An excerpt from a book I recently finished....
"Earth, it occurred to her, was a sexual globe. Unique, in a solar system of dead rocks, snowballs, and gasbags, Earth was a theater, a rotating stage upon which a thin green scum of organic life acted out countless, continual scenes whose content, whether explicit or oblique, was almost wholly sexual. In the biospherical epic, the players were either Seed Packages or Egg Cartons (a few very versatile actors such as the amoeba could perform both roles, but it was a dying art), and the scenery, props, and costumes were designed to enhance or facilitate the coming together of hero seed and heroine egg. The colors, the smells, and the sounds of organic things had evolved as sexual attractants, created to keep the trillion romantic plots moving toward a trillion more-or-less happy endings. Recent observations of the behavior patterns of bonding molecules showed that even on the molecular level, intricate and tricky courtships were constantly transpiring: there was molecular rejection, for example, and presumably molecular heartbreak. Within a broad age span, sexually inactive organisms - plant, animal, molecular, or human - could be said to be aberrations, freakish or pathological misfits out of tune with the harmony of life.
Despite an often ostentatious masculine display that would indicate otherwise, the sexual drama (or melodrama or farce) was largely, historically, directed by the female. That was particularaly true among human beings, in which species the male had gone to ludicrous and often violent lengths to compensate for what struck the more insecure of men as an inferior sexual role. One of the lengths to which they went was the establishment of patriarchal religion and the recasting of a father figure as the producer of the show, although from the very beginning, the cosmogonic principal had been feminine. Those men, envious and anxious, not only fired the Great Goddess (who smiled upon all manner of sexual expression, including that which moderns were to label "promiscuous" and "pornographic"), but they also spent thousands of years and billions of dollars trying to conceal the fact of her existence.
And this further thought occurred to Ellen Cherry after the falling aside of Salome's first veil: that whenever society demonstrated signs of rediscovering the goddess, or returning to more feminine value systems, the patriarchally conditioned psyche generated diseases, literal disease such as syphilis in the hotly romantic nineteenth century and, in the wake of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960's, AIDS. Those diseases were caused not by sexual license but by the fear of sexual license, by the conservative DNA's inability to adjust to hedonism; and they were compunded by guilt over the suppression of the Great Mother and the denial of the sensuality with which she so frequently underscored her coexistence with the void. Eventually, AIDS was destined to run its deadly course, however, and eventually every manner of carnal play would go back into full production, for like it or not, gentlemen, that was the way of her world."
-Tom Robbins from "Skinny Legs and All"
"Earth, it occurred to her, was a sexual globe. Unique, in a solar system of dead rocks, snowballs, and gasbags, Earth was a theater, a rotating stage upon which a thin green scum of organic life acted out countless, continual scenes whose content, whether explicit or oblique, was almost wholly sexual. In the biospherical epic, the players were either Seed Packages or Egg Cartons (a few very versatile actors such as the amoeba could perform both roles, but it was a dying art), and the scenery, props, and costumes were designed to enhance or facilitate the coming together of hero seed and heroine egg. The colors, the smells, and the sounds of organic things had evolved as sexual attractants, created to keep the trillion romantic plots moving toward a trillion more-or-less happy endings. Recent observations of the behavior patterns of bonding molecules showed that even on the molecular level, intricate and tricky courtships were constantly transpiring: there was molecular rejection, for example, and presumably molecular heartbreak. Within a broad age span, sexually inactive organisms - plant, animal, molecular, or human - could be said to be aberrations, freakish or pathological misfits out of tune with the harmony of life.
Despite an often ostentatious masculine display that would indicate otherwise, the sexual drama (or melodrama or farce) was largely, historically, directed by the female. That was particularaly true among human beings, in which species the male had gone to ludicrous and often violent lengths to compensate for what struck the more insecure of men as an inferior sexual role. One of the lengths to which they went was the establishment of patriarchal religion and the recasting of a father figure as the producer of the show, although from the very beginning, the cosmogonic principal had been feminine. Those men, envious and anxious, not only fired the Great Goddess (who smiled upon all manner of sexual expression, including that which moderns were to label "promiscuous" and "pornographic"), but they also spent thousands of years and billions of dollars trying to conceal the fact of her existence.
And this further thought occurred to Ellen Cherry after the falling aside of Salome's first veil: that whenever society demonstrated signs of rediscovering the goddess, or returning to more feminine value systems, the patriarchally conditioned psyche generated diseases, literal disease such as syphilis in the hotly romantic nineteenth century and, in the wake of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960's, AIDS. Those diseases were caused not by sexual license but by the fear of sexual license, by the conservative DNA's inability to adjust to hedonism; and they were compunded by guilt over the suppression of the Great Mother and the denial of the sensuality with which she so frequently underscored her coexistence with the void. Eventually, AIDS was destined to run its deadly course, however, and eventually every manner of carnal play would go back into full production, for like it or not, gentlemen, that was the way of her world."
-Tom Robbins from "Skinny Legs and All"
weso:
Interesting book.