Evil men in the Bible are as a rule state enemies, known foes in long-standing disputes or grudge matches. Women—who still are prohibited from hand-to-hand combat in the U.S. military—can only serve their country in their natural role as spies in the house of love. But even in the workaday world, women have been deemed more dangerous than the battlefield: at least you know what to expect from a man you are at war with—a woman you are in love with is a tender trap. But it works both ways—men destroy women all the time, in fact it is far more common for a woman to have her life ruined by a man’s handiwork—to have it destroyed in tangible, economic ways—than the reverse. Pretty early in Genesis, Abraham casts his maid-mistress Hagar and their illegitimate son Ishmael out of his household to contend for themselves in the desert; the seemingly constant onslaught of celebrity men who are served paternity suits by the women they wish they’d never slept with for the sake of children they would rather not know bears witness to how many men sort-of love and completely leave women behind to contend with their offspring. And despite what is surely horrible conduct on the part of the first patriarch, Abraham, the Bible does not concern itself with the evil of men—in fact, the whole episode is blamed on his wife Sarah’s jealousy, even though, until that moment, Abraham was comfortably the head of his house.
If sexual politics is only casually covered throughout the Bible, Samson and Delilah’s disarray and disintegration departs from that norm, at least partly because the book of Judges is such a crazy, inconspicuous volume within the context of Old Testament lore. It is the How the West Was Won of its era, it encompasses the years of the Israelites settling into Canaan, there is guerrilla warfare, and a lot of mixing and miscegenation between the natives and the new settlers, with many Jews worshipping the God of Moses, but also adopting pagan practices. The story of Samson and Delilah is sandwiched between two strange incidents recalled in Judges: in one, a man abandons his concubine to be gang-raped by a mass of marauders and left for dead on his porch, after which he cuts her body into twelve parts and sends one to each of the tribes; in the other, an army leader named Jephthah vows to sacrifice the first thing that walks out the door of his house upon his safe return from battle, and when he is greeted by his own daughter, he blames her for forcing him to slaughter her upon the altar; Jephthah, in effect, kills his daughter and claims that she made him do it. It is in the book of Judges, with strangers in a strange land that is supposed to be their own, that the chaos of life is constantly countered with “she made me do it.” And so has it been ever since. In the sexually charged relationship between father and daughter, who can say what perversity was intended by this accusation, but the Delilah story buttresses the notion that women drag men down with their wiles. Somehow despite the fact that Delilah herself was being manipulated by the Philistine governors and secret police—that, in essence, the CIA was approaching her and demanding that she reveal the secret of Samson’s strength—and even though, like all women, sexually sweet or not, she was still at the mercy of the might of men, Delilah is thought to have destroyed a man who was clearly bound to self-destruct. “In popular notions of the tale, women are blamed for Samson’s downfall, although in the biblical story both the Timnite woman (Samson’s first wife) and Delilah act as they do because they are manipulated by the Philistines,” writes Cheryl Exum. “Their power over Samson is appropriated by men, in the interests of an androcentric agenda.”
“The man captivated by her charms no longer has will-power, enterprise, future; he is no longer a citizen, but mere flesh enslaved to its desires, cut off from the community, bound to the moment, tossed passively back and forth between torture and pleasure,” writes Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, explicating the dangerous seduction of Circe, a latter-day Delilah. The poison of her sexual ecstasy is that she makes a man—even goodly, godly Odysseus—believe he has no other cares or concerns. “The perverse sorceress arrays passion against duty, the present moment against all time to come; she detains the traveler far from home, she pours him the drink of forgetfulness.”
The danger to the poor man graced with such unearthly delights is that he doesn’t realize that the drug will wear off and the world of widgets and wampum and bargains and deals will beckon once more. “For a while, I’ll let it make you strong / make your heart lion,” the poet Ai writes in “Woman to Man,” as she proffers a taste of her pussy power. “Then I’ll take it back.”
It is wrong to blame anachronistic attitudes for any image of Delilah as dangerous, because feminism or the lack thereof seems to have very little bearing on how the femme fatale is received and perceived. In 1671, John Milton wrote the semi-epic (as compared with the outright epic Paradise Lost) poem Samson Agonistes, the blind scribe telling the life of the blinded judge. In it, he distributes the blame for disaster and drama quite evenly: while he calls Delilah “That specious monster, my accomplished snare,” he also has Samson taking the rap for the relationship, admitting, “Of what now I suffer / She was not the prime cause, but I myself, / Who, vanquished with a peal of words (O weakness!) / Gave up my fort of silence to a woman.” Milton’s Samson even concedes that he saw the betrayal coming, that he knew Delilah was seeking the source of his strength so that the very thing could be summarily sapped; it is her openness and his inability to resist the nonsubterfuge of her seduction that makes him really want to bang his (shorn) head against the wall: “Her importunity, each time perceiving / How openly, and with what impudence, / She purposed to betray me, and (which was worse / Than undissembled hate) with what contempt / She sought to make me traitor to myself.” In most interpretations in the Judeo-Christian tradition inhabited by Milton, Delilah is despised for her sneakiness; here, in Milton’s reading of events, Delilah is blamed for not being crafty enough—for having the audacity to know and show what a bird in the hand feels like. She can’t win for losing! But while Milton’s rendition has the standard elements of a decent guy duped by his lust for a devil woman, the bard is keen to remind us that Samson acted on his own volition until love took away such a will; it is Samson’s stupidity, susceptibility and sexual appetite that drive the action, while Delilah, sultry and supine, an amulet of charms, is only driven to reaction.
While Milton gave at least some credence to the notion that it takes two to tango—if, in fact, they did any ballroom dancing of the duo-as-duel variety in Restoration-era England—many more modern thinkers have held far more antiquated views of Delilah and her sexual power. “Delilah is, as it were, a whore at heart aware of the hero’s love for her and how his emotions may be manipulated to serve her greed and lust for power,” one scholar named John B. Vickery could opine as recently as 1981.
Obviously, if the author of the Bible wanted to invent the possibility of a woman so tempting she’d drag a good man down and throw that out as something to aspire to, He did good. Another view, beyond standard feminist criticism, sees women as oppressed, grasping at what little power is in their reach, ultimately only serving male interests. Of course this is true, but why not also celebrate that power, why not admire the love? In real life, people are more than just forces of history and nature, they have complex feelings and emotions that explain why they do what they do. Love must be a big part of Delilah’s motivation. And love really is part of every story like this. What is wrong, however, with the view that boils Delilah down to nothing but betrayer, or says that women bring men down, that love destroys, is that it concludes with the misguided fear of emotional free fall that we all hide from, it occludes—except from our most peripheral and blurry vision—a safe and simple truth: that people are much more resilient than they give themselves credit for. The awesome awfulness of Samson’s story is that love turns out to be truly lethal for him; basically, very few of us are going to be murdered as a result of a bad relationship—in fact, mostly we just get the pathetic, prosaic fate of crying and feeling lousy and listening to Linda Ronstadt sing “Long, Long Time” over and over again. But that is life and that is the beauty of life. Peop
le surrender to love—they do it reluctantly and with trepidation, but when they give in it is sweet surrender as well as sweet victory. It is part of life, that potential hurt, that fearsome thrill, but women don’t seem to have nearly as hard a time with it. In the end, in the final tally, who knows who has brought the other down more or the most—we only know that this is life’s rich pageant, and we all have to take responsibility for our own feelings, for wishing to succumb and letting it happen. It is degrading to put the blame on Mame or anyone else for the chances we all take freely.
One of the more interesting passages of The Rules occurs when the authors discuss how to handle rejection: “Just move on.” This is, of course, good advice, along the lines of just buck up and snap out of it. It is particularly good advice for the overwrought, the overreacting, the downright hysterical, for the people who feel every heartbeat is a heartache, and every breakup is the end of the world. The types who brood over a one-night stand as if it were the end of a ten-year marriage. It is good advice, but bad philosophy. Bad philosophy because it fails to account for the value of human experience in and of itself. It’s not that anyone ought to suffer too many rejections, but the reason The Rules is so popular is that it caters to women who have been dating too long and have already had enough philosophical responses to the things men have done to them.
But the thing that the book misses is that most of our emotional triumphs occur on the margins of life, at the moments when we least expect them, at the points when we’ve been so hardened that our hearts feel like they’re made of petrified wood and it seems perfectly possible that we’ll simply turn to stone, turn to a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah every time we shudder to think about how many ways we’ve been wronged by love. And for whatever reason—I have very little evidence of it, but I have no evidence of anything happening any other way—it’s at those precise times when things could not be worse and it seems like there is no man from here to the southernmost tip of Tasmania who has not already proved disappointing—to put it mildly—that life surprises us, that some nice person comes along and makes us feel four years old and walking in a field of daisies all over again. I think the fear of Delilah and of all of her kind has to do with some desperate desire to avoid that pain, to stay away from the women who are obviously going to be devastating, soul-murdering. And the stupid thing about fearing that kind of exposure is that the worst pain will not necessarily come from the bad girls—the truth is that it can come from anybody you fall for, anybody who has the capacity to bring you down. That’s why the fear of Delilah tends to extend to a fear of all women, a fear of all intimacy—all of it is potentially threatening, emasculating.
One of the best movies of recent years—and certainly the best debut film of the late eighties—was Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies & videotape, which found its profundity in a message that boils down to: You can run, but you can’t hide. Set in Baton Rouge, the movie revolves around characters who, each in his or her own way, are deeply disconnected from feelings—from spouses and family and lovers, and from themselves. Andie MacDowell is Ann, a tightly wound homemaker, probably sixth-generation Bayou belle, who walks around vaguely disturbed all the time, somehow knowing that everything about her life with her corporate lawyer husband is all wrong, all empty, but she’s so cut off from any sense of what a full emotional life might entail that she’s not quite sure what, if anything, she should do about it. She’s never had an orgasm, she—I suppose this is obvious—doesn’t much care for sex, and is blithely unaware of the fact that her husband is fucking her hotheaded, oversexed sister during sweltering, smoldering Louisiana afternoons when he should be with clients. Her whole life is an avoidance of her whole life—though that too would not strike her as anything particularly troubling. Meanwhile, James Spader is Graham, an LSU fraternity brother of her husband’s who shows up in town after nine years, dressed completely in black like no one in Louisiana ever does if a funeral is not in the offing, and he is obviously far from the beer-guzzling party-hearty guy he’d once been. A traumatic relationship has so shell-shocked him that he’s ceased to have sex with anyone, instead making videotapes of women talking about their fantasies, which he then uses for pornographic self-pleasure.
In the course of the movie, the MacDowell and Spader characters become close, the alienation that results from Ann’s willful denial somehow a good, safe match for the withdrawal that results from Graham’s overexposure and inability to deny anything. It is through this bond that both shed their remoteness and try—tentatively, frightfully, as if life were a first date all over again—to connect, not just with each other, but with the world they’ve been skimming for so long. As a model of the fears of intimacy that are so common to contemporary life, the film achieves an unusual honesty, mainly because not much happens, the gradual and then sudden pace of emotional motion is somehow honored. And the movie never loses sight of the way nothing happens in a vacuum, the convergence is always harmonic: people don’t just swoop down and make a mess of life. There is an order, a drift to things. This could be the classic story of a stranger who comes through town and throws everyone’s life into chaos, but Soderbergh never allows his film to reduce itself to such a simple parable: in this case, the stranger changes the people he meets, but they change him too.
Toward the end of the movie, Ann bursts into Graham’s apartment and tries to get through to him. “You’ve got a problem,” she says. After much denial, after pointing out that compared with the rest of the cast of characters he is pretty sane, he finally concedes, “You’re right. I have a lot of problems. But they belong to me.” And this is an assertion that Ann is just not going to let him get away with. She realizes that her marriage and her whole life are a lie because she has refused to be a full participant, has refused to refuse the half-life she is living. And she will not have this man, who has had such a drastic effect on her, whom she’s opened up to as she has not with anyone else, get away with telling her that his problems just belong to him. “You think they’re yours, but they’re not,” Ann says. “Everybody that comes in here becomes part of your problem, everybody that comes in contact with you. I didn’t want to be part of your problem, but I am. I’m leaving my husband. And you’re the reason. Maybe I would have anyway, but the fact is I’m leaving him now, and part of it’s because of you. You’ve had an effect on my life.”
Graham feels himself unraveling at the thought of this woman who is getting close to him whether she means to or not—and whether he wants her to or not. “When you’re with another person, and you’re inside them, you’re so vulnerable, you’re revealing so much, there’s no protection,” he says. “And somebody could say or do something to you while you’re in this state of nakedness. And they could hurt you without even knowing it. In a way that you couldn’t even see. And you would withdraw. To make sure it didn’t happen again.” This, of course, would be a classic castration complex, the fear that in the sex act a woman will suck a man up, sap him of his motivation, blind him and mute him and deafen him to all but the moment. The man in sex, lies & videotape finds the prospect so frightening that he has not had sex in nine years. That’s a lot of pleasure to trade in for privation just to keep your private parts and pieces intact. And for what? To what end? What exactly is this man saving himself for? What could have happened to him nine years earlier that was so terrible that it induced him to give up on love—emotional and physical—for so very long? What use is all this self-preservation if you do not expend yourself in some way? “This is what you come up with?” Andie MacDowell taunts him.
By now it is basic Freudian-feminist cant that the socialization process tends to make men flee from women—something about having to learn to separate from the mother and identify with the father, a more radical transition from what girls have to go through since they need only emulate the same person who nurtured them, which in most cases is the mom, and hence they are less inclined to separation and are more comfortable with
connection than boys are—and this is meant to explain misogyny and cold feet and all the other male behaviors that make it seem like women need to snare some man by hook or by crook. By feminine wiles. The very thing that makes men scared of women is what also makes women scary, a self-perpetuating process that has been in effect for so many years that who can say it isn’t what makes the world go round. The mechanism of this fear in our age is love’s officially sanctioned anarchy: no longer do men control marriage in the sense that a girl is given over to her groom by her father. But it’s not as if women have gotten the upper hand either. The result is women wishing they could be cool and sassy like Delilah, and men frightened away by a phantom threat of emasculating female power. But if any of us had Delilah’s power, men would be too flummoxed to be frightened: we’d all like to be so enchanting that men don’t even notice that they’re falling in love until they’re already there, don’t even notice that they need to be afraid, be very afraid.
I’m gone on you: I once heard a guy in a bar band singing that line to some anonymous woman, some girl out there, and I thought that of all the ways a man could tell a woman I want you bad, that had to be the nicest. I’m gone on you: You can make my night or ruin my life and I’ll take my chances. And if only the fear of falling were not so great, if only the possibility of pain came to seem normal and not extraordinary, we all could stop being so guarded and defensive—and ultimately vulnerable to hurt when we finally do open up.
What scares me so much about books like The Rules is not that they promote bad values, because they don’t; it’s more that it seems bad enough that so many men are so shut up and careful—why turn women into Teflon-coated emotional shell-shock survivors as well? How horrible is it to take a chance on love and to lose it all? Most of the dramatizations, novelizations and scholarly speculations on the relationship between Samson and Delilah suggest that it was gigantic, a big, big love, and I think this characterization of their affair gives Samson his due, grants him a romantic heroism for daring to fall so hard. “One of the main themes of this story is that love is stronger than all the physical ferocity of Samson,” says Gregory Mobley of the Harvard Divinity School. I think this story has held up over the centuries more because of the strength of their love than the evil of the betrayal. The story of Samson and Delilah is one about two people who took a chance, who dared to fall in love under rather unpromising conditions and saw their sorry situation end badly, tragically and predictably, like any union that is entangled in war and politics.
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