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ajfjdjsidi's avatar

"One reason was that I wanted to preserve — to conserve — the world that made it possible for me to be that free-spirited woman." - beautiful.

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Joe Panzica's avatar

Such a careful essay deserves an attempt at a careful response. So here goes!

Only in certain forms of “play” might we be tempted to identify “sexuality”with “freedom”, and it’s an odd form of play that would generate a view of sex as ONLY self expression. Yet this does happen frequently enough, and when it does, it’s the kind of “play” some ancient Greeks might associate with hubris and consequent nemesis or tragedy.

Similar problems (and potential tragedies) arise from the conflation of sex with power, if “power” is the ability to control or dominate others… even if we are too slowly learning that freedom must be responsibly identified with “ability” rather than license.

Part of the human tragedy is that sexuality, though it cannot be identified with power or violence, can never be cleanly separated from them. Part of the human tragedy is that we are compelled, not only to act out our sexuality, but to explore through play (and through other means?) how sex, power, and violence interact and may be partially separated. Part of our human tragedy is that this dynamic of sexuality and violence is only a fraction of a grander, more thorny “complex”. 

It’s all too tempting to see sex and violence as binary aspects of a greater compelling FORCE personified, perhaps, as a god like Eros or Dionysus (resplendent in blood and light). Obviously, as humanity, we have “been there” and “done that” (which is not to suggest we don’t persist in this type of “playful(?)”  conceptualizing). There is also another aspect of power or compulsion that drives human behavior and imagination. This is nurturance. 

Nurturance can be symbolized in terms of the acute, self-draining, all-consuming attention a human newborn requires from parents (usually mothers). Anyone who ever dwells on the relationships between love and sexuality is likely to be discomforted by how nurturance can morph into sexuality OR violence. Some aspects of nurturance are, after all, forms of “power over,” “control,” and “dominance” that are not always benign. A different aspect of “nurturance” is the urge “to protect,” with its obvious associations with violence. The galvanizing care and attention required by newborns is one (often ill-considered and sometimes perverse, but quite powerful) engine exploited by the anti-abortion right wing who choose to see themselves as “pro-life”.  (This mode of care and attention also has many other noxious permutations.)

Nurturance can also be expressed as compassion or empathy, or even conceptualized as “love” or “grace”. One anthropological view of Christianity (an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism and the brutality of empire) is that it was the first formal WESTERN (state sponsored and state sponsoring) “religion” to begin an attempt to give primacy to compassion as well as loving justice in how it organized society and tried to shape minds and behavior. (Buddhists may rightly smile at or object to this. Christians may rightly object to my use of the past tense.)

Abraham Heschel famously claimed at the end of his “The Prophets” that the Hebrew God should be “identified” with a loving, compassionate, merciful justice. Most of us still struggle to see how justice can be identified with compassion and empathy. Perhaps they are (like sexuality, violence, and nurturance) quite distinct, though inseparable, forces that can only be unified at a higher level of abstraction or on a plane of existence inaccessible to everyday human cognizance. Yet one way mortals CAN routinely explore how these complementary and supplementary expressions of “the life force” combine and interact (for good or ill) is through play. 

Johan Huizinga, in “Homo Ludens” wrote that “play” is older than humanity and human culture, claiming that ritual, religion, language, law, and even war all have roots in formalized play. His view of “the sacred” is that it “sets aside” a realm of true creative and exploratory play with boundaries of space, time, rules, and consent.

“The arena, the card‑table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play‑grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” — Johan Huizinga, “Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture”

https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/b0899cfad820ab8ad7033952b7a022ba1d7cab9d.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Huizinga’s notions are also relevant to the contemporary USA when masked and anonymous “law enforcement officers” are engaged in street violence and abduction as part of a grander sweep of authoritarian repression where women are the original and perennial victims in addition to foreigners, Jews, and those found guilty or suspected of crimes because of some apparent deviance. He warned that fascism will masquerade as “games”, using jokes, symbols, pageantry, spectacle, and false myths of destiny to mask, justify, or glorify violence. (It should be noted that Huizinga was an opponent to all forms of totalitarianism who died in the Netherlands under Nazi house arrest.)

Play is always serious business, and play is also embodied in deities of every culture, not always simply in the guise of a mischievous trickster. The Greek God Dionysus (as an embodiment of masking, tragic drama, grape cultivation and wine culture) may be the prime exemplar of a majestically potent god who combines play, whimsy, justice, revenge, terror, and violence: sometimes creative and generative, other times destructive and cruel. His mythologies are linked to ideas of resurrection and the spiritual transformations resulting from the breakdown of rigid identities. His mythologies are central to Western notions of dance and ecstatic, transformative modes of music. Dionysus is also linked to a wide range of sexual expressivity that go well beyond lustful or heteronormative coupling. He is frequently portrayed as androgynous, and his liberatory festivals were viewed as being especially attractive to women in the Ancient Greek culture, which was generally patriarchal and repressive to women.

Sexuality, violence, and nurturance are all primal and prior to humanity and human culture. (So may well be “justice”.) Their disturbing tendencies to morph into one another are partially responsible for their profound abilities to invoke shame, guilt, and fear. These tendencies may be partially explained as well as be kinetically and somatically explored through “careful play,” where the word “careful” combines both seriousness of purpose as well as the caring associated with nurturant compassion and empathy. But even “careful play” can go wrong, and Huizinga tells us nothing new when he addresses issues of “false play” and cheating. We should also remember that one early (and ongoing) aspect of deadly warfare was the aim to disrupt and supplant the rituals, sacred spaces, and gods of other peoples.

The rise of fascism in the US and the current wave of authoritarian reaction across the globe requires us all to take these ideas seriously, and especially to try to conceptualize freedom not so much as license (with its limited adolescent or malignant appeal to those who seek to benefit from disruption) but as mutual enablement, activation, and development of everyone’s capacities. In the struggle against fascism we may be tempted to resort to violence or escape into privatized sensualities, but building mutual capacities in the face of treacherous power cannot be successful unless we cultivate and elevate compassion and empathy into our games, our work, and our dreams. 

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