Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Riane Eisler.

In traditions that go back to the dawn of civilization, the female vulva was revered as the magical portal of life, possessed of the power of both physical regeneration and spiritual illumination and transformation.

Far from being seen as a “dirty cunt,” woman’s pubic triangle was the sacred manifestation of creative sexual power. And far from being of a lower, base, or carnal order, it was a primary symbol of the powerful figure known in later Western history as the Great Goddess: the divine source of life, pleasure, and love.

page 11
Why, when avoiding pain and seeking pleasure are such primary human motivations, have we for so long been taught that the pleasures of sex are sinful and bad? Why, even when sex is not condemned as evil (as in modern pornography), do we so often find it associated not with erotic love but with the marketing of women’s bodies or with sadism and masochism, with dominating or being dominated? Was it always so? Or was there a time before sex, woman, and the human body were vilified, debased, and commodified?
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Time and time again I kept coming back to the profound human yearning for connection, for bonds forged by love and trust through both sexuality and spirituality. I became particularly interested in the ecstatic experience, and in the at first seemingly incongruous erotic imagery in so many Eastern and Western religious traditions.

page 12
Gradually I began to see that this connection between sex and spirituality was not accidental; that in fact it has very ancient roots. I also began to understand why love is the key word not only in romantic but also in mystical literature, and why the poetry of mystics, like that of lovers, is so often erotic.
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I began to see that neither human society nor human history can be understood without taking into account the very different ways a society can use pain or pleasure to motivate human behavior.
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Most important, I began to understand that to overcome the pain and guilt, the exploitation and alienation, the tragic and often comic obstacles that have so embittered both women’s and men’s lives will require fundamental changes not only in how we view sex, spirituality, and society, but in how we view the human body, power, pleasure, and the sacred.
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page 14
This embedding of mistrust and control into the sexual relations between women and men has been an extremely effective way of ensuring that not only our most intimate relations but all our relations are tense and mistrustful. For if God created a world where man cannot even trust woman — the person with whom through both sex and birth he has the most intimate
physical relations — how can he be expected to trust anyone? If women are so inherently untrustworthy, how can they trust each other, or even themselves?
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All this leads directly to the second major device for using sex as a way of conditioning both women and men to fit into a social system based on force and-fear-backed rankings. This is the conditioning of both women and men to equate sexual arousal with the domination of woman by man .
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page 17
In Western mythology we find many references to the sacred sexual union scholars call the hieros gamos. This probably was an ancient partnership rite before it was distorted into a means for kings to legitimize their rule through union with a high priestess as the representative of the ancient Goddess. Another clue is what nineteenth century scholars termed temple prostitution. This was the practice we read about in Mesopotamian records where priestesses apparently initiated men through erotic rites into mystery cults in which giving and receiving pleasure — rather than enduring pain, as in many dominator religions — was viewed as an important spiritual experience.7 Thus, in the Sumerian narrative of Gilgamesh, hailed by scholars as the first Western epic, we read that a woman (whom translators alternately call a “love-priestess” of the Goddess, a “temple whore,” or a “temple courtesan”) transforms the wild Enkidu from a beast to a human being by having sex with him — thereby helping him “become wise, like a god.”8

There are also strong vestiges of sex as a religious rite in Eastern religious traditions — for instance, in Indian erotic iconography and Tantric yoga. But here — as in the Mesopotamian stories where love-priestesses are reduced to “prostitutes” — the use of erotic pleasure as a means of raising consciousness (or attaining higher spirituality) for both partners has also already been largely co-opted by a male-centered dominator view.
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page 24
Yet the evidence is compelling that for many thousands of years — much longer than the thirty to fifty centuries we call recorded history — this was the case. In traditions that go back to the dawn of civilization, the female vulva was revered as the magical portal of life, possessed of the power of both physical regeneration and spiritual illumination and transformation.

Far from being seen as a “dirty cunt,” woman’s pubic triangle was the sacred manifestation of creative sexual power. And far from being of a lower, base, or carnal order, it was a primary symbol of the powerful figure known in later Western history as the Great Goddess: the divine source of life, pleasure, and love.
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page 33
Thus, the notion that the human body as part of nature is somehow inferior to the mind and spirit is already articulated in European history during classical Greek and Roman times, especially by some of the philosophers known as Stoics. But it is only later with Saint Paul, and then conclusively with Saint Augustine, that the Christian idea that the human body, and particularly the body of woman, is corrupt—even demonic — begins to take hold.
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page 34
The mythic vehicle used by Augustine to support this notion was in its time, as the religious historian Elaine Pagels points out, a radical reinterpretation of the biblical story of Adam, Eve, and the Fall.25 For according to Augustine, the Fall from Paradise—which was supposedly caused by woman—made both sex and the human body irreversibly corrupt. Moreover, according to Augustine, the normal acts of sex and birth are, for all of humanity and for all time, the instruments of God’s eternal punishment of every woman and man for this “original sin.”

Augustine believed, and the Church eventually accepted, that to their dying day all human beings born on this earth through sexual intercourse bear the curse of Eve’s and Adam’s sin of disobedience. As Augustine declared in the Christian classic The City of God, every child born of the sexual union of woman and man is born tainted with sin—which is sexually transmitted through the male semen. He wrote:

God, the author of all natures but not of their defects, created man good; but man, corrupt by choice and condemned by justice, has produced a progeny that is both corrupt and condemned. For, we all existed in that one man, since, taken together, we were the one man who fell into sin through the woman who was made out of him before sin existed. Although the specific form by which each of us was to live was not yet created and assigned, our nature was already present in the seed [semen] from which we were to spring. And because this nature has been soiled by sin and doomed to death and justly condemned, no man was to be born of man in any other condition.”2

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page 35
As the medieval Church’s Malleus Maleficarum put it, “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.”.
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according to the Persian philosopher Zoroaster, there is a cosmic polarity between good as light and evil as dark, with nature and matter (the dark or earthly) inherently corrupt. Zoroaster is believed to have lived from 628 to 551 b.c. (before Christ)—or as religious scholars today prefer to call it, b.c.e. (before the Common Era).30 But although from a
di erent time and place, Zoroaster’s philosophy is very much like that of the Christian Augustine. It holds that “man’s” soul is imprisoned by matter, and that the female (who is said to be soulless) is the mother of all demons. And, like the medieval Christian notion that woman is a carnal source of evil, according to this much earlier Middle Eastern ideology, cosmic darkness and evil were awakened by a female creature—whose Persian name translates into English as “menstruation.”
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page 36
Like the view that the human body is somehow corrupting to the spirit, this view of woman, and particularly woman’s sexuality, as dangerous to man also did not spring up in a vacuum. It came out of the fundamental social shift from a partnership to a dominator model as the primary social “attractor” that, as we will see, brought with it a fundamental shift in how both pain and pleasure were socially constructed. Wherever this shift occurred — be it in India or Ireland, Persia or Japan, Europe or Asia Minor — it characteristically entailed the elevation of man over woman and of the so called spiritual or otherworldly over what is of this world, including our own bodies. Most dramatically, it required an almost total reversal and vilification of precisely what was once revered: nature, sex, pleasure, and — above all — the life-creating-and-sustaining sexual power of woman.
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page 39
Because the Tantric writings that have survived are already shrouded in many overlays of later dominator cultures (both Hindu and Tibetan), their emphasis is on the male. We are told that through maithuna a man achieves union with the life-giving or primal power of the Great Mother. But if maithuna is the path to union with the divine for the man, this is clearly also so for the woman. For it is through woman’s body — through her sexual arousal and her sexual pleasure — that the erotic energy of the Goddess is evoked. In Tantric practice, the man merges with the divine by giving woman sexual pleasure, thus helping to sustain the ecstatic experience for both. But woman’s body is the divine vessel—in Western symbology, the Holy Chalice or Grail.
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page 42
As we saw earlier, Augustine’s dogma that sex is inherently, and eternally, sinful became one of the mainstays of the political alliance between Christianity and the Roman emperors. But why did the Church fathers feel it necessary to take such an extreme position? Why were they so adamant about the evils of sex? Why did they condemn this most natural of acts — and this most natural of pleasures — and proclaim, as did Clement of Alexandria, that even within marriage, to engage in sex for any other reason than procreation is to “do injury to nature”?43

Again, religious scholars have offered a number of explanations. Some say that these men, who compulsively practiced sexual abstinence and often brutally mortified their flesh, were so sexually frustrated that they became emotionally and mentally unbalanced. But even assuming that all of them were sexually abstinent (and there is much evidence that many were not) this is still begging the question of how all this got started in the first place. It certainly fails to explain why the Church fathers should have deemed it necessary to threaten those who disobeyed their commands about sex not only with severe earthly penalties but with the most painful of eternal punishments—with nothing less than eternal torture in the fire and brimstone of hell.
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page 43
As G. Rattray Taylor has documented in his now-classic Sex in History, the Church’s persecutions of heretics—including the torture and burning of many thousands, and according to some accounts millions, of women accused of being witches — were not random. Rather, the Church most frequently focused on those “heretic” sects that honored women, gave them positions of leadership, and / or worshiped a female deity. And often the Church claimed that these sects engaged in immoral sexual practices.

What I am here suggesting is that the Church’s “moral” condemnation of sexuality was far more than a psychological quirk. It was an integral part of the Church’s highly political strategy to impose and maintain its control over a people who still dimly remembered, and clung to, much earlier religious traditions. If the Church was to consolidate its power and establish itself as the one and only faith, the persistence of myths and rituals from an earlier, well-entrenched religious system—in which the Goddess and her divine son or consort were worshiped, women were priestesses, and the sexual union between woman and man had a strong spiritual dimension — could not be condoned. These remnants had to be eradicated at all costs, either through co-option or suppression.

And so the Church took the position it did: that sexuality was tainted with sin unless used by men solely for the obviously necessary act of procreation.

Thus, the Bull God, who in the ancient religion was the son or consort of the Goddess, became the horned and hoofed devil of Christian iconography. And sex, once a sacred gift of the Goddess — along with woman — became the source of all carnal evil.

None of this is to suggest that the Christian Church is to blame for all our sexual ills. The association of sex with male domination and control began many thousands of years before Christianity became the official Western religion. In fact, it may well be that in at least some instances the Christian condemnation of sexual “licentiousness” was due to the by-then all-too common association of sex with violence and domination.

But the Church did not then — any more than it does now — condemn the association of sex with violence and domination or with sadomasochistic infliction of pain. Instead, it condemned sexual pleasure. And this truly unnatural condemnation of sex, and the horribly bloody extremes to which it led, only make sense if we look at them from this larger perspective.
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page 54
Specifically, I am suggesting that human, and before that hominid, social organization did not follow one single linear path but rather a variety of paths — some orienting primarily to a dominator model and others orienting more to a partnership model.
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page 57
But as Kano, de Waal, and others who have observed bonobos both in the wild and in captivity note, among these primates sexual relations play an important role in promoting social relations based more on mutual benefit — or more specifically, mutual pleasure. As Kano writes, “Most other animals copulate only as an act of reproduction.” But for bonobos nonreproductive copulations “diminish hostility and help to establish and maintain intimacy between females and males.”
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page 66
I believe that behind this human striving lies the evolution in our species of two unique, and related, sets of biological equipment: our highly developed mental, emotional, and spiritual capacities for thought, feeling, and what we call higher consciousness, and our highly developed sensual capacities for pleasure from male-female (as well as female-female
and male-male) and adult-infant bonding, which together can form the basis for a humane social organization. In short, as I will develop in the course of this book, I believe that contrary to what we have been taught (through, for example, the many stories of how spiritually evolved men have to struggle against their sexuality), human sexuality is not a hindrance but rather a help in the human quest for higher consciousness and more culturally and socially evolved and equitable forms of organization. Indeed, I believe that far from
being a “baser instinct” or “lower drive,” our human sexuality is part of what we might call a higher drive—an indispensable part of what makes our species human.
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Unlike other primate females, who are sexually active only during a portion of the year (35 percent for common chimps and 75 percent for bonobos), human females can be sexually active year round. Moreover, while other primates also seem to experience orgasms, for humans sexual pleasure seems to be of much longer duration and of much greater intensity,68 with the human female capable of repeated orgasms. As [Hungarian biologist Vilmos] Csanyi points out, all this is of great importance in promoting longer-lasting pleasurable associations that would encourage cooperation between the sexes — associations that, as the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela note, would have been further facilitated by our complex system of language as a uniquely human tool for communication.
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page 67
So Csanyi argues that, other things being equal, a social organization that encourages, rather than inhibits, more partnership oriented sexual and social relations between females and males would have been highly adaptive in early human evolution.

While I basically agree with Csanyi’s analysis, I am concerned that it may give the impression that what necessarily follows from this sexual pleasure bonding is a social organization composed of two-parent families where only biological parents are responsible for the care and protection of the young. Actually it can lead to a variety of family forms.
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page 68
This all takes us back full circle to the fact that ours is a species of enormous flexibility and variability. We are capable of a wide range of sexual and social behaviors. Which of these behaviors we exhibit is to a large degree a function of our cultural and social organization, which is, in turn, largely a function of a number of interrelated factors, such as our physical environment and our technology, as well as of the constant interaction between biological, social, and environmental factors.

But—and this is particularly relevant in our time—it is also a function of still another critical, and increasingly recognized, factor: conscious choice.
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page 111
Today the “discovery of paternity” explanation of male dominance is almost universally discounted by scholars.
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page 112
Even feminist scholars have been caught in the traps of such contradictory “explanations.” One of the most notable examples is the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In The Second Sex, a work that has rightly been recognized as a milestone in bringing to light the injustice of woman’s position, de Beauvoir constantly vacillates from one camp to the other. In some passages, she asserts that woman has always been subservient to man. In other passages she states that the great ideological and social shift from what she terms matriarchy to patriarchy was indeed a historical fact — however, one necessary if civilization were to progress.

page 119 – 120
[James] DeMeo based his conclusions on a large computerized data base correlating information on climate change over thousands of years with field studies of hundreds of different cultures around the world as well as with archaeological data. From this he constructed a global geographical review of human behavior and social institutions, which, as he writes, revealed a previously unobserved but clear-cut pattern. There was, he found, a correlation in preindustrial tribal societies between a harsh environment, the rigid social and sexual subordination of women, the equation of masculinity with toughness and warlikeness, and the repression and/or distortion of sexual pleasure28 (all subjects we will return to).

Moreover, of direct relevance to the question at hand is that this kind of social organization itself seems to have originated in times of harsh climatic changes. DeMeo describes these as times when droughts reduced areas that were once green semiforested savannahs to arid steppes and/or deserts. And he asserts that it was from these areas, which now could support only nomadic grazing rather than farming (and during acute droughts, not even that), that wave after wave of nomadic pastoral migrations and invasions ensued.

Specifically, DeMeo reports evidence from archaeological and paleoclimatic studies indicating that the great desert belt he calls Saharasia (extending roughly from northern Africa through the Middle East into central Asia) did not dry out until around 4000 b.c.e. He also presents data indicating that some of the severest environmental changes in the areas adjoining these deserts took place between 3500 and 3000 b.c.e. — a time when incursions by nomadic pastoralists into the adjoining areas of Europe and the Middle East greatly intensified.

DeMeo believes (and we will get back to this) that there is a direct connection between patrist or dominator patterns of social and sexual organization and physical and/or psychological trauma. He proposes that rather than being merely random or accidental, the making of patrist or dominator social institutions was the outcome of traumatic experiences and practices that evolved during severe climatic and environmental changes.

Also, and this is very important, he proposes that once established, these patterns of social and sexual organization were exported into more fertile regions, where this type of social and sexual organization was now perpetuated through the institutionalization of trauma (for example, through traumatic child-rearing practices that effectively inhibit respiration, emotional expression, and pleasure-directed impulses). He argues that these repressive social institutions, which, as he writes, result in “a chronic characterological and muscular armor,” to varying degrees still today block not only full physiological and emotional expression but sexual pleasure and full sexual satisfaction. And he repeatedly brings out how the institutionalized distortion of human sexuality—particularly severe and cruel controls over female sexuality—have been primary mechanisms for the maintenance of dominator (or, in his term, patrist) societies.
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page 123
Finally, in trying to piece together the puzzle of dominator origins, there is still another factor relating to pastoralism as a technology that I think is worth looking at. This is that pastoralism relies on what is basically the enslavement of living beings, beings that will be exploited for the products they produce (for example, milk and, when processed, cheese) and that will eventually be killed.
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page 147
These laws—and the “morality” they enforced—played a major role in the process that brought about the fundamental shift in social and sexual relations we have been examining. The shift from descent through the mother (or matriliny) to descent through the father (or patriliny) was a very important part of this process. It led to the invention of one-sided
monogamy, along with prostitution, adultery, and illegitimacy, as well as the harsh punishment of women for any sexual (or even personal) independence. Moreover, it was a process that, beginning with the first nomadic incursions into Old Europe and the Fertile Crescent, went along with the institutionalization and glorification of warfare. Most important in
terms of what we are here exploring, it was a process in which sexuality, not only women’s but also men’s, was radically redefined.
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page 153
The domestication of women — that is, the use of women to serve men and breed for them like domestic animals such as cows or asses (with which, not coincidentally, they are lumped together in the Tenth Commandment) — was also serious for men in still another fundamental way. For integral to this process of trying to convert women into male property was also the need to try to convert men from fully sentient and aware human beings into psychosexual automatons: androcratized men who could perpetuate, condone, and even enjoy personal and sexual relations based not on mutuality of benefits and caring but on one-sided exploitation and oppression.

Not that all men then, any more than now, conformed to this ideal of masculinity. Indeed, many men have throughout history rejected these types of roles. But dominator societies are not now, nor were they then, run by such nonconformist men, who are all too often still ridiculed today as “effeminate.”
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page 156 157
But for all their idealization of the power of the phallus, if we look at the compulsive sexual excesses of the Romans, we see that what they reflect is actually a sexual powerlessness: the powerlessness to feel real sexual and emotional fulfillment. For what we are today learning about sexually obsessive and compulsive behaviors is that they generally stem from an inability to fully experience bodily sensations and a full range of emotions. In other words, behind the seemingly insatiable appetite for sex and cruelty of many Romans—their famous sexual orgies and the sadistic sexual practices of some of their emperors65—lies a dominator psychosexual armoring that effectively blocks the full experiencing of bodily and emotional sensations.

It is this same psychosexual armoring that in our time continues to drive men to ever more sexual conquests, to the “excitement” of warfare, and to all the other frantic compulsions that fuel both war and the war of the sexes.
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So it is not only women whose sexuality has been suppressed and distorted in dominator societies, to the degree that many women still today are incapable of expressing themselves sexually, much less reaching orgasm. As we will explore in Part II, it is also men’s sexuality that has been distorted and stunted, so that for all their obsession with the power of the phallus, many men are still today essentially cut o from the very essence of sexual power: the capacity to freely give and fully experience sexual pleasure.
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page 158
As for spirituality, as we will see in the remaining chapters of our exploration of Western prehistory and history, it too was radically altered. Severed from nature and from the erotic and pleasurable, its focus likewise shifted—as sex, birth, and rebirth were gradually replaced by suffering, punishment, and death as the central motifs of both myth and life.
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page 181
The mystical quest—the search for that which mystics sometimes call the Absolute—seems to be a uniquely human experience. And so also does the mystical or ecstatic state, which is said to provide those experiencing it a sense of indescribable inner peace, bliss, and even access to healing powers, along with a sense of unity or oneness with what mystics through the ages have called Divine Love.

There are many roads to an ecstatic or mystic state. The art of the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and Minoan Crete suggests that probably very early in Western culture, dance was used to attain mystical (or what we sometimes today call shamanic) trances. Since ancient times people have also used meditation, breathing exercises, hallucinogens,1 fasting, and deprivation of sleep to induce heightened or altered states of consciousness. And, as we have seen, there is strong evidence that sexual ecstasy was once also an important avenue to mystical or ecstatic states.

This ancient perception that sex involves what we today call an altered state of consciousness, and even beyond this, that the sexual union of female and male can be an avenue to spiritual bliss and illumination, is still evident in many Eastern religious traditions.
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page 191
However, it is important to again emphasize that contrary to popular belief, this kind of dualism is not a Western idiosyncrasy. Nor did it originate with Christianity. It goes back to much earlier non-Christian Eastern cults, such as that of Zoroaster in Persia, as well as to Western philosophers such as the Greek and Roman Stoics, who also argued that man and spirit are superior to woman and nature. As for sex, although many free Greek men indulged in heterosexual sex with wives, concubines, and slaves and often also had homosexual relations with young boys, the Greek medical writer Epicurus contended, long before Christianity, that sex is hostile to good health. And Soranus of Ephesus, like some of the leaders of the Christian Church, even extolled the virtues of continued virginity within marriage.
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page 212
Maturana and Varela, however, specifically relate the emergence of language as a human tool to facilitate sharing and cooperation to sex, arguing that the development of language as a means of communicating in intimate relations was facilitated by the human female’s year-round sexuality. They note that this would have tended to promote more sustained and cooperative contacts between females and males, and thus more need and opportunity to communicate.
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page 214
As the anthropologist Ashley Montagu writes in his pioneering work on this subject, Touching, it is from loving touch that we derive our most intense physical and emotional feelings. It is from loving touch that we obtain not only pleasure but also comfort when we are in pain, hope when we despair, and even beyond this, that indispensable sense that we are, after all, not alone in this world but connected with others of our kind.
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page 215
As the psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz writes in The Chemistry of Love, it is this reward by chemicals that in our species probably explains the euphoria of “falling in love.” For this state, as well as the intense pleasures of sexual love, seems to be associated with rising levels of certain chemicals, probably phenylethylamine, an amphetamine-like substance. Such chemical rewards are most probably also a factor in the pleasure mothers, fathers, and other adults (as well as children) can derive from caring for babies and why people in loving relationships speak of a great sense of contentment—in other words, pleasure. For here again chemicals, probably endorphins, come into play.
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page 218
If, as appears to be the case, the evolution of human sexuality and our very long period of childhood dependency led to our uniquely powerful human yearning for connection — and with this, to the great pleasure we humans derive from loving and being loved — then a social organization oriented more to partnership than domination is more congruent with our biological evolution.
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page 242
Some of what has until now been lumped under the catch-all phrase “the sexual revolution” is in fact part of the dominator sexual counter-revolution.
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page 246 -247
And the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, famous for his advocacy of freedom for men, actually advocated the opposite for women, asserting that girls “should be restricted from a young age.” For, according to Rousseau, “docility” is something women will “need all their lives, since they will always be in subjection to a man or to men’s judgements, and will never be allowed to set themselves above these judgements.”4

Rousseau’s view that women will, and should, always be subjected to men was, as the political historian Linda Kerber writes in Women of the Republic, not just a philosophical point. Kerber notes that Rousseau’s “sadomasochistic sexual tastes gave him a substantial personal stake” in this position.
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page 250
Clearly the Church’s obsessive vilification of sex and woman was a means of preventing sexual bonding between women and men. If men have to be protected from being “polluted” by woman’s sexuality, sexual love is dangerous. And so also is any relaxation of male control over women.

But the Church’s constant association of sex not with pleasure but with eternal punishment and pain was not only a way of alienating men from women, and thus justifying and maintaining male dominance; it also served to alienate men from their own bodies, their own emotions, and above all, from their human need for loving connection. And in so doing it effectively served not only to distort men’s and women’s sexuality; it also effectively conditioned men and women to distort their most basic human need for connection (the need for sex and love) into an acceptance of domination, coercion, and repression.
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page 263 – 264
A notable exception to this fragmented approach was the German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who introduced what he called sex-economic sociology to explain both the rise of Hitler in Germany and why in Russia “the replacement of private capitalism by state capitalism has not in the least altered the typical helpless and authoritarian character structure of the masses of people.”43 A refugee from Nazi Germany and a Marxist profoundly disillusioned with Soviet-style communism, Reich in 1933 published his masterpiece, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. In it he noted that one of the most e ective means through which repressive systems have historically maintained themselves is through the authoritarian family, which is “the factory of its structure and ideology,” and particularly through “sexual suppression.” He also noted that fascism was “not a modern phenomenon but one with deep historical psychosexual roots.”44

When I first discovered Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism in the early 1970s (it was banned in the United States, but I was able to get a copy from an underground press), I was tremendously excited. But after a while I was also saddened. Not only because this important work had been banned, but because despite Reich’s important insights into how both male and female sexuality have been distorted to maintain hierarchies of domination—and despite his assertion that sexual repression and political repression are inextricably intertwined—in the end Reich again drifted o into the all-too familiar male-centered scholarship. And he thus lost sight of the centrality of something he himself noted: that at the heart of the sexual and political repression he so deplored lies the sexual and political domination of women by men.45

What Reich failed to note is that even though the social construction of male sexuality in dominator societies tends to deprive men of their full capacity for sexual pleasure, the issue is not one of sexual freedom alone. In fact, sexual freedom for men is not inconsistent with a repressive, authoritarian, and highly violent society in which men are conditioned to express the kind of sexuality that equates masculinity with domination.
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page 314
Moreover, as Wilhelm Reich observed, male ejaculation is not the same as a full orgasmic experience.42

FN 42
For example, as Karen Wright writes, “Paralysis victims bereft of feeling below the waist often get erections and ejaculate without having a climax and prepubescent boys can achieve orgasm, even multiple ones, without ejaculating” (Wright 1992, 56).
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For instance, the psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswick found that men who defined human relations in terms of rigid masculine- superior and feminine-inferior roles often described sex as merely a “hygienic release of tension.” And it is significant, as she also reported in the classic work on this subject, The Authoritarian Personality, that these were the same men who scored high on the F (for fascist) psychological measurements: men characterized by extreme prejudice and intolerance toward Jews, blacks, and other “inferior” and/or “dangerous” out-groups.

Similarly, a 1971 study of German political extremists from both the right and left (including members of the leftist terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang) found that these men generally suffered from problems of sexual dysfunction, including the inability to achieve orgasm.
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page 319
And we would further know that it is precisely in those societies and families where women are most rigidly dominated by men that mothers are the most controlling of their sons — the male on whom they can most effectively vent their pent-up anger and frustration.
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page 341
Indeed, as psychologists such as Phyllis Chesler and Paula Caplan have pointed out, modern psychiatric theory has all too often been an exercise in mother bashing.32 This is not to say that mothers, and particularly mothers socialized to transmit dominator norms to their children, do not unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, engage in abusive and violent behaviors that damage both their daughters and sons. Just as women in rigid dominator societies often express their self-hate as “inferior” women in ambivalence and hostility toward their daughters, they also unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, express some of their resentment and ambivalence toward men in their relations with the only males over whom they can, at least for a time, legitimately wield power: their sons.
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page 349
But it is only today – as more and more women and men struggle to shift their intimate relations from domination to partnership—that the connection between sex and spirituality is once again being more generally rediscovered.

Some of the books exploring this connection are by men—for example, Georg Feuerstein’s Sacred Sexuality, Peter Redgrove’s The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real, William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, and Robert Anton Wilson’s satirical Coincidence. But most are by women, as a new genre of women’s writings about sex is gradually beginning to emerge: writings that link sex with a full-bodied spirituality imbued with erotic pleasure.

In critical ways these writings are even more radical departures from convention than the more explicit books on sex now being written by women. For what they deal with is the reclamation of nothing less than woman’s ancient sexual power—and with this, the powerful archetype of the prehistoric Goddess.

Some of these writings are by theologians (or as some prefer to be called, thealogians) such as Carol Christ, Elizabeth Dodson Gray, and Judith Plaskow. Others are by poets like Audre Lorde and Barbara Mor; artists such as Judy Chicago and Monica Sjöö; and art historians such as Elinor Gadon and Gloria Orenstein. Some are by lesbians and others by heterosexuals. Some are by women such as Vicki Noble, Starhawk, Luisah Teish, and Donna Wilshire, reclaiming for themselves powerful ancient roles as healers, shamans, and ritualists or priestesses.46 Most invoke the ancient Goddess as the source of erotic power, although a few, like Carter Heyward, still write of her as God.47 But whatever term they use, their focus is on resacralizing both woman and the erotic—which they de ne as inclusive of, but not exclusive to, sexuality—and on the erotic as empowering.
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page 363
Perhaps the most glaring example is that while we have no lack of religious ceremonies to deal with death, we as yet have hardly any rites to imbue the act of giving birth with sacred meaning. Quite the contrary, in the Bible we are told a woman is tainted and unclean from giving birth — a complete reversal of the ancient view of giving birth as a sacred act in image after image of pregnant and birthing Paleolithic and Neolithic female figures.
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page 365
Also not surprisingly, as women become less loath to acknowledge to themselves and others that natural processes such as birthing and breast-feeding can actually give rise to sensations of erotic pleasure and that women’s times of menstrual bleeding are often those when they are most sexually receptive and aroused, women also report much more positive and pleasurable feelings about their bodies — and about being women.
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page 369
Another supposed sexual perversion for which nineteenth-century doctors sometimes prescribed even more sadistic treatments was “nymphomania,” which became a medical obsession during a period of feminist rebellion that sometimes included demands for greater sexual freedom. In fact, as Carol Groneman [1994] points out, doctors (all men, who therefore had no direct experience with what is and is not normal female sexuality) sometimes diagnosed nymphomania for just about anything that to them seemed out of line with the nineteenth-century idea that normal women have far less sex drive than men—from women feeling more passion than their husbands to adultery and even flirting.
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page 463
As the theologian Carter Heyward [1989] writes:

As we come to experience the erotic as sacred, we begin to know ourselves as holy and to imagine ourselves sharing in the creation of one another and of our common well-being. As we recognize the faces of the Holy in the faces of our lovers and friends, as well as in our own, we begin to feel at ease in our bodyselves— sensual, connected, and empowered. We become resources with one another of a wisdom and a pleasure in which heretofore we have not dared believe.

We begin to realize that God moves among us, transcending our particularities. She is born and embodied in our midst. She is ground and figure, power and person, this creative Spirit, root of our commonlife and of our most intensely personal longings. As the wind blows across the ocean, stirring up the seacreatures, causing them to tumble, rearranging them, the erotic crosses over among us, moving us to change the ways we are living in relation. Touched by this sacred power, we are never the same again.

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