The Editorial By Scot Rhoads Changes no, really! You may have noticed in our last issue that despite what I said in the editorial, it was not printed on newsprint. That was a fluke that seems unlikely to repeat. There have been some teething problems with the new printer, but they should all be ironed out with this issue, and it should be on newsprint. This is the format we will maintain for the foreseeable future if it is well received. Please write or e-mail us at nmrEmbracing Sex and the Goddess in an Industrial World In our last issue, Z. Budapest's letter brought to our attention some of the excesses of the terrible treatment of women all over the globe. The problems in our own culture make it disturbingly easy to miss how much worse it is in some of the others. The cause of women demands action so emphatically that it is dangerously easy to address it before we have considered our habitual methods. We should not measure our contribution in the usual terms of how much we invest in the cause, but how well we invest. We should reconsider our usual tactics and measures of success. Our culture is still too focused on pyrotechnics as a measure of results. Our anger and outrage demand dramatic, destructive, aggressive, confrontational displays. We need to see explosions and casualties to know we are doing some good speaking metaphorically, one hopes. Ironically, even in an effort to advance the refeminization of our society and the world, it is easy to look toward our traditional masculine ways, despite their having proven themselves less than ideal. Z. Budapest noted the sex industry as one of the prime culprits in the global exploitation of women. It seems to be a fundamental aspect of the lack of respect for women. It also seems to be a fundamental characterization of the problem, thus a particularly accessible example for my point. It is easy to agree with Budapest's exhortation to take action against the sex industry. Boycott, protest and legislation are proven tools. But this kind of action is not the whole answer. As Lazaris writes in this issue, anger and outrage can serve us well in bringing change, but it is through love that we make it positive and lasting change. Sex is an urge that has been with us for much longer than we have been human. It demands expression. You can repress it, but at a cost. I'm often reminded of a story about a serval at a zoo that was tearing out its hair. The keepers couldn't find anything wrong to explain the behavior. Finally one noticed that the self-destructive behavior echoed the motion of a serval tearing the feathers out of its prey. The keepers started feeding it birds with feathers intact and the serval stopped tearing out its hair. This, displacement, is a serious consequence of repression. Repression, like operant conditioning, has a key place. It can help us forestall catastrophic short-term problems, and give us the latitude to implement strategic efforts. But without a strategic effort, we will soon face problems again, and worse ones. Especially when dealing with fundamental behaviors, repression alone will merely hide a problem if we neglect it, it comes back in a worse form. Many of today's problems are a consequence of our society's history of sexual repression. If we had dealt properly with sex in the past, we would not have to deal with it so urgently now. So that we don't have an even harder time dealing with it in the future, as we boycott and legislate and protest, we must pursue even more vigorously a long-term strategy of assimilation. We must, as a society and a species, recognize the role that sex plays. In nature, sex is not always pretty. For instance, hamadryas baboons have a culture of child abduction and rape. But sex can be pretty. Bonobos have an enviable intimacy and openness, and gibbons settle their differences with song. Nature demands that we have sex, but we humans choose whether it is pretty or not. Ours is an industrial culture and anything with enough interest to support an industry is sure to have one. There is more than enough interest in sex to support an industry. There is more than enough to ensure that we have no hope of preventing an industry short of no longer being industrial. The best we can hope to achieve with repression by itself is also among the worst, driving it underground. If it is underground in our culture, it is also underground in our psyche; and both create problems that are hard to address. The negative associations we have with sex now are because it has been underground psychologically and economically. Those associations are how sex could be driven underground. As long as we allow them to frighten us back into repression, they will dog us more and more emphatically. All we can hope to achieve is an escalating effort to make the symptoms less visible. But we can face the monsters, the phony ones we imagine, the artificial ones we create and the real ones that were always there. As in dream work, we can defeat them and make them give us a gift. It is very important that they give us a gift, for that is how we know we have reassimilated them. We can do that by embracing the positive aspects and the potential of sex in an industrial world. We can displace the negative and exploitated with the positive and empowering, rather than just use repression in the quest for the pipe dream of a permanent, stable sex vacuum. I heard of a popular strip show that amounted to a lesson in women's physiology. Sex lends itself to helping people get more in touch with themselves, the opposite gender, and nature itself. We can use it as a powerful teaching tool, much as the principles of advertising were turned to good use in the laudable Schoolhouse Rock series. Of course there is still the risk that it could be uselessly dry and boring, as in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. It will require some skill and creativity. It will require the services of the intelligentsia. After the debacle of their disdaining television and the resultant much lamented dumbing down of society, they may have figured out their job is to go to the people, rather than whine about the people not coming to them (even as they deliberately distance themselves). Will this mean an end to exploitation? Hardly, but that is an irrational goal on this scale. Exploitation is inescapable when that is how you look at the world. It is a fundamental part of an industrial society. Our society is defined by exploitation. Or you could say that in our society we use exploitation to define everything. (Is there a difference?) Work relationships, family relationships, and government. Everything can be measured in that dimension. Exploitation is a fundamental part of life. Even our own DNA exploits us (whatever us is in this model) when we don't happen to identify with the goal of making lots of copies of our DNA. But it need not be so. Darwinian competition models a natural world that could be (and has been) more plausibly defined instead in terms of cooperation. If we focus solely on one problem or another and decry it only because it is exploitive, that cannot be a fundamental reason or motivation when exploitation does not distinguish any one thing from everything else in our world. We cannot cure exploitation by pruning whatever exploitive aspects of our culture appear salient at the moment. Not only is that again mere repression, but we'd soon prune down to the bare ground, and then to the bedrock. If we try to repress or eliminate aspects of our society because they are exploitive (or whatever other label we are working with), others will fight to retain them. These aspects would not be there if there were no support. Thus we risk getting lost in battles over the way our problems are manifesting, leaving the problems themselves to roam at liberty. Yet we should consider the problem of exploitation and address it in sex, the sex industry, or any problem. We just cannot use exploitation to dismiss anything as an irredeemable evil, or as an excuse for repression without any other action. Exploitation can show us where the worst of a problem is, but it offers no solutions. Solutions, especially in a post-patrifocal culture, lie in joining. I heard a National Public Radio interview with a policeman who grew up in and now patrols Chicago's Cabrinni Green. His impressive advice to kids understandably disgusted with their treatment by the police was to join the police force. I have read that a new tactic in environmental groups is to buy stock in polluting companies to gain a voice in their policy making. It echoes martial arts, where you don't defeat an opponent by opposing his action, but by using it. What is the difference between pornography and the explicit art that anthropologists and collectors ooh and ahh over? Is porno just recent erotic art from our own culture? To some, perhaps I feel the key is respect and celebration vs. alienated adolescent exploitation. But if our culture never recognizes when we are not being exploitive or worse, decides that exploitation is the only possibility. We are trapped. To have a choice, to be able to create a world where sex is not an enemy, we need to embrace sex, including its industry, and give it our sense of celebration and respect. The explosion of porn in society, especially on the Internet, is forcing us to take such action or become frighteningly repressive. But we Pagans have more than enough respect and joy to redeem the abuses of sex. We even have enough to spare for similar tragedies, like the disastrous War on Drugs now making us look like France in 1940. So many of our problems are manifestations of how we have tried to handle them through the masculine tactics of repression, alienation and aggression. Just adopting the feminine strategies of inclusiveness and healing will in itself solve many of our problems and leave us well equipped to handle those remaining. This paradigm shift is the return of the Goddess and why She will lead us to a golden age. Blessed Be! SR | 
