50. Eros Unbound: Cross Cultural Sexual Personae

[Warning; this blog contains explicit sexual language and images.]

Andy rolls up his shirtsleeves above the elbow and fetches the soap from the vanity basin. Eeva bends forward for him to soap her back.

“I suppose we should count ourselves lucky really,” he says as he runs the soap across her neck and shoulders and down her back.

“How’s that, my love?”

“Lucky to have had all that in our lives. The love. The passion. I know sometimes it all seems too painful and you think to hell with it. But then think of all the people who never experience any of that. What they’ve missed. It’s like there’s two kinds of people in the world. Never mind rich and poor, or good and evil. What divides the sheep from the goats is sexual passion and love all wrapped up together. Knowing the intense pleasure of it. Or not knowing. I’d hate to be on the outside looking in on that with some kind of sick envy. Better performers than spectators, don’t you think, even if we crash and burn?“

"And no one can ever steal away the memories of it."

“You know, I’ve probably told you this…"

“Many times, I expect!”

“How surprised I was when I found women get horny too. I was brought up to view love and lust as incompatible, one of the angels, one of the devil. To believe sexual desire was an exclusively male thing. Dad’s sex talks were the weirdest of things. Like he had a whole different language for them, words I never heard him use in any other context. Sort of biblical. A quagmire of strange terms and hidden codes – impure thoughts, fornication, the sanctity of marriage, carnal lusts. Once I began to understand what he was on about, well, you can imagine. The prohibitions became a source of fascination. Then he told me one of the girls in the youth club was not the kind of girl I should be interested in. That sort of did it really. Suddenly her contours and flirtatiousness took on huge appeal and mystery.”

“So, what happened?”

“We did indulge in what, in those days, was called heavy petting but when I eventually plucked up courage and slid my hand inside her knickers I found something pulsing and wet. I was so shocked. Pulled away immediately. Dad’s sex talks never hinted at anything like that. Mum and Dad were kind of affectionate together in front of us kids but never overtly sexy. I couldn’t imagine them rushing off to bed in a fit of passion. Who was that American comic – Woody Allen? Lenny Bruce? – who said, when the facts of life were explained to him, that he could imagine his father doing that. But his mother? No way!”

Andy takes the facecloth and starts rinsing the soap from Eeva's back.

“All that Protestant guilt stuff,” Eeva says. “Thank God, I never had that to deal with. That coy, hidden in the corner bashfulness. In our family, sexuality was always very explicit. Tiki sculptures, marae carvings are full of open vulvas, and massive turgid pricks. Full Monty. And all us kids could see the passion between Mum and Dad as well as the love. So my sexuality has always been part of my sense of who I am. Then there was Pau’ura, one of my Tahitian aunties. She told me that in the old days I would have been one of the arioi…”

“The arioi?”

“The young and beautiful people – artists, warriors, lovers. Travelled from island to island entertaining, being entertained. Lots of feasts, sex, lavish gifts. Sounded good to me. I guess my sexuality has always been part of my sense of who I am. Probably makes me more open to sexual experiences than you. Never seemed particularly strange to me to want to see what it was like with a woman. Not that I wanted to join the Vagina Dentata.”

“The what?”

“Toothed vagina. Radical feminist organization. Celebrates female sex as predatory, swallowing up male power and virility; entrapping, consuming, castrating men.”

“Sounds very Freudian.”

“Yea, knew you’d appreciate that. All that cannibalistic stuff you like to tease me about. Pau’ura told me that in the old days, in our early contacts with European sailors, our local women went out in the canoes with the warriors and stood up shouting, gesticulating, pointing at their fannies. Poor saps thought it was their lucky day. Major bit of cross-cultural misunderstanding there, I’m afraid. The sailors briefly enjoyed the diversion, but it was a challenge to battle. The vagina was associated with Te Po, the forces of cosmic darkness. It was a place of terror. The women were saying “Come in here, lads, and we’ll send you to oblivion.” Bit like those spiders that consume the male after mating…”

“And praying mantis. Don’t the females bite off the males' heads after mating? That’s a whole new concept of giving head, isn’t it?”

“Yuk Andy, that's not very nice. Anyway my ancestors soon got over the aggro. Started trading sex for iron nails off the ships – curiously appropriate really. Nails ripped out of everything, the decks, the bulwarks, everything. Such a flourishing trade the officers got scared the ships would fall apart.”

Andy laughs.

“I guess my sexual history was a bit difficult for you to handle at times, wasn’t it? But partly why you were attracted to me in the first place, eh? Me and my hot Polynesian thighs.”

“Yes, well, we just had tiny penises to look at. Sculptures of Greek boys and young men, all with fashionably tiny cocks. Hard cold bloodless marble. And paintings of Venus rising from the sea, delicate and demure, showered by flowers, with a nymph on hand to throw a cloak over her naked flesh. Not so much as a vulva in sight. Certainly no hints of toothed vaginas to terrorise us, swallow our virility. Nothing so vulgar. All we had was Freud’s mind fucking on the one hand and a bunch of randy Greek gods on the other. Oh, the lost joys of a classical education! I suppose I was programmed to fall in love with someone like you. Not by destiny, or fate, or the disposition of the stars – I have little time for such nonsense - but by the unconscious accumulation of images from my youth. Images of Polynesia from Cook’s accounts of his South Pacific voyages, and from paintings, novels, films, travellers’ tales. Of exotic, colourful places, large boisterous extended families, and warm-blooded, passionate women. What brought me to Tahiti in the first place. A world away from the cold winters of Dunedin and the melancholy joyless Presbyterian diet on which my sister and I were nurtured."

“Are we strange, do you think Eeva? Does everyone experience our fusion of love and lust in the one package? ”

“Sex is such a private thing, it’s hard to know. Fusion, confusion. I blame Eros, that cherubic little bugger. So two faced. The winged little romantic shooting arrows of love around indiscriminately. And the lusty sexy little devil, driving us to passion, sickness, delirium, the desire to possess, be possessed. He’s a two-faced erotic little bugger.”

“Two sides of the one coin, I guess?”

Statue of Eros, Picadilly Circus*

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Sources:
Paglia, Camille, 1990. Sexual Personae, London and New Haven, Yale University Press.
Salmond, Anne, 2003. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas, London, Penguin/Allen Lane.

Note:
*All the world revolves around Eros? The 1892-93 statue is of Eros' brother Anteros and was described by its sculptor Alfred Gilbert as portraying 'reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.' After complaints that it was too sensual it was renamed The Angel of Christian Charity but the name never caught on.