Peter Crowther

Published in the February 2013 issue

Take all the medals away, lay bare the fallen warrior's chest. Put a new medal there: For Valor in the War of Sex. Add the general's corpse to the endless pile our hypocrisy and denial generates: Tiger Woods, Larry Craig, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Gary Hart, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and all the rest.

We get it completely backward, of course. We are willing to forgive — Clinton still survives, the "Big Dog," emphasis on dog, too big to kill, and Republicans have forgiven even David Vitter for his love of prostitutes. God Himself has forgiven Newt Gingrich, says Newt Gingrich. After we destroy, we are downright smug in our forgiveness and quickly proceed to clucking over how cruel we have been, how silly it all is. They have been punished enough, we say — it was a psychological weakness, a momentary fall from grace.

But there was never anything to forgive, for this immature and prim purification ritual is the only unforgivable thing.

I want to suggest that sex, be it adulterous or premarital or deviant or polyamorous, is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that sex itself is the moment of grace. And that our sterile idea of perfection is the actual sin. To start with the subject on the table, adultery is a brave rebellion against the invisible prison we build for ourselves. When the sad little man Larry Craig widened his stance in that airport bathroom, it was probably the most honest and courageous act of his life. When Clinton got that blowjob in the White House, he wasn't indulging a weakness (and an eager intern) but enacting the hero's journey of reconciling inner and outer, risking all to break through the wall of hypocritical purity he had spent years building and projecting to the world in the effort to get elected. By risking martyrdom, in fact, he lifted himself up into an exaltation we still refuse to understand. He was the Martyred Jesus of Oral Sex with Interns and all we see is a mean little sin, as all the sexual deviates pretending to be puritans gathered around in an orgy of denunciation and scandal. In our condemnation, we focus on the supposedly broken vows and the supposed pain of his wife when in fact we know nothing of his wife's true feelings or her knowledge and tolerance of his "frisky" side (frisky being one of the endless array of demeaning expressions we use as invisible prison bars, along with dog and pig and you only want one thing). We never consider that our reaction is the punishment and the meanness is all in our eyes. Every single time we play out this ritual, we replay the Old Testament rite in which the pious transferred their sins to goats, which were then driven into the wilderness, just as we drive David Petraeus and a parade of other scapegoats out the gates of our smug little village of lies in the hope that we can put the "sin" outside the gate — when it is, of course, always inside. That's what happens when you put up gates.

What we're afraid of is the truth. We live in a world in which men and women are buried up to their necks and stoned to death for these same impulses. We recoil at such barbarism with smug assertions of our superior level of civilization while cheerfully meting out our own version of punishment for the same supposed crime — anything to avoid looking at the deeper questions of why adultery exists and what exactly all our endless sexual prohibitions and inhibitions are supposed to do for us. Because if they are there to stabilize the family or inhibit sexually compulsive perversions or avoid the conflicts attendant in jealousy, they're failing spectacularly and they always have.

In fact, the opposite is true. Our prohibitions against sex cause perversion, and the prison walls we put up around our marriages cause adultery. That is why adultery is merely the physical enactment of the truth men and women hide for long miserable years, a glorious terrifying truth that bursts through all our barriers if we have the vitality to rebel — if we have any vitality left after all the social and personal castration that we enact every single day of our miserable slavish self-denying lives. There's a sign on my veterinarian's wall that says, WE ALL NEED A DOG TO WORSHIP US AND A CAT TO BRING US BACK TO REALITY. Those are the mutually destructive roles our society has given to the husbands and wives who assume the prisoner/prison-guard roles in marriage. Let's be honest, we have a long and inglorious social history that essentially reduces women to marital prostitutes who buster their battered dignity with the drab consolation of fidelity. But when those wives and husbands take up the role of the cat that brings us back down to reality, when they refuse their spouse's need for worship and celebration, then, in the immortal words of Malcolm Lowry, the lighthouse invites the storm.

So we have reduced ourselves to the pathetic status of nice guys, geldings of civilization, castrati of the well behaved, and we have indentured our wives in the role of prison guard, in which she is expected to condemn the person she supposedly loves for the vitality that he is slowly killing inside himself. In doing so, she has summoned her own betrayal, putting out a screaming four-alarm APB to all the available women of the world: My spouse is not happy. My spouse is not fulfilled within the sacred bonds of marriage. The slaves' deal of self-denial in exchange for a few crumbs has turned out crappy as always, there aren't enough crumbs, he's dying of starvation. And so he finally cries "Spartacus!" and goes to fuck some stranger, some biographer or groupie or fan who gives him the adoration we all hunger for in our deepest core, who worships his body as we are supposed to worship only God, who says to him, You are beautiful and deserving of the intimate lavishment of my tongue, who receives him like the beautifully submissive O, the sexual Christ, "as a god is received."

Pity the prison guards, too! The fact is, there are people who enjoy the mean little power that comes with the role. But we should always remember that no free person would choose such a role, and that women are also victims of this hateful social design. Their cruelty is in direct proportion to their own suffering, as cruelty usually is.

And the real sadness and tragedy is not that we overreached, that we tempted fate with our imitation of the gods — the real tragedy is that we have been made ashamed to declare ourselves as gods, which is why a man like the otherwise estimable General Petraeus martyrs himself and fires himself when most of the world is finally happy to put the barbaric past behind us and admit it's just a personal matter, that we're beyond that spouse-as-property social contract now, that husbands and wives in the modern world have to learn to listen to each other and accommodate their different and changing needs. Trained in a religio-military ethic to honor discipline above life, he feels so guilty for his one eruption of rampant unsublimated manhood that he turns his eyes from the truth that his social prominence and brief rebellion reveal to so many great men: The real failure is not sexual vitality, the real failure is all in the eyes of the mean little scolds who drag us down from the throne and tell us we are hateful, our desire is hateful, that our essential vitality is a sin.

They know in their hearts that this is a lie, which is why they immediately pivot to celebrating the invisible bars. It's his wife or her husband who is the victim, they say, it's the lie he told, the promise he failed to honor — always the forms and not the substance, never mind that we're interposing ourselves between him and his wife and reading into their privacy our own broken oath. That's the essential tell that shows we don't really give a damn about their private life. It's about us. We're the ones who feel violated, who feel threatened. Tiger Woods owed us. We wanted him to be pure, to be perfect, to be an example and not a man, and definitely not a god worshipped by the groupies we will never have. We wanted him to be more and less at the same time, the sanitized definition of a saint, but especially less because we knew he was more and we hated him for that. So we tried to abstract the vitality out of him and make him less, more like us. Anything to drive that goat out the gates of the city — because the last thing we want to do is face the goat within. Because if the Big Dog and the Tiger are out there fucking eager women and that's not a terrible shameful sin, then why aren't we out there fucking eager women?

Quickly, before we can think too deeply, let's come up with reasons why! Because they're interns, just little "children" who don't have independent minds that can make decisions freely because of the power imbalance between older successful men and beautiful young women, never mind that everyone with half a brain knows that beautiful youth has its own mind and sexual intelligence that speaks to it just as loudly as your sagging old testicles, or that the power balance between youth and beauty and age and success is anything but obvious and usually tends to youth and beauty, as even flirtatious little babies intuit when they play their little hide-and-seek games.

We're so civilized now we have buried the older myth that the real sinners are these hot little Eves tempting us with their ripe apples of ass and breast, summoning against our noble will the snakes that betray with their hidden foulness. That's not politically correct anymore. It's as upsetting to our gelded feminized complacence as the penis gourds and codpieces healthier societies used to celebrate their animal vitality. And I know that even as they read this, a whole generation of feminist scolds is saying, "But but but, the sexualization of women is used to oppress them and keep them trivialized in their place," never considering for one moment that all they've done is reverse-sexualize themselves by denying that vitality and gelding themselves so they can fit into the three-piece suit of civilization and make better little worker bees — who are always by definition asexual drones who have ceded the hive's sexuality to the queens and kings we so eagerly destroy at the first sign of blood, feeding on their moment of weakness like mad hyenas. The scolds never consider that the real victory would be to own their sexuality and include it in their definition of power. And the irony of course is that this animal, emphasis on animal, vitality is not a design failure of great achievers. It is of course part and parcel of why the great become great in the first place.

Do you think it's an accident that so many great men are relentless horndogs, or that so many prominent women seem to be completely asexual — asexuality being, of course, as every priest knows, an especially ferocious form of sexuality so intense that it has masked itself in the chador of its opposite in order to sublimate itself into pure will to power? The sexual vitality of the great is essential to their greatness, not an accident to be suppressed or excused. But our mean little secret is that we secretly hate and fear the Big Dogs because who knows, they might turn out to be Hitler or Attila so let's hammer on them like a fucking piÑata with adulation and temptation and parade our pretty little daughters in front of them — and every famous man knows how men love to display their daughters before them — but don't touch. Because if you succumb to the temptations we parade constantly below your nose, we will have to kill you. So sorry, that's how things are done in civilized society — but don't worry, after the crucifixion, with enough penance and gay therapy, we'll raise you back up again! That's just how generous and forgiving we are! God, we little guys are wonderful!

So the sin is within us. And ashamed as we are, it makes liars of us. Confused, vengeful, and sexually frustrated, we always make our dilemma worse by getting everything backward.

But repeat after me: No adult has the luxury of innocence. No married person has the right to la-dee-da along completely ignorant of the frustrations and unfulfilled passions seething in his or her spouse. How many times have those cuckolds and betrayed wives looked away, how many little betrayals and evasions and "not tonight dears" have accumulated in their marriages before the Big Dog finally escapes his/her cage? Here again, older cultures had a different perception of the truth, an old knowledge retrograde conservatives occasionally let slip out and then immediately take back, as if the hoary old horned goat himself had perched on their tongues: the wifely duty, marital obligations, alienation of affection, the idea that you can't rape a wife, all reminders that what we're really talking about isn't love but a legal contract as noxious as a mortgage — in fact, very much like a mortgage in which you pay with your whole life for the meager privilege of security. In this era of hatred of the animal within us, this era of obsession with our sterile little screens that never cease their ironic transmission of pornography directly into the sanctity of our homes, some people even think we can only rape our wives, for that is the logical conclusion of the idea that power imbalance invalidates choice instead of the truth that is, as usual, the opposite of our fear-driven inclinations — that power imbalance is what excites us in the first place. As the T-shirt says, "I have the cunt, so I make the rules," which means that we must find a way to rule the cunts. Oh, the glory of the power exchange! Oh, the endless friction between inner and outer! This is why all the polls show that there's more porn and more kinky sex in the red states than anywhere else in America. And in the repressive Middle East, pornography is a way of life. And all the rutting will finally stop only when we're all Spocks and born-again saints and the scraps of timid antiseptic sex we do have will no longer be worthy of being undignified — undignify me, baby! — with an earthy word like rutting. Or fucking. We'll have to come up with a new word, something really dull and scientific — something like intercourse.

But of course, we already have thousands of words like that. Oh how we love to impose them on the rutting and the fucking and the cunts and the cocks: penis, vagina, labia, homosexuality, etc., from the scientific realm, and all the infantilizing words that beckon us to a prelapsarian innocence that degrades us with every syllable, from the old standbys like wee-wee to the noxious new ones like Oprah's va-jay-jay. We castrate ourselves with words and comfort ourselves with pity — and the scorn that is always hidden inside pity like arsenic in a hamburger. We extend the majesty of our pity to the wives standing beside their man instead of even once asking where is the wife with the courage to step forward and say, "Of course I knew what he was doing. I celebrate him! That's the man I

married, that's why I married him, for the vital fire you pretend to despise. I know better than anyone, because I have done it myself, that you are making him into a martyr only because you couldn't kill him completely, couldn't make him a coward like yourselves. Now Divine Adultery has revealed the truth to me: He had the courage to betray me in the name of the thing that keeps him alive and makes him more a man than you will ever be. Now we can finally put our marriage back together in the world of reality instead of under the rules of your damnable pretense at innocence." Where is the wife or cuckolded husband with that much courage? Why do we insist on celebrating their willingness to act as an instrument of our will to smallness and celibacy, for their complicity in the castration that is civilization itself?

Why? Because it answers the ugliest need born of that civilization. By declaring that which is most beautiful to be filthy, that which is most natural to be unnatural, by always making laws against and never for, we ensure that laws will continue to be broken and we will always have spouses to scorn and a Christ to crucify.

Finally, let us speak of style. The general arrayed himself in the perfect straight lines of a military uniform and festooned his dress jacket with an overwrought spume of medals that betrayed the red secret strutting within him. We should have known just by looking at him, should have known that he'd represent us all too well, that his entire project as a soldier and as a man was to assert order and sanity and security against the inevitable little disruptions like war and murder and rape that bubble up through the stone walls we build, eternally forgetting that the Final Solution occurred in the most civilized nation on the most civilized continent, telling ourselves it was an accident that the nation of Brahms and Schopenhauer came up with mechanized mass race murder instead of accepting it as the inevitable product of civilized man's deranged self-denial — which points the way, if we will listen, to the ultimate truth that Divine Adultery is trying to teach us.

It is not our sex but our hypocrisy that is the annihilator of marriage and destroyer of lives and reputations. Marriage invites adultery. The uniform invites war. A rage for order always invites destruction.

So here's our modest proposal: The only way out of this horrifying violent loop of repression and explosion is to learn to wallow in the sperm and blood and shit of life, to smear it on the walls and call it art and laugh at the fools who say it demeans us, to encourage our husbands and wives to cheat if they need to, to embrace our gay brothers and sisters and all the other "deviants" whose suffering has protected and insulated us, to open the prison doors of civilization and finally learn how to live free.

Only then will the parade of martyrs stop.

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