In the essay I discuss some heartening recent feminist pushbacks against the joyless '3rd Wave' stuff most associated with that granddame of militant androgyny Judith Bulter. The quote of you starts....
"In our culture of sexual permissiveness, of free and open pornography, it might do well to occasionally remind ourselves that the missionary position remains the go-to for the vast majority of us. At a time when sexuality and gender are being hotly debated in the media, across campuses, high schools, and even primary schools (my grade three daughter recently expressed anxiety about feeling pressured to decide whether or not she was bi, or rather “B. I.,” as she called it), we sometimes forget that sex is also about actually having it..... In the post-#MeToo, third wave feminist climate, it often feels as though, in order to be an ethical progressive women, I need to search out and identify aspects of our society that are sexist, oppressive, unfair....."
As a recovering fundamentalist Christian, I've given a great deal of thought to a wife's submission. While in the Crucible of Marriage, I used to blog about it and was curious whether anyone was doing so on Substack which is how I found your Substack. I never narrowed the topic down to sex like you are here in your Substack.
I am divorced now in large part because of the misunderstanding and misuse of wife submission doctrines in a relationship with a damaged controlling man. But having been married 33 years with thousands of mutually pleasurable sexual encounters, my observation is that my husband had to exercise a great deal of self control while I had to let go of control (AKA "surrender") in order to achieve that oh so satisfying simultaneous climax.
So ^^that^^ is "submission" in your lexicon? Interesting... If only that was all there was to it and it stayed out of other realms, I can see how you can look at it from that angle and call it "joyous".
When my young children commented that "church is boring. Is heaven like church?" I asked them "What do you think is the most fun exciting satisfying fulfilling wonderful experience?" One answered "the roller coaster at the amusement park". I said "Heaven is never boring. It is infinitely more fun, satisfying, and exciting than the roller coaster. You will never get tired of it and it never ends" For me the benchmark in my mind was the best mind blowing mutual sexual fulfillment imaginable.
I very much would not recommend submission to a damaged and controlling man. But just because some men are this way, and it is a danger, we seem to have jettisoned the beauty of submission altogether. This seems to me weak, and anti-life.
I think that sex is a large part of submission, but not the only part.
It is so funny that people jump to the conclusion that submission means, somehow, being a "tradwife," or a defeated woman, or quiet, or dis-spirited. Would anyone think that, for instance, a mother's submission to the needs of her infant child mean that she is any of these things? She can only submit joyfully to the needs of another because she is strong and loving, and fully in command of herself. This joy seeps into all aspects of her life.
I love your idea of heaven. When I was a child, I imagined it to be a place where I could eat all the cotton candy I wanted, and never get a cavity. Now that I'm older, my imaginings are somehow less defined yet more full. That we will not be dissolved into one-ness but keep our selves and our bodies is, for me, the essence of it. -- but what bodies we might have! And what dissolution into another we might have with sex, FULL sex! In my imaginings, it is completely knowing another while still remained oneself. To me, that seems very beautiful.
Thank you so much for reading and for your support!
My intuition is that our current embodied selves are like acorns, and that after we pass beyond this realm of consciousness we will be like oak trees--unimaginably more fully realized and capable of self-expression and relationship with others in the endless rapturous forest of heaven.
You raise the issue that all women advocating for women’s inferiority raise: if women are supposed to be doing nothing but catering to men and have nothing to offer the public, why should we listen to a woman speaking in public?
I am seriously interested in your answer: if women are supposed to submit to men, why aren’t you doing that?
Hi Karen, I don't think women should be submissive to men. And certainly no one who has ever met me has said, "Oh yeah, I know Marilyn. She's super submissive." This is not how I would be described, nor how I am raising my two teenage daughters.
But. Submission of *a* woman to *a* man is different. I am speaking of the submission of a lover to her beloved. It is an act of love which cannot and should not be diluted to some ideological position. This submission is personal and relational. A gift of self to another, given in love.
I've only read your above post, Marilyn, which, I can see now, has probably managed to mislead me as to the gist of your project. But it's misled me in an interesting way.
I fully agree with you on some things--your reading of the De Beauvoir Disorder, for one; your pointing to Shakespeare as a guide, given his refusal of all that smacks of the ideological, his willingness to *see* what men and women are. (I sense Bloom in your reading of Shakespeare, and kudos to Bloom.) These two moves point in very worthwhile directions.
But now, with this comment to Karen, I maybe get a better picture of your project. You seem to be championing one kind of submission, of *a* woman to *a* man in the context of love. In short, if I may put it rudely, you're willing to explore what may be a truer submissive womanhood because it leads to ... hotter sex.
No?
If that's so, I'd put two problems, perhaps perversely echoing Karen. First, why this artificial limitation of submissiveness to the realm of love and passion? Are you not *strong* enough to submit in other realms too? Maybe that sounds outrageous, but I'm posing an honest question. If *submission* somehow approaches the deep meaning of woman, allowing you to discover long-buried truths, why limit it to behavior between lovers? Why not discover the whole extent of this truth by acknowledging that you, as a woman, are meant to submit in a whole range of areas?
I put it in these provocative terms to provoke. Naturally.
Your answer to Karen seems to me to suggest that what you're doing here is something like this: "I'm willing to LARP submissive womanhood in the bedroom because it leads to erotic fulfillment. But in other realms--no, I'm not submissive." That seems to be rather artificially demarcated. What are you afraid of? Why be (apparently) proud of not being submissive in other areas if submissiveness is somehow a key to womanhood?
Don't you risk--like, gee, how many feminists now?--wanting to have your cake and eat it too?
Myself I believe in male/female complementarity. The De Beauvoir Disorder is a dead end, of course. I don't think men are better than women, I think that in *some* areas they're better. And vice versa. Men and women are different, and it's a good thing, and to hell with De Beauvoir, "magisterial" or not.
I'll conclude by saying that if your project will be limited to love and sex, it'll likely prove boring. At least to me. Again because you're limiting it in what seems to me a dishonest way. A way to have that cake and eat it. Discover some truth but not let it out of the box of play between lovers.
The question of what a woman *is* is a much larger and more interesting question, no?
Again, I've only read your one post. Apologies if I don't get where you're headed. But this is what jumps out.
I think the difference is that what you see as LARPing I see as an existential point of seriousness, and, dare I suggest it, truth. And perhaps what you see as "limited" to the bedroom I see as the foundation of being. In other words, there is no limit in love. As John Donne wrote, the sun in shining into a lover's bedroom *is* everywhere. "To warm the world, that's done in warming us. / Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere. / This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere."
I am thinking out loud here, but my thought is this: love might be the ground of woman's meaning. Love is relational. Woman is relational. We relate not in universals but in the particular. It's personal. (For instance, I like children. Sometimes. But I don't like them enough to die for them. But I would die for my children. Because my love for them is personal. Women aren't submissive to men. That is a strange idea, and the basis of a lot gross mistreatment. Woman is submissive to her man, and loves what is Man within him.)
If you want to make love a "mere---" something or other, then fair enough. I'm really not super interested in biology or even political theory. I am interested in what it is to be fully human. Somehow love is at the core of that, and especially sexed love. Eros. But I do not think sex or love is something that is in any way "limited." Love is radical. Love is a complete rewriting of the rules because it cares not at all for rules. Love is wild and free and joyful, so very joyful. What if it is the basis of what is real? That is the thought experiment.
Does this make a bit of sense? I'm working through these ideas as I go along. I don't have a finished theory. But thank you for coming along on the journey!
Yes, this clarifies much about your thinking here, about this project. Many thanks.
I’d say *humans* are relational, but think you’re onto something here in that woman is probably more so—aside from being relational in a different register. The difference has huge implications.
So how does a woman turn her brain off in the presence of one man while keeping it on the rest of the time? At what point does the submission switch flip?
I would add that it is the opening up of oneself to that one man, expanding self to include him. Your natural sense of self-care would then by necessity include the care of him. That is the idea of submission that I believe is being discussed here, not the traditionally negative use of submission as negating self for another. This is what I have come to understand during 30 years of marriage to one man, and being the parent of 5 daughters. Of course, whom you attach yourself to becomes extremely important—allowing yourself to submit in this manner can be excessively challenging in the best of relationships, and almost impossible in the worst. It’s not about catering, it’s about caring. If you can’t be open to the mate you’ve chosen, you’ve chosen badly.
Might as well ask how a man “turns his brain off”, stops being calculating and self-protective, in the presence of the woman he loves, because he also does. That’s love, not gender.
Some of these questions really make me wonder about how deeply this hyperindividualist version of feminism has warped peoples brains…
As a recovering fundamentalist Christian, I've given a great deal of thought to a wife's submission. While in the Crucible of Marriage, I used to blog about it and was curious whether anyone was doing so on Substack which is how I found your Substack. I never narrowed the topic down to sex like you are here in your Substack.
I am divorced now in large part because of the misunderstanding and misuse of wife submission doctrines in a relationship with a damaged controlling man. But having been married 33 years with thousands of mutually pleasurable sexual encounters, my observation is that my husband had to exercise a great deal of self control while I had to let go of control (AKA "surrender") in order to achieve that oh so satisfying simultaneous climax.
So ^^that^^ is "submission" in your lexicon? Interesting... If only that was all there was to it and it stayed out of other realms, I can see how you can look at it from that angle and call it "joyous".
Well Karen, you're a woman. So your loaded question fails for the gotcha you think it is anyway. Women have always talked to and instructed other women, even in the worst examples of the excesses and abuse of patriarchal societies. It's always been funny to me that feminists think they can silence women who talk about sex differences by appealing to the strawman of the omnipotent evil patriarch.
Pleased you have started a Substack. You were quoted in an essay titled 'Shall We Dance' on my own 'stack recently: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
In the essay I discuss some heartening recent feminist pushbacks against the joyless '3rd Wave' stuff most associated with that granddame of militant androgyny Judith Bulter. The quote of you starts....
"In our culture of sexual permissiveness, of free and open pornography, it might do well to occasionally remind ourselves that the missionary position remains the go-to for the vast majority of us. At a time when sexuality and gender are being hotly debated in the media, across campuses, high schools, and even primary schools (my grade three daughter recently expressed anxiety about feeling pressured to decide whether or not she was bi, or rather “B. I.,” as she called it), we sometimes forget that sex is also about actually having it..... In the post-#MeToo, third wave feminist climate, it often feels as though, in order to be an ethical progressive women, I need to search out and identify aspects of our society that are sexist, oppressive, unfair....."
Thanks, Graham!
Will read!
Do let me know what you make of it. I also have other essays on broadly related themes....like this one, for instance: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
As a recovering fundamentalist Christian, I've given a great deal of thought to a wife's submission. While in the Crucible of Marriage, I used to blog about it and was curious whether anyone was doing so on Substack which is how I found your Substack. I never narrowed the topic down to sex like you are here in your Substack.
I am divorced now in large part because of the misunderstanding and misuse of wife submission doctrines in a relationship with a damaged controlling man. But having been married 33 years with thousands of mutually pleasurable sexual encounters, my observation is that my husband had to exercise a great deal of self control while I had to let go of control (AKA "surrender") in order to achieve that oh so satisfying simultaneous climax.
So ^^that^^ is "submission" in your lexicon? Interesting... If only that was all there was to it and it stayed out of other realms, I can see how you can look at it from that angle and call it "joyous".
When my young children commented that "church is boring. Is heaven like church?" I asked them "What do you think is the most fun exciting satisfying fulfilling wonderful experience?" One answered "the roller coaster at the amusement park". I said "Heaven is never boring. It is infinitely more fun, satisfying, and exciting than the roller coaster. You will never get tired of it and it never ends" For me the benchmark in my mind was the best mind blowing mutual sexual fulfillment imaginable.
Heaven is better. Forever.
Thanks for this comment, Gigi.
I very much would not recommend submission to a damaged and controlling man. But just because some men are this way, and it is a danger, we seem to have jettisoned the beauty of submission altogether. This seems to me weak, and anti-life.
I think that sex is a large part of submission, but not the only part.
It is so funny that people jump to the conclusion that submission means, somehow, being a "tradwife," or a defeated woman, or quiet, or dis-spirited. Would anyone think that, for instance, a mother's submission to the needs of her infant child mean that she is any of these things? She can only submit joyfully to the needs of another because she is strong and loving, and fully in command of herself. This joy seeps into all aspects of her life.
I love your idea of heaven. When I was a child, I imagined it to be a place where I could eat all the cotton candy I wanted, and never get a cavity. Now that I'm older, my imaginings are somehow less defined yet more full. That we will not be dissolved into one-ness but keep our selves and our bodies is, for me, the essence of it. -- but what bodies we might have! And what dissolution into another we might have with sex, FULL sex! In my imaginings, it is completely knowing another while still remained oneself. To me, that seems very beautiful.
Thank you so much for reading and for your support!
Warmly,
Marilyn
My intuition is that our current embodied selves are like acorns, and that after we pass beyond this realm of consciousness we will be like oak trees--unimaginably more fully realized and capable of self-expression and relationship with others in the endless rapturous forest of heaven.
You raise the issue that all women advocating for women’s inferiority raise: if women are supposed to be doing nothing but catering to men and have nothing to offer the public, why should we listen to a woman speaking in public?
I am seriously interested in your answer: if women are supposed to submit to men, why aren’t you doing that?
Hi Karen, I don't think women should be submissive to men. And certainly no one who has ever met me has said, "Oh yeah, I know Marilyn. She's super submissive." This is not how I would be described, nor how I am raising my two teenage daughters.
But. Submission of *a* woman to *a* man is different. I am speaking of the submission of a lover to her beloved. It is an act of love which cannot and should not be diluted to some ideological position. This submission is personal and relational. A gift of self to another, given in love.
I've only read your above post, Marilyn, which, I can see now, has probably managed to mislead me as to the gist of your project. But it's misled me in an interesting way.
I fully agree with you on some things--your reading of the De Beauvoir Disorder, for one; your pointing to Shakespeare as a guide, given his refusal of all that smacks of the ideological, his willingness to *see* what men and women are. (I sense Bloom in your reading of Shakespeare, and kudos to Bloom.) These two moves point in very worthwhile directions.
But now, with this comment to Karen, I maybe get a better picture of your project. You seem to be championing one kind of submission, of *a* woman to *a* man in the context of love. In short, if I may put it rudely, you're willing to explore what may be a truer submissive womanhood because it leads to ... hotter sex.
No?
If that's so, I'd put two problems, perhaps perversely echoing Karen. First, why this artificial limitation of submissiveness to the realm of love and passion? Are you not *strong* enough to submit in other realms too? Maybe that sounds outrageous, but I'm posing an honest question. If *submission* somehow approaches the deep meaning of woman, allowing you to discover long-buried truths, why limit it to behavior between lovers? Why not discover the whole extent of this truth by acknowledging that you, as a woman, are meant to submit in a whole range of areas?
I put it in these provocative terms to provoke. Naturally.
Your answer to Karen seems to me to suggest that what you're doing here is something like this: "I'm willing to LARP submissive womanhood in the bedroom because it leads to erotic fulfillment. But in other realms--no, I'm not submissive." That seems to be rather artificially demarcated. What are you afraid of? Why be (apparently) proud of not being submissive in other areas if submissiveness is somehow a key to womanhood?
Don't you risk--like, gee, how many feminists now?--wanting to have your cake and eat it too?
Myself I believe in male/female complementarity. The De Beauvoir Disorder is a dead end, of course. I don't think men are better than women, I think that in *some* areas they're better. And vice versa. Men and women are different, and it's a good thing, and to hell with De Beauvoir, "magisterial" or not.
I'll conclude by saying that if your project will be limited to love and sex, it'll likely prove boring. At least to me. Again because you're limiting it in what seems to me a dishonest way. A way to have that cake and eat it. Discover some truth but not let it out of the box of play between lovers.
The question of what a woman *is* is a much larger and more interesting question, no?
Again, I've only read your one post. Apologies if I don't get where you're headed. But this is what jumps out.
I think the difference is that what you see as LARPing I see as an existential point of seriousness, and, dare I suggest it, truth. And perhaps what you see as "limited" to the bedroom I see as the foundation of being. In other words, there is no limit in love. As John Donne wrote, the sun in shining into a lover's bedroom *is* everywhere. "To warm the world, that's done in warming us. / Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere. / This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere."
I am thinking out loud here, but my thought is this: love might be the ground of woman's meaning. Love is relational. Woman is relational. We relate not in universals but in the particular. It's personal. (For instance, I like children. Sometimes. But I don't like them enough to die for them. But I would die for my children. Because my love for them is personal. Women aren't submissive to men. That is a strange idea, and the basis of a lot gross mistreatment. Woman is submissive to her man, and loves what is Man within him.)
If you want to make love a "mere---" something or other, then fair enough. I'm really not super interested in biology or even political theory. I am interested in what it is to be fully human. Somehow love is at the core of that, and especially sexed love. Eros. But I do not think sex or love is something that is in any way "limited." Love is radical. Love is a complete rewriting of the rules because it cares not at all for rules. Love is wild and free and joyful, so very joyful. What if it is the basis of what is real? That is the thought experiment.
Does this make a bit of sense? I'm working through these ideas as I go along. I don't have a finished theory. But thank you for coming along on the journey!
Yes, this clarifies much about your thinking here, about this project. Many thanks.
I’d say *humans* are relational, but think you’re onto something here in that woman is probably more so—aside from being relational in a different register. The difference has huge implications.
Great answer. Provocative in turn.
I’m grinning, Eric. Thank you.
This exchange represents Substack at its best.
You can’t go far wrong grounding your theory in an epithalamium—and John Donne’s are amongst the greatest!
So how does a woman turn her brain off in the presence of one man while keeping it on the rest of the time? At what point does the submission switch flip?
It has nothing to do with turning her brain off. This is a fully alive woman. At all times she is fully alive.
I would add that it is the opening up of oneself to that one man, expanding self to include him. Your natural sense of self-care would then by necessity include the care of him. That is the idea of submission that I believe is being discussed here, not the traditionally negative use of submission as negating self for another. This is what I have come to understand during 30 years of marriage to one man, and being the parent of 5 daughters. Of course, whom you attach yourself to becomes extremely important—allowing yourself to submit in this manner can be excessively challenging in the best of relationships, and almost impossible in the worst. It’s not about catering, it’s about caring. If you can’t be open to the mate you’ve chosen, you’ve chosen badly.
Might as well ask how a man “turns his brain off”, stops being calculating and self-protective, in the presence of the woman he loves, because he also does. That’s love, not gender.
Some of these questions really make me wonder about how deeply this hyperindividualist version of feminism has warped peoples brains…
As a recovering fundamentalist Christian, I've given a great deal of thought to a wife's submission. While in the Crucible of Marriage, I used to blog about it and was curious whether anyone was doing so on Substack which is how I found your Substack. I never narrowed the topic down to sex like you are here in your Substack.
I am divorced now in large part because of the misunderstanding and misuse of wife submission doctrines in a relationship with a damaged controlling man. But having been married 33 years with thousands of mutually pleasurable sexual encounters, my observation is that my husband had to exercise a great deal of self control while I had to let go of control (AKA "surrender") in order to achieve that oh so satisfying simultaneous climax.
So ^^that^^ is "submission" in your lexicon? Interesting... If only that was all there was to it and it stayed out of other realms, I can see how you can look at it from that angle and call it "joyous".
Well Karen, you're a woman. So your loaded question fails for the gotcha you think it is anyway. Women have always talked to and instructed other women, even in the worst examples of the excesses and abuse of patriarchal societies. It's always been funny to me that feminists think they can silence women who talk about sex differences by appealing to the strawman of the omnipotent evil patriarch.
Women Not Talking is kind of funny to me, but then I know very little of the non-Western world.
Sounds fascinating
I don't think I exactly agree with you but appreciate your willingness to push into discomfort and deal with some definitely non-orthodox views.