I chanced to read an article in the New Yorker about Roman Polanski’s ongoing legal troubles. He is still being held accountable for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl he committed decades ago. He was quoted as saying, “What happened there was so far from being rape that I rode away in the squad car bewildered,” or something like that. The story the girl told was different …and Lord, did I relate. She described how she had tried to dissuade him by saying she had left her asthma medication at home and had to go get it; she said “No!” when he pushed her down on a bed. She said, later, she had not fought because she had been afraid of him. He, full of injured innocence, said it had all been consensual (including the sodomy!!??) (Ugh, ugh! I remember that too! How confused I was by that painful turn of events! I didn’t know what it was! Or why he was doing it! And I thought myself so remiss for not liking it at all!)
In the 60’s, which includes the early 70’s, there were plagues of older males hanging about ready to reach out and grasp young girls going by. The Pill had dawned, like a chemical pink sun, and responsibility seemed a thing of the doddering past. (The media suppressed research results that the Pill quashed libido in many women…that news didn’t fit the leering myth of the day, that girls were free for the taking, and so willing.) These guys came from all professions, backgrounds, pasts; from the bragworthy to the pitiful. And most (not all) of them were innocently thinking that what they were doing was some new liberated improved form of the dance of the sexes.
Only there was no dance – to have a dance you must have partners; equal partners, ready to look in each other’s eyes and twirl. These dudes no doubt believed, as Roman Polanski does, that the child had a rare old fine time, just like he did. And herein lies the crux of what I want to bring discernment to.
The things a ripe woman explores in her prime are her own business. She is finding out things herself; i am not wanting to interfere with that at all. Some women are lusty, some refined; each has a long life in which to make heads and tails of what might be her way or ways. That is all fine and good. But what constitutes maturity? I don’t suppose I was sexually mature till I was about…thirty-two or so? Certainly not before; and it took a powerful lot of meditation and unburdening to get me there. And that, really, was just the beginning; I still had to learn to be frustrated with my fulfillment and look beyond it into the finer places of my being vis a vis connecting with a man. I may be atypical; I don’t know. But I think I can safely say that thirteen is too young to have blossomed. So very very much too young – especially when you put thirteen next to forty-whatever (as Polanski was, the grinning sod.) What can forty-whatever get out of thirteen but a masturbation? There won’t be any answering resonance…no nectar…no laughter…no communion. Does forty-whatever not even recognize these things?? Apparently not. Does he not sense the terror, the ghastly rictus of pain? And he thinks – he really believes – he is a lover?? I’m not talking here about men who know they are criminals (that is another thing, an awful and painful one, I won’t go into here) – but he who thinks he is a lover. And is in fact a thief.
What is a teenaged girl? She is not a woman…and women are mysterious enough. A teenaged girl is a bud, a waiting, a growing – and she herself does not know, and nor does anyone else, of what she is capable and of what not – in the incredibly complex, delicate world of the senses, the heart, the consciousness, the emotions, of sex and love. It is her business and hers alone, to unfold naturally in time, in time…and in the best of worlds, with the sharing of stories of women who have gone before her into that wild and near-trackless land.
And what, oh Romeo? Did you think preeningly to yourself that you would awaken her? I think you did think that.
Awaken what? You yourself have no idea – because you suppose, as men do by and large, that she is just like you.
It is the great freedom of all beings to be different from each other – individuals unlike, unlike as they please, as they find themselves. Human Design has given me this so beautifullly – the happy release of all people who are not me, to be unlike me. So, shouldn’t I just let Roman Polanski be his dunderheaded self? Osho says, “Do whatever you like – just don’t interfere in anybody else’s life.” That one injunction covers all. All. And rape is interference in ways the dunderhead just can’t imagine.
A vagina is not a penis turned inside out, with the same localized sensations, release imperative, absorbed mission like a schoolboy writing with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth in concentration. Not like that. A vagina is a mystery, a place with an entirely different sort of sensitivity – not of nerve endings, but of a sort of half-buried consciousness; an awareness of whom she is inviting. She needs to know this, you see; the progeny’s worth will depend on it. The vagina is a possibility to receive energy in a particular, subtle incarnation: this particular man’s energy. Which is all of Yang, and yet so individual. I once had a lover, an immature fellow, who became angry when I described penetration as “not pleasure – but being thrown backwards off a cliff and falling, falling. Terrifying and wonderful at once.” He wanted to hear that I had the same sheer erotic whatever-it-was that he had. But the vagina is not made for that. Other bits might be – but still they belong to a human, a girl, a woman – for sex actually is attached to a whole human being, see? Just as if you get a paper cut on your finger, your whole self gets grumpy. So the erotic is not so localized; or if it is sometimes experienced as so, it can be frustrating. The whole being really wants to get involved it it – like dancing, like religiousness.
So what is that whole human being, and why should Roman Polanski care? He doesn’t have to care; though I’m sure he fancies himself a great lover, a great Lothario. He, like a zillion zillion uneducated males before him, can run about being very, immensely, extremely much like any cageless primate in a jungle, leaping on whomsoever he pleases…and this is like a man who goes in a restaurant and sidles up to diners and smirks and eats their food off their plates. That is the degree of finesse involved…I’m sure Polanski talked Art and Philosophy with the girl while they were photographing her in the Los Angeles canyons before his final and planned importunement, his thank you for her cooperation. This conversation, he probably thought, was foreplay enough. (Actually he says in his autobiography that she “talked a lot in the car afterwards and recited Shakespeare in a Valley Girl accent and I cringed.” Why didn’t he mark these objectionable characteristics before he swarmed all over her? Is he trying to tell us something was her fault; that she was just a teenager and he a great director and thus it was fine that he used her like a Kleenex?)
But wait – a monkey female, approached by an unwanted male, would surely bite and scratch! A diner whose farmed- salmon-on-a-cedar-plank was swiped off her plate would hiss and upbraid the thief! The young girl said she was afraid of Polanski. He likely was puzzled by that. Moi? Scary?
When I was a child, in the 50’s, I was sent to my room for being impolite to a grownup. It went like this: there was a neighbor our mother (behind her back of course) called “Mrs. Stupidson” and her kids were called “The Stupidsons.” The kids were allowed by their mom to walk over the swingset top-pole like monkeys; my mother thought this was egregiously dangerous and thus showed the idiocy of the parent. The kids were considered too to be woefully un-intellectually-gifted – I think they trailed about with runny noses and said “ain’t” or something. Our family, being poor, had to stand on its pride however it could, so it puffed its chest out at how smart it was. Anyway, I had heard my mother dissing Mrs. Stupidson so often that when the latter was walking by our front yard one day while our mother was watering, and the lady stopped to chat and our mother was of course being all fakey-polite, I showed my solidarity by kicking water from a puddle on the driveway all over Mrs Stupidson’s legs and skirt. I was sent to my room for punishment – and Lor’ but I felt misunderstood!
The lesson – and it was taught at school, at home, everywhere – was that kids had better be polite to grownups. Grownups are something special! They know stuff! They are powerful! They know what they are doing!! And maybe sometimes this is true – but sometimes it isn’t; particularly when that ‘grownup’ is a man and the child is female.
I think that my mother was more worried about what I might want to get up to (projecting, I would say) than about any need I might have to protect myself from what a man might want to get up to, that I didn’t. She did offer the advice that when I went on a date with a boy, I should always take in my purse some ”mad money” – bus fare to get home with in case I got angry at him. But there were so many assumptions in this that turned out to be irrelevant to me. First of all, perhaps she assumed I knew what I was supposed to be getting mad at him about. (Hand on knee? Kiss prolonged?) But I hadn’t a clue. It never occurred to me then that it might be something about sex. I wondered many times what indeed I was to get mad about! Just some disagreement about whether the Doris Day movie had been worth watching? That didn’t strike any chord with me at all – first of all, we are a very nonconfrontational family; people look sideways and mutter at a level below human hearing and live-and-let-live, and then complain about the objected-to relative behind his back, to another relative. I couldn’t imagine disagreeing with anyone to his face about anything, really, except perhaps politics. Secondly, coming from poverty, all movies were amazing and wonderful, so that wouldn’t have been it. Otherwise, she just cautioned me darkly about the helpless power of the male libido and how it was up to me to put a stop to things before they got too far – but again, the assumption was that I wanted to get started in the first place. (I did want to – but of course very selectively, and the panoply of men the 60’s threw at me held many a specimen I did not fancy knowing carnally as well as plenty of young men in velvet bell bottoms that I did; for all the good it did me, since neither they not I knew the first thing about what we were doing really at all, at all.)
Another assumption was that I would naturally go on dates. But people didn’t date in the 60’s. They didn’t have to – they lounged about in communes, and there each other was, right there – no need to for wooing, no need to go to the movies in a car. Another assumption was that those dates would be with “boys” – but they were not. After the first unrewarding fumbles I had no use for boys. Nor, yet, did I have a bedtime use for men, after the first few years of disappointments; I felt I needed to wait and get myself sorted out before going on. Men would hear me say this, nod, and then leap anyway a couple of days later (after lots of conversation about philosophy and art). Since I’d asked them not to, I didn’t really believe it was happening…I only realized this in my 50’s! – that I had been cut off from the happening because I had after all prohibited it in a friendly manner and they had agreed! But I did like good conversation with them (not forthcoming with boys) and I did really like to be noticed and praised by them. This happened a lot…I was a poet and in those days people didn’t gag when the word poetry was mentioned. I got lots of praise for my turns of phrase, my originality. I liked it, it was my due, it was true…and furthermore my father had given me precious little ground to stand on so I was hungry, hungry, hungry…not for sex – which I was completely unequal to – but for energy, attention. The men however wanted payment for that attention, in the proverbial pound of flesh. Or perhaps they felt it was just all the normal course of romance…I think the latter, and more fool they!
I paid – I didn’t know what else I could do. They were grownups! They must know what they are doing! I am a good girl! I don’t fight! I don’t bite! I don’t any more kick water on people! (And besides, above all, I was being polite! That’s the 50’s, down to the ground: Too polite to say “Get your penis out of where it is impolitely sticking itself!”) I trust people! If they think it is time to take my clothes off, what do I know? The fact that I feel nothing but unease and soreness and embarrassment must be my fault - I am frigid! Oh god! And I was haunted by the notion of my frigidity until years later when meditation set me free of so many things; so very very many; and education – the right sort – taught me the difference between Yin and Yang. Then finally it was myself I could come to trust…and the man was secondary. (Speaking of man – if my mother had known, in the 50’s when she was cautioning me about boys, what vintage of man would tend to see me as toothsome – she would have got grey even faster than she did. I’m not sure why she omitted this factor from her warnings.) Too, I felt flattered that such men wanted me; and I felt that to consort with them, in whatever discomfort and danger to health, was to expand my boundaries, make me bigger than I had been. And I’m a born risk-taker so this was important to me. But sex was not in it…not pleasure, not the erotic, not all that…nor was there the sort of meeting that blooms into greater consciousness…only obsession and despair were spawned there, then. Or disdain, or loneliness. Any friendships I formed with those men – and I did form some, for I and maybe even we were friendly souls – were in spite of the ructions of the genitalia, not because of them.
Now, it is not my intention to get moral here. I have no use for that – morality has made people nuts for too long. I’m talking about consciousness, physics, what is…what mystery a female is, what a male. (The defense in the Polanski case made a big deal out of the fact that the young girl was not a virgin, had made love twice with her boyfriend; as if that instantly turned her into a bona fide wanton, available for men at large. But this just shows the stupidity of the whole society’s attitude towards what a woman is. The child loved her boyfriend – she told him about the rape that evening – and she did not love the slimy bulb-nosed old fart who upended her on the bed. It is a completely different thing altogether. A vagina is not a public drain. It is the woman…a door to herself. Any morality brought into the case just obscures the real science of the thing.)
You see, rape – the broadest form of sexual abuse – is just the worst of the many many ways that men show they don’t see women. They don’t have a clue what this most mysterious of creatures is. I am sure most would really like to know – most are earnest – but nobody gives them any useful teaching on the subject. Hollywood glorifies sex that looks like mutual rape, and everybody thinks that’s what it is about. The subtle is completely abandoned; it is as puzzling an embarrassment as poetry.
And this lack of education hurts men as much as it does women; for are not the two living side by side? Are they not part and parcel of each other? Do we not contain both male and female in us, each and both? An ignorance that affects one hurts the other.
So: here is a way that men and women are different and yet involved in each other – and here too a suggestion for any woman being pushed by a man she does not fully want and feel responsive to (besides kicking water on, screaming, etc. which are likely all very good things and I wish I’d tried them): Begin to murmur to him about his mother. His relationship to her… ask him if she ever yelled at him. Ask him what she smelled like …what she wore…what she cooked for him. Whether he ever felt abandoned by her, or misunderstood. Whether she punished him for making noise, and how he felt. Ask him if his father is proud of him, if he wanted him to turn out as something other than he is. In short, think of the things that will go most directly to his vulnerability and drive them home. Insist on it; if he squirms away keep asking. And if that doesn’t work (though it will, with any sort of date/acquaintance-rape situation, I think) direct your screams precisely into his belly – focus there – and let the screams be wild, irrational, anguished, enraged. Let your own belly erupt into his in this way. Hold nothing back.
Here’s how it works: a man is vulnerable in the second chakra; the belly, under the navel; the emotional center. It is his vagina, and it is as ingoing and abysmal and deep-into-the-core as a vagina; and as hidden by nature. Your belly, on the other hand, has a positive, outgoing electrical charge. Your attack on his ingoing one - and the first thing I recommend, where you are just asking questions, is also an attack, since he did not ask you to do this and is not ready at all – is actually an emotional rape. You are showing him what it feels like for a woman to be rushed into physical intimacy. A man rushed into emotional intimacy is just as scared as a woman rushed into physical. In fact, it doesn’t function; it is not intimacy if it is rushed. There is only shock; no real feeling can be engaged with. Feeling takes time. (If you love a man, concomitantly, never do this to him! Stay your hand! No bitching either! That is emotional violence to a man!)
Now, the real point of my whole rant here is this: in the Cherokee culture, so I am told, boys and girls coming of age participate in a certain meditation called Cherokee Fire Loop Chakra Breathing. They do this all together and then make love with their chosen partner; so that their first experience is lived with all their chakras open. This is amazing – this is the whole thing, right there. For then the whole being makes love – the whole being meets the other. I have no idea what, physically, might occur or not occur in such a meeting; I am sure though that it is not the point. The point is, meeting…with all of oneself. in wonder and awe. From toe to head and back again. No rushing mind getting in the way – no panic – no performance! Just… energy, in all its mystery.
I have done that meditation many a time in group processes and it is the strongest one I know. I’ve put many people though it as a session – for it can be done alone or in a group. Afterwards one feels like… a tingling all over one’s body/being, a tingling of unprecedented aliveness, the mind gone, only the reality of being ness loud and clear. (This, by the way, it what women really want …whether they know it or not. They are capable of a meeting where heart and soul and body are all involved. Men are too, but only if they really work to make space. The reason women are much more slowly “aroused”, science has now discovered, is that they have a much larger bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain than men do and so are tuned to a much broader range than men are; they can’t just focus like men can with their smaller more tunnel vision/senses. The woman naturally is vaster, in other words, in what she can access of her world; man must learn from her rather than the other way around. As in all the best fairy stories, he must earn her…by raising his own consciousness; expanding it to where the heart is allowed to brush him with its fluffy soft tail like a cat…to where his heart and his attention are opened more broadly, and he can woo her correctly with word and deed. And for her part: She must appreciate the beauty in being feminine, herself…. When I was young I thought for a time that I wanted to be male because it seemed the male had a better time in sex. I didn’t understand what I was wishing…to be narrowed down, pointed. In later experiments I understood maleness by assuming a male persona for a time; I understood the fabulous purity of it, the love in its companionships; its Quest, its princeliness. And when it was time to return to the feminine I understood melting and flowing and dissolving…with new respect.)
To meet from that place… Wow! And to have it be your first…so that all meetings afterwards are informed by it…it shows one what incredible barbarian arrogance the European had in believing he was superior. When really he was just a sick&sorry wayward monkey, with a bulbous nose.
