Sexuality: a search for perspective; 4; Is a New Sexuality Possible? Reflections on Modernism in the Arts and Religion -- Dr. Tom F. Driver, Professor of Theology and Literature at the Union Theological Seminary, New York.

Men and women in modern times have had to ask about the human meaning of their being male and female. Neither the family, the state, the church, nor the cultural tradition has been able to answer this question for people. They have had, recently, then, to try to work it out on their own. There could be no more telling a sign of cultural crisis. Michigan State University Radio presents Sexuality, a search for perspective. A series of recorded lectures from an interdisciplinary colloquy on human sexuality held on the campus of Michigan State University. The purpose of this series is to provide a comprehensive discussion of human sexuality in its broadest possible perspective, and yet deal with this important and timely topic in an organized, informed, and rational manner.

The lecturer today will be Dr. Tom F. Driver, Professor of Theology and Literature at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Dr. Driver is a noted author, critic, and lecturer. He is the author of the book Jean Genet, and is currently writing a history of the modern theater. He will speak today on the question, is a new sexuality possible? Reflections on Modernism in the Arts and Religion. Now Dr. Tom F. Driver. We begin with the obvious question, well, what is sexuality anyway? The question is a little hard, but let us try some definitions. In this lecture, I propose to use the word sexuality as a middle term standing between sex on the one hand and love on the other.

Let us say that sex, the shorter word, that's too bad, I hate to use long words, but the shorter word is not really my subject. Let's say that sex refers to certain biological conditions and to certain acts defined biologically. That will be on the one hand. On the other hand, let us say that love is a spiritual act. This will not mean that love isn't physical, because I think it certainly is, but it will mean that the norm by which we define love is beyond physical limitations and cannot quite be described physically. Love implies the union of what is separated, and here, for purposes of this definition this afternoon, I'm picking up, you will recognize, upon a long tradition about that word,

there are others as well, but this one comes out of the Greek's thought, and in particular that word for love they had which we call eros. They had some others, but it's that one which seems to me to be the most persistently important, and I pick up on it, and it brings me to the assertion that love implies the union of what is separated. And as this union of what is separated is an ideal, then it makes sense to speak of perfect love. It makes sense to speak of love as an ideal toward the perfection of which one would attempt to move, for which he might strive, an ideal perfection which might be present as a pull or a drive within him, even though he would never achieve it. So it makes sense to speak of perfect love, in the sense of perfect love meaning a perfect

harmony, or perfect union. But it would make no sense, on the other hand, to speak of perfect sex, I'm sorry to tell you that, but I don't think that makes any sense, sex means division. It comes from a Latin word, secare, which means to divide. Sex is therefore an imperfection, a disunity, and a lack. It's the most pleasant one that most people know, but in any case, it is a lack or an imperfection of division. Perfect sex, therefore, is a contradiction in terms. Whereas to go back to that other hand, love, even though perfect sex is a contradiction in terms, perfect love would overcome sex. The perfect unity, the perfect union, would mean that we had passed beyond sex. In heaven, we are told there is neither male nor female.

Perhaps that is why so few wish to go there. Fortunately, we do not live in heaven. We live neither in perfect love nor in unalloyed sex, whatever that might be, instead we live in a world of sexuality. Now I come to that middle term, a world of sexuality that is somewhere between sex and love. This is our misery as human beings, it is also our grandeur. Sex and love are certainly connected, but they are not identical and not co-extensive. It is a great mistake, productive of much harm, to think that all sex either can or should be loving.

At same time, whatever loving we do, including the love for God, is done by sexual beings, for we are inseparable from our bodies, which are of one sex or another. And yet, although all loving is done by sex creatures, that is not necessarily the same as sexed up creatures, yet all loving is done by sexed creatures, not all sex acts and sex fantasies are loving. To modulate our thinking from sex to love or from love to sex, we need a mediating term, a term that will highlight for us the distinctively human way of being a sex creature. That term, I propose, is sexuality.

Sexuality, wherever it is not merely a polite or academic way of saying sex, is a word that points to the manner in which human beings relate to and express their sex. But I am a creature of a certain sex, that my sex is male, that I therefore have one kind of a body with its characteristic equipment, and not that other kind with its characteristic equipment, all this is in the nature of biological information. But my sexuality, although it is based on the biological data, is not determined by it alone, but also by cultural formation and psychological conditioning, in interaction with my personal freedom, all this results in a sexual style.

My sexuality is my particular way of being male, of carrying and expressing my male-ness. To be sure, I might have picked a more interesting example, Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Lauren are both sexy females, but I submit that their sexuality is not at all the same. And our preference for the one or the other of these females would reveal something about our sexuality. As for love, we love not merely in and through our sex, but we do it specifically through our sexuality. And this is true not only of what we call sexual love, but of all other kinds, including the love of nature and beauty, and also that love which issues in creative endeavors

of all kinds. Now sexual maturity is a topic of more than ordinary interest in our society. This is because the topic has to do not only with sex, and not only with individual psychology, but also with such social issues as how to foster justice and cultural creativity. It has also a great deal to do with religion, although I have decided that I do not have time in this lecture to deal very specifically with religion. And I must hope therefore to do that elsewhere while I am on campus. But it is important, I think, first of all to set the cultural setting to describe the cultural setting and tendencies which seem to me to be so important at the present. Therefore, our purview must now shift from individual sexuality where I began to

begin for purposes of illustration to social and cultural sexuality within which we all live and with which we have somehow to make our peace. The Industrial Revolution, little by little, deprived women of making to society two contributions the important economic contributions they had long provided. These two were first people and second finished goods. The woman bore children and she cooked, wool, sewed, and did other jobs to turn raw goods into finished goods.

We can put all this, including the children, into an epigram by saying that she baked the husband's loaves in her oven. He stoked and she burned. It was a good arrangement and it belonged to what I shall call the nuclear economic family. Society needed large numbers of children, as today it does not. It also needed finished goods, which today it gets elsewhere. The family was, so to speak, a bakery to provide these and the woman's contribution to society was a net economic gain. Even if most of the goods she finished were consumed within the family. The nuclear economic family embodied a true collaboration between man and wife. The contribution that each sex made was complementary to that of the other and it was equally important

to society at large. Thus sexuality was defined by function, much more than by role. It would be left to the Victorians to emphasize sexual roles to compensate for the loss of sexual functions. At sentence I want to repeat because I believe it's rather important, although I may not say that much about it later on. That where the husband and the wife were both through the instrumentality of the agrarian family, making contribution to the economic functioning of society, their sexuality tended to be defined by function much more than by role. It was going to be later with the Victorian family that the sexual roles, as such, would be emphasized to compensate for loss of sexual functioning.

The Industrial Revolution made large families an economic liability. At the same time, it gradually took over the work of the nuclear economic family to provide finished goods. One result of this change was the Victorian family and the authoritarianism of its Paterra familias. The authority of the father in the Victorian family was exaggerated precisely to the extent that it became dysfunctional. The great moral emphasis placed upon the family in the late 19th century was compensation for the fact that the family had become, as it were, an economic luxury. It had to defend itself now in moral terms to become the bastion of individualistic virtues which were symbolized in the father.

And it is the Victorian family and its American counterpart which has set the stage for the crisis in family life and in sexuality that we are undergoing today. It may be particularly difficult for us in the United States because the American counterpart of the Victorian family was blended with all kinds of ideas that came from the mythology of the American frontier. The American frontier, which by definition, and you'll find this in the Marlboro cigarette ads if you didn't know it already, is man's country and the woman comes along as it were for the ride. Now this Victorian family and its American counterpart, I say, has set the stage for the crisis we experienced today. That does not mean that the Victorian family is the principal reason for the crisis, only that it set the stage for it by giving us something dysfunctional to react against.

The real reason for the crisis is the family's loss of its economic function. That loss has made it necessary for men and women to find a new way of understanding and experiencing each other. No longer defined by economic collaboration within the family, their relation has had to be thought out and lived out a new. In order to search for a new relation between the sexes, people could and did look in two directions at once. One was towards sex. Sex in itself. Sex more or less divorced from the idea of the family. This tendency was strengthened by the spread of birth control.

One may see the issues clearly drawn in Popol's recent encyclical Humanae vita. The Vatican is trying to perpetuate the family as the determiner of the form and meaning of sexual relations. Since it retains an absolute ban on artificial methods of contraception, for their use implies the primacy of sex over childbearing. It means that sex itself has more to do with sexuality than does the beginning of children. This order of primacy is rejected by those who have challenged the logic of the encyclical. The Vatican's position is not really based on the doctrine of natural law, although that is what is claimed.

Actually, the Vatican is fighting a rearguard battle in defense of that form of sexuality that is consonant with the nuclear economic family. And this rearguard battle is, I am sure, a lost cause. The modern search for sexuality through sex itself has led to what we nowadays call sexual permissiveness, sexual frankness of speech, sex education in schools, a literature of sexology, and so on. All this is so familiar that I think I need not dwell upon it. It has brought us to the state which we are now in, in which we are not at all surprised to find the sexual act and all kinds of other things connected with it on sale in the bookstores, visible in theater and film, and spoken about in the parlor and so on.

Let me merely say that all this sexiness is good in my mind, insofar as it is motivated by and helps to further a search for genuine sexuality. But it is bad in my mind, insofar as it serves mere economic exploitation, and insofar as it provides an escape from sexuality, which it can do by fustering and cultivating within us if we are not careful, one-dimensional stereotypes, or that is to say a reduction of sexuality to sex. Now I think I can describe pithily what I would see as the relation between sexuality and sex by saying that sex on its way toward sexuality is eros and rebirth, whereas sex

in flight from sexuality is Thanatos or death. Let's now turn in the other direction in which people have moved in order to renew the relation between men and women. This we might call the avenue of symbolism. The male-female relation is not only biological and sensate, it is also a locus of meaning and one of the most fundamental. Men and women in modern times have had to ask about the human meaning of their being, male and female, neither the family, the state, the church, nor the cultural tradition has been able to answer this question for people.

They have had recently then to try to work it out on their own, there could be no more telling a sign of cultural crisis. There is no accident that psychoanalysis has risen in this period. Psychoanalysis is not a theory about sex but about sexuality. It is a symbol system, closer to myth than to natural science, and the practice of its therapy is the art of interpreting symbolic meanings. Psychoanalysis rightly belongs to the modern period of crisis in the relation between men and women. As is often pointed out, psychoanalysis also belongs to the history of romanticism. And that is correct for romanticism even in its earliest phase in the 18th century was an anticipation of the sexual crisis I am speaking of, and we shall all remain romanticists

of sorts as long as that crisis continues. Romanticism gave us a literature concerned not so much with men and women, with parents and children, as with masculine and feminine, the parental and the filial, not so much the nouns as the adjectives, and precisely because it is the adjectives that raise the question of meaning. Romanticism thus was concerned not so much with sex and society as such, nor with the clash between them, but the question of sexual identity, which turns out to be inseparable from the question of identity per se. Romantic questing is romantic questioning, and it almost always circulates around the

question of identity, and we will have noticed perhaps that that question of identity is so frequently cast in sexual terms. To be male is the biological fact. To be masculine is the way in which that male is carried and expressed. Masculinity and femininity are the two basic and interdependent forms of sexuality. The decline of the nuclear economic family has meant a reexamination of what it means to be masculine, to be feminine. In our time these cannot be well defined by social roles. They have thus to be seen on the one hand as rooted in one's biological constitution in the body, and on the other hand as leading toward the highest flights of the human imagination. Perhaps the greatest single virtue of psychoanalysis is to have reminded us that imagination is

rooted in our bodies, and in some ways always returns to them. There is no act of imagination that is not an expression of sexuality. The connections between imagination and sexuality are twofold. In the first place as Norman O'Brown has recently been trying to tell us, almost all our thoughts are images of our bodies. In the second place, which I think equally important, imaginations sexual origins are revealed in its persistently dialectical character. That's a philosophical observation I will not take time to spell out, but only to suggest it to you by having you think of a whole family of terms that belong together, imagination, creativity, sexuality, duality, ambiguity, dialectic.

To these we might add 100 more, all on the borderline as it were, between the realm of sexual life and the realm of the imagination. Words such as imitation, reflection, representation, shadow and substance, male and female. Imagination has always to do with substance and shadow, departure and return, alienation and reconciliation, imagination is always in dialectical movement. And I am suggesting that the basic pattern, the basic experience out of which that dialectic arises is the experience of sexuality. Consider for instance the following lines, which I'm going to read to you, of which are among the more famous lines of modern poetry written about poetry.

And as I read them, although at first you will think that they have nothing to do with sexuality, you will see how at the conclusion the poet makes a see that they do by his shift in vocabulary. The poet is Wallace Stevens and the poem is the man with the blue guitar. Poetry is the subject of the poem. From this the poem issues and to this returns, between the two, between issue and return, there is an absence in reality, things as they are, or so we say, but are these separate? You said an absence for the poem, which requires its true appearances there, suns green, clouds red, earth-feeling, sky that thinks from these it takes, perhaps it gives in the universal

intercourse. It's that last word, of course, that gives it away and it's a deliberate pun and the language makes it possible to make that pun. I'm going to read those lines again. I'm going to read them again in the second time. The first time probably one is struck by the fact that there is a philosophical interpretation of a poem in its relation to reality. I want to read those lines again precisely because they are not overtly sexual and with this time through, would you consider in your mind how the poem may come to life if we think of the poem that he's talking about as a body or a self and if we think of its journey into reality as the journey of a self into the opposite sex. Poetry is the subject of the poem.

From this the poem issues and to this returns between the two between issue and return there is an absence in reality, things as they are, or so we say, but are these separate? Is it an absence for the poem which acquires its true appearances there, suns green, clouds red, earth-feeling sky that thinks? From these it takes, perhaps it gives in the universal intercourse. Now those are not sexy lines, but they are deeply sexual. They imagine a poem as a body, a self, and they imagine it as going out from itself toward something other, which is called reality, but which might also be called the world or otherwise the opposite sex.

And we can ask whether that going out to the other is an absence or if it is an exchange in which the self discovers itself. At any rate the logic here is that a poem is to reality as a lover to the beloved and that the transaction between them is as language may remind us an intercourse. Now that phrase, the universal intercourse, is, I believe, to be taken quite seriously as a clue to what modernism in the arts has been about. Samuel Taylor-Colaridge enunciated the most seminal of modern ideas about imagination. When he said that it was ezymplastic, that means molding and forming, that he said that imagination did not, like fancy, deal with fixities and definites, but that imagination brought about a reconciliation of opposites.

In short, imagination works by a kind of intercourse in which difference and sameness are held dialectically together in the body of a new creation. You might consider that while entertaining thoughts about the achievement of James Joyce. In Ulysses, a Fortiori in Finnegan's wake, there is a universal intercourse. So feekund that the brood is impossible to describe even in the longest commentaries. Every word seems to connect with almost every other, in a process we would feel as sexual even if Joyce had not made sexuality the explicit theme of both works. Your great modern works of art are bodies. They are not vehicles of ideas nearly so much as they are bodies, containing in themselves

that intercourse, which we find fascinating in itself and which causes new life to stir within us. I here call it intercourse, in the books you will usually find it called tension, which is a perhaps bad mechanical analogy. The modern imagination is the attempt, at a time of cultural uncertainty, to seek orientation by returning to the most basic feelings and impulses. The cultural tradition has been received in fragments and must be sure against our ruin, as Eliot said in the wasteland, a poem that is about the loss and recovery of sexual power, just as it is about the loss and possible recovery of cultural unity. One goes back through the ruins to the pre-cultural sources of life, to the primal parents as

it were, to father sky and mother earth, and to all their various emblems. But one discovers that in doing this he is not really going backwards in time, however much lore he may be reading from the golden bow, or the gleanings of Jane Harrison or Mirkea Aliyad, know he is going downward, which means also upward, into himself, into that sexual kingdom we all inhabit, which we sometimes call the self, but which it would be better to call the intercourse between self and world. Now the modern imagination has led us to discover a new, not only the sexual duality of all creative processes, but also the fact that this duality is ambiguous.

To journey from the outer landscape of cultural disarray to the inner caverns of sexual creativity is to discover that there is a feminine in the masculine, a masculine in the feminine, and a mysterious ambiguity about them both, is leopold bloom father or mother to Stephen Deedles, literally neither in truth he is both. Modern literature has discovered that heroism is only half the truth about man. The other half is not cowardice, but a feminine desire to embrace and nurture new life. Even while we have also discovered that there is a feminine heroism, to be one's own

person come what may, of which the great modern example is Nora in Ibsen's Adults House, but of which there are others besides. Modern imagination in other words leaves off thinking of masculine and feminine as fixities and definite. Today it sees them more ambiguously, as emplastically in Coleridge's quaint word, opposites they yet co-inher each to mold and to inform the other. They interpenetrate and are at every moment dialectically related in the individual as well as in the couple. I said earlier that my sexuality is the way that I carry my mailness. That statement has now to be modified.

My sexuality is the dialectical relation of the masculine and feminine that live together within me. I am myself a marriage of masculine and feminine. Like other marriages this one has its ups and downs. You also are a marriage. In societies where the social roles of the two sexes are clearly demarcated, the fact that the individual has two genders may not appear important. One can get by on the role, but where the social roles are not firm, this insight is crucial. That communication begins to wither, for one is out of touch with himself. And we can now see why sexuality is the human dimension of sex. In the dialectic between masculinity and femininity it is the self that presides.

The self preserves the dialectic, makes choices that affect its growth and prevents it from falling into a sheer antagonism of opposites. If the dialectic does fall into a sheer dualistic antagonism where the masculine and the feminine either are at war with each other or are isolated from each other so that they do not communicate through the self, if that happens as it does, for instance, in Ibsen's head of gobbler, the result is loss of self and perhaps suicide. Now the ambiguity of sexuality is what I had in mind when I asked in the title of this lecture about the possibility of a new sexuality. I could have interpreted that phrase to mean something like what we now call a sexual

revolution, all the new permissiveness and such like, but that would have seemed to me to have missed the real point. What I am really concerned about as what may be underneath all this phenomenon and which may have to do with something we might call a new sexuality is this ambiguity of the masculine and the feminine and the drive toward something which is androgynous, much more than we have seen in the recent past. In my answer you will see that in this sense not only is that possible, but also that it is urgently necessary to a large extent perhaps it is already here and I may even sound a little old fashioned to people as tolerant of sexual ambiguity as the younger generation seems to be. Still there are choices to be made and so I recognize the great gulf that separates, for example, the earlier DH Lawrence from the later.

The early Lawrence seemed to me to perceive clearly all that I have been trying to say. And in such a book as the rainbow, he traced the fortunes of sexuality, beginning with the breakup of the nuclear economic family as I have described it, and passing on through the industrial revolution as he knew it in Manchestershire and coming on down to the second and third generations and showing that as you came further down in that course of time the question of sexual identity became less clear but more interesting as you went long. What the later DH Lawrence was alas the spokesman for a supermasculinity that has the most unfortunate political and psychological consequences. The mantle of the later DH Lawrence has fallen somewhat a skew onto the shoulders of Norman

Mailer. His pursuit of an ideal masculinity leads as it did in Lawrence to the worship of violence and it is self-destructive for the violence is aimed at the feminine side of oneself. And in this connection what might one be tempted to say about the project and the life of Ernest Hemingway? Avoiding that oromanly strain in modern literature, one would be wise I think turns such as Joyce, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf. It is a little hard to find American novelists or playwrights to mention here though our poets beginning with Whitman have been among those whom I might call the bearers of the

androgynous imagination. I'm speaking of those who perceive that the self is not identical with its masculine or feminine nature and who recognize that there are many modes of love, most of them already present in our imaginations. When I speak of a new sexuality however and when I speak in praise of it I must also drop a couple of flares to warn any who follow me against two branches of the road that I believe lead nowhere good. And one of these roads have gone the cultists of homosexuality. What I have against them is not their homosexuality but their cultism. Homosexuality per se says there is that in me which longs for a person of my own sex

I shall seek him out. Sexual cult says since we cannot have the female on our own terms we fear her. We shall avoid her and create a mock femininity on our own. The key element in homosexual cult is mockery, sham. That is why it is so frequently found in occupations where sham is allowable. In the arts show business, fashion, decor, religion. The current name for this mockery is camp. Of an exceedingly witty it displays seldom a high order of creativity. To which I think there are a few notable exceptions one to be found in the work of Jean-Jean-A,

whose great strength is his willingness to lay bare the nihilism, to which homosexual cult is devoted. The other false road toward a new sexuality is one that I have followed far enough to encounter the figure of Norman O'Brown, exhorting me to leap on to and then over Sigmund Freud and have done with the tyranny of genital sexuality. Norman Brown beckons us to play in the fields of the Lord a childlike game called polymorphous perverse. Now my debt to Norman Brown is immense, not least when I bid him a due and return to the main and winding road. In life against death and even more in love's body, Brown converts his readers to belief in the omniscience and the omnipresence of the body, not the soul, not the spirit, not

the mind, but the body. And then lo and behold he confides that the body he is speaking of is not carnal. And then I turn away sorrowful, as said somebody else did once upon a time, because I had thought that if we were going to speak of the body, that's what we were going to mean. But no, as Norman Brown, the body he's been speaking of all this time is not carnal, and we are off now on an imaginary curve away and beyond the reality principle, rounding in a lovely orbit to the Eskitan, ascended into the heaven of imagination where there is neither male nor female, the body is not flesh and there is no more division to be overcome. When Brown gets through with the body of love there is no more eros in it, and I turn away as if from a vision of angels, knowing like Robert Frost that I have miles to go

before I sleep. My warning flair here is against those who would have us leap at once into paradise. To hear of paradise is one thing, to try to rent a house there is another. Now these visions that Norman Brown has spun so beautifully before us in those two books need not have been mentioned here if there were not some in the culture who seemed bent on putting them into practice, as a means of renewing life and art, and when they do they are very exciting for a moment and then they pass away. I think of the living theaters play paradise now for instance, and I wonder if you do paradise now what do you do for an encore? The becs are not only political anarchists but cultural and social anarchists as well.

I think also of Dionysus in 69, the apotheosis of Dionysus has arranged by Richard Checkner with some though too little debt to Euripides. I remember all its naked and sexless bodies, and I moan. They were trying, I think, to be those bodies Norman Brown had spoken about, bodies not carnal, and they succeeded in being only so many pounds of meat. No this kind of thing won't do, we had better not take the new sexuality to mean that we shall pass beyond sex, sex, secare, to divide. The story of sex is the story of the search for the other, the other that is complement to myself. When this basic truth is lost side-off, it is the feminine that suffers first and then the masculine by consequence.

The two roads I have rejected here are two forms of solipsism. They do not take seriously the fact that it is by the love of the other. It is by the love of the other that I enter into participation with the world. The other, the other person, the other from whom I am divided and with whom I would unite in the sex act and in the expression of my own sexuality, that other is the my point of entry into the world. Not just into another private psyche or private consciousness, that is dirty, it is my point of entry into the world. Lovers have always known this, that is why lovers have always spoken of their beloved as the world, and we have taken them wrongly perhaps to think that they were simply exaggerating. They are not exaggerating, they mean it quite literally you are that by which I gain

entry into the world. Thus the warning flares I am putting up are against those who do not quite understand the importance of the other. They take the ambiguity of sex to mean that one is sufficient to himself, but the real message of the ambiguity of sex is that one complex self has an affinity for another that the couple has an affinity for the universal intercourse. In society now we are looking are we not for a way to achieve an equality of the sexes. We do not yet have it by any means. Reality of the sexes must mean for us the equality of difference, not of sameness, yet things that are different can be equal only in the eyes of love.

Love but not logic, imagination but not science can treat what is other as an equal. Sexuality modulates to love. It is not only between the sexes, but if you allow me now an analogy, it is also between different races, between different ideologies and cultures that the modern world must establish equality. This it will be able to do only if it makes justice the instrument of love and it will be able to love only if it can build upon a mature sexuality.

There is a woman in every man, a man in every woman. Let the four lie down together, four shall be two, two shall be one for a time. There is an Arab in every Jew, a Jew in every Arab. Let these four be one for a time. I am the honky who lives in the black. He is the other who dwells in me, not knowing that we lay down for a time, oppression he cried, he was right, two and two only are strangers.

But four may be one for a time, thank you. You have been listening to Dr. Tom F. Driver, Professor of Theology and Literature at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Dr. Driver spoke on the question is a new sexuality possible, reflections on modernism in the arts and religion. This has been sexuality a search for perspective, a series of recorded lectures from an interdisciplinary colloquy on human sexuality held on the campus of Michigan State University. Editor for the series is Steve Jensen, this is a Michigan State University radio production.

This is the National Educational Radio Network.