Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia

[RoosterDance]

Incest and the Sexual Abuse of Children in New Guinea
by Lloyd deMause


As with infanticide, the sexual abuse of children is widely reported by anthropologists, but in positive terms: maternal incest is seen as indulging the infant's sexual needs, oral and anal rape of boys is described as both desirable and as desired by the boys and rape of both girls and boys is presented as an unmotivated "cultural" artefact. I will begin with the use by mothers of their infants as erotic objects.

Anthropologists maintain that "the incest taboo is the very foundation of culture"140 and that "the taboo on incest within the immediate family is one of the few known cultural universals."141 The culturally-approved sexual use of children, therefore, must be renamed wherever it is found as something other than incest. Ford and Beach's widely-cited Patterns of Sexual Behaviour makes this false distinction clear: incest, they say,"excludes instances in which mothers or fathers are permitted to masturbate or in some other sexual manner to stimulate their very young children,"142 then going on to call incest rare. The authoritative Growing Up: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia covers 87 cultures in which it says there is no incest, just adults playing with, stroking, masturbating and sucking their baby's genitals: "Truk adults play with an infant's genitals... In China, Manchu mothers tickle the genitals of their little daughters and suck the penis of a small son...in Thailand, a Banoi mother habitually strokes her son's genitals."143 But again, this isn't incest. Davenport's cross-cultural study similarly concludes that"Mother-son incest is so rare that it is insignificant and irrelevant[since] genital stimulation as a means of pacifying a child may be regarded as nonsexual..."144 Konker reviews cross-cultural adult-child sexual relations and finds that "the ethnographic record contains many...examples of normative adult/child sexual contact" but said this isn't a problem since experts have found there is "no reason to believe that sexual contact between an adult and child is inherently wrong or harmful."145 Korbin's Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives likewise finds that mothers masturbating children is widespread in her large sample, but she says it is not incest since the society doesn't call it incest:

In some societies, children's genitals are fondled to amuse and please them, calm them or lull them to sleep... This would not constitute 'abuse' if in that society the behavior was not proscribed and was not for the purposes of adult sexual satisfaction, even if the adult tangentially experienced some degree of pleasure.146

Since the use of infants and children as erotic objects is so common cross-culturally,147 it is not surprising that New Guinea adults also commonly use their children sexually. Babies in particular are treated as if they were breasts, to be sucked and masturbated all day long. Whenever ethnologists mention childhood in any detail, they often begin with such comments as, "My strongest impression among women was created by their incessant fondling of infants"148 or "As babies and small children their genitalia are fondled."149 As with most infanticidal mothers, this sexual fondling most often occurs when the mother is nursing the baby (or even older child, mothers nursing until the child is three to six years of age), since nursing is highly erotic, occurring over a hundred times a day or as often as the mother needs the stimulation to overcome her depression.150 Gillison describes the process of masturbating infants among the Gimi:

The mother insists upon continued contact, interrupting her toddler'splay repeatedly to offer the breast. Masturbation...with a baby girl[occurs when] the mother or amau holds her hand over the vulva and shakes it vigorously. She may kiss the vagina, working her way up the middle of the body to the lips and then inserting her nipple (often when the child has given no sign of discontent). With a boy, she kisses the penis, pulls at it with her fingers and takes it into her mouth to induce an erection. Several women may pass a baby boy back and forth, each one holding him over her head as she takes a turn sucking or holding the penis in her mouth. When the child then pulls at his own organ, the women, greatly amused, offer squeezes and pulls of their own.151

Many ethnologists in the New Guinea-Australian area notice the connection between nursing and the erotic use of infants, first describing the mother putting her nipple into the baby's mouth whenever it cries, even if it is not hungry, while massaging her other breast and"caressing the fleshy parts of its body...and implanting breathy kisses over and over again in the region of its genital organs."152 Only Hippler, however, notices the incestuous trance the Yolngu mother goes into while nursing and masturbating her child:

The child is sexually stimulated by the mother... Penis and vagina are caressed... clearly the action arouses the mother. Many mothers develop blissful smiles or become quite agitated (with, we assume, sexual stimulation) and their nipples apparently harden during these events. Children... are encouraged to play with their mothers' breasts, and...are obviously stimulated sexually...153

Maternal incest, like other sexual perversions, will often also reveal the sadism of the mother as she uses the child as an erotic sadistic object to overcome her depression and despair-which is rooted in her own loveless childhood. As Poole reports, "It should be noted that these erotic acts are often somewhat rough. Mothers' stimulation of the penis may involve pulling, pinching, and twisting in a manner that produces struggling and crying in infant boys. Also, I have treated many women whose nipples had been bruised and lacerated by their infants."154Similarly, in addition to masturbation during nursing, Roheim reports that mothers will sometimes "lie on their sons in the [female on top]position and freely masturbate them" at night.155 That all this masturbation of children by parents is socially acceptable is shown by how often the mothers do it in front of the anthropologist.156 This helps explain why children in the area spend so much of their time when playing with dolls making them repeat over and over again the cunnilingus, masturbation, anal penetration, intercourse and other incestuous acts which their parents had inflicted on them: "their only, and certainly their supreme, game was coitus."157

The incestuous use of children in New Guinea and Australia extends to the other Melanesian and Polynesian islands, although as the societies become more complex, the sexual practices become more ritualized. For instance, in the Marquesas Islands, besides simple masturbation of infants,158 "the mons Veneris is massaged during infancy and girlhood... accompanied by stretching of the labia to elongate them. This was done by the mother during the daily bath. The child was seized bythe ankles and its legs held apart while the mother manipulated the labia with her lips."159 In Hawaii, a "blower" is designated for each male infant, ostensibly to prepare him for sub-incision of the foreskin, and "the penis was blown into daily starting from birth. The blowing was said to loosen and balloon the foreskin [and] continued daily...until the young male was 6 or 7."160 For infant females in Hawaii, "milk was squirted into her vagina, and the labia were pressed together. The mons were rubbed with candlenut oil and pressed with the palm of the hand to flatten it...the molding continued until the labia did not separate. This chore usually was done by the mother..."161 The Ponapé islanders"pulled and tugged at the labia of the little girls to lengthen them, while men pulled on the clitoris, rubbing it and licking it with their tongues and stimulating it by the sting of a big ant..."162 This oral manipulation of the labia and clitoris extends to many of the other Pacific islands.163

Mothers are not the only ones to use their infants as sexual objects. Although fathers in New Guinea are often reported avoiding their infants during the nursing years because they say they get sexually aroused when they watch them nurse,164 when they do handle their infants, they too are reported as using them erotically. In the New Guinea Highlands, Langness reports, "There was a great deal of fondling of the boys' penis by males. Women fondled infants, but not older boys. Individuals of both sexes would pick up infants and mouth their genitals..."165 Like all other anthropologists who report the regular masturbating and sucking of children's genitals, he calls this love: "Any adult is apt to love and fondle any child almost at random."166 Roheim, too, describes similarly widespread oral-genital contact by fathers: "The father...stimulates[his children] sexually at a very early period while they are still being carried. He playfully smells the vagina or touches it with his mouth; with the boys he playfully bites the penis..."167 It is this common use of the child as a breast by the father that is mistaken by so many anthropologists as "close, loving fathering" in New Guinea and elsewhere.

Virtually all anthropologists report the long maternal nursing period of from three to six years as "nurturant" and "loving," assuming without evidence that this universal incessant nursing is done to satisfy the child's needs, not the mother's. Only one, Gilbert Herdt, interviewing the Sambia with the help of the psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller, asked the mothers directly about their sexual feelings during nursing. The Sambia, like most New Guinea groups, have prolonged postpartum taboos that prohibit couples from engaging in coitus for at least two and a half years following the birth of each child.168 Anthropologists always portray these postpartum prohibitions as unexplained "cultural beliefs,"as though there were no personal motives for them, but in fact they are simply practices chosen to express the mothers' desire to use their children rather than their spouses for sexual arousal. Since a taboo this long means women choose to have sex with their children rather than their husbands for much of their lives, it is obvious that they are unable to achieve the level of mature love relationships, and instead, like other incestuous individuals, need to have sex with children in order to counter deep feelings of depression.169 Like all infanticidal mothers, New Guinea mothers, unloved themselves in childhood, feared as polluted by her society, devoid of intimacy with her husband, needs her children rather than loves them.

The motive for New Guinea maternal incest is clearest in the case of the Sambia, for the mothers in this group report regularly having orgasms during nursing.170 Herdt's informants told him that when they breast-fed their children they felt orgasms that were "the same" as when having intercourse with a man,171 and that "all the women feel that... not just me... all of them do."172 So powerful is this ability to orgasm during nursing that even thinking about nursing can provide sexual excitement for the mother:

P: Then my baby thinks, "My mother doesn't bring back my milk quickly, so I am crying and crying waiting for her." He cries and cries and waits. And when he thinks that, then my breasts have to have an imbimboogu [orgasm].

H: You're saying that at that time, that's when you're feeling imbimboogu, when you walk about?

P: Yeah... I'm hot in the nipples, inside.173

Herdt asks Stoller what this means, saying, "as she's walking back to the hamlet, she has this experience she's calling an orgasm. I mean, it doesn't, can't...sound believable." 174 Stoller reports that occasionally"women in our society report genuine orgasms with suckling,"175 though this is rare compared to the mothers in New Guinea.176

Since Poole was the only New Guinea ethnologist who interviewed both mothers and children, he obtained the most complete reports of maternal incest.177 Like infanticidal psychoclass mothers everywhere, Bimin-Kuskusmin mothers consider their babies to be part of their own bodies, "never permitting the infant to be detached from contact with her body" and breastfeeding the baby "not only on demand, but also sometimes by force," whenever the mother needs the stimulation.178Mothers, Poole says, constantly masturbate the penis of their baby boys, while trying not to let their incest get out of hand:

She is expected to masturbate him periodically to ensure the growth of his genitalia, but she must carefully avoid the excessive development of erotic 'infant lust' which may injure his finiik [spirit]... When mothers rub the penis of their infant sons, the little boys wriggle on their mothers' laps and have erections. These tiny erections bring laughter. It is play. It will make their penis big when they are older. But'infantile lust' can become too strong and can damage the growing"spirit or life-force" (finiik) of little boys. You will see mothers and sons together in this way everywhere.179

Much of the ribald joking among mothers is for the purpose of denying that the erotic use of the child is in fact incest-it is blamed on the infant's "lust" only-for only "bad" mothers "are believed to stimulate their sons beyond the bounds of 'infantile lust' in order to satisfy their own sexual desires..."180 Those mothers who completely give in to their own "lust" are called "witches" who are said to be "driven...to destroy all aspects of masculinity through jealousy and rage"181 a condition all women can fall into, particularly when they are young, inexperienced mothers or are treated harshly by their husband's family. In order to prove that she isn't being too lustful, mothers deliberately cover their breasts with bark cloth when they are stimulating the penis in a ritually prescribed manner. Indeed, this often highly ostentatious act of covering the breasts is a display to a never-watchful public that the mother is acting properly in tending her son. On occasion, I have witnessed older women admonish a young mother for failing to cover her breasts when rubbing her son's genitals.182

More privacy is afforded at night, however, when mothers can rub against their children's entire bodies because they sleep naked with their them,"together in each other's arms" and when they also can "regularly rub"the boy's penis to erection.183


Notes
140. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 41.
141. James L. Peacock and A. Thomas Kirsch, The Human Direction: An Evolutionary Approach to Social and Cultural Anthropology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970, p. 100.
142. Clelland S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior New York: Harper & Row, 1951, p. 119.
143. Given J. Broude, Growing Up: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1995, p. 303.
144. William H. Davenport, "Adult-Child Sexual Relations in Cross-Cultural Perspective." In William O'Donohue and James H. Geer, Eds. The Sexual Abuse of Children: Theory and Research. Vol. I. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992, p. 75.
145. Claudia Konker, "Rethinking Child Sexual Abuse: An Anthropological Perspective." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 62(1992): 148.
146. Jill E. Korbin, "Child Sexual Abuse: Implications From the Cross-Cultural Record." In Nancy Sheper-Hughes, Child Survival: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., p. 251.
147. Lloyd deMause, "The Universality of Incest." The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 123-164.
148. Gillian Gillison, Between Culture and Fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands Mythology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 176.
149. Ronald M. Berndt, Excess and Restraint: Social Control Among a New Guinea Mountain People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 91.
150. Melvin J. Konner and C. Worthman, "Nursing Frequency, Gonadal Function, and Birth Spacing Among !Kung Hunter-Gatherers." Science 207(1980): 788-791.
151. Gillian Gillison, Between Culture and Fantasy, p. 176.
152. H. Ian Hogbin, "A New Guinea Infancy: From Conception to Weaning in Wogeo." Oceana 13(1943): 298.
153. Arthur Hippler, "Culture and Personality Perspective of the Yolngu of Northeastern Arnhem Land: Part I Early Socialization." Journal of Psychological Anthropology 1(1978): 235.
154. Fitz John Porter Poole, "Coming Into Social Being: Cultural Images of Infants in Bimin-Kuskusmin Folk Psychology." In Geoffrey M. White and John Korkpatrick, Eds., Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 232.
155. Geza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: Culture, Personality and the Unconscious. New York: International University Press, 1950; Geza Roheim, "The Western Tribes of Central Australia: The Alknarintja." In Warner Muensterberger and Sidney Axelrad, Eds., The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, Vol. III. New York: International Universities Press, 1964, p. 194, 231.
156. Geza Roheim, "The Western Tribes of Central Australia," p. 236.
157. Geza Roheim, "Play Analysis with Normanby Island Children." In Warner Muensterberger, Ed., Man and His Culture: Psychoanalytic Anthropology After 'Totem and Taboo.' London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969, p. 179; Geza Roheim, "The Western Tribes of Central Australia: Childhood." In Warner Muensterberger and Sidney Axelrad, Eds., The Psychoanalytic Study of Society. Vol. II. New York: International Universities Press, 1962, p. 207.
158. Lia Leibowitz, Females, Males, Families: A Biosocial Approach. North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press, 1978, p. 135.
159. Robert C. Suggs, Marquesan Sexual Behavior. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966, p. 42.
160. Milton Diamond, "Selected Cross-Generational Sexual Behavior in Traditional Hawai'i: A Sexological Ethnography." In Jay R. Feierman, Ed., Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990, p. 430.
161. Ibid., p. 431.
162. Herman Heinrich Ploss, Das Weib in der Natur- und Volkerkunde: Anthropologische Studien. II. Band 1. Leipzig, 1887, p. 144.
163. Herman Heinrich Ploss, Max Bartels and Paul Bartels. Femina Libido Sexualis: Compendium of the Psychology, Anthropology and Anatomy of the Sexual Characteristics of the Woman. New York: The Medical Press, 1965, p. 140; Robert C. Suggs, Marquesan Sexual Behavior. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966, 177.
164. Gilbert Herdt and Robert J. Stoller, Intimate Communications: Erotics and the Study of Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 139, 274.
165. L. L. Langness, "Oedipus in the New Guinea Highlands?" Ethos 18(1990): 395
166. Ibid., p. 399.
167. Geza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, p. 160.
168. Herdt and Stoller, Intimate Communications, p. 42.
169. Stanley J. Coen, "Sexualization as a Predominant Mode of Defense." Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 29(1981): 909.
170. Herdt and Stoller, Intimate Communications, pp. 72, 138, 163.
171. Ibid., p. 163.
172. Ibid., p. 165.
173. Ibid., pp. 165-166.
174. Ibid., p. 169.
175. Ibid., p. 170.
176. Barbara B. Harrell, "Lactation and Menstruation in Cultural Perspective." American Anthropologist 83(1981): 799.
177. Fitz John Porter Poole, "Folk Models of Eroticism in Mothers and Sons: Aspects of Sexuality Among Bimin-Kuskusmin." Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 1983; "Cultural Images of Women as Mothers: Motherhood Among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea." Social Analysis 15(1984): 73-93; "Coming Into Social Being: Cultural Images of Infancts in Bimin-Kuskusmin Folk Psychology." In G. M. White and J. Kirkpatrick, Eds., Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, pp. 183-242; "The Ritual Forging of Identity: Aspects of Person and Self in Bimin-Kuskusmin Male Initiation." In Gilbert H. Herdt, Ed., Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, pp. 99-154; "Personal Experience and Cultural Representation in Children's 'Personal Symbols' Among Bimin-Kuskusmin." Ethos 15(1987): 104-132; "Images of an Unborn Sibling: The Psychocultural Shaping of a Child's Fantasy Among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea." In L. Bryce Boyer and Simon A Grolnick, Eds., The Psychoanalytic Study of Society. Vol. 15. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1990, pp. 105-175.
178. Poole, "Cultural Images," p. 87.
179. Poole, "Images of an Unborn Sibling," pp. 127, 106.
180. Poole, "Folk Models of Eroticism," pp. 2-3.
181. Ibid., p. 6.
182. Ibid., p. 11.
183. Poole, "Personal Experience," p. 115.

[RoosterDance]

Maternal Incest: The Child as Breast
by Lloyd deMause


In the previous chapter, widespread maternal incest-with the mother using the child as an erotic breast-substitute by masturbating it or sucking on its genitals-was documented for many contemporary preliterate tribes. Although equally clear evidence is hard to come by in history because of the lack of detailed descriptions of early mothering in the past, it is likely the sexual abuse by both mothers and wet nurses continued until modern times.

Primate mothers are widely reported as copulating with their children;indeed, many cannot learn to reproduce unless they have had sex with adults when they were children.406 Many immature primates "copulate with their mothers...explore adult genitalia and experience manipulation of their own."407 Our closest ancestors, the bonobo chimps-termed "the erotic champions" of primates-spend much of their time sucking and masturbating the genitals and "genito-genital rubbing" of both male and female juveniles, "to reduce tensions."408 Primate children are regularly observed being taught to thrust against their mothers'genitals.409 This "sexualization of the infant" was likely extended when human infants grew much larger heads, since it meant in order to get through the narrow birth canal before the head grew too large human infants had to be "born fetal," extremely immature and increasingly helpless, so that in early humans "maternal attention was not sufficient to care for more helpless infants..."410 This in turn meant a selection for those babies who could most satisfy the mother's erotic needs-for instance through the extension of non-hairy, erotic skin areas-for they would be best nursed and cared for as an erotic, tension-reducing object. Likewise, those human mothers were selected who had evolved the largest and most erotic breasts411 and who had genitals shifted around to the front, where they could rub them against their children.412

The psychogenic evolution of the central motivation for mothering from incest to empathy took millennia, and is still far more prevalent than is realized. As we detailed in the previous chapter, researchers have described mothers in various tribal areas and countries outside of the West as routinely sucking and masturbating their children, but have concluded that this was not incest since the society didn't believe it was sexual abuse. Since both the perpetrators and the victims of maternal incest also collude-each for their own reasons-in denying its occurrence, current figures for sexual abuse by females-13 percent of girl victims and 24 percent of boys victims-are considered likely to be underestimates.413 (Some studies actually find girls twice as likely to be abused by women as by men.)414 This denial is possible because women sexually abuse children at a much younger age than men do, so the incidents are more likely to be repressed by victims of female abuse.415Maternal sexual abuse is acknowledged to "remain undetected"416 and therefore to be badly "underreported...unless coercion was involved... [because] sexual abuse of children by adult females is usually nonviolent and at times quite subtle [involving] intercourse, cunnilingus, analingus, fellatio, genital fondling, digital penetration... and direct exposure to adult sexual activity."417 Genital contact with the parent is even more prevalent; in America, "more than fifty percent of eight- to ten-year-old daughters touched their mother's... genitals [and] more than forty percent of eight-to-ten-year-old sons touched their mother's genitals..."418 Some clinical studies reveal widespread female masturbation of little children "to counter her feelings of lethargy, depression and deadness," "the only way she could make herself go to sleep," or "painful manipulation of the genitals by mother [with] the wish to destroy the sexuality of the child."419

The sexual use of children by mothers has been widely reported by outside observers in both non-literate and literate nations outside the West. Childhood in much of India earlier in the century was said to begin with masturbation by the mother, "high caste or low caste, the girl 'to make her sleep well,' the boy 'to make him manly.'"420 Like most traditional families, children rotated around the extended family as sleeping partners rather like a comfort blanket, and one sociologist who did interviews modeled on the Kinsey studies reported "there is a lot of incest... It is hidden along with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out, like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family... To arrive at even a passable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the hornet's nest..."421 Throughout Indian history, says Spencer, "Mothers stimulated the penises of their infant sand gave a 'deep massage' to their daughters as a form of affectionate consolation."422 Arab mothers are said to "rub the penis long and energetically to increase its size," "In China, Manchu mothers tickle the genitals of their little daughters and suck the penis of a small son," "In Thailand, mothers habitually stroke their son's genitals,"etc.423

Western observers even today often notice that Japanese mothers masturbate their young children during the day in public and at night in the family bed-in order, they say, "to put them to sleep."424 The average Japanese mother sleeps with her children until they are ten or fifteen years old, traditionally sleeping "skin-to-skin" (dakine) while embracing her child because the father-as in the traditional gynarchy-is usually absent, over two-thirds of Japanese husbands being involved in extramarital intercourse.425 Japanese mothers often teach their sons how to masturbate, helping them achieve first ejaculation in much the same manner as with toilet training.426 A "mental health hotline" in Tokyo recently reported being flooded with calls about incest, 29 percent of them with complaints such as that the mother would offer her body for sex while telling the son, "You cannot study if you cannot have sex. Youmay use by body," or "I don't want you to get into trouble with a girl. Have sex with me instead."427 Wagatsuma reports "Japanese mothers often exhibit an obsession with their sons' penises... [they are] usually brought in by their mothers who fear that their sons' penises are abnormally small,"428 with the result that Japanese marriage clinics find "60 percent of their patients are afflicted with the 'no-touch syndrome,' that is, they will have no physical contact with their wives for fear that it will lead to sex...[termed] the ''I love mommy'complex."429 Adams and Hill and Rosenman have thoroughly documented the castration anxieties resulting from Japanese maternal incest.430

Maternal incest in history is, of course, almost impossible to document except for indirect evidence. Doctors told mothers and nurses to "gently stretch the end of the foreskin every day" and to "massage the scrotum"as well as to infibulate the foreskin later.431 Rabbinic sources deemed"a woman 'rubbing' with her minor son" common enough to have a law concerning it.432 Myths and drama endlessly depicted maternal incest,433and dream-books like Artemidorus' mostly interpreted dreams of maternal incest as indicating good luck.434 Sophocles has Oedipus claim that "in dreams... many a man has lain with his own mother,"435 a fact mainly true of actual victims of maternal incest. Incest in antiquity was not illegal,436 nor was it spoken of as a miasma, an impurity,437 and early civilizations from Egypt and Iran to Peru and Hawaii had brother-sister incestuous marriages where the parents played out their incestuous needs by forcing their children to marry each other-a third or more of marriages being incestuous in the case of Roman Egypt.438

Still, direct evidence of widespread maternal sexual use of children in history can hardly be expected if even today it is everywhere denied. True, doctors from Soranus to Fallopius counsel mothers "to take every pain in infancy to enlarge the penis of boys (by massage and the application of stimulants)..."439 But usually the only reference to maternal incest is in the penitentials, where the Canons of Theodore mention that "a mother simulating sexual intercourse with her small son is to abstain from meat for three years...,"440 or, as in Dominici and Gerson, the child is told not to allow the mother to touch him.441 One could also cite various cleric's warnings about maternal incest, the many illustrations of mothers and grandmothers being shown with their hands on or near their children's genitals, or one could detail the nearly endless accounts in autobiographies and other direct reports of the sexual use of children by nurses and other female servants who masturbated and had intercourse with their charges "to keep them quiet,""for fun" or "to put them to sleep."442 Alternatively, one could document various other routine practices of mothers that indicated they used their children erotically, such as the habit of grandmothers and mothers to "lick it with 'the basting tongue'" all day long, sucking their lips, faces and breasts as though the child was itself abreast,443 or one could describe the incestuous behavior in the public baths (many of them doubling as brothels) in which mothers and children co-bathed.444 But just how widespread these incestuous maternal practices were escapes our research tools.

There is, however, one indirect measure of maternal incestuous practice that could indicate that mothers until well into the Middle Ages were acting out their erotic need to violate their daughter's genitals. Mothers in China and India have been observed to "clean the sexual organs of the little children during daily washings...so scrupulously"that the girls have no trace of a hymen... Even Chinese doctors do not know anything about the existence of the hymen."445 Some Arab mothers also "practice 'deep cleansing' on their very young daughters, purposely tearing the girls' hymen."446 A survey of physicians from antiquity to early modern times reveals that none of them were able to discover a hymen on any of the little girls they examined.447 Obviously the mothers and wet nurses of little girls during this period were routinely rupturing the hymen during some assault on their vaginas. Even Paré in the sixteenth century found when he dissected innumerable little girls as young as three yours old, "I was never able to perceive it."448Occasionally a doctor like Soranus would find a hymen with his probe, but considered it an aberration.449 If one wanted to determine if a girl was a virgin in Greece, one resorted to magical virginity tests, like sending her to a cave where a poisonous snake lived, and "if they were bitten, it was a sign that they were no longer chaste."450 By the fifteenth century, the existence of the hymen and the act of deflowering by breaking it was finally recognized, 451 indicating that the practice of assaulting girls' genitals had become less than universal.452

By the sixteenth century, giant communal family beds, "with people packed like sardines between the blankets,"453 including "grandparents, parents, children, servants and visitors,"454 began to diminish, so that over the next three centuries more and more people asked each other nostalgically, "Do you not remember those big beds in which everyone slept together without difficulty?...in those days men did not become aroused at the sight of naked women [but now] each one has his own separate bed..."455 The change was completely psychogenic, as it occurred in rich and poor families alike. Those who couldn't afford separate beds simply turned the children around, so their heads were opposite to their parents, and nightclothes were used rather than"skin-to-skin" sleeping of previous times, so that even "working-class children seldom saw a naked body because most of their parents slept with their clothes on and changed clothing in a corner when others were not looking."456 By 1908, incest was finally made a criminal offence; it is today a minor felony in most nations.457

Notes
406. Jay R. Reierman, "A Biosocial Overview of Adult Human Sexual Behavior with Children and Adolescents." In Jay R. Feierman, Ed., Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990, p. 30.
407. Ray H. Bixler, "Do We/Should We Behave Like Animals?" In William O'Donohue, Ed., The Sexual Abuse of Children, Vol. 1. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992, p. 94.
408. Frans de Waal, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp. 100-105; Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan H. Turner, The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, pp. 22-23.
409. Clara Mears Harlow, From Learning to Love: The Selected Papers of H. F. Harlow. New York: Praeger, 1986, p. 228; Gregory C. Leavitt, "Sociobiological Explanations of Incest Avoidance: A Critical Review of Evidential Claims." American Anthropologist 92(1990): 981; R. Dale Guthrie, Body Hot Spots: The Anatomy of Human Social Organs and Behavior. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1976, p. 96.
410. Wenda R. Trevathan, Human Birth: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987, p. 33.
411. Helen E. Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1992, p. 180.
412. Lloyd deMause, "The Role of Adaptation and Selection in Psychohistorical Evolution." The Journal of Psychohistory 16(1989): 362.
413. Anne Banning, "Mother-Son Incest: Confronting a Prejudice." Child Abuse & Neglect 13(1989): 564.
414. Michele Elliott, "What Survivors Tell Us--An Overview." In Michele Elliott, Ed., Female Sexual Abuse of Children: The Ultimate Taboo. Harlow: Longman, 1993, p. 9.
415. Margaret M. Rudin, et al., "Characteristics of Child Sexual Abuse Victims According to Perpetrator Gender." Child Abuse & Neglect 19(1995): 963.
416. Adele Mayer, Women Sex Offenders. Holmes Beach: Learning Publications, 1992, p. 5.
417. Christine Lawson, "Mother-Son Sexual Abuse: Rare or Underreported? A Critique of the Research." Child Abuse & Neglect 17(1993): 261, 266; Ira J. Chasnoff, et al., "Maternal-Neonatal Incest." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 56(1986): 577-80.
418. A. A. Rosenfeld, et al., "Determining Contact Between Parent and Child: Frequency of Children Touching Parents' Genitals in a Non-Clinical Population." Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 25(1986): 229.
419. Estela V. Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood. New York: The Guilford Press, 1988, p. 96; Stanley J. Coen, "Sexualization as a Predominant Mode of Defense." Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 29(1981): 905; Joseph C. Rheingold, The Fear of Being a Woman, p. 108. Also see Mike Lew, Victims No Longer: Men Recovering From Incest. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
420. Katherine Mayo, Mother India. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927, p. 25.
421. S. N. Rampal, Indian Women and Sex. New Delhi: Printoy, 1978, p. 69.
422. Colin Spencer, Homosexuality in History. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1996, p. 79.
423. Allen Edwardes, The Cradle of Erotica. New York: the Julian Press, 1963, p. 40; Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1983, p. 38; Given J. Broude, Growing Up, p. 303
424. Robert J. Smith and Ella Lury Wiswell, The Women of Suye Mura. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 68-72; Douglas G. Harig, "Aspects of Personal Character in Japan." In Douglas G. Haring, Ed., Personal Character and Cultural Milieu. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956, p. 416; Nicolas Bornoff, Pink Saurai: Love, Marriage and Sex in Contemporary Japan. New York: Pocket Books, 1991, p. 76.
425. Edgar Gregersen, Sexual Practices: The Story of Human Sexualiy. New York: Franklin Watts, 1983, p. 246.
426. Machio Kitahara, "Childhood in Japanese Culture," p. 56.
427. Michio Kitahara, "Incest-Japanese Style." The Journal of Psychohistory 17(1989: 446.
428. Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., "The Phallic Planet." The Journal of Psychohistory 28(2000): 33.
429. Ibid., p. 31.
430. Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., "Castration Anxiety in Japanese Group-Fantasies." The Journal of Psychohistory 26(1999): 779-809; Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., "The Phallic Planet," pp. 24-52; Stanley Rosenman, "The Spawning Grounds of the Japanese Rapists of Nanking." The Journal of Psychohistory 28(2000): 2-23.
431. Aline Rousselle, Porneia, p. 54.
432. Michael L. Satlow, "'They Abused Him Like a Woman': Homoeroticism, Gender Blurring, and the Rabbis in Late Antiquity," Journal of the History of Sexuality 5(1994): 15.
433. Franz Borkenau, End and Begining: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 116-117; Wolfgang Lederer, The Fear of Women. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1968, p. 121.
434. Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1, 79-80.; John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge, pp. 34, 211-215.
435. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 980.
436. Luciano P. R. Santiago, The Children of Oedipus: Brother-Sister Incest in Psychiatry, Literature, History and Mythology. Roslyn Heights: Libra Publications, 1973, p. 23.
437. Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in EarlyGreek Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 97.
438. Keith Hopkins, "Brother-Sister Marriage in Roman Egypt." Comparative Studies in Society and History 22(1980): 303-354; R. H. Bixler, "Sibling Incest in the Royal Families of Egypt, Peru and Hawaii." Journal of Sex Research 18(1983): 264-81; Russell Middleton, "Brother-Sister and Father-Daughter Marriage in Ancient Egypt." American Sociological Review 27(1988): 603-11.
439. Soranus, Gynecology, 107; Gabriel Falloppius, "De decoraturie trachtaties," cap. 9, Opera Omnia, Vol. 2. Frankfurt, 1600, p. 336.
440. Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code: 550-1150. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, p. 31.
441. Giovanni Dominici, On the Education of Children. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1927, p. 41; Jean Gerson, Oevres Complètes. Vol. IX. Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1973, p. 43.
442. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, p. 123; Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. 2nd Ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 9, 40, 73;Jean-Jacques Bouchard, Les Confessions de Jean-Jacques Bouchard. Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1930, pp. 28-36; Wilhelm Reich, Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897-1922. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988, pp. 6-25; Joseph W. Howe, Excessive Venery, Masturbation and Continence. New York: E. B. Treat, 1893, p. 63;Bernard Grebanier, The Uninhibited Byron: An Account of His Sexual Confusion. New York: Crown Publishers, 1970, p. 24; C. Gasquoine Hartley, Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1917, p. 312.
443. Daphne duMaurier, The Young George duMaurier: A Selection of His Letters 1860-67. London: Peter Davies, 1951, p. 223; David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, p. 255; Christian Augustus Struve, A Familiar Treatise on the Physical Education of Children...London: Murray & Highley, 1801, p. 273.
444. Abeelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 119, 165-173; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p. 135; Fernando Henriques, Prostitution in Europe and the Americas. New York: The Citadel Press, 1965, p. 57.
445. Heinrich Ploss, Das weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde. Anthropologische Stdien.2. Band 1. Leipzig, 1887, p. 300.
446. Edgar Gregersen, Sexual Practices, p. 228.
447. Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity. Cambridge: Harvard Universtiy Press, 1990.
448. Ibid., p. 176.
449. Ibid., p. 113.
450. Bradley A. Te Paske, Rape and Ritual: A Psychological Study. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1982, p. 117.
451. Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 44.
452. Esther Lastique and Helen Rodnite Lemay, "A Medieval Physian's Guide to Virginity." In Joyce E. Salisbury, Ed., Sex in the Middle Ages. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991, p. 56.
453. Reginald Reynolds, Beds: With Many Noteworthy Instances of Lying On, Under, or About Them. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1951, p. 20.
454. William Manchester, The World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1992, p. 53.
455. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality. Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 100.
456. J. Robert Wegs, Growing Up Working Class: Continuity and Change Among Viennese Youth, 1890-1938. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989, p. 126.
457. Louise A. Jackson, Child Sexual abuse in Victorian England. London: Routledge, 2000, p. 3; Andrew Vachss, "Comment on 'The Universality of Incest." The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 219.

[RoosterDance]

Interview: Judith

Judith is a youthful looking thirty-nine, and has sensitive eyes. She is well built, dresses in sporty clothes, and is fashionable. At first she was a bit reserved, but she gave the impression that she was certainly someone who knew what she wanted.


Judith: I met Jacqueline when she was thirteen, in the early '80s. A friend of mine, Flo, had a catering business serving appetizers or whole meals for parties, and I worked with her. One day, we were doing a large party at which there were a lot of well-known people, among them Jacqueline's mother. I was vaguely acquainted with both her and Jacqueline. At the party Jacqueline began to court me in little ways. We were serving champagne, and Jacqueline presented her glass to me with a rather grand gesture. l just said “thank you” in a normal way, not aware that it meant anything special.

After the party she went along with us to the house of one of my girlfriends where we were going to have a little something to drink. There was a whole group of us, and it was really her first acquaintance with our lesbian circle; I think she was very impressed by it. When we were saying goodbye she asked if I would be willing to give her a call if we had another catering job somewhere, because she thought it would be interesting to see how it was done.

An Opportunity presented itself soon afterwards. A new shop for designer goods was opening and we were hired to provide the snacks. I phoned her, and she was pleasantly surprised; she clearly hadn't counted on hearing from me again. She came, but I was very busy with the Work. After the party, as I was packing and carrying the equipment out, Jacqueline began to help. 'When we were finished we were standing outside and all at once, just like that, she kissed me on the lips!

I said, “What's that all about?” And she replied, “I think you're great!” I nearly fainted with surprise and was totally perplexed. I'd never had it happen that someone so young made advances to me. I'd been entirely unaware of it, and I really hadn't seen it coming. It seemed to me spontaneous, the reaction of someone who apparently had taken a liking to me. Just that moment her father arrived to pick her up. A good thing it was too. Who knows what sort of crazy things I would have said. I was completely bewildered and didn't know what I should do. I did ask if she wanted to go with me on a catering job the following week in Amersfoort.

On the way to that job, the three of us were sitting stuffed into the little car that Flo and I always drove around in with all our catering things. She sat on Flo's lap while I drove. It was just as though we suddenly had a kid. Flo found her very nice too.

Jacqueline was so beautiful, a kind of budding flower. That was the punk era; at thirteen she looked sturdy and really sharp. There was a band playing, and we danced together; she asked me. That was all right, but I was supposed to be working. It put a bit of a dent in my relations with Flo: our work was being disrupted by a girl who was in love with me.

Afterwards we brought her home again. I was pretty impressed by her, and found it all very exciting. Back then I wasn't much thinking things through, just living very much day to day. I had a little girlfriend and an affair going, and was very busy with my work; I just went from one to the other.

Two days later I was leaving for a winter vacation. She asked if I would see her before I left. The evening before I left, I went around to see her, but before seeing her I went past my other girlfriend's and broke it off with her.

Jacqueline lived in this big house, with high ceiling rooms and antiques, a bit run down and cluttered, but with great atmosphere. She was home alone. I still remember what I had on, a white shirt and leather Levi pants. There was a definite tension between us. I was terribly shy and didn't dare do anything. I was also a bit anxious to get home because I still had to pack. I told her I should get going and we began kissing. It didn't go any further. I didn't know what I should do. My heart was pounding as I went down the steps, dazed at everything that had happened.

When I got home I found a letter she had stuck in my pocket. She must have written it before I arrived. She poured out her heart. It was heavy for her, and for me too. I found her really fine and wonderful. On the train I wrote a reply to her, and mailed it quickly at the border. I would rather not have gone away, or would have preferred to have taken her with me. During the vacation I wrote her often, and when I got back she was at the station waiting to meet me. I went with her to her house, and she introduced me to her mother. Jacqueline asked her mother if I could sleep over with her. Her mother was very friendly, but when she asked how old I was, I didn't dare to tell her my true age. I was 31, but said I was 29. Her mother said, “Look out. I could turn you in to the police.” It was her way of telling me to behave myself. She said it in a half joking way and it seemed clear to me that she didn't really intend to do it. I slept over, and we had sex together.

That week it was bitter cold, and we went skating with a whole club of girls. It was very romantic, with the clear weather and clean air. Jacqueline couldn't skate very well with racing skates, but she thought it was worth the blisters to go long-distance skating with me. Everybody was very friendly, and took it in stride. “So, Judith has a nice new young friend,” was the only comment.


Pressures

When I wasn't working I was at her house, even sleeping over there. Her parents were divorced, and she lived with her mother who was always working and away a lot of the time. Her mother had a girlfriend who also had a crowded schedule.

It was a hectic time. Catering with Flo was very heavy work, and swallowed up all my energy, emotional too. We had a job every day, and were travelling all over hell's half acre. Jacqueline still came around. Looking back, I think Jacqueline must have had difficulty with this: at that age, she expected that you'd be with her day and night, that's the way first love is. She couldn't quite comprehend that somebody my age had a busy job. With somebody your own age you can skip school and do the same things. But I was terribly busy.

Her mother didn't have time to cook and we ate out a lot, sometimes the four of us, with her mother and her girlfriend, but during that time I saw comparatively little of her mother. I think she was happy that I was there, because she was away nearly every evening with her work. I was her babysitter. At least when she was with me, Jacqueline spent less time in the hash cafés, where she otherwise hung out. Thinking back on it I'm sure it suited her mother just fine.

After school she came around to my place and did her homework. In the daytime she'd be with me, but she slept at home, because her mother wanted to see her every day. When she came from school, I had to get bread and butter with chocolate sprinkles ready for her. I bought special things for her: candied fruit, sprinkles, cola. I bought “kids' stuff” like she had at home, too.

We had a lot of sex. She soon started looking older; she bloomed, matured through all that sex. She hadn't gone so far with boys. I held back a bit, I didn't take the initiative so much, but left that up to her, because I didn't want to force anything.

She wrote things in my date book, scribbled down between my appointments: “I love you”; “We've been going with each other three months today”; “Today we've been together four months.” She even wrote little poems. She did it when I wasn't watching, and then I'd open my calendar and there they were, all so sweet. She did it for a long time; for more than a year my calendar was full of these nice messages. It seems that her feelings for me were very strong for a very long time.


To Bed on Time

Jacqueline and I didn't talk much; we gave each other little presents. I bought her little gifts that fitted her age that I wouldn't have given to somebody my own age: Snoopy dolls for example, toys from the second hand shops, very touching things.

I was very surprised how adult she was in her reactions to me, how adult her feelings were, even her body language. I think I could even say she was teaching me a thing or two, bringing out something archetypically female in me. She provoked me, was kittenish, teasing. She acted the way you usually see girls do with boys, running hot and cold. I was quite moved to see her do it, because she did it so beautifully, so entirely innocently.

Jacqueline had to be in bed on time, so we really didn't have evenings together to speak of. Usually it was eating out, or eating home, and then to bed. If I didn't have to be away, I went to bed early with her. That seemed entirely natural. I found it marvelous, to be all warm and cozy together in bed; and up early too. I was the one who heard the alarm clock and got us up. I took her to school and then went on to my place and to work. For her age, she had been going to bed quite late—that is, before she got to know me—at eleven or eleven-thirty.

Sometimes it could be difficult. Once, at a birthday party, she had to go to bed because she had school the next day. It was a warm, friendly party, all kinds of interesting people, but I went upstairs with her out of solidarity. It was very tempting to stay with the adults. It would have been easy to separate myself from Jacqueline, but that's not what I did, even though it's obvious I could have stayed longer at the birthday party. I was choosing her one hundred percent.

While I was going with Jacqueline, I focused my attention completely on her, and didn't have much contact with her mother. That was deliberate. I didn't want to be on an equal footing with her mother, because I was afraid Jacqueline would have problems with me if I tried to be her second mother. One time her mother did have dinner at my place with her girlfriend, and that was pleasant. I liked having them there; they were both very friendly. I wanted to have more to do with her mother, because I rather liked her. After all, she was Jacqueline's mother and very much resembled her. But I simply couldn't do that. We would have talked about Jacqueine as two adults, and it couldn't be that way.


The Outside World

When Jacqueline and I were courting, I developed the habit of taking her everywhere with me. I was proud to be seen with her. She was terribly pretty and very spontaneous. My women friends probably found it was a bit strange, but they weren't unfriendly. They were rather curious, but that didn't bother me. It was Jacqueline who felt that she was regarded strangely, but I think that was a sort of natural uncertainty, because she was suddenly being placed in a world of adults.

That feeling became stronger when she began to use makeup, and dress more like a woman. In my lesbian circles most of the women wore pants and dressed like men. That was the reason she gave for not feeling at home with them, that and being younger than everyone else.

Jacqueline took me with her when she saw friends from school, both girls and guys. She also played in a band, and naturally I had to watch them perform. I even went with her to a disco. I was dragged back into a world that I had long since left behind. Being thrown back into that school world began to make me feel a bit like a teenager myself

At first she was very proud of our relationship, because she was terribly in love with me. That changed quickly though, because she experienced such resistance at school. Her friends thought she was strange. If I was with her they'd act like she didn't exist. She found it difficult to have to be the one who always took the initiative to get together with them. Naturally, that tears you up. It began to bother her more and more.

If I picked her up from school, I didn't stand in front of the door. I knew that would cause her trouble. I stood instead by the corner; spared her a bit. It wasn't a big deal for me, but I could imagine how she felt, and didn't want it to become an issue. When we went out, it was mostly to the disco where her friends from school hung out. I did feel strange there. I also realized that I was jealous. If she stood around talking with others I couldn't bear it. I felt the end looming at such moments.

From her mother I never felt any resistance whatsoever. I kept strictly to the rules. If her mother said, “You two have got to be home by midnight,” I did it. With a friend her own age, Jacqueline would probably have paid less attention to her mother's word, and got in trouble for it. But I felt responsible, and also felt I didn't want to take any risks. Jacqueline could sometimes be very difficult, but after we met she settled down and took on a more regular schedule. I never could talk about this with her mother.

When Jacqueline began to dress more like a woman, she also attracted more attention from men. I didn't like that at all. I myself liked the way she looked without making herself look older. Regardless of whether she looked boyish or feminine she was still beautiful to me. When she started dressing like a woman, I got the feeling that I was in competition with the men, particularly older men. I became jealous, I got furious with those old fogeys. They knew that I went around with her and had a relationship with her, but they really didn't take me seriously. They list made advances while I was standing there! I was just a woman; they didn't consider me a threat.


Teen Years

Jacqueline was acting like the total teenager: moody, liable to inexplicable outbursts of crying and hysterics. That all began after about a year. I think that she couldn't handle the conflict between me and her friends. I wasn't sitting around in the coffee shops all day with her either. She led a sort of double life. At first glance it all seemed to flow smoothly, but that wasn't really the case. She was so young, and still in school.

Often she didn't want to go to school, and then I had to try to persuade her. I was a bit divided about this: as far as I was concerned she didn't have to go to school, but I also felt responsible to her mother. I had the idea that she had more or less entrusted Jacqueline to me, and that I had to honor that. I knocked around her house as “her daughter's fiancée,” and nobody made any trouble about it. If there was a problem, I went to her mother to discuss what I had to do. I was kind of caught in the middle between them, but I tried hard not to act like her mother. As much as it was possible, I tried to stay her equal, but that was hard.

It was very special with her. I was in love; it was a strong, caring feeling. When I saw her all alone I found her so pathetic that I always melted. It was not something physical, it was rather an inner feeling of tenderness. When she had problems, I found it very emotional, and felt entirely in sympathy with her. She would see gigantic problems in things that I myself no longer experienced that way because I had long since put them behind me. I often suspected what her moods were all about, but I usually didn't know how to deal with them. Often she didn't know what was going on herself, so she couldn't talk it through. I realize now she must have been wrestling with problems about her identity: did going with me really make her “lesbian”; was she attached to me as a person, but did she also want relations with boys?

My tenderness for her was entirely different from that for someone of my own age. If she did something wrong, even if it was at my own expense, I would find the way in which she did it such that I hadn't the heart to blame her for it. If she was angry, I wasn't hurt by it. I took her seriously; I knew that the world of her experience was totally different from mine because she was so young.

I know I am a bit naive but I think that one of the things that attracted me to her was her show of concern for me. She definitely wasn't looking for something motherly in me; actually I had the impression she wanted to protect me. We were friends: she teased me a lot; absolutely didn't look up to me; had no automatic admiration for my age or status. She teased me a lot, called me “dumbo” and “dope,” as if I was a kid, a friend her age. But she defended me if somebody else tried to put me down.

She was jealous though: especially of my other acquaintances, but even of someone discussing work with me for too long. Everything revolved around her feelings. Perhaps all girls at that age are like that, jealous of everything they have going with somebody. I didn't dare to tell her that she had to make a distinction between the relation I had with her, and the way I dealt with the acquaintances that I had before I met her. I didn't want it to seem as if I didn't take her feelings seriously. Naturally, I was remiss. It was terrible that sometimes I couldn't steer things along the right path. But that happened because I hoped things would work out all right.

Slowly everything changed. Outside pressures were so great that she began to see our relationship through the eyes of others. At first she was so proud to go around with me, but later she felt ashamed. She felt that the outside world, the world in which she moved, disapproved.


Signals

Jacqueline began to push away from me. She tried to find a way out, a way of calling it quits. She began to lie about what she had done, or about what she was going to do. I can well imagine her uncertainty; she knew that I was crazy about her and didn't want to cause me any pain. I didn't know what I should do myself, but if I was indifferent, that would also be bad.

She blamed me for all sorts of things. It was getting more and more difficult to react to her properly. She was turning into an opponent, but an opponent much younger than I. If you are going to defend yourself you want to defend yourself against an equal. Of course, she wasn't an equal. But it was easy to forget that at some moments. My greater experience gave me the advantage. She couldn't match that, but I handled it wrong. I was trying my best to prolong our relationship, but that meant that I was also misreading the signals she was sending me.

I had never criticized her. When she began to wear adult looking dresses, I didn't say, “They're awful, what do you see in them?” I have to admit that I had found them beautiful without realizing that wearing these dresses was a signal that she had begun to distance herself from me, that she wanted to express her heterosexual side. I should have sensed things were changing. I could have asked her simple questions like, “Is something wrong?” To tell you the truth, I really didn't want to know what was happening. I knew that she probably didn't know either.

Then it began to get so difficult that I really felt I had to talk it over with her mother in order to find out what I had to do to keep her with me. I didn't do it at first, although I really needed to. Finally we were at a party once with her mother and it was bothering me so much that I finally asked her what I should do. The only thing she could say to me was, “Let go of her.” It was just as if Jacqueline herself had said to me, “I'm breaking it off.” It was a real blow, but everything was now crystal clear, as if a light had gone on in my mind. I'd really needed to hear her mother say that.

Looking back on it all, I think that I didn't want to talk to her mother earlier because I knew what she was going to say. Something like, “You should have known it would go this way.” Naturally, she saw what I saw, that her daughter was feeling desperate. I had hoped against my better judgment that her mother might have helped me stay with her daughter.

Jacqueline had difficulty saying to me that we should break it off, so she communicated it through her behavior. In the normal course of events that happens often enough in relationships, that someone breaks things off without words.

It was over all of a sudden. I had seen it coming, but it was still a terrible blow. I never saw her again; I had a real breakdown. All in all, our relationship lasted about a year and a half.


Looking Back

As I look back on it now, I think that the fact that such a relationship was possible at all—that alone was a great triumph. It is the only relationship I've had that gave me something very special, and left no negative feelings behind. For her it was the first experience. Yes, she caused me pain, but not consciously; she didn't want to hurt me.

Jacqueline matured awfully fast in that year and a half between her thirteenth and fifteenth birthdays. Perhaps that is normal for that age; she changed from a girl into a woman. That was very beautiful to watch, and I experienced it from close up; I saw her bloom. Normally you only see that as a mother, but in my case it was totally different, it happened under my hands. Perhaps our relationship was possible because her mother was having a lesbian relationship, so it wasn't such a big step for Jacqueline. She wanted to know how it was; she wanted to experience it too. The relationship didn't have to be hidden, which made a difference too.

My feeling for her differed from that for earlier girlfriends. It felt as if I had a child myself, though it went much further than that. All relationships are complicated but this one was complicated in a completely different way. I was maneuvered into a nurturing position. I felt responsible; I had to be the wiser one. With girlfriends my own age, I went much more my own independent way.

It was so different with her because so much responsibility was involved. I was very sympathetic to her moons, and for my part gave her as much room as I could. I really was pretty much under her thumb because I was so crazy about her. I never opposed her. If I took the initiative and organized some activity for us I constantly worried about whether she was enjoying it or not. Everything was completely centered around her: was it to her liking; was it making her happy?

She really had much more power in the relationship. The power that I in fact had, as the older one, I never used because I found it unfair. In the back of my mind must also have been the suspicion that if I did come down hard on her, it would have ended sooner.

I still go with women who are younger than I, but not with anyone as young as Jacqueline. I would now find that too complicated. It was so confusing, demanded so much of me, that I couldn't cope with it now. She wanted every last little thing out of our relationship, including sexuality, which for her was naturally still completely unexplored territory. That's not the case with women my own age. They've gone a step further, know better what they do or don't want. The responsibility is not so great.

It's difficult to say why I felt so attracted to Jacqueline; it wasn't that I was out looking for such a relationship. It came because she took the initiative. I let myself be drawn into the situation. But once we had a relationship, I tried as much as possible not to hurt her, because she was so vulnerable. Among her peers all they did was beat each others' brains out and mentally torment each other.

Now that I've had this experience with Jacqueline, I think I have more awareness of the budding feelings of young girls. Before I couldn't even guess their age; couldn't tell if a girl was thirteen or fifteen. Now, if a girl of that age acts insufferably, I can still see, despite her being insufferable, something endearing and beautiful. All because of Jacqueline.

[RoosterDance]

Sappho: The Tenth Muse
by Unknown


In the Anthologia Palantia, Plato is credited with saying: "Some say the muses are nine - how careless - behold, Sappho of Lesbos is the tenth". While in a similar vein, a poem attributed to Dioscorides hails Sappho with the invokation of "greetings to you lady, as to the gods; for we still have your immortal daughters, your songs". Famously too, the great statesman Solon, a contemporary of Sappho, is said to have heard a boy singing one of her songs, and asked him to teach it to him, so that he might learn it and die.

Who was this womyn who could garner such divine-like praise? Sappho lived in approximately 600 BCE, on the Aegean isle of Lesbos. Born in the coastal town of Eressos, her mother's name was Kleis, a name she later gave to her daughter, while her father was named Skamandronymos. She also appears to have had three brothers called Erigyins, Charaxos (who was actually mentioned by Herodotus, in his Histories), and Larichos, who held office in local Mytilene government. Such was the extent of her families' involvement in politics that at one stage Sappho had to seek temporary refuge on the island of Sicily.

Her name, in the original Greek, was Psappho, but we know her today by the Latinized version of her name. It appears to have meant, or to have been synonymous with, lapis lazuli, a stone of some magickal significance. Lapis is commonly associated with water, the primordial element of creation, and with the Goddess. In Egypt, it was known as the Stone of Truth and was sacred the goddess of fate Maat, while in China it was considered to be one of the Seven Precious Things. Importantly, too, the Sumerian goddess of death and the underworld, Erishkigal, slept naked in a vast palace of lapis lazuli. In the early translations of the Bible into English, the word sappur was mistranslated as sapphire, but originally this word meant holy-blood. This sappur referred, not to the stone we know today as the sapphire, but to the lapis lazuli, as a symbol of the blueblood of the Dark Goddess, and of Her protection of matrilineal inheritance. As lapis lazuli, then, Sappho was an incarnation of the goddess, and an embodiment of the wise blood that permeates all life, and all beauty and allows poetry to be written, and the songs of the kozmos to be sung.

There are no exact representations of Sappho from her time period, so we have no idea what she looked like. There are, however, a number of busts attributed as her from later period in Greek history. The earliest known rendition of Sappho is an annotated picture on a Grecian vase from the sixth century BCE. She is shown wearing traditional Greek dress, and holding lyre; though it has seven strings, Sappho was famous for inventing a 21-string lyre.

The general consensus is that Sappho founded or became the head of a school of learning and religion. Her poetry refers to a close circle of friends and associates, that she describes as hetairai, literally mean companions. This word, though, has sexual connotations, because in Athens, a similar word referred to the male, and female, prostitutes that would attend the meetings of older Greek men. It is known that Greek education was pederastic, in that older men would teach young boys through a personal and often sexual relationship. We can suggest then, that Sappho employed a similar practice at her school for girls, hence the use of the word hetairai to describe her friends and pupils. It is important to point out that there was nothing exploitive or abusive in the type of relationship, and it is only its lack of social context that would make emulation in today's world ill advised. This form of sexual teaching also bears out one of the scientific theories for the presence of a gay-gene in the make-up of humanity. It has been argued that a gay-gene provides people who are able to teach and assist young people, unencumbered as they can be with families of their own; although it is, of course, erroneous to suggest that every homosexual does not have children, or a desire to have a family.

It is also vitally important to clarify that the ancient practice of the prostitute did not carry the same double-standard stigma that it does in the modern world. Often prostitutes in the ancient world were sacred prostitutes, who lived within the precincts of the temples, and were honoured for their vital role in society. In fact, the modern derogatory word whore was originally a sacred title for a priestess of a goddess, derived from the word horae; just as other slang words were originally sacred, such as bitch, cunt, or even old wives' tale. It is only in today's world based on patriarchy that the once sacred office of the prostitute could be degraded and criminalized, while the buyers and abusers of this ancient, and still sacred, art-form often have the law on their male, and thoroughly patriarchal, side.

The exact nature of Sappho's school is not a recorded one; in fact it relies more on common record than any historical one. However, there is an account by a male compatriot of Sappho, Alcaeus, in which he describes a religious and seemingly sexual festival. He tells of how he lived in a remote area of Lesbos during a time of political turmoil, where, in a sacred area, Lesbian women walk about trailing their gowns and being judged for their beauty, while the wondrous sound of the women's sacred cry every year echoes all around".

Alcaeus, who elsewhere addressed Sappho as "weaver of violets, holy, sweet-smiling Sappho," appears to have witnessed a festival of some importance, in which the part played by womyn was paramount. We can also tenuously deduce an almost lesbian aspect in the beauty competition, where it seems to be have been judged by women of Lesbos, and not by men.

Lesbos, even it would seem, in Sappho's day, was regarded as an island on which lesbianism was widespread. Originally, before Sappho grew to her legendary stature, lesbianism was known as tribadism, while lesbians were referred to as tribads. Aside from Lesbos, the island of Leucas was also regarded as a lesbian retreat, as the very first illustrated book of tribadic sexual positions, in Greece, if not the entire world, was reputed to have been written by a Leucadian womyn, Philsenis. Also Plutarch, the historian and commentator, echoed the Athenian belief that tribadism was more common in rival Sparta, and mentioned that "at Sparta love was held in such honour that even the most respectable women became infatuated with girls" .

Certainly, the lesbian elements in Sappho's poetry are proof of the presence of lesbianism or tribadism, in ancient Greece, and further, of Sappho's own sexuality. This however, as we shall see, has not hindered attempts at hiding and removing this central element in her work. However, the briefest perusal of her poetry in its unadulterated state will quickly confirm, not only her sexuality, but also her celebration of it.

From her poetry, we know that Sappho had, as her lover, a beautiful girl called Anaktoria. She left Sappho, becoming now far distant, and so Sappho was left with only memories of her pleasing, graceful movement, and the radiant splendour of her face. The only other lover of Sappho that is mentioned by name is a girl in Lucians satirical "Dialogi lieretricil" called Leaina. She is described as being loved by the rich woman from Lesbos, and that they shared a home doing heaven knows what with each other." This story is highly apocryphal though, and of course satirical, and so nothing great need be read into it.

The clearest example of Sappho's passion and depth of love occurs in Fragment 31, where she speaks to a girl she is madly, but apparently unrequitedly, in love with. She speaks of the she feelings towards anyone who is able to sit near to her, and to hear her delightful voice and seductive laugh. And then describes how:

Even when I glimpse you for a moment
My tongue is stilled as speech deserts me
While a delicate fire is beneath my skin -
My eyes cannot see, then,
When I hear only a whirling sound
As I shivering, sweat
Because all of me trembles;
I become as moist as grass
And nearer to death...
But all must be ventured...

This is without doubt the finest example of lesbian desire ever put to paper. It is also a poem that illustrates just how patriarchy will seek to reinterpret and blatantly misrepresent anything that challenges its preconceived view of the world, Despite the obvious emotion that Sappho expresses towards the poem's object, it was common up until only recently to describe the poem as a wedding song, with the bride and groom being the couple Sappho watches; this is regardless of the fact that there are no hints of affection between the man and the womyn. In another gross misinterpretation, the object of Sappho's affection is taken to be the man, who because of his "natural superiority as a man", is making her question her homosexuality; the fantasy of every red-blooded and homosexually- threatened man. This interpretation has often been compounded by the misreading of Sappho'a reference to being "more moist than grass" as the less erotic "greener than grass".

The reason for this misreading, other than that it ‘fits the jealousy scenario, is that it is sexually explicit in such a way to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who prefers to think of women as desire-less. It can be read as either the vaginal moisture that occurs in arousal, or as Germaine Greer argues, the kind of ecstatic and maenadial liquefaction that is characteristic of the uninhibited female libido. "Sappho's poem presents pretty well the state of mind-body that causes twelve-year old teenyboppers to liquefy all over the chairs at pop-concerts, to sob and scream and wet themselves... Though the wholesale liquefaction by love-sick females is well known to pop-concert promoters, who have to undertake to re-cover the seats after rock concerts, it is not discussed in polite society... The spectacle of uninhibited female libido is terrifying. Greer does not suggest, however, that Sappho remained in a state of perpetual adolescence, but that this element of female sexuality was more familiar to the ancient Greeks than it is to us now. So "if it was accepted as a part of female sexuality, the capacity for incontinent emotional riot may well have endured into maturity".


The Fragments of Sappho

As we have already seen, Sappho's family had an important role in the local politics, which were fraught with turmoil and rivalry and were obviously of some financial worth. Sappho herself, however, does not appear to have held much interest in either money, or politics, and says as much in Fragment 16:

For Some - horsemen; for others - infantry; For some others - it is ships which are, on this black earth, Visibly constant in their beauty. But for me, It is that which you desire. To all, it is easy to make this completely understood For Helen - she who greatly surpassed other mortals in beauty – Left her most noble man and sailed forth to Troy Forgetting her beloved parents and her daughter Because the goddess led her away. Which makes me to see again Anaktoria now far distant; For I would rather behold her pleasing, graceful movement And the radiant splendour of her face Than your Lydian chariots and foot-soldiers in full armour.

What poetry we have by Sappho comes only in fragments much as this one above. She is said to have composed enough material to fill nine books. Greek scholars, working in Alexandria, Egypt, during the Hellenistic period collated this body of work. The first book had all her songs based on four line stanzas; known as the Sapphic stanza now, such is Sappho's fame. And we also know that the ninth book contained all of her songs, such as those for weddings, that were not based on the Sapphic stanza. All up, it has been calculated that the nine books contained 6,300 lines of poetry, approximately 300 songs. Unfortunately, along with many of the great works of the ancient world, Sappho's nine books were destroyed by the Church, which with good reason deemed them obscene. Tatian, the 2nd century Christian writer, for example, called Sappho a "love-crazy female fornicator who even sings about her own licentiousness" Pope Gregory VII, in the 11th century, is said to have personally ordered that Sappho's work be burned. But besides her homosexuality, the Church had another reason for destroying the works of Sappho, and that was her uninhibited love and celebration of the goddess Aphrodite. It must be remembered that this goddess was more powerful, and more of a threat to Christianity, than the diminutive and patriarchal title of goddess of love would suggest.

Because of this wilful destruction, most of Sappho's poetry then, was retained only in the often inaccurate, quotes of historians; until the early 1800s, when fragments of papyrus and manuscript used in the wrapping of mummies of the Hellenistic era were found in Egypt. These fragments although often in a tattered and dog-eared state, contained many missing pieces of poems for which there had previously only been quotations or single line excerpts. But of the original nine volumes, all we have left today is 200 often- incomplete fragments. The loss of these works was aptly expressed by the modern American writer Willa Carter, who said: "If of all the lost richness we could have one master restored to us, one of all the philosophers and poets, the choice of the world would be for the lost nine books of Sappho."


Sappho and Aphrodite

The only complete song of Sappho that we now have is her Hymn to Aphrodite. There is a kind of magic in this because Sappho's relationship with the goddess was a remarkable one. Whereas the gods, in a conventional framework, were in a position of power that had to be entreated, Sappho's use of her stanza-form, and her love-like relationship, brought them, or rather the goddess, closer. Her style of writing poetry, in contradistinction to what had gone before, embraced the personal, it celebrated the pain and emotions of being human, and then spoke to the gods. This style was ascending in nature, whereas previous styles had been written from the viewpoint of the gods, (condescending to humankind. Sappho's prose is a form of magick, then, and her works are keys to unlocking god-forms, and the kozmos, with just the utterance of a few words.

The Aphrodite that Sappho knew and loved was not the familiar image we see in the paintings of Sandro Botticelli (despite his undeniable skills, he was dealing, in this instance, with stereotypes) or even the ephemeral goddess she became to Athenian Greece. Instead, she was an all-powerful, and originally matriarchal, form of the goddess. Her power was one of unabashed and unfettered female sexuality, and lust, not the romanticized and saccharine concepts that she is now associated with, and also continues to be every time the word "Venus" is used in a stereotypical and dismissive fashion.

She was a goddess who fell in love with the youth Adonis, but when Persephone, goddess of the underworld, also fell in love with him, it was decided that he would stay one-third of each year by himself, another with Persephone, and the other with Aphrodite. Consequently, he would be gored to death, every year, by a boar sent by Aphrodite. This emulates a myth cycle found throughout Europe and the Middle East in such goddess-consort duos as Cybele and Attis, Ishtar and Tammuz, and Inanna and Dumuzi. This cycle also finds a northern application, where the dying god was Balder, and the queen of the underworld was Hela. If we recall the chthonic imagery associated with Sappho's name of lapis lazuli, as found particularly in the Sumerian Erishkigal, and the Egyptian Maat, we are able to argue that Sappho can be understood, in a manner of speaking, as the dark, and chthonic, aspect of Aphrodite.

Further, if we consider the frequent motifs of absence, loss, and departure in her poetry, and replace Adonis with Anaktoria, we can see Sappho as providing an esoteric, lesbian, form of the ancient mysteries. Perhaps it was something like this that was taught at her school on Lesbos, in a combination of matters sexual, religious, and magickal.


Deeper Mysteries

We have seen hints of a connection between Sappho and the dark goddess that move her importance even beyond that of lyrical poet and lesbian icon. Her name relates to the blueblood of the goddess, and to the lapis lazuli that is used to decorate the halls of many underworld goddesses (including Erishkigal, Maat, and Hela). We have also just seen that there was more to Aphrodite (the goddess who appears most consistently in Sappho's poems), than just a simple goddess of love. What then are we to make of this suggestion of some greater significance, of some mystery taught at Sappho's school on Lesbos?

It has been suggested that Sappho was not one particular womyn, but rather a title for a particular kind of high priestess. This would not be without precedent in the ancient world. For example, the many Marys in the new testament point to a group of priestesses, who were dedicated to the dark goddess (the name Mary being the same as Maya-Maia, one of the Hindu-Greek names for the dark goddess), and who were behind the sacrifice of her mortal consort, Jesus; who is the same as Attis, Tammuz, and Adonis. Whether we wish to accept the premise that Sappho was not one womyn, which some may argue is a move to belittle her (just as it has been argued that the goddess was divided into many aspects as a way to disempower her; in itself a matter of opinion), the idea that she was the priestess of a mystery religion is still valid.

In at least two of her poems, Sappho uses ritual description as a metaphor, employing a similar scene of young womyn around an altar. The first tells of an altar of love:

And their feet move
rhythmically, as tender
feet of Cretan girls danced once around an
altar of love, crushing
a circle in the soft
smooth flowering grass

The second poem is even more evocative in its imagery, with everything that suggests the twilight world of the dark goddess, which is entered through ritual:

In the spring twilight
the full moon is shining:
Girls take their places
as though around an altar

Considering the hints of the death of the sacrificial king that we have already seen implied by the Sappho-goddess matrix, it is no great leap to suggest that the rites on Lesbos were somehow related to this. There is a suggestion of this in Sappho's poetry, where she talks of an unnamed consort who is lost to someone called Rosy-cheeks. This Rosy-cheeks has often been thought, in accordance with the heterosexual context so frequently applied to her work, to be some rival of Sappho, when actually the name was a title of the death goddess. The consort who was lost to Rosy-cheeks was, therefore, the sacrificial king of that year, whose passing was ritually mourned through poetry and song. The song for the sacrificial king is found in almost all instances of this ritual: the prophet Ezekial famously refers to the wailing laments for Tammuz made by the womyn of Jerusalem (the wailing or howling was called alalu by the Babylonians, and houloi by the Greeks).

One classical myth of the sacrificed king shows a direct association between this rite and the island of Lesbos. The semi-divine poet Orpheus was the lover of the nymph Eurydyke (universal dyke), who was in reality, a form of the dark goddess as matron of fate and justice, like Hela and the Egyptian Maat. Several tales are told of him, but the one that concerns is that of his death, where, after his loss of Eurydike, he wandered through the wilds of Thrace, carrying only his lyre which he played constantly. A band of Maenads came upon him, and the frenzied womyn tore him to pieces, and cast his head into the river Hebrus. The river carried it along until it came to rest on the shores of Lesbos, completely undamaged by the journey, and still singing. The Muses found the head and buried it in the sanctuary of the island. Orpheus's lyre was also kept as a holy relic in the temple on Lesbos, and was considered taboo and not to be touched. When Neanthus, son of the Tyrant of Lesbos, once played it, he was soon after torn to pieces by a pack of dogs; whether they were real dogs, or the priestesses of Lesbos, the sacrifice to the goddess is again clear. It is also significant to find the goddess Eurydyke, the source of the word dyke, so closely associated with the island of Lesbos. As Olga Broumas states in a poem we shall consider later: What tiny fragments survive, mangled into our language.

Sappho then, was the goddess-priestess of the blueblood of the goddess and the blue lapis lazuli of her underworld, who sent the sacrificial king on his way to Persephone-Eurydyke. She was the guardian of the gateway between this world and the next, and so it is significant that in depictions of her, she is often portrayed goddess-like, seated or standing near two columns. Columns and pillars were an innovation on the archaic cave, which represented the vulva of the goddess, the passageway between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Pillars also played an important part in the sacrifice of the king, being the structure on which he was so often killed. The cross of Jesus is the best example, while others are the Djed pillar of Osiris, the world tree of Odin and Attis, while even the scarecrow placed in fields to protect crops is an echo of this tradition.


Sappho Through History and Herstory

Sappho underwent a form of apotheosis, as she became not just a poet, but a muse. We can see the beginnings of this in Plato's remark about her being the tenth muse, but with the passage of time her goddess-like status became all the more pointed, as her life became the stuff of legends, while the facts became less relevant. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it is no different from say the evolution of the real-life Iron Age figure of Odin into a god, or a similar process that lead to the creation of a Jewish messiah, known today as Jesus. An idea of the mythological characteristics that would become attributed to Sappho can be seen in the work of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). In De Claris Nulierbus: Concerning Famous Women, he gives a description of Sappho that has little reliance on facts, but instead illustrates her growth into a goddess:

"The poetess Sappho was a girl from the city of Mytilene in the island of Lesbos. No other fact has reached us about her origins. But if we examine her work, we will see that she was born of honourable and noble parents, for no vile soul could have desired to write poetry, nor could a plebian one have written it as she did. Although it is not known when she flourished, she nevertheless had so fine a talent that in the flower of youth and beauty she was not satisfied with writing solely in prose, but, spurred by the great fervour of her soul and mind with diligent study she ascended the slopes of Parnassus and on that high summit with happy daring joined the Muses, who did not nod in disapproval. Wandering through the laurel grove, she arrived at the cave of Apollo, bathed in the waters of Castalia, and took up Phoebus's plectrum. As the sacred nymphs danced, this girl did not hesitate to strike the strings of the cithara and bring forth melody. All these things seem very difficult even for well-educated men. Why say more? Through her eagerness she reached such heights that her verses, which according to ancient testimony were very famous, are still brilliant in our own day. A bronze statue was erected and consecrated to her name, and she was included among the famous poets. Certainly neither the crown of kings, the papal tiara, nor the conqueror's laurel is more splendid than her glory."

But with this evolution into legend, Sappho became successively recast -both celebrated and vilified- and her life and love was retold to spare patriarchal sensitivities. By the Roman age, Sappho had been relegated to mere heterosexuality, and attributed an obsession with a young boy known as Phaon. When her affections were spurned, according to this tale, she leapt to her death off the White Rocks of Leukas. It is relevant to note that this plot device is still a favourite one of modern filmmakers, who have a tendency to kill their homosexual characters with alarming frequency. The story of Phaon is widely regarded as apocryphal, since the mythical Phaon appears in other similar legends. In one incident he was the lover of Aphrodite; while Aphrodite was herself said to have leapt from the White Rocks of Leukas for the love of a young man, in this case the golden youth Adonis. Another invented male may be person given as Sappho's one-time husband, Kerkylas of Andrea. It has been noted that his name is similar to the Greek word for penis, kerkos, while his home, Andros, alludes to the Greek word for man, suggesting that the name is a pun, that he was "Dicky-Boy from the Isle of Man'. Alternatively, this may suggest that the father of Sappho' a daughter Cleis may have metaphorically been just a penis, or more literally, a donator of sperm; a practice that is certainly not without parallel in some modern lesbian relationships.

But the Roman's conversion of her sexuality was not the last attempt to remould Sappho into a respectable figure for patriarchy. After a period of absence, Sappho reappeared during the Renaissance as an aristocratic and learned matronly figure, albeit virginal, and with not a trace of her lesbianism. In 1584, the French court historian Andre Thevet compiled his True Portraits of Illustrious Men, which included biographies of Homer (some mean feat, considering the lack of information on the poet's history) and Sappho Lesbienne. He vehemently denied any links between the Sappho he wanted to portray as a predictably married, and "honourable" poet, and the other Sappho, of whom Thevet said "the horror of whose crime it rather behoves me to suppress than to mention here'. Because Thevet favoured censoring Sappho, it was not until 17th century France that the greatest revisions, of both her life, and her work, occurred. As in modern society, the heterosexual male, of which the system of patriarchy is an embodiment, is both titillated and threatened by lesbianism. On the one hand, the video of two heterosexual women acting in a lesbian way is sure to be on heavy rotation at the video store. But on the other hand, genuine lesbian women, who may not fits preconceived image of either lesbians or women in general, pose a threat to the patriarchy's control over matters sexual. Lesbianism is the greatest threat to patriarchy because it, in the mind of patriarchy, suggests that 1) women are, indeed, sexual beings, and 2) they do not need the penile protrusions of men to satisfy them, emotionally, or sexually. And so, it was this double standard of fascination and dread that was at the core of French translations of Sappho's work. Separate editions were produced for men and women, the male editions featured enough of Sappho's erotic work to titillate the intended male audience, while the editions for womyn, made to be read in parlours, were free from any sexual suggestions. After all, French manhood would not wish to expose their women to something that could quite likely make them redundant.

By Victorian times, Sappho had been elevated to a state of Marian purity, in which being as moist as grass, and her other sexual metaphors were either expunged or explained away. One of the most popular explanations for Sappho's use of highly affectionate language was that, as a headmistress of a girl's school on Lesbos, her songs were merely chaste send-offs sung to her pupils as they left to be married. Even with a trite explanation like that, one is still left intrigued by the level of affection between a, supposedly, mere teacher and pupil.

At the same time though, the Romanticist movement of Byron, Shelley, and Dante and Christina Rossetti embraced Sappho, but it could be argued, for all the wrong reasons. Instead of celebrating her depth of love and devotion, they embraced the scandalous aspect of Sappho, along with her mythical self-destructiveness, as characterized by the Phaon myth. However, a sense of the respect Sappho eventually gained can be found in a description of her by one of the great Victorian poets, the pagan-inclined, and viciously anti-Christian, Algernon Charles Swinburne: Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the Very greatest poet that ever lived. Aeschylus is the greatest poet who was also a prophet; Shakespeare is the best dramatist who was also a poet, but Sappho is simply nothing less - as she certainly is nothing more - than the greatest poet who ever was at all.
Such was Swinburne's love for Sappho that in the sublimely titled Anactoria, he used her as the voice that rails against a certain Hebraic god:

Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate,
Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath, And mix his immortality with death.

While the words placed in Sappho's mouth by Swinburne may have been harsher than those the Lesbian poet usually used, it would not be the last time that she would speak through, and to other poets from her place deep in the past.


Even Later Someone Will Remember Us

So wrote Sappho in Fragment 147. V., and this prediction, against all the odds, did indeed come true. The influence of Sappho on modern writers has been remarkable. Her honesty, love and sheer talent has echoed down through the centuries and still touches people in the most profound ways. Within our own magickal circles, the Order of Nine Angles produced the cassette work SAPPHO: fragments, a musical rendition of the most striking of the Sappho fragments. It fused ancient Greek music with modern nuances, producing a profound and moving interpretation of Sappho's poetry, and allowing the emotions behind the text to be experienced as if it was Sappho herself who was singing them. The music was complemented by its literary partner, with new translations of the poetry by David Myatt, and five colour paintings by Christos Beest, representing phrases from the fragments. These were complemented yet further by a performance at the Gwent College of Art (by Sister Lianna, Christos Beest, and Wulfran Hall) in which the fragment images were projected onto a screen, as the music was played through an amplified-system; the audience response was reported to have been positive but low-key.

The recurring sense of unrequited love, and of emotional desolation, in Sappho's poetry is not unlike the isolation experienced by many womyn, and homosexuals, in the earlier part of this century. And it is this sentiment that is expressed in the poetry and the art of several of Sappho's modern literary descendants.

One of the most prominent was Amy Lowell, an eccentric womyn who scandalized Boston society by amongst other things, smoking large black cigars. Born in 1874 to one of Boston's most distinguished families, she was not afforded the formal education that her brothers received, but made up for it with her own acumen and perspicacity. Lowell was an important proponent of Imagism, the modernist poetry movement so named by Ezra Pound; though in her time, her reputation was greater than that of Pound. Imagism was typified by short, precise poems, influenced by the Japanese form of haiku, and so the poetry of Sappho had much in common with it. Lowell compiled one of the major representations of Imagist work, a three-volume anthology, Some Imagist Poets, and also gave enthusiastic lectures on modern poetry. Like Sappho, though, she suffered the slights of patriarchy because of her lesbianism, along with her weight, demeanour, and other matters irrelevant to her ability to compose excellent poetry; the jealous Ezra Pound, who never got on well with Lowell, even took to referring to Imagism as Amy-gism.

Her affinity with Sappho can be seen in one of her non-Imagist poems, The Sisters, in which she celebrated her feminine literary heritage (which, along with Sappho, included Elizabeth Barret Browning and Emily Dickinson). The most compelling segment says:

There's Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.
I know a slender thing about her:
That loving, she was like a burning birch-tree
All tall and glittering fire,
and that she wrote
Like the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there,
A frozen blaze before it broke and fell.
Ah, me! I wish I could have talked to Sapho,
Surprised her reticences by flinging mine
Into the wind. This tossing off of garments
Which cloud the soul is none too easy doing
With us today. But still I think with Sapho
One might accomplish it, were she in the mood
To bare her loveliness of words and tell
The reasons, as she possibly conceived them
Of why they are so lovely. Just to know
How she came at them, just to watch
The crisp sea sunshine playing on her hair
And listen, thinking, all the while ‘twas she
Who spoke and that we two were sisters
Of a strange isolated little family.

Like many of the lesbian poets that were to follow her, Lowell seemed able to channel the spirit of Sappho through her poetry, and some of her imagery seems to come straight from the lyre of the tenth muse.

From: In Excelsis

You-you-
Your shadow is sunlight on a plate of silver;
Your footsteps; the seeding place of lilies;
Your hands moving, a chime of bells
across a windless air...
I drink your lips,
I eat the whiteness of your hands and feet.
My mouth is open,
As a new jar I am empty and open.
Like white water are you who fill the cup of my mouth,
Like a brook of water thronged with lilies.


from: Absence

Red and trembling with blood
Heart's blood for your drinking
To fill your mouth with love
And the bitter-sweat taste of a soul.


When one considers Ada Dwyer, Lowell's lover of ten years, it is understandable how she was able to write of such unadulterated, and all-consuming love and desire. The beautiful young actress was, unquestionably, Anaktoria to

Yet another womyn involved with Imagism, and in fact engaged to Ezra Pound at one time, was the bi-sexual Hilda Doolittle, or H.D, as she was often known. Born in 1886, H.D, like many homosexuals of her time (both male and female) married out of convenience, but she left her husband, the Imagist Richard Aldington, after the birth of her daughter, Frances Perdita, in 1919. (Frances was named after Frances Gregg a womyn H.D had had a brief affair with]. After a leaving her husband, H.D lived for much of her life with the writer Winifred Ellerman, who preferred to be called Bryher, and who too had married out of convenience; twice in fact, but both times never consummated. Bryher supported H.D and Frances, even going to the extent of adopting the young girl as her own, while she also financed H.D's travels to the USA, Egypt, and most importantly, Greece.

H.D's admiration for Sappho can be summed up in an excerpt from her essay The Wise Sappho: "I think of the words of Sappho as these colours (red, scarlet, gold), or states rather transcending colour yet containing (as great heat the compass of the spectrum) all colour. And perhaps the most obvious is this rose colour, merging to richer shades of scarlet, purple, or Phoenician purple"

Using the Sappho fragments, H.D. published a collection of poems called Heliodora, in which a line of Sappho's was expanded upon to form a complete poem, as if Sappho herself had penned it. An example, taken from Fragment 36, begins with Sappho's:

I know not what to do:
my mind is divided.

Which was then elaborated upon, explored, and further developed, by H.D.:

I know not what to do,
my mind is reft:
is song's gift best?
is love's gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
now sleep has pressed
weight on your eyelids...

In another poem, Moonrise, H.D revisits some of Sappho's familiar imagery, in what appears to be an invokation of a hunting lunar goddess much like Artemis (who, with Aphrodite, was the most important goddess on Lesbos):

Will you glimmer on the sea:
will you fling your spear-head
on the shore?
what note shall we pitch?
we have a song,
on the bank we share our arrows;
the loosed string tells our note:
flight
bring her swifty to our song.
She is great,
we measure her by the pine trees.

Other important lesbian poets drew upon the rich heritage provided by Sappho. Renee Vivien, (1877-1909) made the first French translation1 of the Sappho fragments, taking them from the original Greek, which she had learnt specifically for that purpose. In an autobiographical novel, the heroine Vally (modelled upon Vivien's real life lover, Natalie Barney) expresses Vivien's admiration for Sappho: "the only woman poet whose immortality equals that of statues is Psappha [Sappho], who didn't deign to notice masculine existence. She celebrated the sweet speech and the adorable smile of Atthis, and not the muscled torso of the imaginary Phaon."

Renee Vivien's devotion to Sappho became a central tenant of her work. Many of her titles reflect, the influence of Sappho (Toward Lesbos, Sappho Lives Again, and Landing at Mytilene), while in her poem Like This Would I Speak, Sappho became apotheosized as a goddess of lesbian love.

Sappho, her restless fingers on the sleeping lyre,
Will marvel at the beauty of my lover...
Sappho will shower us, in her fervent breath,
With the odes whose melodies charmed Mytilene.
And we will prepare the flowers and the flames
We who have loved her in a century less beautiful.
Sappho will serve us, amid the gold and silk
Of soft cushions, nectar mixed with joy.
She will show us, in her graceful manner,
The Lesbian orchard that opens to the sea..

Another modern era poet who could claim descent from Sappho was the Prussian born Mary Madeleine, or Baroness Von Puttkamer (a title she received when at 19, she married General Heinrich Georg Ludwig Freiherr (Baron) von Puttkamer). She was born in 1581, in Eydtkuhnen, East Prussia, and at the age of 15 and 16, began writing a unique form of lyrical, sensual and fiercely erotic poetry and prose. Much of this early work of short stories and novellas was published in the 1900 collection that made her name, Auf Kypros (On Cyprus). Her work that followed included In Seligkeit und Sunden (In Bliss and Sin, 1905), Katzen (Cats, 1910), Krabben (Crabs, 1910), Die rote Rose Leidenschaft (The Red Rose called Passion, 1912), Die drei Nachte (The Three Nights), Pantherkatzchen (Panther Kitten, 1915) and Taumel (Ecstasy, 1920). Much like the poems of Sappho, Madeleine's work created a paradox for critics, who could not deny her talent as a poet, and her skill in rhyming skill, and use of brightly coloured imagery, but still described her highly sensual work as "shameless", "lascivious," "lewd", and "lecherous."

Mary Madeleine also used Sappho as a source of lesbian-inspiration. In Foiled Sleep, she revisits the emotions Sappho experienced upon hearing "that seductive laugh, that makes the heart beneath ‘my breasts to tremble".

Ah me! I cannot sleep at night;
And when I shut my eyes, forsooth,
I cannot banish from my sight
The vision of her slender youth.
She stands before me lover-wise,
Her naked beauty fair and slim,
She smiles upon me, and her eyes

With over fierce desire grows dim.
Slowly she leans to me. I meet
The passion of her gaze anew,
And then her laughter, clear and sweet,
Thrills all the hollow silence through.
O, siren, with the mocking tongue!
O beauty, lily-sweet and white!
I see her, slim and fair and young.
And ah! I cannot sleep tonight.

Finally a poet who could almost claim direct descent from Sappho, Olga Broumas (born 1949), born on the island of Syros, one of the Greek Cyclades, expresses Sappho's sentiments in the most explicit style yet. Her celebration of lesbian desire echoes that of Sappho, but with a sense of pride that overrides the feeling of isolation that both the Lesbian poet, and her lesbian descendants, frequently expressed:
I work
in silver the tongue-like forms
that curve round a throat
an arm-pit, the upper
thigh, whose Significance stirs in me
like a curvi form alphabet
that defies
decoding, appears
to consist of vowels, beginning with,
the mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound.
What tiny fragments
survive, mangled into our language.

Broumas often makes use of themes and images from Greek mythology, and, like Sappho, uses them as metaphors for her own situations. She reinterpreted the story of the rape of Leda by Zeus into a tale of lesbian desire by changing the sex of the swan (the form Zeus assumed). But most remarkably, while reviewing notes she had made on Sappho, Broumas found a two-verse epigraph that she assumed must have been from one of Sappho's fragments. But it is not from any of them. It seems instead that Sappho took the opportunity to write yet more, through her modern inheritors. Perhaps one day, when more fragments are found, this will be among them:

She who loves roses must be patient

[RoosterDance]

Interview: Mimi

Mimi (48) met Bert (34) for the first time at the junior high school where she was teaching. While they have known each other for twenty years, they have had a relationship only for the past fourteen years. For the first several years Mimi consciously maintained a distance between them, because she wanted a relationship based on equality.


Mimi: An age difference in a relationship makes me think of two horses in a meadow; as night falls they stand together so that each one can rest its head on the other's back. Together they can watch in both directions. 1 was born during the war, and my outlook was shaped by the generation in which I was raised. The same is true for Bert. Our combined experiences give us greater possibilities.

The way I was raised had a very direct influence on my sexual relationships. As children we received a lot of information about eroticism. My parents were involved erotically with each other when the children were present. My mother told us very early - I think that I was eight or nine - how good it could feel to have sex with someone. I remember that very well, that my mother indicated that she enjoyed it so much herself. She was a very physical person. She's old now, but exactly the same. Certainly, given the times we were living in, we had a rather progressive sexual education. I think that my sense of passion was awakened by it. In a way, that was paradoxical, for my mother also had great anxiety about sex, at least about the consequences and the problems it could cause for you. A consciousness of the consequences couldn't be communicated very well, so we got two messages: passion exists, and the consequences of it should be feared. Passion won out: it was what was most clearly visible.

My mother got a lot of pleasure out of getting carried away with her passions. Now that she is seventy-five it still happens despite herself. And her anxiety about the consequences is still as great. I have been considerably influenced by this positive emphasis on passion. Something was opened up for me; I was able to think about it. To think and to do, because I have always been rather quick to try things out. As a young teenager I had relationships with girlfriends; very early I felt people up, and it wasn't always rejected. Not that I turned into some kind of siren, you understand, not at all. I experienced passion as a great liberation, but when I acted on that liberation, my parents would rum against me quite terribly. That was the paradox of passion: while it brought people together, it also brought them into conflict with themselves and with others.

You could say that the messages I got from my parents resulted in some strange experiences. For instance, I was married to a much older man for thirteen years. The relationship started when I went away to school at the age of seventeen. My husband was ten years older, and when you are a teenager that is an enormous difference. I had just begun school, and he had dropped out of university. In my current relationship, the age difference is reversed-my friend Bert is fourteen years younger than I, and I now experience the difference as being smaller than I did then.

My parents strongly opposed that marriage, so much so that we were married privately by a judge when I was twenty-one. I didn't see my parents for a year and a half But the world was different then than it is now. That might have been one of the reasons that my parents were so against the relationship. I come from a bourgeois family. It was the usual argument: this is not a good match; nothing good will come of it. But on the other hand they were enormously vital people sexually. In raising and educating us, that vitality had been very important. But their reality and the social reality have always been at odds with one another, with all the difficulties that go along with that.

I have to say that my sexual education gave me a certain erotic self-confidence, that is, I came to trust my instincts. If it feels good physically, it's OK. What I myself experience as most problematic is dealing with power in relation to the erotic. In my marriage I had a kind of passive power. I had a lot of power, but I also let myself be influenced by my husband.

With Bert I was clearly conscious of this power problem. Even before I actually got into the relationship, for a long time I had the feeling that it couldn't be because my power was too great. This was mainly because I first met him in school. I clearly felt there was an erotic tension between him and me, but when I was his teacher the power imbalance between teacher and pupil prevented me from acting on my feelings.

I noticed this erotic tension early on. He was in the Dutch equivalent of junior high; he was fourteen and I was twenty-eight. I described my feelings in my diary, but not very clearly. I was repressing them a bit because they were too difficult.

After that year I didn't have him in my class until he was sixteen. Bert could see clearly that I harbored erotic feelings for him, as he did for me. He couldn't understand it when I gave him signals that a relationship between us was impossible. The signal for him to go away was so strong that it must have been completely baffling for him. My experience of the power difference was not at all the same as his.

In my daily life at school I maintained the same distance from Bert as I did from all the other pupils, but in his case I deliberately avoided meeting him alone. Naturally, that created a tremendous tension. I felt like having a tantrum when it seemed that he would not be in my class in his final year. The school administrators had really made a mess of it for me; I wanted to see him every day. Bert sought me out, coming to ask about little things every now and then. That strengthened our connection. We had to live with a tension which became greater because we didn't express it.

My feelings started provoking strong reactions in me. For example, when I had to admit to myself that my whole life was beginning to revolve around this situation, I resigned my job. I divorced, and I went travelling for two years. I was fleeing from the situation.

Bert was not uncomfortable, as I was, about the teacher-pupil power issue. We've often talked about why we couldn't have had a sexual connection then. I couldn't have had an erotic relationship and a teacher-pupil relationship at the same time. I don't think that I have any moral reservations about it, but for me an unequal power relationship is dangerous. I don't know if my reservations come through something in the environment, or through a real understanding of what power is in such a situation. I enjoy myself most when I make love with an equal of course, you can have a superficial, erotic relationship with a much younger person, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted much more.

When I returned after those two years of travelling, he came to visit me all the time. He pursued the contact, not I. I merrily moved from one place to another, without leaving a forwarding address behind. But he followed me every time. I have this ability to just push things aside and move on, you know. But whenever he found me again I was terribly happy. It's very flattering if someone goes to all that trouble; it's beautiful, and romantic. It's also frightening. I knew intellectually what it was to be romantic, and at the same time I found myself living in the middle of a Harlequin romance! I thought, "Just look at me!" I don't think I was ready for such a relationship. I had ended a marriage. Getting my act together was the first order of business, not playing mind-games with myself.

After high school, Bert went on to the conservatory. It was only then that I had the feeling it could develop into something. He had more autonomy; he could do his thing without my sitting on top of him and saying you've got to do this and you've got to do that. I had learned enough about myself by then to know I could be very dominant and demanding in a relationship. I want my partner to be responsive. In retrospect I see that he always was responsive, but I didn't see or feel it then.

Five years passed from the time we first met, when he was fourteen, until we began a real relationship. During that time I had other relationships, and I was by myself for a while, which I really needed. I had also gone back to school and gotten an advanced degree. I had quieted down, and I think that that made it possible for me to take the risk of beginning something with Bert. I am reasonably monogamous; that is to say, a relationship makes a very deep impression on me, it has to have space and quiet.

I thought it over as carefully as I could. You sit with someone and think, "It should happen now; we are really going to make love, and stay together for a couple of days." I had to think it over very deeply, in order to be sure it was not happening because of any power I held; that I wasn't heavily influencing or taking over someone, or playing those sorts of games.

My first marriage had been to someone much older. I hadn't thought at all about the reactions of those around me. Which is crazy. At that time, at school, I had understood the implications of the power relationship between teacher and pupil, but I didn't realize the significance of an older woman going out with a younger man.

When you asked to interview me, I thought, well, hell yes, you are with somebody much younger than yourself After a while you don't realize it any more. Every now and then it suddenly comes up: in a conversation, or when running up against someone's prejudice. Then you think, "Oh, yeah, that's me they're referring to." But it's not always in the front of my mind.

At some times the age difference is more obvious than at others. Bert and I often go shopping for shoes together, and then somebody suddenly says, "Your son wants you." I kind of react, you know, "Who do you mean? That can't be me." The other person usually feels more embarrassed than I do.

When we were first together I was living in Amsterdam, in a neighbourhood where everybody knew everybody else's business. The "Buttinski's," who were always hanging out their window, lived across the street. Almost immediately they were shouting at Bert loud and clear, that old Dutch adage, "You gotta' learn to ride on an old bicycle! Ha, ha, ha." At first I didn't even understand it! At the same time they could be really sympathetic. Once, when I suddenly had to go into the hospital, they were the very first to come by with flowers. The "old bicycle" reaction was just a kind of a joke.

The strongest reaction we got was from my parents. My father, who has since died, said, "Are you sure you know your responsibilities toward Bert?" And I replied that I certainly did. Later he took it back, that's the way he was. They knew perfectly well that I would do just what I wanted. After a while he also said that I was the only one in the family who had really become independent. He saw that we had a very good relationship, and he understood my choice. That pleased me.

My mother was also dubious about it. I think that she understood the erotic pleasures in it. On the other hand, she thought that if I'd married an older, richer man, then I'd have had something to show for it.

Of course, that was my side of the story. For Bert it was simpler because his friends are mainly from musical circles where out-of-the-ordinary relationships are more common, including quite a few relationships between teachers and students. Furthermore, I have always gotten along well with Bert's mother, whom I first met at parent-teacher meeting. His father had died, which meant that I had a more intense contact with his mother than I might have had with other families. So, things with his family went fairly easily, which was nice. Why exactly that should have been so-well, if you were a psychologist you might be able to tell me.

One of the most unpleasant incidents involving us and my family took place during a dinner at my brother's house. One of my nephews, who was still very small, was sitting next to Bert and kept staring at me. Finally, he said, "Really, how can you put up with such an old bag?" Obviously, such a young child must have heard that from someone else, and my brother didn't correct him. Since then my relation with my brother has cooled. My reaction in such cases is, what an unbelievable meat-head. A sort of angry scorn comes over me when people are so unfeeling about what is going on.

Other things annoy me too, for example, when people don't take the younger partner in a relationship seriously. I find that terribly nasty. A colleague in my department sometimes says, "Such a young kid, what can you find to talk about with him? Has a kid like that got any opinions?" Then I think, "Damn it, take a look at your own relationship." Sometimes I hear something from a child of six that fascinates me, that I find very worthwhile. We also know what bullshit PhD's can spew out. It's a matter of perspective. It leaves a sour taste if people don't take seriously something that is an essential part of you. You'd better believe that a great deal of your being is wrapped up in the knowledge that someone fits you perfectly!

There are social affairs that you really should go to with your partner, but I don't do that. I've come to detest them. Some colleagues know Bert and I rather well, but I seldom run up with him as the others at school do. All you hear is "Oh, that one's with so and so," and "My God, did you see that?" I don't see any sense in putting myself on display in such circumstances.

I've always sought situations where I can have a relationship with someone without hesitation or preconditions. According to our bourgeois upbringing, all kinds of things should take precedence: steady jobs, houses, possessions, children, just name them. To me these are limitations. I enjoy freedom in my relationships. It provides both of us with more room.

When I see a colleague tied down with a husband and children, then I realize how lucky I am that I'm divorced and not in that trap. I've not trapped myself in a cage; people don't immediately realize that we belong together, and that has advantages.

I don't think that you can teach anyone how to think their way beyond those preconceptions. I say to my students: try to get back to who you really are, but don't try frantically to stay there; try to develop. Take responsibility for yourself

I've probably also been fortunate. It's still amazes me that I've gotten hold of the right person; it's so romantic. He just happened to be there. How? Dumb luck. If I had looked for work at another school, I would probably never have met him.

My relationship with Bert has worked because we fit perfectly with each other, and that has nothing to do with age. As far as I am concerned, basically it has nothing to do with sexual orientation either. We are talking about an individual's "being;" if Bert had been a woman, I think I would also have fallen in love with her.

Early on my mother recognized Bert as my possible lover. When he was in my class, in the '70s, it was the custom that pupils visit you in your home. My parents were visiting once when Bert and some students came by. My mother instantly picked Bert out. She said, "Let me take a good look at you; take off your glasses for a moment; let me really see you." She meant that as a very erotic request. She really wasn't so surprised when I brought him home.


Translated from the Dutch by Words and Pictures.

[RoosterDance]

There's Feminism and Then There's Feminism: Will the Real Feminism Please Stand Up?
UDN, Number 5, April 1992


You've heard it all before. "Pornography victimizes women and children." "Pornography is a record of sexual abuse." "Adult-child sex is the moral equivalent of slavery." "Intercourse is imperialism." "All men are rapists." "Sexual contact between an adult and a child is by definition abuse." Words uttered by people (men and women) who claim to represent "feminism" or the "feminist" perspective. But what precisely is that perspective?

In the realm of sexual politics, virtually anything which appears to criticize "male power" passes for feminism. Dworkin/McIGnnon-style censorship is called "feminist", even though it is backed heavily by the religious right and advocates even greater state control over sexuality than we see now. The current vogue for essentialist emotional distinctions between "nurturing" women and "warrior" men also has its "feminist" proponents, although such essentialism is supported, not by science, but by the most reactionary forces in society which would, if it could, render women barefoot and pregnant.

The disempowerment of youth, girls in particular, under the guise of "protection" is also called "feminist". Since girls are "powerless" in patriarchy, the argument goes, we should be ever vigilant lest they become victims. Boys will be boys, but girls will be kept at home with morm - a form of protection which is nothing short of indoctrination into domesticity. Heaven forbid we teach them self-respect, self-defense and the pleasure of sex. In her book on sexual abuse, entitled I Never Told Anyone, Ellen Bass warned her 4-year-old daughter: "There are some grown-ups... that if they see a child's vagina or penis, they may want to hurt it. That's why I want you to wear underpants when you're on the street alone." Believing herself to be a good "feminist," she taught her daughter in one easy lesson to feel guilt and fear about her sexuality. Although the clinical data demonstrate the rarity of violence in intergenerational sex (which is itself relatively uncommon), Bass advises mothers to create irrational fears in their children that the mere failure to keep their genitals covered by underwear could lead to grave injury. Only Bass' sexual ideology (and not just her belief in the absolute evil of adult-child sex) can explain why she eschewed simple, sensible warnings (e.g., don't get into cars with strangers) and chose instead to prepare her daughter to think like a victim.

Teaching girls to think like victims is no less pervasive in "anti-sex" feminist visions than it is in patriarchal culture in general. The message is simple: at every stage, girls are reminded that they are or will become victims, that they should have little expectation other than victimhood, and that they should be encouraged to express their feelings about their victimizations. In this formulation, experience — pleasure in particular - is suspect. Only ideology can properly organize it and give it its "real" meaning. (Anti-sex feminist researcher Diana Russell, for example, asked her sample of women not 'were you upset by your experience or did you find it pleasurable.' but "how upset were you by this experience — extremely upset, somewhat upset, or not very upset?") The incest-awareness movement of the mid to late 70s, necessary to bring to public light sexual/power abuses within the family, unfortunately fostered a new brand of intolerance which silenced the positive side of sex. Confirmation of negative experience as every woman's experience became the goal and those who disagreed were traitors to the cause. As Pat Califia recently noted in "Feminism, Paedophilia and Children's Rights" (Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia, Special Women's Issue (1992)):

We encourage incest survivors to break the silence and tell family secrets about violence and sexual abuse. But this sisterly support turns to outrage and cries for silence if a woman wants to talk about being a sexually active child or even a teenager who was not traumatized by the experience.

Germaine Greer (Seduction is a four-letter word, 1975) has also noted the vehemence of the denial of positive sexuality - so powerful, that a positive experience could be utterly obliterated and remembered only in negative terms. Speaking of a classmate, Greer wrote:

She enjoyed sex with her uncle throughout her childhood and never realized that anything was unusual until she went away to school. What disturbed her then was not what her uncle had done, but the attitude of her teachers and psychiatrist. They assumed that she must have been traumatized and disgusted and therefore in need of very special help. In order to capitulate to their expectations, she began to fake symptoms she did not feel, until at length she began to feel truly guilty for not having felt guilty. She ended up judging herself quite harshly for this innate lechery.

Without analyzing the differences between pre-pubescent and adolescent girls, or the differences between paedosexual man/girl relationships, incestuous relationships, and "normal" heterosexual relationships, anti-sex feminists indict all such relationships as mere variations on a theme of male domination and abuse. It should be noted that in all the books that have come out of feminist circles on sexual abuse, there are but a few accounts of paedosexual experiences between men and girls and little clue that girls might have an active sexuality other than mutual looking with male age mates or same-sex explorations.

But rhetorical abuses of language for ideological purposes are not limited to men's and girls' sexualities. Anti-sex feminists also use language to infantilize girls and to underscore the need for social control. Thus, regardless of age, anti-sex feminists (and their male allies) typically refer to girls/young women under an arbitrarily selected age of consent (young prepubescents and teenagers alike) as "little girls" whose helplessness and passivity are portrayed as absolute as the unmitigated power of male sexual authority. In the final analysis, however, the control which anti-sex feminists envision - authoritarian and patronizing - resembles too closely the control which already exists in society.

As historian judith Walkowitz has noted with respect to another anti-sex feminist (and religious fundamentalist), Josephine Butler, who was active during the mid 19th century, [Butler...'s rescue work] was a political device, aimed at subverting and superceding patriarchal authority: it gave mothers, not fathers, the right to control sexual access to the daughters. In this way, Butler sanctioned an authority relationship between older middleclass women and young working women that, although caring and protective, was also hierarchical and custodial.

When it comes to children and sex, anti-sex feminism is nothing more than authoritarianism under the guise of political correctness.

[RoosterDance]

Isabel's Story
by Isabel


My name is Isabel, I'm 38 and a foreign language teacher. In spite of my age, I still feel like a child and people think I'm somewhere between 16 and 26. Looking younger helps me get near children more easily.

I'm not a typical ped, but then again who is. Although there are some common characteristics among many peds, each and every one is a different personality. I'm not exclusively pedophile either. But few people have exclusively one sexual preference. I prefer girls aged 7 to 12, but I can also be attracted to adult women who look youthful and have some childish characteristics. I'm also attracted to men who have childish characteristics, but so far I've only been in love with gay men and heterosexual women, so I've never had a romantic relationship. As to the young girls that I've been attracted to, we never became friends due to circumstances or lack of interest from their part. I do artistic gymnastics at a gym club, so I'm around little girls often. I don't teach children, because I don't like them to see me as a superior, I want to be at the same level as they are. I don't lack adult friends though, I have many male gay friends. I've been active in different gay organizations in different countries and at an international level for 20 years. I eventually got disappointed by the shift from sexual liberation to politically correct homosexuality (pedophilia being thereby rejected), so currently I only keep contact with the few radical gay organizations left in the world.

I became aware of my homosexuality at nine, when I fell in love with a class mate. I knew that I was different from other people already at five, but I just didn't know how. I felt that society was trying to manipulate me—like it manipulated other children—into becoming a typical woman who wears make-up, gets married and has children, and I reacted against it. So I knew that I'd never marry or have children of my own, and I told my teacher and parents, but none of them took me seriously. Nobody ever did for that matter. This is a major mistake that adults make with children. I always felt deeply offended when my opinions and knowledge about myself and my plans for the future weren't respected. Another matter that adults don't seem to grant children is their sexuality. I discovered masturbation when I was five and I've been active and fully satisfied in that respect ever since. However, I knew that adults wouldn't like it, so I said nothing about it to anyone. I thought I was the only one who did that anyway. At ten I fell in love with a male actor, so then I knew I was bisexual. However, I had no desire to have sex with men until a very late age (my late twenties). On the other hand, I was desperate for love-making with girls and women, especially when I fell in love with a female teacher (at eleven). The whole school knew pretty soon about my love for her, as I did constantly many crazy things (like washing and kissing her car every week). She never spoke to me in person and she was quite cold towards me, she just asked me on a couple of occasions to stop doing what I did (like stopping going to her apartment building). I never got pestered by any of the kids either. However, my best friend broke contact with me after her mother had found out about me and probably told her that I was a pervert.

It wasn't before I was past 30 that I realized I was also pedophile. I always thought of age as being unimportant and of homosexual pedophilia as being part of homosexuality, so I never put any borders between ages or who I fell in love with or felt attracted to. As an adult, however, I never happened to fall in love or be attracted to a little girl before I was 32. I think it's only due to the fact that I just didn't think of children as potential objects of desire. I didn't get involved in pedophile activism before that, so I didn't question myself over that area. When I finally did, I started to be attracted to little girls. Sometimes I'm also attracted to little boys; but I seldom share interests with a boy, and their being very macho makes them uninteresting to me. But I can be good friends with a gay boy, because I feel that we understand each other and we can communicate better.

I live in a country where the hysteria against pedophiles hasn't reached very far yet. So until now I haven't been a target of pedophobia, although I'm an open ped. My being female helps too; most people can't imagine how a female can be a ped, or they think of her as non-dangerous. I'm more of a threat to parents when they find out I'm gay. They think I'll push their daughters towards homosexuality. I hate being dishonest, so I get seldom involved with parents whose daughters I feel attracted to.

I don't want to have children for many and very different reasons, one of them being the one I mentioned before, my desire to be at the same level as children. I'm not unhappy nor depressed due to my pedophile desires, but I'm not really happy either. I'm always involved in an unrequited love, and that gets me periodically very depressed and unhappy. I would be happy if I had a successful relationship with an adult and little girls as friends. Making love with a little girl would be a wonderful experience, but it isn't a must for my existance and happiness. I'm a fairly optimistic person, and that helps me get over my depressions. I also believe that the pedophobic wave will yield some time soon.

[RoosterDance]

Mother and Child: The Erotic Bond
by Lynda Marín

Reprinted with permission of the author, from MOTHER JOURNEYS, Feminists Write about Mothering edited by Maureen T. Reddy, Martha Roth, Amy Sheldon, pp. 9-21, Spinsters Ink, Minneapolis, MN, © 1994


No one is prepared for becoming a mother even though the world is full of discourse on the subject. I became a mother at thirty-eight and by then I thought I knew a few things. I knew for a fact that I would never be adequately prepared, for instance, and that I would just do it the way every other woman probably had, the best way I could. Right from the beginning of the pregnancy I felt myself initiated into the realm of the best-kept secrets. No one had ever mentioned, for instance, the tingly little cramps just over the pubic bone that set in almost immediately with a first pregnancy and raise the fear that just when you'll need those very muscles to be strong they seem to be giving out. Many months after the birth of my son, a mother of three told me they're called round ligament pains. Nor did anyone ever mention the invisible belt of hivelike itching that often occurs in the second through fourth months of pregnancy. And although I had heard plenty of warnings about menstrual spotting in the the first four months, no one ever told me about the incontinence that might accompany the entire pregnancy and beyond. "Incontinence?" my friend Katherine laughed when I mentioned it a few years later. "Oh, yeah, forget about running, jumping, or sneezing!"

The best-kept secrets pile up around the subject of childbirth, postpartum "depression," and the first twelve months. My son was born prematurely and so I encountered a whole other set of secrets no one thinks she'll need to know until she does. I remember, though, being determined, as I had heard other women say they had been, to not forget a thing, to document every private discovery, every hidden event. But denial, displacement, and cultural mandates for self-effacing motherhood aside, there are compelling logistical reasons why new mothers keep the secrets. They are too exhausted, disoriented, and busy for the most part to be recording them all, and by the time they aren't (do I really believe such a time arrives?) the vagaries of memory commit those secrets yet again to the farthest outposts, the silent margins that delimit the discourses of mothering. And so I have failed, like so many other mothers, to resist the inevitable. Most of the best-kept secrets of pregnancy and early motherhood lie buried safely within me shimmering just out of reach in some vast and timeless collective.

But that is not that. Other secrets replace them, take up the present moment, carry thornier implications. A secret that compels me now, that has increasingly gained complexity in the last two years, has to do with the erotic bond between my son and me. That the bond is an erotic one is not in itself a secret. This is the secret upon which Freud founded psychoanalysis as we know it—that the child has drives that are sexual and that the first objects of those drives are its parents, most initially its mother('s body). But what we do with that bit of psychoanalytic insight is what we seem so bent on keeping hidden.

Alexander likes to say he is "four-and-three-quarters." I got plenty of warning about this age, about the intensity of the little boy's attachment to the mother and his Oedipal struggle to possess her entirely for himself. Numbers of women friends with boys assured me that their preschool age sons really do propose marriage to them, intercept their affectionate gestures intended for spouses or lovers, and lavish them with tender phrases and caresses. How dear, I thought. And how poignant the necessity of redirecting these most passionate expressions of desire. Nevertheless, that is exactly what our culture requires, however mediated by our various ethnicities and classes, in order that the boy child identify finally with the other, the father, the law, to take up his place in culture as a man. And while I am ceaselessly rewriting culture's script for men, I recognize my limited power in this arena. I have one son whom I would wish to become an unusual man, a man who resists his gender identity enough to grapple always with the rigors of self-reflection and the complexities of social construction. But seeing no other alternative (how many androgynes do I actually know?), I would wish him still to identify as a man. So it was with a sense of forewarning and purposefulness that I imagined myself meeting Alexander's first dramatic displays of Oedipal conflict. This sense was nurtured by not only the content but the tone of all those conversations I had had with mothers, the books I had read, the films I had seen. My position always seemed clear. I was the figure who must nurture and assist my son through this difficult attachment/detachment maneuver to/from myself.

But no one had really ever told me, in a way I could hear at least, what it might feel like to be the mother in the Oedipal conflict. Indeed of the three key characters in the Greek myth of Oedipus, Jocasta's experience is least described. Upon discovering that she has had four children with her son Oedipus, we are told, she hangs herself. That, of course, is the best way to keep a secret forever. Still, it seems mothers do something equally silencing in the day-to-day way we do not speak of our erotic feelings toward those most desirable of objects, our children. We say our kids are cute, of course, or beautiful or remarkable, and we endlessly detail their behaviors and idiosyncrasies, but rarely do we acknowledge the erotic component of our own feelings in these observations of them. I say "rarely" because just today, when I was trying to explain the topic of this essay to a friend with a six-month-old daughter, she said simply, "It's the most erotic thing I've ever felt. You know it's no joke about pretending to eat her right up. I really do want to. It's just uncontainable, this desire. But what can I do? I can't have sex with her. Although nursing takes care of that." That's right, I thought. The physical intimacy of early infancy does mediate those drives in the parent, does "take care of" the uncontainable desire in a way that can't occur at the Oedipal stage. Now that my son is nearly five, I do not have access to his body in the same ways I did when he was younger, nor does he have the same access to mine. I have to ask permission now to clean out his ears, help blow his nose, or make one last wipe after he gets off the toilet (could I ever have imagined such a thing in the midst of all those diaper changes?). And he knows better now than to try and "pinch" my breasts—"fondle" is, of course, much more like it, but language allows him the same diversionary tactics I use.

In fact, language is the very intervention in our children's developmental process that requires us to come to terms with the erotic energy that infuses our love for them (the developmental process I am referring to is here marked by the Oedipal stage—a crucial step in attaining gender identity that boy and girl children experience quite differently but whose name suggests its emphasis on the boy child's experience). But it is also language that foils our expression of that eroticism. When my son wraps his arms around my legs, sighs, and says, "Mommy, I want to have a baby with you," a number of things inevitably occur in me. The impossible tenderness of the moment is followed by the need to say something. "You do?" I say, stalling for the right response (and noting that last year he wanted to be me). I could extend the fantasy toward the realm of the practical and avoid the more problematic implications by asking what he'd do with a baby. Would he like to dress it and feed it and change diapers, etc. But I know that has nothing to do with what he wants. I could redirect the fantasy to include his father, and suggest that what he might like is a sister or brother, but that, I am sure, is not what he is talking about in this moment. I could "reality adjust" him in the service of heterosexuality by assuring him that one day he will marry someone he loves and have a baby with her. But now, far from being a comfort, this assurance will not alleviate the anxiety he must be feeling. After all it was just a short time ago that, lying next to me one morning, staring blankly at the ceiling, he sang a wandering little song that went, "Oh, mommy, I love you so much I don't know what to do" Good grief, Charlie Brown, I thought to myself in a voice I use when we're playing sometimes, I feel the same way about you. The truth is just that simple and just that complex, too.

I remember a specific moment, a "where-it-all-began" moment when I glimpsed the enormity of language's intervention in the continuum of desire that contained us both. We were in the kitchen and he was two. He had been saying lots of words for a long time, so I had passed beyond the wonder of yet another new one but was enjoying tremendously his pleasure in stringing them all together, his various forays into meaning. "Mommy!" he said, "you want a cookie." And as if my brain were wired through his, I indeed felt hunger for a cookie, as if he had only "read my mind." In the time it took to hand him the cookie, a lot happened. I realized that we had been operating like this for a long time, that the boundarylessness between mothers and preverbal children did not simply shore up with the onset of language but rather found ways to persist inside it. This was the first time I had ever noticed in nearly a year of his acquiring language that he had never used the word I. I had been hearing I for all those yous, and not just by mentally exchanging pronouns but actually registering his desire in my body (what power in a pronoun!), feeling it come up against my often different desire, and finally assigning the conflicting desire to him. Not surprisingly, it was around this time that I noticed other people in the family helping him to make the distinction between I and you, something that is actually very difficult to explain due to the nature of pronouns themselves, i.e. "Oh, you mean I when you say you. No, I know you don't mean me, you mean you, but you need to say I when you mean you," etc. I left it to the others. I was in no hurry to give up what might be the last vestiges of some of the most compelling commingling I have ever felt.

But the leaving it to others felt like a secret I ought to keep. No one likes the idea that a mother enjoys the boundarylessness of relation with her child. That pleasure suggests too intimately her own regressive, infantile underpinnings. More than anything, we need a mother to be an adult. We want to believe that all her own early polymorphous pleasure has now been securely organized around her genitals and directed toward her adult sexual partner. We like to think of a mother's delight in the softness of her child's skin, the firmness of its body, the familiarity of its smell, the singularity of its voice, the sweetness of its breathing as something quite separate from a woman's delight in the body of her lover. We like to make a clear distinction between motherly affection and female passion. If there were not a clear distinction, what would stop mothers from engulfing their children forever in their own hedonistic designs? What hope would culture have?

But what if one of the best-kept secrets is that there is no distinction, really, between motherly affection and female passion? Or rather, that we practice this same love, this erotic energy continuous with our early attachment to our own mother's (or her substitute's) body, in tirelessly deliberate and mediated ways. And we do this exactly because of the lack of boundary between ourselves and our children, exactly because our children are never entirely other. This is the positive side of the narcissistic attachment to children for which mothers are so often criticized. Never is it more clear than with our own children that what we do unto them, we do unto ourselves. If we support their independence and self-reliance, we inevitably gain more freedom and time for ourselves. If we honor their individual expression and spirit, we usually get respected in return. And if we burden them with guilt and shame, we can count on being plagued with those same feelings about ourselves and our parenting. Since the feedback loop is almost immediate, we learn early how to mediate the merging of desire (ours, theirs, and whatever overlaps), how to negotiate the tangle of erotic drives that constitutes the bond between a mother and a child. The other thing we learn is not to talk about it.

Alexander likes to cuddle a lot. A lot. I remember hoping before he was born that he would be an affectionate child because I like to cuddle, too. An astrologer friend assured me in the hospital that his early birth in the sign of Cancer would predispose him to strong emotions and an affectionate nature. For the first year, of course, there's no telling. Five months of colic, followed by teething and developmental anxieties, made it almost impossible to discern what sort of little person he would become. I only know I seemed always to be holding him and always on the lookout for another pair of willing arms. By the second year, though, the astrological prediction seemed to be bearing itself out. And what really confirmed it was the language that began to accompany his affectionate gestures. I can rarely turn down invitations like "I need to cuddle with my soft sweet mommy."

By now Alexander's cuddling is a highly developed art. It begins early in the morning when he appears in my room holding Orker the seal, slips into bed beside me, and coaxes one of my sleepy arms around his middle. This is complicated. On the one hand, I resist. I am never ready to be awake. On the other, I am endlessly grateful that here he is whole in body and spirit, in all his morning good cheer, and almost calm enough to let me pretend to myself that I am resting a little while longer. It's a count-my-blessings kind of moment, and then some. "Mommy," he says, after about ten or fifteen minutes, "let's be animals. " This has been going on for as long as I can remember (perhaps this is what replaced nursing so long ago). He is the baby elephant, bird, snake, fish, seal, horse, dog, or kitty, and I am the mommy of the same species. We go looking for food, we have adventures, we don't get caught, we return home where we cuddle, of course. Sometimes he just collapses against me, his face pressing down on mine, and I breathe him in, breathe him out. Sometimes in these moments he says how much he loves me, but most of the time he is talking to himself, or singing, or just staring off. If his dad tries to enter in, Alexander always pushes him away, even though at other times he is quite loving with him. Then suddenly he will disappear under the covers all the way to the foot of the bed. After a lot of tossing and giggling he reappears, naked, having left his pajamas somewhere down at my feet. He presents himself with noisy fanfare, giddy with his own power. He is delighted by his nakedness and, I sense, by something like defying an assumed prohibition. For although nudity is commonplace in our family, he seems to sense that he's on some kind of an edge. He turns his skinny backside to my front and we lie like spoons, half-moaning half-humming an exaggerated "Yummmmmm." The sensuality of this moment that we have constructed almost takes my breath away. For the short time that we snuggle like this, I feel as close to perfectly happy as I imagine possible.

Most of the time I'm the one to say we've got to get up, to eat, to dress, to go to school, etc. But when I can't marshall the forces, or when I am lulled into overtime by the pleasure of our play, I sometimes begin to feel uncomfortable. "OK, I'll be the mommy bird and you be the baby and you cry and I'll feed you. Here, nurse the mommy," he says, pointing to his tummy. And although I'm tempted to kiss that spot as a way of playing along (I can't even imagine pretending to nurse him—here a taboo is in full force), I often hear myself responding with things like, "No, I'm sleeping now," or "Yikes, I fell in the river." Nevertheless I let the game go on. I am, of course, partly curious to see how he plays out being the mommy (she's always good at finding food and fighting off hunters). Now suddenly he's the baby and wants to nurse. I laugh him away, but he insists and pretends to grab for my breast. "Cut it out!" I say partly laughing because he's laughing, but partly serious, too, and in this moment thinking quite concertedly about where the boundaries ought to be. "OK, OK," he says, seems to stop, and then dives towards my chest, kissing me on the clavicle. That he kisses me takes me aback. I see that he does the same thing I do—that he doesn't really pretend to nurse either, that he opts for that more adult vestigial gesture of nursing, the kiss. And, like someone who suddenly realizes she is witnessing an historical event in the making, I think IT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. In this moment, unlike any other that I have known, I am actually the mother and the woman, the original object and its displacement. This is the impossible conjoining that patriarchal and heterosexual culture so labors to veil, to mystify, to interdict, which I can hardly hang on to long enough to mark before it passes imperceptively like water into air.

What, I wonder in moments like these, would I do if he were a girl (or if I had a second child and no time for this sort of play)? Would a daughter his age and I even be playing these games? Or would our games be more informed by the kinds of power struggles that ordinarily accompany a girl child's efforts to separate out who is who in the selfsameness of mother-daughter gender? But just say that we did play mother-and-baby games as part of our morning ritual, would I feel the same ambivalence at the same turns? Would I wonder for a moment about our nakedness together? Or about the appropriateness of the game? My sister-in-law has been saying tactfully for a long time now that "most mothers curtail access to their body to their boy children at this age." She is a psychotherapist and a sensible woman/mother, so I take her advice to heart. But she is also, I always tell her, a white, middle-class American. Many people of other cultures and classes don't operate with these same taboos, and anyway I don't want my body to become distant, mysterious, and only, therefore, an object of frustrated desire. I want a woman's body to be a real thing to him, with its various characterizing features and quirks, cycles and stages. She reminds me, though, and I acknowledge also, that Alexander is growing up in this culture in a predominantly white, middle-class family. But, I ask her obliquely, what woman in her right mind wouldn't want to resist that institution and remold its membership? And how better to do it than with our bodies, the most split-off and thereby suppressed/oppressed instruments culture has at its disposal? And that brings me back to erotic love and its power in the mother-child relationship, because all those normative steps to desexualizing the child's attachment to his/her mother's body are predicated on a split between mother and woman that is culturally required but personally mutilating for both mothers and children, a category that finally includes everyone.

I see that what I am holding out for, in these borderline experiments in erotic love with my son (the wording is so sensitive here, and nothing that I can think to say is quite what I mean), is a rewriting of sexuality as I know it. It is not a free-for-all kind of sexuality that powered the imagination of the "sexual revolution" of the '60s and '70s but left us, men and women, just as split in ourselves as ever. It is an inclusive kind of sexuality that recognizes itself basically everywhere. It is not so scary in its infantility because it's just as much a part of adulthood, too. And if we were to recognize that kind of sexuality much more intimately in ourselves all the time (since it's operating there all the time anyway), we would have to pay it close attention, to be careful and caring with it. I imagine our having to add lots of new words to our language to describe it in its multiple manifestations in any interaction, fantasy, work of art, etc., in much the same way we have thought Inuit peoples to have so many words for snow. But I recognize that as innocently as I try to cast it, it's a sexuality that would not support life on the planet as we know it, that is, would not support social hierarchies, multinational corporations, a free market economy, racism, colonization, or any other of the problematic realities that depend on our ability to split off what's safe and good (mother) from what's desirable (woman).

Last year Valorie (a dear friend and second mother-figure to Alexander) and I took him to the Women's Music Festival. It is an all-women's event, four days of music and sun, hikes and swimming, workshops and food. Boy children ten years of age and under are also allowed. When we got inside the festival grounds, I was amused by the first truckload of women passing by laughing and waving, their bare breasts jouncing to the bumps in the road. They were acting out, I thought, taking every opportunity to do what is everywhere else forbidden. But I didn't blame them. By the next day I didn't blame myself either. In the afternoons the large swimming pool filled up with bodies of every imaginable size, shape, and texture. Mothers, children, lovers, friends towel-to-towel along the steamy concrete deck, dipping in and out of the brisk water. All those naked bodies so happily commingling in the security of our shared gender. Was it erotic to be there? Of course it was. It was magnificently, luxuriously, ubiquitously so. And yet we were as orderly as any other crowd, waited in long lines for dinner and almost as long ones for showers, had regular conversations, and helped each other out in small, immediate ways. I don't remember ever seeing any overtly genital sex acts between women there, although the atmosphere was clearly sexually charged. In fact I felt more comfortable and secure in this crowd than in any other I'd been in.

No surprise, much of that comfort had to do with Alexander, that he was in as safe a place as he could possibly be, all those women/mothers with an eye and an arm out, just in case. I wasn't surprised either that the other children there seemed less competitive, more trusting, and, interestingly, more independent than many kids I've had occasion to know. But I was surprised at my sense of relief when, dropping Alexander off at the festival daycare center, I felt unambivalent pleasure at his fingers tracing my cheekbone and his "Goodbye, my dearest mommy lover. " How often I have marked those kinds of goodbyes at his regular preschool with a vague anxiety about their possibly problematic implications. How often I have listened furtively to the way other children say goodbye to their mothers hoping to hear equally "excessive" endearments. And how often has the sensible mother within had to remind me that what really should be noted is how happily he says goodbye and lets me go. But what would it mean to never feel one moment of that ambivalence, to trust that this love I feel for my son is as good as it ever gets? What would it mean if I could openly and directly model all my other loves on this, my finest? When it was time to leave the festival, none of us wanted to go home. Alexander made us promise we would bring him back next year. Both Valorie and I got ready for reentry trauma, and we didn't have to wait long. Just twenty minutes down the highway we stopped for gas, minded our business, and, predictably, got harrassed by two drunk men until the tank was filled up.

"How would you feel if Alexander grew up to be gay?" a lesbian friend doesn't quite ask as we speak recently of things erotic and motherly. Or, I think to myself, sexually ambivalent or a cross-dresser or a fetishist, or—? These questions have crossed my mind before. I would be kidding myself to say it wouldn't matter, that whatever his sexuality I would accept it without reservation, remorse, guilt, or judgment. "It would be hard," his father says when I ask him the same questions. And I agree. Life is hard enough, and being "different" is that much harder. I'm already feeling sorry that he's having to deal with being left-handed. (I was left-handed, too, but the kindergarten teacher would have none of that.) On the other hand (the right one), to consciously guide him into the heterosexual model of masculinity feels abusive. Yet again, to not deliberately guide him in that direction seems at times equally injurious. Example: Alexander at his gymnastics lesson begs me for a leotard like the other kids have (the girls, that is). Here's one of those moments where I watch my conditioning vie with my resistance to it. I think "No," plain and simple, but I try out "Yes" for a fleeting second just to really test myself. After all, I might have been able to say yes just a year ago, but kids say things now to each other about haircuts and clothes and so I know a leotard is sure to bring him immediate censure, probably even from his teacher. Nevertheless, as I am feeling the absurdity of my own explanation to him, that boys and girls usually wear different kinds of uniforms for most kinds of sports (though I am hard pressed to answer his outraged "Why?"), I grind to a halt between what I know and what I want. "If you really want a leotard, you can have one" I tell him, "but you just have to know that someone might make fun of you because you will be different." "Never mind," he says. A week later after co-oping at Alexander's preschool, his dad reports that in the fantasy room Alexander got himself dressed up as a cowboy and then with equal enthusiasm donned an elaborate bride's costume and went through a double wedding ceremony with his friend Evin and another "couple." "How was that?" I ask his dad. "He made a beautiful bride," he says. And we both laugh and remember the evening before when Alexander had said to me at the dinner table, "OK, I'm the bride and you're the broom. " Groom," his dad said, "the man is the groom." "Oh," Alexander says, a little abashed, and then, "No, I want you to be the broom." "OK," I agree. A bride and broom seem likely enough in a domestic sort of way, but then again, if the broom can fly....

On my desk sits a small photo of myself circa four "and-three-quarters." I retrieved it from my stepfather after my mother died thirteen years ago. It had been taken in Iowa where I lived with a foster parent who must have sent it on to my mother in California. I have often wondered at the self-possessed expression on that child's face, her legs crossed and her hands clasped squarely in her lap. It is one of the few photos I have of my childhood and it has become, by now, one of my most familiar images of myself. Recently, though, while late-night working on some translation at my desk, I saw that photo/myself anew. Who knows what triggered it. Perhaps it was La Amortajada, the text I was so feverishly unravelling, about a dead woman's dialogue with her split-off selves, or perhaps it was the residue of a drawn-out, difficult "good night" with Alexander, who that evening thought his bedroom too lonely to fall asleep in. Perhaps it was everything and nothing I could point to, but in any case it happened. I looked at the little girl in the photo and I felt such a surge of desire I must have stopped breathing. I wanted her entirely, to embrace her until she melted into me, to infuse her with all of myself, to enjoy the delicious intimacy of her little body as a day-to-day, minute-to-minute commonplace—her skin, her hair, her smell, her sound. I could almost reproduce her right then and there, a tangible, palpable child.

In a trying-to-make-sense-of-this effort I reminded myself that these were actually feelings I have for Alexander. And it did make sense that on account of family resemblance and age correspondence I had, at that moment, mapped the feelings I have for my actual child onto the photographic image that represents for me my internalized child. But the unmediated desire I felt for that small girl in the photo made me at least suspect that it might be the other way around. What I mean to say is what if, for a reason I can't presume to know, for a split second some of my psycho-social infrastructure slipped just enough to reveal another of the best-kept secrets: that all love whether it be for our children, our lovers, our work, our ideas, is fundamentally the same love, is first and last, coming and going, not even erotic but autoerotic? For isn't erotic love just a further development, a successful splitting off, redirecting, and renaming of that first continuous unbounded connection/pleasure we feel with our mother's body?

Of course, autoeroticism is not such a secret since we can find it strategically positioned, just as I'm suggesting now, in psychoanalytic discourse. The real secret, though, is how "ardorously" culture struggles to forget what eroticism actually is, where it comes from, and why it is absolutely everywhere all the time, especially and necessarily in a mother's love for her child. When we successfully forget that fact, as we require ourselves to do in the name of becoming adults, we severely limit the ways we can experience the connection/pleasure which originally nurtured us into life and which sustains our desire for life forever after. It seems evident that one of the reasons, for instance, that Western culture has so little regard, by and large, for what's left of natural life—for plants and animals and earth and atmosphere—is its successful endeavor to see itself as separate from all that life, to forget the connection/pleasure that informs our very being here.

So what is a mother to do? If I had never had a child, my task would be the same. I would still have that little girl internalized and her picture on my desk. I would still need to be parenting her, the child she is, the woman I am, the best way I know how. It's just that having Alexander confronts me more urgently to uncover the secret of what that best way is.

"Do you love me so much that you just have to close your eyes?" he asked me the other day when we were hugging. "Yes!" I said, surprised at his accuracy. "Me, too" he said matter-of-factly and patted my hand. But for whatever permission I am learning to give myself in honoring the erotic bond between us, I wonder still if it makes any difference. One morning recently he sits at the table eating cereal and crooning a love song to mother. Something about how wonderful and sweet I am and how much much much he loves loves loves me. "Goodbye," I interrupt him on my way out the door. "Can I have a hug?" The goodbye hug is a ritual. But this morning he doesn't even hear me. His eyes are so far off in his song that I hesitate to ask again, though I suppose that later on he'll think I didn't say goodbye. So I try once more. But it's no use. "I just love her so much my mommy," I hear as I leave the house. Tossing his car pillow into the backseat to make room next to me for my books and papers, I marvel at that other "mommy"' that symbolic creature who, seemingly overnight, has exceeded and displaced me, and who, this morning, has him in thrall. I only hope, for all our sakes, she loves him as undividedly as she can.

[RoosterDance]

That's all for the articles in the Butterfly Kisses Research section, I believe. For anyone interested in reading more (personal stories especially), the entire website has been archived and can be downloaded on your own as Jim pointed out.

My current recommended archive of BK is via Katie Cruz:

https://mirror.amapin.love/download/but ... e-archive/

However, the forum thread I'm copying still has a few more articles about female pedophilia that were found from other websites. I will be copying them here in time.

[aeterna91]

Very interesting articles! Thank you for sharing.