I couldn't even put a name to."

What made him so different, anyway, from the tank of a man I belatedly put my heart into resisting? Or more to the point, what made him so different from Ali, the boyish Moroccan "guestworker" to whose clean, sure power I put up only token resistance and whom I left painlessly in the morning, feeling wonderfully "ravished"? For Ali turned out to be every bit as "good in bed" as he claimed, and yet I couldn't wait to get away...

Does that sound like a calculated sexual adventure? It wasn't. Accepting the hospitality of a total stranger in a shack on the edge of the lavender fields only followed a deplorable error of hitchhiking strategy -- with night coming on, the thinking hitchhiker doesn't get out at a minor exit in the middle of nowhere! But it's an error I was far from regretting once Ali had subverted my simple goal of sleep, once he'd deftly removed the pants that were making us both, as he said, "very uncomfortable" and slipped into me with a contented "Ah, ça va mieux!" And he's right. It is better -- much better.

"Tu m'aimes?" he asks, panting as he reaches a part of me I didn't know could be reached (was this the vaunted G-spot?); "Tu m'aimes? Tu m'aimes?" He pushes on, determined to force a cry of love from vvmy lips -- to force a lie, of course, for what can my unwilled convulsions of the flesh, my involuntary animal cries, have to do with love? Nothing, and for now, everything. "Oui, je t'aime," I pant back, and in the darkness do not begrudge Ali the triumphant grin that I'm sure adorns his handsome face. I've won something too, I think and fall into an exhausted sleep ... waking up to blue skies outside, no morning-after regrets and no desire to stick around either, especially after Ali discovers that my period hasn't quite ended. "Tu saignes!" he exclaims, "alors ça ne vaut pas la peine" -- and I realize that I had the perfect excuse the night before, if I'd really wanted it: as a bleeding female (out of season, so to speak) I'm not "worth the trouble" of laying. I suppose I should feel insulted; instead, there's only this wonderful feeling of animal well-being as I walk into Bollene and board the bus to Avignon.

So it was possible for me to have great sex and feel no connection to my sexual partner afterwards? How disconcerting to my sense of myself! -- and how different from that later encounter in the Auvergne! Remembering an enchanted afternoon in the bracken, in the arms of my carpenter lover (for he told me that, at least, along with the fact that he had a wife and five children), I have no trouble imagining the chase scene from "The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter"

When he heard his name called oot

He's mounted on his steed,

She's buckled up her petticoats.

And after him she's gied....

He rade and she ran,

The lang simmer's day,

Until they cam' to a water

That was called the river Spey....

or from "The False Lover Won Back"

He turned about his high horse heid

And fast awa' rode he.

She's buckled up her petticoats,

And fast, fast followed she, bonnie love

And fast, fast followed she.

and imagining both scenes in the same erotic spirit. For me, both ballads, and not just the second (which features a pregnant heroine and an openly erotic refrain of "it's love for love that I do want..") are imbued with the same intensely sexual and extraordinarily active sense of yearning.

To credit the possibility of such persuasive, "anonymous" lovemaking, I have only to read my own journal, written close enough to the event to capture the frustration of not indulging in any such chase. Had my lover only ridden a horse instead of driving a pickup truck.... I knew it was a pointless wish; still, I wished and wondered and even found myself envying his wife as it never occurred to me to envy Ali's.

So I reread my journal for a key to the puzzle. What was so different this time? What was this "enchantment" that owed so little to any exchange of sentiment, or indeed to words at all, and that clearly didn't hinge on "wild and wonderful" new sexual techniques either? (One of the difficulties I faced, when a New York editor pushed me into telling what I vastly preferred the reader to imagine, was that without getting "corny" or clinical there wasn't really that much to tell; from the writerly standpoint my sex scenes are narrative flops.) But yes, when I backtracked a bit, there was something that tied in....

It began that morning. Monsieur Harold, my serendipitous overnight host on a secondary road in the Ardèches (on the way back to the Auvergne, I'd just knocked on their gate for a drink of water!) conveys me to Villefort and the route nationale which he and madame agree will be better hitchhiking. Once the curves straighten. For now, I saunter dreamily between reservoir and rocky cliffs, well fed and well slept, singing over and over the funny sad song I learned from a village child. And picking the scab off an old wound, which wine and music and a sense of kindred spirits impelled me to open to my unsuspecting hosts.

Nineteen years earlier, I was the pot stirrer and fire tender, the barefoot blueberry and raspberry picker, the oh-so-careful keeper of food stores for the four males who shared my lost Eden. We shared something very special, we five who left our elders in civilized comfort while we struck out on the waterways of the Algonquin. Even Tom, whom at fourteen I found a royal pain back home, fitted vin here. "Who cares if we leave a few cans behind?" he tried saying once. "We bury them," said Dick firmly. So Tom dug. He'd do anything for a twenty-three-year-old brother.

I remember long days on the river ... an arc of silver droplets glinting from my paddle, a crick of pain between my shoulder blades ... my knees trembling, my paddle poised as Dick and cousin Will and I are swept into our first rapids and then, from Tom and Dick's friend Whit in the second canoe, "Whoopee, can we do that again?" I remember moonlit nights when Will and I paddled out on the glassy water, his dreams burning high and bright as I listened in privileged sympathy. I remember his kidding me too, about always being the last to bed and the first one up, long before anyone else was up (sneaking out from beside Dick's sleeping bag for an early morning ramble, except for that one time when I found myself held fast instead..) "You just can't wait to start living, can you?" said Will, as if this spitting image of my own eagle-like father weren't just as keen on living as I ... but of course that's why I was afraid to approach him at the nightmare end of our Cedar Lake crossing (to the backwoods general store on the other side, to reprovision), afraid to approach when the rain came at last and the lake calmed and Dick was already gone. I knew Will would pull me under too and hold on for dear life, as Dick had held, so I watched him flailing away and did not swim over to him... "You were all so alive" wrote the French-Canadian who passed by with his son on that last evening of wind and rain, puns and poetry. And Dick's quiet voice saying, "This is where I'll bring my wife for our honeymoon."

"Suppose she doesn't like to camp, Dickie?"

"Don't worry, Jeanie, she will." I believed him too. She would have...

Stop it, Jean! It's over and done with -- get back to your new song! But "Ne pleure pas, Jeannette" is no help; even the tra-la-la's sound maudlin. In the phantom grip of a man who first held me as he dreamed and then as he drowned, and neither time, I am sure, knew whom he was holding, I no longer know for whom I am weeping either. A long-dead brother or a never-found lover? I only know that my heart is terribly exposed, my senses tuned up like taut fiddle strings...

Does it show? A horrid old man picks me up and asks a lot of impertinent questions; when I refuse to answer, he starts talking about his own sexual experiences in what I take to be very graphic detail. He gropes too, so I sit up hard against the car door and get out at the next village. Goodbye and good riddance!

Climbing steeply, my road skirts the craggy parc national des Cévennes. Pine scent in the air and blue flowers at my feet... "Montez, madame! I'm going as far as Mende." This driver, a travelling jazz musician, asks some pretty impertinent questions too -- impertinent but not dumb, and why not answer? I admit to feeling expérimentée without, in fact, having had that many expériences, and he smiles at me approvingly. But what on earth have I said -- have I said anything at all? -- to provoke his parting observation, uttered in measured tones, of "Tu as énormément besoin de caresses". Does he tell all women they have this "enormous need," I wonder, or is it really something about me?

The Auvergne begins on the other side of the river Lot: first the pastoral tablelands of les Causses and then on to Saint Flour and the mountains of le Cantal. Here I was told one needed un appétit de géant -- how appealingly immoderate! -- and of course I made this land of giant appetites today's goal. So it's over the river and up to the lime-rich pastures of le Causse de Mende, sheep grazing on pastures sprinkled with purple and blue, yellow gorse against the dark pine, lichened boulders erupting from a sea of heather and fern...

A pickup stops, the driver a broad-shouldered, wavy-haired carpenter, on his way home from a fishing expedition. Thirty-nine years old, with a wife and five children. In response to my disjointed chatter, it's all he says for a long time. But his deep brown eyes come to rest again and again on my flushed face, and I sink into a moody silence -- wrapped in reverie, and yet always aware of his searching gaze. Always aware of a disturbing male strength as I sit very still beside this quiet man and breathe in his scent of wood smoke and sweat.

Without speaking, he pulls off the road and pulls me toward him for a long, hard kiss. An awaited kiss? In any event, it comes as no surprise, and I put up no argument, either, when he grabs a scrap of burlap -- viens!-- and steers me through the pines with one muscled brown arm.

"Dessous la fougère, bergère..." In traditional song, these amorous interludes are often consumated, with great economy of action, "under the ferns"; and right now, on a bed of common bracken, I am following the traditional script. A very unliberated shepherdess indeed, it seems I must either kiss and flee, or kiss and cling; and today I am madly, hopelessly, stupidly clinging -- objecting not to the speed with which matters have proceeded thus far, but to their ever ending. How awkward for a man who, with family waiting at home (not to mention fresh caught trout in the back seat of the pickup) knows they have to end. I'm just no goddamn good at casual sex!

"Mais non, I do not find you ridiculous," he says, kissing my tear-wetted cheek and holding me fast again, at first to comfort me and then -- tu le veux?-- to love me, and then to comfort me and then again... "Shall I see you again this evening?' he asks. Yes, oh yes, for a long night and a proper bed, I think, the flies buzzing about us, as I wipe beads of sweat from his broad forehead, his serious face gazing down into mine. But where? I have no idea where I'm staying in Saint Flour and cannot even make a decent rendez-vous -- what utter ineptitude!

"Alors, but we must go now." For the afternoon sun is sinking fast, and the carpenter's wife, whose life I shouldn't really care to trade for mine, should I? -- oh, if I only could! -- is probably preparing supper. So shaking twigs from my clothing and hair, I make my legs walk back to the truck, my hand in his but with my eyes averted for fear I'll turn into a mess of quivering protoplasm if I actually look at him -- that I'll throw myself into his arms, collapse at his feet, do something stupid and hopeless and horribly embarrassing for both of us. For of course he must leave. That is to say we're leaving together, but he's turning off at the very next fork of the road, while I must continue on to Saint Flour.

Must? Yes, because that's where I said I was going, and has he suggested anything else? "Open that door, Jean, and haul out your gear," I tell myself when much, much too soon we stop. It is the hardest door I've ever had to open. "Je te comprends," murmurs my driver with a gentle kiss. And perhaps he does understand, but what can else can he do but drive off, leaving me to compose my face and find a ride to Saint Flour (with a family of four -- not a single man, thank goodness!)

So the day closes, and my journal entry does too, in the hilltop town of Saint Flour -- "the biggest village in the Cantal," the family called it -- which turns out to have a hostel-type maison des jeunes on the edge of town, with a huge empty dortoir des filles. All those unused beds when all I want is one bed and vone man! I roam the streets for an hour, just in case (might he possibly come looking for me?) and then burying my face in a dirt-and-bracken-stained shirt, I wrestle the scratchy blankets all night long, trying to conjure up from aching body memory a flesh-and-blood man.

So what happened? What was so different this time? What leaps to mind is the difference in me -- a deeper, more "daemonic" me (as Paglia describes a realm of unconscious nature that is neither good nor evil), and more particularly, a "me" corresponding on all essential points to Paglia's picture of the female "hormonal extreme." Acutely aware and awaiting. To be sure, that I met a man who not only sensed my peculiar mood but had the strength and gentleness to match it was critical. For I recognize this painfully heightened feeling of thin-skinned "aliveness"; it is a familiar companion to me in certain lonely, beautiful places, but it had never before impelled me to anonymous "enchanted" lovemaking; the confluence of man and mood had never happened before.

Now "mood" is perhaps too flippant a word for a deeply ghost-stalked mode of being, dwelling at once in mythic memory and heightened life. For the "pastoral scene" we're exploring here is far from flippant. Clearly, a sense of "holiday" from stifling social convention does not preclude erotic seriousness; indeed my notion of the "high folk pastoral" assumes just such seriousness, and especially such female seriousness (for I agree with Paglia that woman's own body inclines her to a strong sense of biological reality). Not that I mean to burden the folk pastoral heroine with anything so melodramatic as my family story! And not that I would expect to find anything so entirely subjective in action-based folk balladry anyway. But I think we all have our ghosts, our memories of painful loss. And the memories are us. As Paglia says (in Sexual Personae),

Human beings are the only creatures in whom consciousness is so entangled with animal instinct. In western culture there can never be a purely physical or anxiety-free sexual encounter. Every attraction, every pattern of touch, every orgasm is shaped by psychic shadows.

Yes, and mine have a way of grabbing center stage. I'm forced to recognize them as a vital part of me -- part of acting "with all my heart" -- so that, for me at least, "enchanted" lovemaking is far likelier to be "baggage-rich" than fashionably "baggage-free."

But, of course, there is also the matter which balladry does touch upon of feminine "spunk," and I assume it was this my driver meant by "resisting or giving yourself with all your force." I think, in a sense, he was admiring the basic warrior virtue of courage (for unless we have the "heart" to act on them, what do our civilized ideals of love or justice or compassion amount to anyway?); only he was obviously seeing it as a sexy female virtue -- as I do too. For it's woman who opens with flaunted inaccessibility the high-stake game that is more than a game; woman, with a sexual dare that she perhaps only dimly understands herself (and that Paglia understands not at all!), who opens the suspect erotic realm of strong lovemaking.

Paglia would probably say that the dare is a foolish one, given the sexual hazards women face (she has said that they give "confusing signals," by which I presume she means more than the feeble confusion of the woman who "acquiesces" and then wonders if she has been "violated"). She speaks of "nature's burden" falling more heavily upon one sex, and I know what she means (though testosterone-driven young men surely labor under no light burden themselves!). I can even agree with her, logically, sensibly, prudentially, that "biological constraints must limit eroticism, that is, our imaginative lives in sexual space," even though I suspect Paglia means the risky sexual space into which I would encourage women to expand their imaginative lives. It would, I freely admit, be less confusing for men if women all followed -- were able to follow -- Paglia's prudent advice and give no sexual signals at all until they could give a clear and unambiguous green light to sex, or at least (a la Wendy Shalitt), a green light to serious courtship. Such total "honesty" would be less confusing to men, but for me at least it would have been deeply dishonest; it would have meant either pretending I didn't find men exciting or riding roughshod over my gut-level resistance to them -- over a prolonged sense of inviolate bodily selfhood. Which might have uncomplicated my life, but I do not think it would have encouraged "magic to reign," at least not if the uncomplicated time-to-lose-my-virginity stories of so many old sexual "revolutionaries" are any guide. They sound so dreary!

To be sure, there are doubtless many routes to this matter of sexual magic, and the Italian tradition, with its assumptions of vigilant family protectiveness, follows perhaps a less personally "resistant" route than mine. And though I would argue the case for personal responsibility, arguments are perhaps beside the point. For me, at least, the connection between "resisting or giving yourself with all your strength" -- between the strength of my "no" and my "yes" -- is a visceral one.

There's the memory of writing that crazy-confident letter home in which I assured my mother that solo hitchhiking at twenty was perfectly safe and that nothing, absolutely nothing could happen to me "as long as I wasn't afraid of cold or wet or hunger," in other words, that drivers had no coercive power over me (it went without saying that I wasn't afraid of them as simple men) -- and the memory of coming home to be told by Dick that I "looked French." As if my new-found magic showed, the knowledge that I could indeed excite desire and the knowledge that the power to say "no" and make it stick, was also mine. It would have changed everything had I "known" (as victim feminism says I should have known) that when push came to shove I was only a hapless victim of male desire.

Thank God, or rather, I thank my English mother, whom I belatedly recognized as "different" from other girls' mothers, that I didn't know any such thing! (My college roommate said that "no mother in her right mind" would sign the permission letter I requested for a weekend outing with her and our three rockclimbing buddies -- among other inducements to maternal peace of mind, I said that one of the three was a tough ex-Marine, terrifically good at blowing on campfires -- but of course Mother signed, admonishing me only to "take along a flashlight, dear.") And I thank her that from the same untaught "lesson" I could feel whole in my own body. We had no intimate talks on sexuality, but somehow the message got through that my body was me (and that "me-ness" mattered) -- a message put to the test at the end of my sixteenth summer, when my co-workers at a Michigan Avenue soda shop presented me with a surprise going-away gift. I didn't even know what those twin cones of foam rubber, a maraschino cherry taped to the tip of each cone, were at first. Then, intimidated by the group eagerness to "improve" me as well as by the rules of courtesy (this was after all a gift), I did not protest as the girls inserted the objects into my size A (AA? ) bra. "Oh you look so much better," they said, and it was true; walking to the El, I did draw men's eyes as I had never drawn them before. And I felt a fake. How could I walk into my mother's honest house wearing "falsies"? In the end, I threw the damn things into Lake Michigan (my apologies to the lake!) and walked home.

There were plenty of things wrong with me as a kid and obviously still are; but there was always some core of rightness not unlinked, I think to my foreign birth. For fear of rapist man is only part of a distinctively American distrust of the female body, which has unhappily become one of our major exports (it was Germaine Greer's focus in her first book, The Female Eunuch). That distrust fuels the sale of "training bras" and silicone breast implants and feeds, too, I think, a certain fashionable sexual language trivializing the event to which the myth of the lady and the lusty smith attaches such "irrational" weight. In the myth, irrresistible lovemaking effects a sea-change in the lady's whole being, while our current way of talking has "recreational" sex thrown into the more serious matter of "caring relation" (presumably to enliven it). In other words, having sex doesn't make it serious. How true! And how very sensible we are today, so much wiser than I, when I plunged into marriage a year after my brother drowned, determined at 23 to bear the new life I carried within me, determined to recreate my parents' happy marriage. Of course, it was pigheaded of me to think that just because I wanted to sleep with someone I must want to marry him. but how could I want the baby and not the father? For the me who wanted no half measures it was a package deal. So I persevered in a mistake that has rippled through my children's lives, a mistake that perhaps I had to make... I had to try... I cannot regret being who I am.

And the fashionable, sensible language still bothers me, for it seems to me to trivialize something good that I yearned to copy from my parents' marriage. That theirs was a deeply caring relation none of us children ever doubted, nor was there ever any doubt in my mind about the importance of that rumpled double bed ("it wouldn't be so much trouble to make, Mother, if you just snuck in and out of the sheets the way I do," I once admonished her). The bed from which those late night sounds came that I lay awake listening to in awe and wonderment... The bed in which my father died at 87, past eating or speaking, but still turning toward my mother's side.

I was not thinking of my parents when I coined the phrase "romance of the body," but it fits their story, imperfectly, to be sure (especially in regard to the folkloric sequence of events) and yet, somehow, truthfully. I say this, as I trust my mother will take it, in tribute to their deeprooted, very human love. I say it, recalling her answer to my younger brother, who came back from England, shocked at public displays of affection in the London parks ("the English don't believe in Platonic love, dear") and recalling, too, a blasted white oak tree at our family's country place in Pennsylvania, with one huge limb gone from a winter storm. That tree comes to mind whenever I think of our family and the ways in which it failed contemporary mental health standards: the way my mother wept behind closed doors, and my father never spoke of the son who had been his disciple, could not bear to hear him spoken of, even alone with my mother (surely then, I thought, but "no," she says with a sigh, "we never talked of Dick.").

Their real romance was made of sterner stuff than the romantic little verses that Dad, no poet and a stutterer to boot, wrote for Mother at Christmas and on her birthday -- and read out loud too, in the presence of his eye-rolling teenage children. It survived much that might have destroyed a lesser union, and survived as a living force that I found myself envying. In the muted tempests of my own copycat marriage would I ever say, "if I didn't love him so much, I'd leave him"? Was I ever that wholehearted about the man I'd married? I wanted to be; I'd pretended to be, but I knew all along (and so did he; "you were a reluctant bride," he says) that the answer was "no." I should have had an affair. And used contraceptives.

The myth of the lady and the lusty smith confers on lovemaking a seriousness that evidently cuts two ways. It can induce a woman to wait on total body commitment as my mother waited. (And how cold that sounds! In fact, she responded to my father's suggestion of a "fling" by gambling on commitment or nothing, and thinking for a time that she had lost the gamble -- that she would never see him again...). But, of course, it can also encourage the procreative recklessness that social workers deplore, though their concern is more likely to be teenage girls than grown women of 23! Was it sex as solace for me? A wiping out of memory? In any case, I too yearned to be "swept away" in strong lovemaking; and even today I can appreciate the power of that mythic dream. For the intensely physical way it links sex and feminine love reflects what I, at least, have felt. There was a kind of sea change in me. I did want to cleave to the man I'd welcomed into my body, even as a part of me looked at himwith disrespectful eyes, knowing that I hadn't really met my match at all -- that out of my own crying need I had, in a sense, only invented him..

So I applaud the myth with a wariness that has nothing to do with the danger of physical violence. The danger is in the enchantment.

Which is not to discount the problem of violence. That we are a violent society, with dangerous levels of sexual violence, I do not doubt. But I do not blame a "sexist" myth; I do not see the heightened sexual tensions that the old ballads invite us to applaud as a source of this danger. Indeed I wonder if what truly terrorizes us is not rather linked to the very rhetoric of a kinder, gentler world -- to the vision of a perfectly civilized, perfectly "safe" world that unwittingly decrees the very violence it decries. And no, I'm just saying this because it sounds so elegant. It's a truly troubling thought, echoed by Robert Kaplan (in "Euphorias of Hatred," The Atlantic Monthly, May '03). "The more advanced a civilization," he writes, "the more cerebral and subtly conformist it is likely to be -- and, consequently, the more extreme the pent up frustration and the more spectacular the violence it fuels." Indeed. I would seem to be defending this imperfectly civilized myth of the lady and the lusty smith, then, precisely because it is so imperfectly civilized. Because like George Orwell, I am both deeply appreciative of civilized (or "feminized") middle-class values and unhappy with their total triumph. The trick of enduring civilization, it seems to me, is in a kind of balancing act between civilization and savagery -- an act that ideological absolutism makes impossible, though ordinary people often have the knack of it ... if we could only stop telling them what to think.