In Praise Of Promiscuity, Infidelity, And Sexual License - Men Were Not Made To Live In A Cabin In The Woods

Abel Ferrara directed the movie Welcome to New York, the fictionalized story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (the fictional Devereaux), a libertine and leading candidate for the presidency of France.  When accused of prostitution, bawdry, and procuring he said, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes.  All women look the same with their clothes off'. 

 

Sexual libertinage, promiscuity, or addiction – whatever it was called by Strauss-Kahn's accusers – in his eyes is morally neutral.  Prostitution has always been tolerated if not legal in France, and women are as much commodities as those he has always traded on world markets.   The fact that his sex drive was more insatiable than others is not the point.

The final shot of the film shows Devereaux staring blankly at the camera, perhaps the only suggestion the director makes that despite his arrogance, defiance, and ability to survive and profit, Devereaux is chastened, vulnerable, and aware. 

However the  penultimate scene – that of Devereaux propositioning the maid – is the real moral closure of the film.  He is virile, irrepressible, contemptuous of the bourgeoisie and its myopic values, and subversive of them.  He is reminiscent of Fyodor Karamazov, the father of the brothers of Dostoevsky’s novel, who is as sexually driven, condescending, and irreverent.  Both men are attractive in their will, defiance of the meek, timid, and sexually repressed. 

Ferrara’s film is particularly interesting because it was produced in a very politically correct time and dealt with subjects– accusations of rape, infidelity, and sexual ambition -  which are reported in only predictably correct ways.  Devereaux’ legal proceedings and acquittal do not interest Ferrara.  The film is as ambiguous on this score as the claims and defense of the case on which it was based.  Ferrara is only interested in showing an absolutely confident, determined, willful, unapologetic, and unrepentant man in the face of sanctimonious social censure.

The film is especially important because it is an indictment of today’s increasingly Puritanical American culture.   Sex in the name of civil protections and women’s rights has been legalized, sanitized, and nearly considered off-limits unless it is between two consenting, married adults.   Sex for Devereaux was necessary and absolute.  As in the case of most older men, sex with younger women is their only hope of retaining the potency and vitality of their youth.  Although sexual conquest is enough for most men, Devereaux could not stop there.   It was the sex act in all its twisted diversity that mattered.  And what was wrong with that?

Infidelity, always the object of derision in America, is only a sidelight in Ferrara’s film.   It is of absolutely no consequence in the arranged marriage of the Devereaux and no consequence at all within the context of individual will.  Nietzsche is famous for his Superman; but he was right in his statement that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of his will.   Devereaux is a perfect Nietzschean Superman.  Men always cheat on their wives because sexuality is the defining characteristic of human nature; and lovers, the variety of sexual experience, the roll call of conquests, and the loosening of the traces, make us – especially men - what we are.

Fyodor Karamazov is often dismissed by modern critics as an unduly authoritarian father, for his emotional dismissiveness of them, and for his all-consuming selfish desires.  Yet Fyodor is the most attractive character of all the Karamazovs.  He wants no part of Alyosha’s religiosity or of Ivan’s academic atheism.  Dmitri is weak, susceptible, and morally suspect.  Only Fyodor – like Nietzsche’s Superman and Ferrara’s Devereaux – follows his own instincts as an expression of will, a scorn for bourgeois society, and an understanding that dismissiveness and pleasure are all that count in a world that amounts to very little.

Sharp edges, moral imperfections, and stubborn sexuality are all universally condemned in American progressives’ desire to reform the world.   Great statesmen– FDR, LBJ, MLK, Thomas Jefferson, and many others – are now judged more for their personal rectitude than their political leadership.  Jefferson’s sex life with slaves; Martin Luther King’s Lothario lifestyle, Roosevelt’s longtime mistress; Clinton’s dalliance with an intern are now judged alongside of war and peace, social reform, justice, and equality.

Of course ambitious and intelligent men will do just about anything to get what they want; and since power breeds even more  marital and social infidelity, no one should be surprised at their stretching the truth, evasion of accountability, and amoral pursuit of their goals. 

Our lenses have become distorted by sanctimony and idealism.  The world is no different than it was in the days of empire and long before.  Men and women are just as territorial, protective, violent, and ambitious as in the days of Henry VI or Elizabeth I.  Humanity is not progressing, but acting as it always has. 

If anything America has become even more censorious since the debut of the film over twelve years ago.  The MeToo movement declared the inviolate sanctity of women and put men - all men on notice.  Men, they said, were genetically predatory, sexually ambitious, and fueled by hormonal excess were dangerous and threatening. 

A firewall was put up between men and women, and men were to be the trick dogs of the circus.  Just as Miss Julie in Strindberg's play of the same name made her valet Jean jump through hoops to prove her female dominance, American women said enough is enough, women must be restored to the pedestal on which they have always belonged, and sex will be at their command, no one else's. 

MeToo followed on the heels of No Means No, an even more telling Strindberg-esque movement to bind men to a check list of 'may I's', an emasculating and sexually depressing exercise of feminist fantasy

Of course one does not have to read through many volumes of literature to find examples of men’s frustrated pursuit of women.  A woman’s ‘no’ was part of her allure, ‘playing hard to get’ was part of an elaborate pas de deux, a mating dance of sexual demurral, passion, and conquest. A woman’s currency was her honor and her chastity. Her marriage might be arranged and her final worth a matter of dowry, family name, and ancestry; but the ballet was still her way of testing the interest and resolve of her suitors, exciting them with her demure sexuality, and promising much more.

So, what has happened ? Why has the age-old sexual ballet turned sour, nasty, retributive, and punitive? One would have thought that with the final liberation of women, the game would remain the same, but the rules of engagement – pursuit and submission – would be altered.  There would be no need for shy demureness, reticence, or chastity on the part of women; and instead of a playful hand-slap men would get a firm ‘No’. In other words women would have no reason whatsoever for refusing sex other than lack of interest or desire; and men, now appreciating women’s new sexual authority and seeing a wide-open field, would not bother to persist.

Coyness, flirtation, perfume, décolleté would not disappear; and if anything would become more provocative; and it was up to men to negotiate with new sexy-cum-defiantly independent women. Most men I know have learned quickly and well.  Women are just as interested in having sex, bonding, mating, and marrying as ever before; and just as in Abelard and Heloise’s day, the only conquest that counts is the mutual one. A lady’s voluntary and passionate submission is a tribute.  Force makes no sense at all. If you can’t win a woman’s heart with charm, confidence, and patience, then it isn’t even worth trying.

So the current crisis about rape is a mystery to me. What has happened to the beautiful game? Have men forgotten that women have not changed and still respond to respect, male confidence, and sexual interest? Have women read only half of the new sexual charter and not bothered with the part about sexual maturity and responsibility? Have men gotten caught between the sexual expectations of a libertine age and the new authority of women?

It is surprising that men need to be told “No means no”. Of course it does, and is expected in any relationship; but as true and honest a declaration it may be at one moment, a firm ‘No’ may turn into a warm ‘Yes’.  That’s how the game of mutual conquest is played – figuring out just when ‘No’ becomes ‘Yes’.  There are no absolutes in sexual gaming as any sexually successful man – or woman – knows.

And so it is that Ferrara's film resets the compass and returns sex to its proper, uninhibited place in human affairs.  The sexual libertine - Strauss-Kahn, Valmont (Liaisons Dangereuses), or Lothario (an Italian name used as shorthand for an unscrupulous seducer of women, based upon a character in The Fair Penitent, a 1703 tragedy by Nicholas Rowe where Lothario is a libertine who seduces and betrays Calista) - is simply the asymptote of sexual behavior on the bell curve which ranges from zero to the uxorious, to the timid and bashful to the confident, limitlessly ambitious and equally limitlessly attractive. 

God's greatest irony as suggested by Konstantin Levin in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is that He created an intelligent, sentient, creative, humorous, and marvelous being, gave him but a few decades to live, and then consigned him for all eternity in the cold, hard ground of the steppes.  A far greater irony is that God created men with a lifelong desire for women but granted them but the same few decades to fulfill it. 

Men like Strauss-Kahn, JFK, MLK, LBJ and ten thousand other men of power and influence have the means and wherewithal to live out their lives in the manner intended; and many others with will, ambition, and a dismissal of risk do the same.  These are men who have rejected women's harping, religion's warnings, and society's opprobrium and lived their lives to the fullest. 

While Henry David Thoreau might have thought that a life of solitude and contemplation in the forest was one's true calling, and while sadhus climb the Himalayas and contemplate The One, hoping for enlightenment, most men have intimations of Strauss-Kahn.  If a man was created with a lifelong sexual desire and granted but a few years to fulfill it, then isn't the libertine the Nietzschean hero?

Most men, alas, are far from that ideal, sexually sedentary, complaisant, and muddling through.  Perhaps this censorious, feminized, Puritanical ethos will retreat one day, and life can be led without women's j'accuse, but not for a while.  In the meantime, let us fete the Lotharios and Valmonts of the world and cheer them on...and maybe harvest our own field of delights. 

A Washington Tale - A Squawky Woman Is Seduced By A Conservative And Life Becomes A Bed Of Roses

Marfa Phipps had tried being a social activist. She couldn't quite pinpoint the moment she turned from her patrician past - Chippendale, Townsend, Revere in the living room, Turner and Copley on the staircase walls, the memoirs of her Aunt Abigail, direct descendant of John Davenport of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the New Haven Plantations and founder of Yale College.- but she did, decisively.  

It couldn't have been at Miss Porter's, the finishing school in Farmington; it couldn't have been at Vassar.  That school which had mistakenly decided to go co-ed once Yale did, immediately lost cachet and applications and dropped into the third tier of American institutions of higher learning; and with her desultory grades at Miss Porter's she was lucky to gain admission to Vassar.  

No, Vassar in Marfa's time was a far cry from what it was in the halcyon Seven Sisters era - the equal of the Ivies in ever respect - and it had become a loopy, artsy kind of place, lots of gay boys, and girls like herself who couldn't make the grade elsewhere.  So no campus activism, no student protests.

She struggled with her courses - even the ones in 'Communication', the modern catchall for just about everything.  Courses on 'culture' were her favorite, travelogues really, all about the customs, practices, and mores of different countries, but the required courses on statistical method stumped her completely, and only thanks to a generous donation by Aunt Abigail who was a Vassar graduate herself, did Marfa graduate. 

'Now what?' was the girl's dilemma.  Her classmates were headed off to this and that, internships, volunteering, marriage.  One even became a nun - Bridget Connor a sweet girl with a vocation which didn't keep her from 'Sapphic' love, as the Vassar administrators called it, happy that the institution was finally becoming diverse.  Bridget went off to the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Feasterville and was apparently quite happy in the company of so many girls in such a religious setting. 

Marfa, however, had no calling or no real aptitude for anything, so she drifted for a year until invited by a Vassar classmate who knew exactly what she wanted to hike the Shenandoah. Nature for Emily was like Jesus was for Bridget - a savior who only had to call once and was heard - and the hiking through God's country would wake Marfa to the bright potential of creation. 

It was a buggy slog through woodsy tangles, thickets, and brambles.  What had she been thinking? and how on earth did Emily ever get religion this way.  Yes, there were some nice views, but hardly worth the climb, and Marfa only ended up tired, fagged, and bored silly.  If that was nature, it was for the birds. 

'One more time, puleeze', begged her friend disconcerted that Marfa had not had the uplift promised.  'We'll go west', Emily said, 'big sky country'; but although the landscape differed, the result was the same.  The valleys were dull, endlessly wide, the mountains dark, gloomy places.  

So, like many girls of her background and education, Marfa drifted to Washington where Emily found her a job at a non-profit agency, a kind of pick-and-choose office where new employees were placed, based on interest and preference, in Civil Rights, The Environment, or Gender, but could do a round-robin and try a little of each to see which fit best. 

It took, this easy-going progressivism - nothing too demanding or arduous.  She could dabble to her heart's content and still feel satisfied at the end of the day. Gradually she became more interested in her work, invested more energy and will into lesbians for example, or the fate of the Apalachicola River.  She could not call herself an activist - her work was still too marginal and incidental to really count - but she felt she was on her way; and it wasn't long before she wore the mantle of The Movement proudly.  

Yet, it still didn't feel right.  It wasn't quite the buggy slog of Nature but close to it.  All those collegial dinners in Dupont Circle half-basements, endless colloquies on the plight of this or that, marches, protests, speeches.  She was about to give it all up and dive into uncharted waters when she met Lance Reventlow, Co-Chairman of the Washington Conservative Coalition, Californian, surfer-ready, tousled blonde hair, blue eyes, and a graceful swimmer's body.  Lance in fact had swum for Santa Barbara and was at the top of the list for the next summer Olympics. 

They met at the Old Ebbitt Grille across from the Treasury Department, and after a few rounds of oysters and martinis Marfa had forgotten his Trump credentials, his Republican ambitions, and his off-handed slurs about her constituents - the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten - and agreed to go off with him. 

It had been ages since she had had a proper roll in the hay - somehow the time was never right, work had become more obsessive, and men like Lance simply didn't come around all that often - but now, all had fallen into place. 

If there could be December-May affairs why not liberal-conservative ones?  Why did intimacy depend on political philosophy. 

'It's about the sex, isn't it?', Coleman Silk's friend Nathan Zuckerberg says to him after he learns of Coleman's potentially disastrous relationship with a young school janitor (The Human Stain) and so it was that Marfa's friends assumed the same thing about her and Lance.  She couldn't have given up her solidly progressive beliefs that easily unless it were some Lawrentian epiphanic sex, and more power to her although they hoped they would never be put in that compromising situation. 

And how Lance did go on!  The inner city was a sinkhole of entitlement, gross indifference, intellectual and moral corruption, and transplanted tribalism.  Transgenders were freaks of nature, lopping off perfectly good parts of their bodies and gluing on others just to make a point.  Equitable redistribution of wealth was taking from earners and giving to layabouts.  Immigrants must pay their own way, demonstrate their viability and utility or stay home in their mud-and-wattle thatched huts. 

Best of all, Donald Trump was the greatest thing since sliced bread, a popular hero, a doer, a Machiavellian genius, and a Borscht Belt comedian far funnier and more outrageous than Shecky Green or Jackie Mason - a mensch, the long-awaited Founding Father of the New America. 

Give it to me.  Give it to me, Your Royal Highness' is what Carolyn Burnham, failed realtor (American Beauty) says to The King of Real Estate as he works her over in bed; and this is exactly what Marfa said, in so many words, to Lance Reventlow.  Fuck the rest of it, fuck me! was her litany, her canon, her liturgy. 

Did Lance turn her into a conservative? Possibly, but those trysts in the Mayflower, those afternoon sexual idylls wiped the slate clean as far as she was concerned. Form follows function, or something like that said the Bauhaus architects of the Thirties, and this is what sex was all about for Marfa, or at least she saw some attributive meaning.  

In any case, politics either Left or Right, were of absolutely no interest whatsoever; but in most cases like this when the chador is removed, when women can see clearly once again, and when politics becomes just an irrelevant pastime, life begins.

'I heard she was living with some cowboy in Montana', a friend of Marfa's said. 

'Sounds just about right' said another. 

Donald Trump Entertains The King Of England, And The No Kings Crowd Says, 'See, What Did We Tell You?'

We Americans love British royalty. Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey were both long-running serials. Victorian England has always had a hold on America.  Empire, Churchillian values, confidence, reverence for God, King, and Country, the discipline of Eton and Harrow that made leaders of men; and above all, pomp and ceremony. 

In all Edwardian soap operas we may have rooted for the scullery maid or the footman, enjoyed the camaraderie and earthy enjoyment of the staff, but we cared only for the toffs.

Victorian and Edwardian England seem remote, but the images of an even earlier England, that of the imperial King George who ruled us in the 1700s, are American emblems.  Our Founding Fathers looked like Englishmen, dressed like them, behaved as aristocratically as their forefathers, built English-style homes as graceful and elegant as the country manors of England.



Our Eastern city neighborhoods are English. Georgetown, Beacon Hill, and Rittenhouse Square are like South Kensington or Holland Park.

We idolize our movie stars.  Although their glitzy, glamorous lives are far beyond our reach, they are not that far. Thousands of women have looked in the mirror and seen a face as classically beautiful as Angelina Jolie or as pouting and sexy like Scarlett Johansson. With a little luck and a few connections, one might be in Hollywood too, they say.

Aristocratic England is all the more appealing because it is remote and impossibly unattainable. We would fumble and drop our forks at Downton Abbey or trip over the Persian carpet at Montpelier.  English Lords and their estates, fox hunting, understatement, and chauffeurs are way beyond us.  We can imagine having a beer with Matthew McConaughey, but not the Third Earl of Hereford. 

The administration of John F Kennedy was called Camelot because it came as close to English aristocracy as possible for an American republic.  Americans disregarded the fact that Jack was a shanty Irish son of a crooked bootlegger and looked only to the sophistication, high culture, and royal taste of the president and his wife.  Robert Frost, poet emeritus of America read verse at Kennedy's inauguration.  Pablo Casals, renowned cellist played at state dinners.  Jackie refurnished the White House in simple, early American and classic European style. 

Camelot came close to Buckingham Palace but not that close.  Beneath it all Kennedy was as much of an Irish bar fighter as his father.  

The images of all the Trump-hating, No Kings zealots smiling while applauding King Charles III's speech to Congress was an example of this royal idolatry.  Charles is the King of England after all, heir to thousands of years of aristocratic rule, the greatness of empire, the civilizing rule of the dark regions of the world, the genesis of democracy and the rule of law.  In those moments when he stood before the Congress and spoke in his plummy, marvelously elegant way, all thoughts of colonialism, white supremacy, predatory rule disappeared. He was an example of rule beyond politics, generosity, and good will swept away such ideas, and the room was his. 

The No Kings claques in the audience, caught off guard, and giving the king warm, welcoming, applause, quickly regained their form as they mingled in the rotunda, whispering innuendoes and suggestions about Donald Trump and his regal ambitions.  But the chatter was toned down, circumspect, and in fact quite compromised.  If this - that is, the elegant, composed, supremely patrician Charles - was kingship, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. 

Vicki Barton had been in the phalanx of the No Kings protests in Washington. A fiercely harsh and demanding woman, she took all the ills of kingship on her shoulders and marched with a heavy burden.  The President of the United States, Donald J Trump had every intention of becoming a king.  Well, not exactly.  This crass, unschooled, brute could never match Louis XIV, Henry VIII, or the great shahs, emperors, and czars of of the world; and his reign would be a meretricious affair; but kingship has many faces.  Look at what Caligula did to Rome. 

Now, if Trump could be like Charles, Vicki thought as the King of England made his way through official Washington, very properly attired, gentlemanly, and acting with grace and charm, then she might think differently, but Trump was a rube, a clown, a second-rate vaudevillian.  'I hate him', she said, hoping this bit of venom would dispel traitorous thoughts. 

Vicki never looked past the end of her nose when it came to politics.  Donald Trump was ipso facto an evil man, the very incarnation of evil, a man endowed with every Satanic ambition and hatred of humankind as his hellish patron. What more was there to say? What parsing, what exegesis, what logical deconstruction was necessary? He was already testing the extrajudicial waters with ICE and DOGE, running roughshod over the Constitution, preparing for a fourth term and the consolidation of a Republican conservative monarchy ad perpetuam. 

This invitation of King Charles was a carefully-planned ploy on Trump's part.  He wanted to show the world that this is what kings and kingship was all about - the embodiment of history, the motherlode of culture.  Charles was Britain just as De Gaulle had said, 'La France, c'est moi'. 

After all, that was what Trump had always wanted to convey.  He would restore the central ethos of America enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, bring forward the principles that are at the foundation of the Republic, represent them, promote them, incorporate them.  He would be, like the kings of England, embody the best of his nation's culture. 

This was the most serious reasoning Vicki had ever given to any idea since struggling with her philosophy final at Vassar those many years ago, and she found it confusing.  There was something to this idea of a harmonizing ethos, a reverence and invocation of history, and an avowed patriotism; but at the same time Trump was a racist, misogynist, capitalist tool.  What was a mother to do?

This befuddlement was on the faces of the No Kings partisans in Congress, the cabal of screechy Squad harridans and the alte kockers who had pushed their soggy ideas of progressivism for years as their union card, their ticket to election victory in solidly Democratic districts.  It was too on the faces of the hangers-on and wannabes who actually believed that Kamala Harris would have made a good president and that the time for dumping white people into the Potomac had finally come. 

This gentleman of English royalty gave them pause for the first time in years.  O, if he were only king of America, then things would be right again.  It was the kindly image of Charles who brought the real nastiness of kingship to the fore.  Against his warm, welcoming, charitable man were the real autocrats, dictators, and tyrants of the world - Idi Amin, Mobutu, Bokassa, Kagame, Deby, Kim, and a thousand more human predators. Trump, as demonic as he was, was a far cry from these murderers. 

Vicki turned off the television - she had been watching the king's visit since his plane set down at Andrews Air Force base - and sat looking out her picture window.  She must refill the birdfeeder, she thought, and the skip laurels needed trimming.  For the first time in weeks, the usual bile she felt after watching the news wasn't there. The urge to go out in the streets and tear off her clothes in protest of the evil man in the White House was surprisingly absent.  

What was happening?  Without the hatred, the bile, the venomous thoughts, she was an empty vessel.  Trump hate had not only consumed her for years but had become her.  She would be nothing without it. 

And there he was, standing with the king and queen showing them the Presidential beehive and basking in their praise.  He, Trump, spawn of the devil, a beekeeper? But the bile still wouldn't rise.  It was a touching scene, a charitable one, a kindly one.

No Kings organizers shelved their plans for more rallies and demonstrations. Somehow given Charles' visit, they didn't seem to make much sense.  'Maybe Kings', suggested one conservative observer who had always been amused at the old Sixties matrons marching every which way to protest Trump, white biddies for whom the No Kings jamboree was a nice outing.  'I'll miss them', he said, but of course like everything else he said, it was tongue in cheek.  Good riddance was what he meant.