Season of the Witch, part 5

[photo: Jack Gesheidt]

When did sex become bad? When all of nature is singing love songs, why did human beings decide that overcoming bodily desires was the way to go? Why was chastity prized over erotic bliss, purity over embodied fulfillment? How come, most of all, women's sexuality became not just suspect but potentially demonic?

Witches fornicated with the devil. They incited lust, they were lustful, they dazzled men into a frenzy and they caused their members to wilt. They were sluts and they were cock teases, they were whores and they were hags. A woman who refused a man's advances could be accused of being a witch. So could a woman who submitted to them. There was no way to win.

The most alarming sexual deviance, however, was clearly exhibited by the inquistors themselves. The extreme tortures inflicted on women accused as witches, which I will not describe was sickeningly pornagraphic. They were stripped, violated with grotesque ingenuity, and frequently, usually, raped.

Again, we should not take this deviance as somehow deviant from civilization's agenda--which has also been about controlling the earth and women's bodies both. Owning those bodies, forcing them into perpetual fertility, blaming those bodies when they don't perform in a way that is "pleasing." Within patriarchy it became important to assume propietorial ownership over the "fruit" of those bodies--but how can you be sure, in ages long before DNA testing, that those bodies are truly yours?

Women's sexuality needed to be contained and controlled. Only if one man, their husband or owner, was sleeping with them could that man be sure that the children were his. Women's chastity became crucial to ideas of property, inheritance, and dominance. In matriarchal cultures women are allowed a great deal more sexual freedom. Motherhood is no longer a singularity but the shared experience of an entire community who all experience the child as belonging to them and all of them belonging to the land. In the revelatory (if complicated) book Sex at Dawn, the authors recount a number of indigenous communties where, in fact, women want their potential child nourished, in utero, with the "milk" of different fathers--and where any number of women will feed the child with actual milk after its born.

Patriarchy demands virginity. But it also requires progeny. Women must be chaste but fertile. Anything that threatens this algorithm becomes not merely suspect but evil. Nature, all of nature, offering such a plethora of perspectives on the erotic is most suspect of all. Womens' bodies are dark and dirty. Their instincts are sinful. They are Eves, Jezebels, sorceresses of one kind or another. Men and women who don't have "normal" sexual instincts become most suspect of all and probably suffered most of all during the witch craze (not to mention the rest of history.)

Thousands of years of this misogyny has created a truly miserable sexual landscape. Every single religious institution is guilty of phenomoneal sexual crimes against women and children. Each new revelation is treated like a surprise rather than an acknowledgement that this is what religion was meant for. Privilige purity and sexuality distorts itself into institutionalized perversion.

Today we live in a world brimming with violent pornography in which fewer and fewer people report enjoying sex and young people are actually having less sex than ever. When a species stops singing its love songs something is definitely the matter.

Emerging from millennia of sexual trauma, and the still-fresh horrors of the witch craze, pervasive colonial atrocities, and the unimaginable sexual brutalaties of slavery, women are reeling with uncertainty about how to even know what it is their bodies really want. What do I desire? What does the earth desire?

The witch craze was an attempt to destroy female sexual pleasure. In his brilliant work of historical fiction, The Hour of the Witch, author Chris Bohjalian gets inside the head of a young woman unhappily married to an abusive husband who is accused of witchcraft in colonial Boston. She doubts herself primarlily because she has found some relief in masturbation and ordinary sexual fantasies and now wonders if, perhaps, yes, she has been "consorting with the devil." Perhaps that is what she was doing. She doesn't even have the words for what she has been doing. How can she trust her desire as natural when nature itself is apparently demonic?

There are a plethora of excellent books about female sexuality from Vagina to Bitch, each title forcefullly asserting the right to talk about these things. At the same time, the escalating abortion agenda seems to be the new witch craze primarily designed to make women fear sex and fear their bodies. Why else are these so-called right-to-lifers so often also against birth control and lgbtq experiences? They want women's bodies to be property again.

Because of all of this the world is dying. We have forced the earth into a state of genetically modified fertility and are surprised that the birds, the fish, the trees, the flowers are all disappearing. Rational men come up with rational plans to "make things better." But what if we trusted the earth to make Her own decisions about Her own body? What then?

To reclaim our right to sexual pleasure is to recover the lost love songs of the world. When we pray for love and bliss, we join a chorus of voices who even now are praying for the world to be reborn and resurrected. Let us join our voices and our bodies with the bees even now searching for flowers, with the glorious birds, with every creature and every green thing longing for love. Let us claim our right despite everything to embodied joy.

This is a seven-part series I am offering as part of my free Substack. I also offer a paid subscription that includes a Zoom conversation on the third Sunday of every month about my posts. I hope that you will join those conversations about the unseen world.

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