A Plea for Eros

perverse at worst. And because sexual excitement always partakes of the culture itself, finds its images and triggers from the boundaries delineated in a given society, the whole subject is a messy business.
    Several years ago I read an article in
The New York Times
about a Chinese version of the Kinsey Report, the results of which suggested that Chinese women as a group experienced
no
sexual pleasure. This struck me as insane, but as I began to ponder the idea, it took on a kind of sense. 1 visited China in 1986 to find a place still reeling from the Cultural Revolution, a place in which prerevolutionary forms appeared to have been utterly forgotten. Maybe there can’t be much erotic life, other than the barest minimum, without an encouraging culture—without movies and books, without ideas about what it’s supposed to be. When I was fifteen, I remember watching
Carnal Knowledge
at the Grand movie theater in Northfield, Minnesota, my hometown. Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margret were locked in a mystifying upright embrace and were crashing around the room with their clothes on, or most of them on, banging into walls and making a lot of noise, and I had absolutely no idea what they were doing. It had never occurred to me in my virginal state that people made love
like that.
A friend had to tell me what I was seeing. Most teenagers today are more sophisticated, but only because they’ve had more exposure. I was thirteen before I stumbled over the word
rape
—in
Gone with the Wind.
I walked downstairs and asked my mother what it meant. She looked at me and said, “I was afraid of that.” Then she told me. But even after I knew, I didn’t really understand it, and I couldn’t imagine it.
    My point is this: A part of me has real sympathy for the Chinese couple, both university professors, who married, went to bed with each other faithfully every night, and, after a year, visited a doctor, wondering why no child had come from their union. They thought sleeping
beside
each other was enough. Nobody told them that more elaborate activity was necessary. Surely this is a case of an erotic culture gone with the wind. (In China among the class that could afford to cultivate it, the female body had become a refined aesthetic object. In Xi’an I saw a very old woman with bound feet. She could no longer walk and had to be carried. Those tiny, crippled feet were the gruesome legacy of a lost art. Binding feet made them small enough to fit into a man’s mouth.) The famous parental lecture on the birds and the bees, the butt of endless jokes and deemed largely unnecessary in our world, never took place in the lives of the two puzzled professors.
But
where were their bodies?
We imagine that proximity would be enough, that
natural
forces would lead the conjugal couple to sexual happiness. But my feeling is that it isn’t true, that all of us need a story outside ourselves, a form through which we imagine ourselves as players in the game.
    Consider standard erotic images. Garter belts and stockings still have a hold on the paraphernalia of arousal—even though, except for the purpose of titillation, they have mostly vanished from women’s wardrobes. Would these garments be sexy if you’d never seen them before? Would they mean anything? But we can’t escape the erotic vocabulary of our culture any more than we can escape language itself. There’s the rub. Although feminist discourse in America understandably wants to subvert cultural forms that aren’t “good” for women, it has never taken on the problem of arousal with much courage. When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn’t convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a “sick society,” the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics.
    Desire is always between a subject and an object. People may have loose, roving appetites, but desire must fix on an object even if that object is imaginary, or narcissistic—even if the self is turned into an other. Between two real people, the sticky part is beginning. As my husband says, “Somebody has to make the first move.” And this is a delicate