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.