The Taming of the Shrew ends with a long speech from the “tamed” Kate to her husband Petruchio. In front of her sister and her brother-in-law, her husband’s friend and his new wife, and her father, Kate praises Petruchio’s manly virtues and celebrates woman’s submissive position. “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign: one that cares for thee,” she says to the other wives present. “I am ashamed that women are so simple / To offer war where they should kneel for peace; / Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway / When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.” Kate ends the speech on her knees before her husband, publicly offering him her hand to step on, should he request it. She tells other wives to do likewise: “place your hand below your husband’s foot, / In token of which duty, if he please, / My hand is ready, may it do him ease.”
There is no need to point out that this final speech is viewed by contemporary women as an embarrassment, if not an outrage. In it, Kate endorses every stereotype of the obedient, submissive wife that women of the modern era have worked to overcome. It’s hardly surprising that none of my university students or colleagues see this speech as anything other than that of Kate mechanically reciting a philosophy she’s been brutally forced to endorse. The most generous thing a scholar might say about the passage is that Shakespeare gives Kate this speech to undermine such poisonous realities through sarcasm: the scene is, they assert, a caustic, ironic mimicry of what a “good” wife should say. That a self-respecting woman such as Kate would ever say such things sincerely is beyond the realm of possibility.
When contemporary thought understands Kate’s kneeling as an episode in the history of misogyny, the political movement is served and our guiding narrative remains undisturbed. Shakespeare cannot surprise us; in this scene we see once more, with dreary consistency, the domineering patriarchy and its enforcement of female submission. Our anger is justified; all is well. But from another perspective, the ease with which we take up such an interpretation might be a sign of our own culture’s lopsided insistence that the ideals of self-possession and self-sovereignty are more valuable than love and generosity. When we interpret Kate’s speech according to a liberatory mandate, we miss something that is emotionally real, and might be important: she loves her husband through the gift of her submission, and this appears to be one moment in a virtuous circle, an ascending dialectic of love that elevates both parties above selfish antagonism. Contemporary literary criticism rejects out of hand the possibility that this could be anything other than sexual false consciousness in Kate, and does so with the best of egalitarian intentions. Thus do we demonstrate our own independence from patriarchal control and affirm our conviction that marriage serves primarily to enact such control. But we also flatten and frustrate the richness possible in a marriage that has self-giving as its very foundation. Kate offers Petruchio her own hand to stand upon: if his position is one of power over her, it is only because she gives him that power over her in the first place. Quite literally, the entire arrangement is in her hands.
In the uncomfortable interpretive reversal above, it is not Petruchio but we modern readers who refuse to hear her voice and see her gestures, on the supposition that we know her better than she knows herself. Perhaps, then, the oppressive hegemony operating here is our own, silencing a woman’s voice because it doesn’t align with our moral and social codes. The severity with which we casually judge the past indicates that it is one country we are still happy to colonize: whatever its inhabitants do or say, the enlightened reader somehow always knows better. To be a responsible reader requires vigilance on behalf of the present, lest one be tempted to “go native.” And so Kate, duly domesticated to our cold house, becomes a resource. Taking the play as a cautionary tale, our hope is that women will refuse to kneel before their husbands, their partners, their lovers.
But what if we were to unwrap Kate’s speech from our own layers of political vigilance and take it more nakedly, as a generous act of wife to husband, tenderly and lovingly performed? Do we even have the vocabulary to comprehend this? A colleague of mine called Taming a representation of “the fantasy of male control.” She said this with contempt, but I think her language is bang-on if we take away the disgust implicit in her tone. What is wrong with playfully entering into a male fantasy, even one of control? Isn’t it gamesome, generous, and beautiful for Kate to participate whole-heartedly in her husband’s fantasy? What would enthusiastic consensual hierarchy – even consensual subordination – look like, and what would it accomplish? Why on earth would a strong woman kneel in front of her husband and – worse! – call him her “sovereign”?
A detour into our own popular theater might help us understand the denouement of Shakespeare’s play, and the beauty of kneeling. The Netflix series The Crown dramatizes the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The most interesting characters of the series, and especially of its first (and best) season, are Elizabeth and Philip, or rather, more precisely, what’s most interesting is the shifting power dynamic of the relationship between them. Philip, a red-blooded, sporting man, squirms under the necessary submission he must show to his wife. And Elizabeth, for her part, agonizes over her role as sovereign and over her role as a wife, the duties she owes to the crown and to her family.
In the episode of Elizabeth’s coronation, Philip exhibits considerable resistance to the thought of kneeling in front of his wife as her subject – quite literally subjugated. It might be easy for us, now, to see Philip’s stubborn pride as a familiar instance of yet another member of the patriarchy bemoaning his own loss of privilege, but one has to feel for the guy on some level, regardless. Through his marriage he lost his career, his home, and his freedom. Yet in spite of his resistance, the episode of the coronation culminates with Philip kneeling before his queen. Duty to his social position wins (as does Elizabeth’s duty to hers), and his action, in the end, is performed with sincerity and reverence. The act of sacrificing his own understanding of himself as a self-sovereign man is precisely why his kneeling is an act of consecration; it is that, almost as much as the holy oil which anoints her, that makes his wife his – the – queen. Philip isn’t a man who is broken by kneeling before his sovereign. He is man who demonstrates his strength of character and manliness by making a personal sacrifice in order to uphold the social order and the common good, and to show his wife that they are in this together. In the Netflix series Philip kneels, in the end, without bitterness, cynicism, or defeat. It would have been nothing more than juvenile and petty stubbornness in him to stay off his knees, standing arms-crossed and foot-stamped. By kneeling with sincerity, Philip redeems himself and his relationship to his wife from the inside.
There is another episode of The Crown in which Elizabeth, still a very young woman in her 20s, must correct Winston Churchill for sidestepping the bond of trust between parliament and monarch. It is an exquisite moment of theater, where the very senior, the very dignified Churchill takes a scolding from the young queen. Tail between his legs, Winston leaves Buckingham, and Elizabeth leaves the rooms of state and returns to the domestic space of the palace where she finds Philip, in the bedroom. He sees her, and remarks on how she looks different, “Taller, somehow” he says, “Or is it just that I’ve shrunk?” “There is nothing shrunken about you, dearest,” is her pert reply. Philip remains there, calmly taking off his formal suit jacket and objectively evaluating her, truly sizing her up, digesting her new stature before saying, “Either I need to get some stilts so I can reach the heights of my new tall woman…” He pauses. “Or?” Elizabeth asks, archly. “Or,” he replies, slowly and deliberately, “she could get on her knees.”[1]
It isn’t a real choice. He is telling her. And she, his wife, looks him squarely in the eyes as a playful smile begins to tug ever so slightly at the corners of her mouth before spreading warmly across her face. The next scene we see is a long official hallway in Buckingham Palace, and a butler informing some briefcase-clutching functionary that the queen is going to be late for her meeting with him, “Her majesty requests that your appointment might wait … until tomorrow.” It is a delicious moment. We all know what we aren’t allowed to see: the sovereign of the British Empire performing fellatio on her consort. Kneeling.
Of course, we have no way of knowing if the real Elizabeth ever did this, but this is hardly the point. The Crown is its own story. For the Elizabeth and the Philip on the show, it’s worth imagining what this experience was like. Elizabeth is always above her husband; their social hierarchy is inescapable. But at this moment, as she kneels in front of him and gives him the gift of her service, of her submission, the gift of her lips and tongue, he is above her. She makes him her lord as she disciplines her own body to be an instrument for his pleasure. Feeling the grain of the floorboards against her knees, the pressure of his phallus against the back of her throat, the sovereign at this moment becomes very much a subjected body, and her husband becomes a conqueror, invading her boundaries. It is easy in our contemporary world to see this language of masculine conquest as “toxic,” and it is easy for us to view Philip reasserting his power over his wife in such a sexual manner as demeaning, reducing a woman’s body to an object for man’s use, evacuating her of her humanity, individuality, her self-sovereignty. Yet if we insist on viewing the act of love through a political lens, then to be competent political theorists we must have room for the idea of legitimate rule. A king and a tyrant are not the same thing.
There is a difference between a man who must physically force a woman to kneel and a man who commands her to, with an authority she recognizes – just as there is a difference between a woman who kneels because she has a desperate internal need for approval from a man and a woman who kneels because she approves of him.
We react strongly to sexual domination, and this not only speaks to our desire for social justice and the pursuit of an egalitarian society, it also points to our intuition that sexuality is precious, even sacred. This intuition is somewhat buried in a society that celebrates casual sexual encounters as healthy expressions of human sexuality. But, of course, if sexuality were something casual, we needn’t get offended if it’s treated as such. We do because it isn’t. There are few things as dehumanizing as forcing a woman against her will because sexuality is such an intimate and reverential part of the female (and male!) identity. Women were angry in the #MeToo era because there is something pure that was being defiled. This sacred part of us is the gift we make of ourselves in willing submission when we kneel before a man and consecrate his desire to have his phallus adored as an object of reverence.
Is it horrible, and dirty, and unethical that masculine sexual fantasies are often about women’s abject humiliation? Likely. Is it a sign of the inegalitarian nature of masculinity that men fantasize often of supremacy? A sign of an unrestrained id that they want their phalluses to be regarded by a woman with adoration, and even a little bit of fear and trembling? It sure is! But also – let’s deal with what is real – that seems to be how things are, all the same. A quick google search of blowjobs will reveal this to us, if one is inclined to click on the videos that pop up. What we see is a fawn-eyed young woman who enthusiastically but mechanically brings the man to climax and then waits like a little sparrow, open-mouthed and eager to have her face covered in the man’s ejaculate. What porn understands is the powerful masculine desire to be powerful, and for a woman to be achingly ready to receive her humiliation. Pornography understands this desire so well that they’ve perfected its recipe and now market it to the masses as a kind sexual junk food. There is real generosity and virtue in the gourmet humiliation of a loving woman effacing herself and becoming a sort of object, offering her personhood as both acolyte and sacrifice to her lover’s phallus: she makes herself a blank in order for her lover to experience the fullness of his desire, not merely the fantasy of masculine power, but the real material experience of it. Her self-abasement grants to his nature a reverence that redeems it. In pornography, this whole-hearted humiliation is replaced by a kind of fast food reproduction of it, and what we see are the acts of a desperate girl who subjects herself for the vulgar and self-serving motivation of achieving some sort of fleeting fame on Pornhub, or for the egocentric need to be liked. What we see is an entirely uninteresting penis (we almost never see the whole man), that is merely an object which makes a mess of things, and then the man attached to it chuckling about it. Without the reverence, it’s juvenile.
A common contemporary response is to argue how wrong it is for men to desire female submission, let alone humiliation. It’s hard to find reasons to disagree. The history of women in the West, we are told, is a history of enforced submission, and the singular goal of feminism is to combat and correct this historical injustice. The celebration of feminine submission is unutterable, even unthinkable. Female submission is obviously wrong in an egalitarian society, and men, for the most part, tend to agree with our demand to be treated equally. It is right to claim that men who dehumanize women deserve a particular kind of righteous anger, and women in the reckoning of the #MeToo era have been quick to express their rage. But this particular kind of anger, the kind of primal, trembling and flushed fury we often see in otherwise stolid and well-mannered women reveals, perhaps, something else: that forced degradation is so awful because willing, offered degradation is at the core of our sexual nature, the part of sexuality that is most dangerous, most risky, and most delicious – and the part of our sexuality that even decent and respectable men ache for.
When Philip asks his wife to get on her knees, he is asking for more than something that feels warm and moist – though I imagine those are important qualities of the experience of fellatio for a man. What he is asking for is for a woman to be made an object, for a woman to make herself one for his unrestrained gratification. What he is asking for is not for her resistance which he overcomes by force, but for her willing humiliation in the service of granting him his fantasies of masculine force and power, in allowing him to realize his fantasies through her self-abasement, even self-negation. Michel Houellebecq describes it thus: “Kneeling in front of me, she has taken my penis in her mouth, her lips are closed halfway down my glans. Her eyes are closed, and she is concentrating so hard on the act of fellatio that her face is blank, her features perfectly pure; I have never again had a chance to see such a representation of the gift.”[2]
Forcing a woman to do this might cause a man to feel a rush of wild adrenaline, a surge of power, but the detumescence would result in a self-loathing and self-disgust that cannot be excised except through more acts of forced brutality, which then devolve into a cycle that can become systemic. It is this cycle that feminism should break. But instead of celebrating the possibility of redeeming men’s desire for power from the inside, as it were, by offering themselves to it as a gift, too much of contemporary culture wants to make the sexual desire for female submission itself into an elemental evil, causing men to feel guilt and self-disgust without ever having enforced a woman’s sexual compliance in the first place. Their desire itself is the original sin upon them, and yet this is a sin that cannot be redeemed (because only women’s self-sacrificial giving can redeem it) and that can only be assuaged through constant feelings of inner torment and guilt about their own sexual nature. (It is their inner anguish about their irredeemable desires that get projected onto women as misogyny.) The irony of this occurring during a time when we celebrate every other form of sexual orientation is so obvious that we somehow miss it. Yet what men reveal about themselves when they desire women’s kneeling, the gift, is something very tender, very intimate. Men need women in order to feel powerful. For them to ask us for this, even to ask us to efface ourselves so that they can experience this, is a deeply vulnerable thing because it is an acknowledgement of their own dependent identities.
Feminism since Simone de Beauvoir is right to argue that women should be allowed to get her pleasures, too. But to focus on self-gratification during sex makes the entire enterprise into a ruthless, mercenary, and soulless mechanical sort of exercise that results ultimately in alienation. Love is turning to another. It, to quote the ancients, “seeks not its own.” It is a woman’s full and joyful gift of herself to a man’s desire to subject her to his phallic authority that is the very thing that redeems this desire. And it is by submitting to a man’s desire for power that a woman’s desire to be adored is fulfilled, because she is adoring. To suggest that a woman might find fulfillment in giving herself to a man is entirely anathema to much of what we see as contemporary orthodoxy on the matter, at least the kind that gets publicly aired. Yet the fact we cannot even imagine that we find fulfillment in each other; that fact that we cling to self-possession even at the expense of self-isolation, demonstrates nothing about our progress towards equality, and everything about our impoverished understanding of ourselves and each other.
The moment when the sovereign Elizabeth kneels is the moment she makes her husband the most powerful man in the British Empire. He has more wealth than nations, more authority than rulers, is more sovereign than the monarch. If he is the most powerful man in the world at that moment, it is because she has made him her ruler. She gives that position to him by positioning herself beneath him, like Kate with Petruchio. I like to imagine him finishing recklessly upon her upturned face. What a feminine act of self-giving generosity that would be. What an act of love, befitting a queen.
***
I have spoken here of kneeling during the act of fellatio as an act of consecration, as a redemptive act of self-giving by the woman towards a man’s desire. I do not use these theological terms lightly. I kneel every week at Sunday morning church service, and I have come to understand why traditional forms of religion incorporate kneeling into their rituals and their worship. The body and the soul are not divisible, this kneeling suggests. In our secular society, it is easy to dismiss religious kneeling as an archaic, empty ritual, suffused with irrational superstition and even, perhaps, with a hefty dose of mind-control. Yet the experience of participating in such a ritual does not make one feel hollow in this way, at least, not if one participates willingly and intentionally.
When I kneel in church, in penitence, prayer, and surrender, I am of course aware that a part of what I’m doing is silly. I am a practicing Anglican, but I am also a secularized academic, and when I participate by kneeling as part of the church liturgy, I see myself doing something that is quaint in the extreme, and perhaps largely based on imaginative fanciful thinking. So much the better. This awareness of my own silliness is the very pathway to seeing myself objectively, and that is not an easy thing to see.
We are concerned in the modern era with subjective experiences, which are, we assert, infused with profound truths – “lived experience.” This is why positionality is the current vogue of academic inquiry: our subjective social positions determine our sightlines, and thus grant us unique ways of seeing hegemonic social structures. In my inquiry into fellatio, I have taken the idea of academic positionality, which sees positions as ones of class, race, gender and orientation, and simply applied it literally. What does the position of kneeling allow me to see? Kneeling before a man allows me to see certain aspects of him that I would otherwise miss if I were to always insist upon an equal footing, his nature, his majesty, his power and his hunger for it. I see a man who is unapologetic. God’s steward of the natural order.
An equal footing would also prevent me from seeing aspects of myself that I would otherwise miss if I didn’t kneel. When I kneel at church in penitence, for instance, I see in myself the very thing I need to be penitent about: my self-centeredness, my ego, which is usually so dominant in my internal musings, so constantly and exhaustingly running its own internal monologue in my mind, (and often a monologue of self-pity because I am not seen always as I would wish to be (poor me)), that I feel as though I can never be free of the burden of my own self-regard, never nudged away from my self-centeredness. Yet through the physical act of kneeling, of making myself uncomfortable, quiet, and humble, I experience myself objectively, first physically and then intellectually and spiritually. My internal monologue is seen from the sightline of my new position, my position of one who rightly should be humbled because I see the hegemonic control of my own belief of self-privilege, my conviction that I matter so damn much, has over my self-understanding. I recognize myself as selfish. And feel that I am less worthy of my own self-regard than I would like to believe that I am. In kneeling, I feel exposed to myself. I feel, quite often, ashamed of what I see, but strangely I do not wish to cover up my shame with layers of self-affirmation or self-caring. Nor do I at those moments want to resist my shame with feeling pride in my own humility (which would then simply be false-humility, and not worth mentioning). The cure for shame isn’t pride, its apparent opposite, but humility. As I kneel, I descend the ladder of humility, down and down. This is not the same as self-abasement. Humility allows one to feel the gift of self-compassion, and offers a release from burdensome individuality, from the incessant “me-ness” of introspection. The internal sightline from which I see myself while kneeling helps me to see myself as unworthy of my nagging self-regard, and through that admission, become properly able to love myself as I in fact am, rightly humbled, and through that love am no longer ashamed, because in being loved become worthy of it.
When I kneel in front of my lover and take his swollen phallus into my mouth, the physical act leads me to a deeper understanding of how much I hold on to self-respect, self-assertiveness, self-confidence, of how much I desire to be someone who should be taken seriously. Participating in my own humility, I see how it is my very subjective position that prevents me from seeing myself objectively. But through kneeling and being in the, let’s face it, ridiculous position of having another person’s genitals thrust into my mouth, I become suddenly grateful for the chance to see myself as a little bit silly. Why am I doing this? If the sex-positive answer is “Because I like to feel the power of making another person feel good,” then, well, ok. I imagine there are worse ways to go about empowering women than by suggesting they get off giving blow jobs (I expect most of my male readers will agree with me here). The problem is, though, that to feel empowered based off of one’s power over another is a precarious stratagem. Power is constantly in flux, constantly shifting. If a woman gets a rush of sexual excitement and the thrill of power by giving a man a blowjob, then she is building a sense of empowerment on a very shaky foundation. If that man turns casually away afterwards, the rush can turn to disappointment quickly. And of course, if I was using him to feel powerful, what is to stop him from using me? The game, then, becomes a self-defeating circle of endless feelings of elation and regret, and this can lead to a different kind of shame, not a sexual shame – we are beyond that – but a shame in not wanting to see oneself clearly. After all, to use someone in this way, so that I feel power, is unlovely. It is ugly. Yet paradoxically what we want is to be loved, by others and by ourselves. But to love truly involves seeing another, and allowing one’s self to be seen.
The thing we are ashamed of is perhaps something we cover up ourselves, and what we often hide precisely by drawing attention to our cover. Our desire to cover up our shame is compensated for by both minimizing the act of fellatio in the first place and by feeling a sense of self-pride in one’s sexual freedom that hides the disappointment of the temporary, trivial experience of the act. “It was just a blow job.” What I may really be ashamed of is the very thing I continually cover up and hide from exposure, that my sexual gifts are meaningless because I have not attached any meaning to them. And that the power I may feel is – surprise – unfulfilling because it was sought for self-gratification. The whole enterprise was meaningless from the start because I was only doing it for myself. And the search for sexual joy through casual liberation doesn’t work because if I do something selfishly, it is unlovely, and therefore I find myself difficult to love. And that is where my real shame lies.
If, on the other hand, I allow myself to be an object of silliness, a bit of a ridiculous, slobbering mess not from my own sense of pride in my sexual freedom, nor from a desire to feel my own power over another, but out of an act of true humility, to give myself over to my lover’s desire because I love him, I lose all shame in myself, because my self-giving is lovely, and therefore loveable. There is no shame in the body, none in the soul, for in an act of true generosity, what is there to feel shameful about? And my lover’s shame, the shame that is caused by the unlovely desire to see another subjected to his fantasy of phallic power and control, becomes no longer shameful since it is the very thing in him that I am loving as I kneel before him. In us, the esoteric and the material, the erotic and the carnal combine. He becomes worthy of the gift, because I am giving it to him, and the gift itself is worthy, because he sees that I see him. Through my kneeling, he sees himself clearly and what it is I am giving him, the release of his shameful fantasy through its consecration in love.
[1] The Crown, “Scientia Potentia Est.” Netflix. 4 November, 2016.
[2][2] Michel Houellebecq. Serotonin. Farrar Straus, and Giroux, 2019.
Wowow. That was incredible. How you weaved through Victorian era dramas to Shakespeare and through religion to state the unconscious opposite that a sacred “no” requires us to also value an enthusiastic “yes”.
I especially loved this: “The cure for shame isn’t pride, its apparent opposite, but humility”. What a powerful statement.
"The richness possible in a marriage that has self-giving as its very foundation" is the essence of Pope John Paul II's "Theology of Marriage."