What Is Sex?

Matrix a novel by Lauren Groff.  Riverhead Books.257 pp.  $18.00.

“As she sometimes does when she rides out to the abbey’s estates, she leans forward against the horn of her pommel, and lets the motion of the horse’s gait build against her until she gasps and something in her breaks.

“She is always calmer afterwards.”

“The infirmatix’s hands lift the hem of her shift and then Marie feels the shock of smooth skin upon the flesh of her inner thighs and understands when she feels Nest’s breath that it is not a hand there but Nest’s far softer cheek.  She feels her eyelashes brushing her skin.  Her skin shivers the length of herself.  And then Nest’s mouth is there, her hands are there, and Marie is brought violently to the swift central current of a river where she is released, she spins, she goes under.  When she comes up again, she shakes and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes.  Sparks fly in the dark.

“Marie lets the infirmatrix dress her.  Nest pulls Marie’s hands away from her face and says sternly, no no, oh prioress, there is no shame in this bodily release, that it is an expression of the humors, not unlike bloodletting, it is utterly natural, it has nothing to do with copulation.  She will still meet her god a virgin.  It’s simply that some of the nuns require such expression of the humors more than others.  Some as often as once every two days, some once a year.  Nest has often wondered that Marie might be one who required it rather frequently.  There is sometimes, well, a wild look in Marie’s eye.  She tells Marie to come back to the infirmary when she feels the need.”

I have no idea what Lauren Groff’s religious background is.  I don’t believe she is Catholic.  And her account of life in a 12^th century nunnery in Matrix doesn’t sound much like what I’ve read about nunneries (really just Karen Armstrong’s marvelous memoir of her difficulties with that life).  But I don’t believe Groff is trying to write a realistic novel about life in a nunnery, or even about life in the Middle Ages.  Groff’s writing has a utopian streak, and she seems rather to be writing about what life might have been, or might be.  She is creating a paradise of women in this novel (at one point, Marie bans all men from the premises, even as servants.  Some women have been showing up pregnant, and that has become a problem).  I’m reminded of my long-ago interview of former Jesuit Joseph Kramer, who told me that the Jesuit order was “homosexual heaven.”[1]

But I’m noticing as I read this novel all the references to sex.  I’m sure that devout Catholics are scandalized, as they were years ago by a book that was an instant classic merely by its title: Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence.  But although Groff will get major brownie points for legitimizing queer culture in this book (as she also does in Fates and Furies), I’m not sure that’s what she intended.  I think she’s saying that sex is a natural part of being alive.  It’s a human energy, and you stifle it at your peril.  That seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me.  But so many religious traditions deny it.

Nest in this novel is a Welsh woman who has arrived at the nunnery because her husband died and she could handle her grief in no other way.  She actually has trouble communicating with the other women because she doesn’t speak French or English (she does know Latin, with which she communicates with Marie).  Marie soon discovers that Nest knows about healing plants, and healing in general, so she makes her the head of the infirmary.  Nest is comfortable with all kinds of infirmities, including mental ones (several of the nuns are suffering from mental illness or dementia.  Nevertheless, they have a place in the community, and help as they are able).  Nest is a healer and understands healing energies.  It is as a healer that she performs oral sex on Marie.  She can see the woman needs it.

I’m quite fascinated by her statement that this act has “nothing to do with copulation” and that Marie is still a virgin.  I suppose those things are technically true.  It does seem to me that the two women are having sex (despite what Nest says, and what President Clinton once claimed). Later on, when Marie is going through menopause and suffering mightily from hot flashes, a younger nun seduces her and suggests that they continue.  Somehow that seems different to Marie, and she decides that she can’t continue, despite the fact that she enjoyed what happened.  It was more like a love affair than a medical procedure.

I wonder what Nest would say about men mutually masturbating, or having oral sex.  Do those things have nothing to do with copulation?  What about (heaven forbid) anal sex?  Is that where men would cross a line?  I don’t see why.  Penetration is penetration, and the women penetrate each other with their fingers.  Does that have nothing to do with copulation?  Nest, for one, feels that way (since she is a widow, she has presumably copulated).

I wonder if there is a weird double standard between men and women about masturbation and orgasms.  When I was at the Insight Meditation Society, and we were told that for ten days we vowed to refrain from sex, I assumed that included not masturbating, and other men I spoke with agreed, but when I brought that up with women they thought that was silly.  Masturbation wasn’t sex as far as they were concerned.  It was a way to relax.  What men call “sex,” by which they mean intercourse, includes male ejaculation but not necessarily female orgasm.  Most men don’t give a damn whether that happens or not (according to women I’ve talked to).

So it is the male orgasm, in particular ejaculation, that makes something sex.  And of course male masturbation is widely regarded as sinful, because the Bible prohibits “spilling one’s seed,” even though Onan’s transgression was neglecting to impregnate his widowed sister in law, not jerking off.  But of course organized religion immediately jumped all over that passage, claiming that the Bible prohibits jerking off, which immediately brands ninety five percent of men sinners (and the other five percent liars) and exposes the massive hypocrisy of the whole enterprise.  Everybody knows that men jerk off and that it’s a good thing to do.

There’s an immediate assumption on the part of most people that holy people, or truly religious people, are celibate.  Why is that?  It’s widely assumed that Jesus never had sex or any sexual feelings.  Really?  And he was fully human?  Why is it that sex and religion stand in opposition to one another, and are assumed to be opposing forces?

Lauren Groff seems to be gently suggesting they are not.  That sex is a human energy that doesn’t necessarily interfere with a religious life.  They can co-exist.  They should co-exist.

Of course sex can be misused and get us in trouble, but that’s true of virtually everything, food, wine, drugs, work, exercise, even religion.  Everything has a good and bad side.  But human energies shouldn’t stand in opposition to one another.

My favorite quotation about this subject comes from a commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra by Alistair Shearer.  It’s a sane statement, on a subject which could use a little sanity.

“Brahmacharya means literally ‘moving in the immensity’ or ‘living in reality,’ but from earliest times it has been understood to refer to the sublimation of the life force that is normally expressed as sexuality.  Thus brahmacharya has frequently been translated as ‘celibacy,’ by which sexual continence is meant.                “This has led to much confusion.  True yoga is a natural process, and has no place for repression, whether of the ego, sex, or anything else.  Such an attitude of forced control is against life, and can only result in strain and tension incurred in the name of some supposedly ‘higher’ ideal.  However, as we progress on the path of yoga, needs and desires become more refined.  Sexuality is one area of experience that typically tends to aberration, becoming narrowly confined to the habitual need for release of tension and dissatisfaction, rather than the magnification of an already existing happiness.  Nourished by yoga, a wider loving-awareness that is present at all times begins to develop.  Such all-inclusiveness is the natural state of awareness; it has its own economy, self-sufficient and unforced.  And if such a transformation is experienced, it will only be because the limited self, which is always more or less motivated by the need to overcome its chronic and anxious sense of separation through repetitive and unexamined behavior patterns, has been transcended.  Transcendence has nothing to do with suppression, and brahmacharya does not mean ‘self-control’ as normally understood.  It is a state of self sufficient wholeness, an innocence that is its own ecstasy.”                Shearer implies that we reach a state where we never need orgasms, where we’re constantly ecstatic.  I’m not sure I agree.  I certainly haven’t reached it.  I tend to side with Nest, and her understanding that everyone needs this release from time to time, though people vary in how often.  But I agree with Shearer that suppression doesn’t work and isn’t helpful.  Sex and the body aren’t evil.  They’re ours while we’re here, and we should celebrate and enjoy them.  I think Lauren Groff would agree.

[1] (the interview was for my book The Red Thread of Passion.) He didn’t mean that there was a lot of sex going on.  He himself had devoted himself to a celibate life except for three “slip-ups.”  What I think he meant—and I understood, because my wife had attended a Jesuit seminary for a year, and we had been guests several times at Jesuit houses—was that the order was like the greatest boys boarding school of all time.  All the guys were smart, talented; a number of them were good looking.  They were fabulous hosts.

The fact that the Catholic church is officially anti-gay is totally preposterous.  Not every Jesuit is gay by any means.  But those Jesuit houses were the gayest places I’ve ever been.