In 1975 Brownmiller spoke some home truths about rape. She also poured all tales of sexual conflict, all "dominance" of mind or muscle, into the same mold and made sweeping assumptions of female victimhood that have blossomed into a climate of enormous sexual nervousness.

"I think ... people are profoundly afraid of questions of power in bed." 1 Maverick lesbians Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga, conversing a decade later on "What We're Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism," speak a gutsy language -- of "aches" and "throbbings" and "the pull in the hips" and an "erotic tension that excites the wildness of my imagination..." They speak to me, and they speak for me too in protesting a "neutered sexuality where everybody's got to be basically the same because anything different puts the element of power and deviation in there and threatens the whole picture.." Newton and Walton,2 too, complain of "flattening sexual experience in the name of equality . . . which for the middle class has always meant uniformity." For they, too, are in a butch-femme relation and thus out of step with "egalitarian sex" and assumptions of "functionally interchangeable partners and acts." They, too, find the "fem question" hard to talk about without "sounding passive," though clearly that isn't how they see it. As Hollibaugh says, "there are femme ways to orchestrate sexuality...."

But how strange and wonderful to find lesbians on the barricades of sexual difference! And how wholeheartedly they endorse my own deepest sexual feelings -- much more wholeheartedly than mainstream women reviewers of Dworkin's Intercourse, who in 1987 offered in rebuttal to her sex-is-rape argument only perfectly civilized, "caring relationship." 3 It seemed a curiously crippled response, betraying a failure of the imagination only cofirmed in the playpen "Wildness" of Mary Daly's Pure Lust. That title momentarily raised my hopes. But Daly exhorts women to be "Wild" and "Lustful" while demanding that men be perfectly tamed (or "reeducated"); in other words, she, too, is unable, or unwilling, to see woman as full player in the unreformed pastoral scene, to see her as other than victim in an animal world that does perhaps, at first glance, seem very much man's domain. "But they're bigger and stronger, aren't they?" I keep hearing, as if, on this animal level, sex were a matter of sheer muscle -- as if, even with species that show a much greater difference in male and female body size than humans, sea lions, say, females did not exercise some sexual choice (zoologists once assumed that the "big battles" over terriory settled the matter, an assumption proving untrue with closer observation of wild animal behavior.) Anthropologists remind us that men have arms, which is said to account for a peculiar human "vulnerability to rape," and rape, to be sure, can be an ugly fact of human life. But, strong arms or not, I think any man who tries animal strength when all animal enchantment has fled is taking a big risk.

Does that sound smug (or stupid)? The simpler truth is that growing up as a girl I never felt "at risk" -- only hedged about with (occasional) silly restrictions, like the time, at fourteen or fifteen, I had to drag a younger brother along to the Chicago Stock Show because my parents didn't think I should be going to a "rough" part of town alone. I knew he had no appreciation even for glorious draft horses, but they insisted, so I was stuck with a bored-to-tears "protector" whom I privately thought more likely to be a target for physical assault, simply because he was a boy, than me. I had a point, too (and so did my parents).

And Brownmiller, to be sure, gives me pause when she notes that "A Clockwork Orange" and other "heroic rapist" works (she cites Mick Jagger's "Midnight Rambler" and Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels; my mind leaps to the self-glorifying rapist killer of Norman Mailer's American Dream) are applauded, at least by some critics, for showing "the true nature of man" or "our need for adventure and excitement," while homosexual or child rape gets no such free glory ride. She blames Helene Deutsch's Psychology of Women (vol. I and II published in 1944, 45) for selling post-World War II American women on the "fundamental rightness of rape as an archetypal female experience" -- in other words, for giving respectable theoretical support to what Ayn Rand was already popularizing in The Fountainhead. First published in 1943 and still in print over three decades later, the library book "opened itself," says Brownmiller, to the scene that she remembered "heating my virgin blood" as a schoolgirl and that has evidently continued to draw fascinated readers. As Rand sums up the rape of superwoman Dominique Francon by superman Howard Roark:

It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him -- and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master, taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.

(The Fountainhead, p. 220)

Now I have to confess that I only remember finding Ayn Rand so given to preaching political philosophy for pages on end -- preaching a kind of "rugged individualism" -- that if I ever started this sex Bible of my time, I certainly never got to its "torrid" rape scene. I'd like to say that these pages imbued with "contempt" and "defilement" wouldn't have heated my virgin blood, though I'm probably wrong; they probably would have. Because I'd been brainwashed by a "rapist society" into finding contempt and defilement conditions of erotic pleasure? Say rather because a confusing erotic overlap exists, not just between The Fountainhead (which I finally read all the way through) and at least some of my erotic daydreams, but even more, between those dreams and the "mass market" (or Harlequin) romance that has been called a kind of "women's pornography." 4 And yes, strong arms are part of this "overlap" -- part of what can be turned to the shape of sexual oppression.

Thus Deutsch elevates her theory about the "rightness of rape" by ascribing it to man's evolutionary triumph over the apes -- i.e., his "prehensile appendages" -- at the same time admitting that "popular movies or magazines showing an anthropomorphous ape or a powerful bear-like masculine creature with a completely helpless female in his arms" played a large part in her "favorite speculation" about sex as an original, irresistible "act of male violence" 5 In Deutsch's view, feminine fantasies about being held in strong arms are "really" King Kong fantasies of total female helplessness. And Brownmiller goes a step further when she equates any desire "to re-enact the old primitive forms of lovemaking, in which woman was overpowered by the strength of man" with "the morbid attraction of Sylvia Plath to a male Nazi figure."; as a symptom of this "victim psychology" she specifically notes, among intelligent women, the sentiment my mother once expressed: that she could only be attracted to a man she considered more intelligent than herself. Clearly, my mother wanted to "meet her match"; she even took the old-fashioned wedding vow to "love, honor and obey," but I cannot imagine anyone, my father included, ever describing her as "submissive" or "helpless."

In "Mass Market Romance," Ann Snitow deplores the cardboard quality of the Harlequin heroine. "Without spontaneity and aggression," she says, "a whole set of sexual possibilities is lost to her, just as without emotional depth, a whole set of sexual possibilites is lost to men." Now the ballad heroines with whom I identify (who fit, as we shall see, into a definable set of erotic assumptions) are far from fully drawn, but their preference for strong, bold men comes though loud and clear -- as does, on their part, a high degree of female "spontaneity and aggression."

The equation of traditional erotic values with sexual serfdom doesn't fit my my ballad heroines; it doesn't fit my mother; I don't think it fits me. But yes, there is a disturbing fantasy overlap embedded in the heterosexual erotic world and specifically embedded in female fantasy; there is this disturbing figure of extraordinary sexual energy and enchantment -- neither common rapist nor romantic lover but someone out of an earlier, "natural" order of things (it has been suggested to me that Toni Morrison evokes him in Tar Baby, Florinda Donner in Shabono.) So perhaps it isn't so strange, after all, to find my allies in the "other camp." For they can speak up today. They don't have to wrestle, even intellectually, with the spectre of rape. However "maverick" in their imitation of the power-laden heterosexual model, they are still lesbian and their sexual relation doesn't have the same potentially threatening meaning -- the meaning so forcefully conveyed in "The Twa Magicians" -- it might have with a man.

Yet an embarrassment over the "feminine" or "femme" role persists, and it is indeed a matter of "power in bed." Or on a bed of bracken. For I submit that the power play which Hollibaugh and Moraga defend in lesbian form and Child 44 puts into magical terms is also the fantasy of the pastoral. A wild, free fantasy of spontaneous animal delight -- of animal energy and enchantment. And no, I am not forgetting the "lady," whose naysaying is both necessary to the ballad's high erotic drama and, to my mind, entirely natural. For chastity isn't just a saintly virtue; it can be a fighting, animal sense of bodily integrity, coexisting with equally powerful feelings of animal attraction. In linking love and lust, and implying that the lady marries (or wishes to marry) the man who takes her virginity, "The Twa Magicians" would seem to be celebrating no simple roll in the hay, no passing interlude of erotic delight, but the same deep play that haunts other high-conflict, high-stake ballads of erotic encounter -- "high folk pastorals," as I now call them in contrast to such low-conflict pastoral folksongs as "Two Maids Went a-Milking" or "A Wee Bird Cam' to my Apron."

And I cling to that word "pastoral," despite the total lack of "pastoral trappings" in Child 44 and the artificiality of the polite literary pastoral, for the "wild" erotic the word continues to evoke. So Michel Zink, writing on the medieval French pastourelle, refers to the "pastoral function of carnal desire in the pure state," 6 which is another way of saying that the pastoral defines us all as lustful, desiring creatures (it might help to remember that the root meaning of lust is "strong joy"). And taunting Scottish ballad heroines suggest that flaunted sexual resistance can indeed function as an expression of sexual desire, conflicted, to be sure, in a visceral and very inviting way.7 They suggest that the lady, in the end, may be said to have orchestrated her own "defeat."

Now there's the rub: that it is a kind of defeat. That the lady isn't simply playing a calculated social game (as she would appear to be doing in a lengthy 18th-century variant of "The Baffled Knight," which also sets her up to be man's sexual prey) but that a part of her is truly resistant to the very idea of sex. A proud part of her, perpetuated perhaps in the peculiar sexual arrogance I found in some radical lesbian writing of the '70s, is forever altered. ("We have the secret of new life," Ti-Grace Atkinson seems to be boasting,8 in a way that I cannot imagine a gay man boasting, as she castigates science for not doing more research on parthenogenesis.)

Well, perhaps "forever altered" is overstating the case. But the defeat that the ballad can only describe in magical terms implies a radical change in the lady's psyche; as a Harlequin romance would put it, at the right moment she "melts." And that's even worse, or at least more intellectually embarrassing, than the idea of her "defeat." To be just "letting it happen"? To be -- what horrors! -- simply "acquiescing"? Modern sex scenes like to show the woman astride her lover, thus disguising his driving sexual role, but in outward terms, at least in the strong lovemaking that the ballad invites us to applaud, it is indeed man who "stars."

So what does the "feminine" mean in an erotic of power-laden sexual difference? Weakness? Passivity? The "fem question" bedevils "role-playing" lesbians today, as according to Michel Foucault,9 it once bedeviled the ancient Greeks. Not, of course, that the Greeks worried about women playing an inferior sexual role. But the idea that in man-boy love, the boy, in training for active, striving manhood, could be playing a weak or passive role -- that was a deeply troubling question for Greek thinkers, says Foucault, who sees "Platonic love" as their answer: a kind of end run around what is at heart a problem of heterosexual theater.

And linguist-philosopher Walter Ong, linking the problem to a habit of Western thought itself, also traces it back to the Greeks. That is, he traces an "agonistic," this-vs-that way of thinking, which always privileges the "masculine" over the "feminine," outward over inner power, back to the show-off, male combat model of the Greek gymnasium. He views argumentative thought, in other words, as an extension of personal combat, while I have come to see courtship, on a gut level, in similar terms (indeed "Courtship and Combat" was my first title for early drafts of this project). Similar but different. For confusingly if inevitably -- I think this is what Ong calls a "cost" of the "adversative structures of truth" 10 -- we borrow the language of hostility to describe a state of pleasurable sexual tension, a situation that is sexually "charged." The ballad of "The Twa Magicians" may borrow elements of swashbuckling male-to-male combat, but we should not be deceived into thinking that its central puzzle of the lady magician can be so simplistically defined. Until we come to terms with her "wild" erotic -- until we come to terms, that is, with the fantasy of Child 44 -- "power in bed," I suspect, will continue to bedevil us.