Sexual Submissiveness
A talk given at the Erotic Academy of ZEGG University
by Sabine Lichtenfels, March 1989
(translated from the original German by FP ‘Ayran' von Dreger)
Our theme today is sexual submissiveness. We're dealing with questions concerning the archetypal images of sexual relations among men and women. We're also looking at historical views of what sexuality has been, and what it could be. That means we're also looking at the development of a vision for a future sexuality, and the question particularly related to this, namely : What is sexual submissiveness [ - sexual dependency ?] How can we come up with a new view of sexuality which resolves this problem, without losing what we genuinely love and desire in sex?
I'll begin with a few quotations from "Stern" [a glossy German magazine], which recently ran a series of articles on the theme of sexual submissiveness. Let me give you an example : "The passion of the young secretary for the middle-aged author was so boundless, and her desire to submit to him so great, that she tolerated even his violent outbursts, his obscene letters and his perversions." That's simply a quote, a slice of reality. "For him there were only two kinds of women - goddesses and doormats."
I chose this quotation because it's a classical statement, which describes precisely what has formed our history up to now. The male human being worships the holy and the unreachable. Doormats are all those who, from his point of view, are available for the taking because they need it. Doormats : those are women who show their sexual desires, and follow them. The man has contempt for them because he's unable to integrate his adoration of woman with his views of sexuality.
Professor William Schmidt-Bode says this on the theme of submissiveness : "Submissiveness has the characteristics of an addiction. In the end, satisfaction is unobtainable. On the contrary, the desire of getting the partner completely is never achieved; it merely leads to a repetition of the behaviour and to an increase in the dosage."
Stern magazine deals with the whole issue as a type of sickness. Submissiveness is a type of sexual disease which is contrasted with so-called "normality". Most people today probably agree with this view. However, I suggest that at this time particularly we women, although this is actually the case for men as well, need to consider carefully what this "submission" really is, and whether it isn't perhaps an unresolved life-issue that affects all of us. I'm not now looking at submissiveness as an illness, but rather from a very special point of view, insofar as it concerns everyone who has at one time or another been involved with the issue of sexuality, regardless whether that person is a woman or a man. I am here speaking very specifically from the woman's point of view, since I want to let the men know some essential facts about women. I also want to encourage the women here to think and speak about their desires in the sexual area, since the question whether we'll manage to create a more attractive future depends on our willingness to communicate openly about all this.
The image of sexual submission : There is a sexual reality in which the woman loves to be conquered, that is to say possessed by the man. It is a fantasy-image of sex. An archetypal image. There is a moment in sex when the woman's desire is : take me totally. And this is an essential and decisive moment in her sexual opening. And it is also an essential and decisive moment in her sexual shame. It may well be here that we find the deepest level of woman's "shame", her feeling of being sinful and her feelings of desire. This is the point where, up to now, she has always thought : if I do this, then the man will despise me, then he and all others will think that I'm not worth anything anymore. The curse of being seen as a whore has dug itself so deeply into our feminine memory and our feminine being, that at the point of our greatest joy we become crippled.
The fact that woman's self consciousness has until now been so deeply conditioned by shame is one of the causes of what we now term "submissiveness", and also of extreme jealousy. The results of that can then be read about in the papers : "The woman wanted him all to herself. She bashed him to death with a hammer."
At the point where she has actually opened herself completely on the sexual level, for once, her rage begins; at that moment her fear sets in that he'll now turn around and leave her; and here, too, the madness starts which will not allow her to let him go because she believes that she's now given herself away and will no longer be respected by any other man.
In the sexual world there is this archetypal image of man wanting to take woman completely, with the woman desiring to be taken totally by him as well. That's undoubtedly not the only image in sex, but it is a very powerful central aspect of sexual longing. Once a woman moves into the realm of sexuality with an inner opening to satisfy this longing, then she actually thinks of nothing else except this one thing, the thing that she wants infinitely more than anything else. And that's exactly the point at which her shame sets in, and the fear that if she gives in to this desire the man will no longer find her attractive and she'll be branded as a fool. As women, we have had this shame and this fear historically embedded into the very cellular structure of our bodies. It is written in the Old Testament : "In pain shall you bear children, because you have followed your lust." The sexual temptation was Eve's evil deed, and Adam's sin was that he followed that lust. That is the reason why both were thrown out of paradise.
Right up to current times, women still cannot combine their actual sexual fantasies and desires with their joy and personal sovereignty, especially not in those fantasies in which the woman is the "victim" and the man is the "perpetrator". She thinks that once she has given herself completely to him, he now has her and no longer needs to be further concerned for her. That's the reason why women prefer to entice men with their seductive wiles, and remain with their seductive "No". As long as a woman stays with that, she retains her sexual power over men. She stays beyond reach until a man comes along that conquers her. After that, she wants to belong to him completely. The theme of sexual violation has a place in women's souls as well, as they have been fashioned up to now. It no longer makes any sense to react to these things emotionally with disdain or hate. We need to understand what's going on. I have attempted to shed a bit more light on the connections involved here, in the book "Rettet den Sex" [Save Sex] authored by several of us women.
Sexual reality does not ask permission whether it may or may not be what it is. It is a fact, a fundamental fact of our civilization and our history, and it depends solely on our will regarding sexual matters, and on our spiritual clarity, whether or not we choose to change this reality in a positive direction. Neither vociferous demands for male castration, nor offers of therapeutic intervention to secure compliance, are of any use here. The sexual attraction between man and woman in fact exists. In it, there exists also this desire for a total surrender, for conquest, for an animal-like mating. The only question that remains is what we decide to do with this existential fact, in the future. Will it remain tied up with fear, hate, unclarity and lies ? Will it continue to lead to sexual subservience and jealousy ? Or will we succeed in integrating it into new forms of living together ? Will we succeed in creating a new form of sexual understanding which is no longer tied up with the old barriers of possessiveness and rage ? Will the woman of the future participate with sexual desire and interest when her lover is attracted by other women, because she enjoys being attractive to others as well ? Will she be able to understand that other women have the same desires that she does, and that her male partner, whom she loves and wants, is naturally also loved and desired by other women ?
You cannot divide up sexuality like a piece of cake, but you also cannot promise it to one single person. Sexuality is a power and a quantity that is limitless. It is a fact that one can never be totally satiated with sex; rather, it awakens in us a hunger and a joy that looks forward to a satisfaction of the senses through human contacts which we, today, want to support and bring into being with the power available to us through our conscious awareness.
A lot of women dream and fantasize about being violently taken. Then, when they wake up, they are shocked by the agitation and the sexual desire which they have felt. In their fantasies, the men involved are often strangers, and often several, one after another. What women experience with fear and dread in their waking state, appears lustful and desirable in their fantasies. So what is actually true ? It no longer makes sense merely to say that fantasies just aren't reality. Because these fantasies show a reality of desire, a reality of sexual longing. And as long as this reality of sexual desires is not seen, not accepted, not positively integrated into the actual sensual contacts of men and women, our world will remain split between the world of fantasy and the world of the much more boring daily reality. And as long as this split remains, the dissatisfactions and tendencies to violence in human society are dammed up, because the human male evidently has similar fantasies. And thus what happens is that these fantasies are acted out, every day, somewhere in the world, in the most brutal and destructive ways. People are tortured, raped, and crippled, wherever the dams of morality break, and when societies creates opportunities for that to happen, as for instance in wars. Or when someone totally loses it and the sexuality which has been dammed up for so long in that person explodes like dynamite. The papers are full of such reports.
These sexual fantasies of women have exact parallels in the sexual fantasies of men. They point to sexual desires whose reality has never officially become part of the ethical, social and political questions anywhere. Up to now, no society has shown serious interest in finding humane ways of dealing with this issue, beyond legal prohibitions and the continuation of traditional morals. Can we find ways to have that which we desire, in a way that no longer produces pain ? Is there a way in which a man and a woman can share specific fantasies with each other - fantasies which essentially have much in common, and which could therefore themselves be means of bringing them together - and by so doing make genuine, sensually and sexually exciting contact with one another ? In full sexual contact between man and woman, which is consciously experienced and affirmed, and which includes such fantasies without any suppression or cruelty, lies a central "transformation-point" of violence generally. That last sentence seems to me so important for the construction of a humane society, that it ought to be repeated three times over.
Up to now, suppressed and unintegrated sexuality has always led to cruelty and destruction. The witch burnings in the Middle Ages is one example of that. If we do not include that fact in our considerations and in our readiness for a thorough change in our sexual behaviour, freedom from violence will never be possible; it will remain an empty appeal.
More people die as a result of unlived, that is to say unintegrated, sexuality than from automobile accidents. When it breaks through its barriers at one time or another without ever having come into consciousness and integrated into the life of the person, the force of repressed sexuality leads to rape, murder and torture - every day.
This is the point at which the genuine emancipation of woman begins; the point where, as a result of understanding the connections between these facts, women take on and shape their own role as sexual beings. That is their essential contribution to a new form of humanity. When woman does that, the mythology of the Old Testament can be altered. Sexuality, which in old Hebrew is the same word as knowledge, is then no longer the expulsion from paradise but rather the entrance and the way in. Woman now lets the man know very simply how she wants to be taken; he no longer needs to be so concerned to play the big conqueror. And she just as simply lets him know what she doesn't like, since that's part of sexual communication as well. However she stops mothering him and treating him like a little child.
The fact itself of woman breaking free from her shame, is sufficient to make it impossible for her to be despised by any man. That sounds paradoxical, but that's the way it is. Once woman has overcome her old shame in a positive and genuine way, she can face man in her full sexual power. I experienced that over and over again myself in my visits at the harbours of Marseilles and Nizza [in France]. On hearing a clear "Yes" from a woman, it may well be that the man at first just can't get it up.
That's simply part of the process of transformation, since the man needs to detach himself from his own ideas as well, for instance from his notion that he first of all needs to break a woman's actual resistance before he can have her. The old way of seeing man as the conqueror, to whom woman is counterposed as a member of the "weaker sex", doesn't work any more either. The woman conscious of her sexual power suddenly appears to him as something like a goddess. But this goddess is one who suddenly says, "You may !" So the man needs to change his thinking in these respects, just like the woman. After that, of course, the various games of conquering and being conquered, and all the erotic bits and pieces that go on between man and woman, can be taken up again, consciously and joyfully. After all, there's a lot of enjoyment in this seductive game. But now erotic play is no longer subject to this unbending rule which makes everything depend on that first yes or no. Because it is now played consciously and freely on both parts, it no longer leads to violence and brutality and to a situation where the woman continually seeks the role of victim, while the man becomes the perpetrator, or some other comical figure, such as her saviour.
There comes a moment in the relationship between the genders when the decision is made whether there will be war or peace on earth. I've tried to describe that moment. It involves a fully lived and integrated sexuality, and a corresponding sexual and humane understanding. We are founding the Erotic Academy for the purpose of creating a larger space for sexual experiences and sexual understanding, in which the linkages involved become more transparent. Here, at the first gathering of the Erotic Academy, we first of all need to construct the spiritual field for this project. A field in which it will be possible to begin changing the course of human life. To whatever extent we become consciously aware beings, to that extent we have the possibility of taking action to effect change, instead of allowing ourselves to remain defenceless objects of the so-called "laws" of nature.
Once women reach a consensus on this point, there is the possibility for a genuine friendship among women, instead of competition and struggle. Then they know that they love the same things in men. And then they realize that they cannot lose a man because of his involvement with another woman; quite the opposite. Solidarity and partnership between a man and a woman can only last and retain its sexual fire when both follow sexual reality; and that tells us clearly that we desire others as well. The old views of what constitutes "faithfulness" and a "couple relationship" will of course need to be replaced by new ones. The redemption of sexuality requires altogether new social forms for human beings living together, specifically in the areas of love and sex. We clearly pointed to such new social structures in our book "Rettet den Sex" [Save Sex - not available in English translation]. In such new social structures, in which the power of sexuality no longer needs to be squeezed into "marriage" or "couple relationship" forms - cages which are far too small for it - in those structures sexual abuse and sexual submissiveness would no longer exist.
I thank you for your attention.