Women’s sensuality, the fact that they are sexual beings, seems to be so distracting, so overwhelming in its vertiginous power that no one can stand it. “In this androcentric view female sexuality, unless controlled, leads to evil and destruction,” writes historian of Judeo-Christian and Islamic cultures Gordon Newby in The Making of the Last Prophet. It’s not that at this late date women are barred outright from positions of power, but in order to assume the role of serious scholar or intimidating manager or levelheaded leader, she must not be attached to anything that resembles sex appeal. Because the sexual lure, if recognized in a woman, is suspicious and scary because it is believed to be unbridled. Or else it is thought that what is really out of control is men’s response to her sexual presence: he simply will not be able to think straight with sex just spilling all over the conference room like a slippery mess.
Now, it may well be that sexual tension can keep business from getting properly conducted, but, my God, life is still a great deal more fun with the intrusion of this kind of trouble into life now and again. And for what it’s worth, the idea that the President of the United States can be trusted to manage Saddam Hussein but cannot keep a handle on his own libido would seem to indicate that a highly sexed nature does not preclude one’s capacity to engage in sensitive matters involving security and international nutcases. I know there are plenty of women in serious policy positions on Capitol Hill, and—a silly argument—no doubt many sexy, lovely, alluring young women work in the White House and in other centers of power, and in many cases they command power. But I’d like to see any one of them go all the way, be completely in charge, without having to become serious and less flirtatious. Men do not have to lose their charm to exude power, but women’s sexuality is a dangerous distracter. If you don’t see what I mean, consider this: As long as the President’s cabinet contains only women like Donna Shalala and Janet Reno, then as far as I’m concerned it is still half empty.
This would be the most permanent legacy of the Delilah story: the dis-integration of woman from her sexuality. Always, a woman is seen as using her sex appeal to destroy a man, to get power, to gain the upper hand. Or else it is out of need, she must display her erotic nature in order to sell her body to make a living: she is a whore, she is desperate, she is cheesecake, she is a stupid girl reduced to this. The notion of a woman simply reveling in her own gorgeousness and sensuality because she can, because she enjoys it, because she wants others to appreciate it, seems not to exist in our cultural lexicon. She is always using it. A woman is never allowed to be integrated with her sexual nature in a way that isn’t either demeaning or frightening. Here sex has been set up as this great source of power for women, and yet, when any one of us decides she’d like to put it out there in ways that have not been pre-approved by the powers that be, they take it away or deny it or somehow try to make it suspect. For such a source of all the world’s ills that women’s sexuality is said to be, few women have access to it in any way that is not manipulative. The feeling that men are more susceptible to seduction can be countered by the fact that women get swept up in romance, and, in the end, in love, we are all vulnerable, and women should not be seen as dangerous because we are desirable.
In the bizarre case of Sol Wachtler, the eminent chief judge of the state of New York who stalked and threatened Joy Silverman, the Park Avenue divorcée with whom he was having an affair when she tried to break it off, the media depicted him as in the wrong—which was hard not to do, considering he was sending filthy letters and condoms to Silverman’s daughter. Nevertheless, there was a constant sense that such an eminent man could only have been driven to this behavior by a sorceress, a practitioner of some brand of sexual exoticism of unknown origin. While it is easy to think the situation must have been extraordinary, in fact it was all pretty straightforward. Sol from the start seems to have been a bit disappointed in his marriage choice, not because his wife Joan was not a fine woman, but because like many people married in the fifties to the first person they ever kissed, he was wistful and wondering, and like many middle-aged men, Wachtler chose to have an affair with a younger woman who, over time, urged him to leave his wife and marry her. When this was not forthcoming, she decided to see other men. Now, unlike most women left in the lurch at age forty-five by some man (think Anjelica Huston in Crimes and Misdemeanors) who wallow in self-pity and never love again, Joy Silverman went out and found herself a new boyfriend—pronto (whose last name, strangely enough, is Samson). Had she not, I’m sure we would feel much more sympathy for her. She is good-looking, rich and Republican—in other words, easy to hate, a big target. It’s easy to dismiss her as a much-married JAP who wreaked havoc on a learned, accomplished man who knew what it meant to work for a living. Just the same, the scenario of their affair, this adultery, is totally common, right down to the fact that Sol never left his wife. The only thing unusual in this story is his behavior. But still the focus is on what a bitch she was. In fact, the only thing she did wrong was get on with her life when he could not give her what she wanted and needed. To most people, that is what’s known as healthy.
And yet, somehow, echoes of Delilah everywhere.
To be fair, Mrs. Silverman supposedly told Wachtler that her new boyfriend was richer and handsomer. Which is crass and uncouth, though not actionable. And I can think of the occasional occasion when such nastiness might be perfectly appropriate—such as if the man is making obscene phone calls, sending sick letters, threatening your daughter, trying to withdraw your trust, etc. But you know what? It doesn’t matter how she behaved. The trouble is with how he behaved, which even in the realm of a scorned lover is a real outlier. Late in life the guy fell hard for someone, probably for the first time ever. His failure to act on that—his decision not to leave his wife and pursue this passion—was his own idiocy. That he could not cope was not surprising—his emotional life until then had been very limited. But that’s not Joy’s problem. He failed her, not the reverse. The focus should be completely on him.
In other words, let’s focus on Samson’s behavior, not Delilah’s.
Trouble is, even if we do look at the men’s culpability, by most traditions women still get assigned the greater share of blame for illicit or ill-considered sexual liaisons on two counts, while men can be found guilty on only one. In her essay “Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law,” Paula Sanders notes that in ancient Islamic societies, “although men and women presumably bore equal responsibility for illicit relations, that responsibility was construed in terms of certain assumptions about the natures of men and women. Men were considered susceptible to seduction and the actors, whereas women were considered to be both seductresses (that is, tempting men to act in certain destructive ways) and the recipients of the men’s acts.” While this Islamic view may be an advance over Hindu beliefs that all women were temptresses, that any man who went astray was a victim of her tantric sex trickery, in our modern world, is this what we want? For that matter, do we really want Joan Wachtler idiotically standing by Sol, saying I’m prettier than Joy, I’m thinner than Joy—do we really want women acting like the wife in The Crucible, begging the husband for forgiveness for somehow driving him to go astray—acting in some sense as an obverse of seduction?
If we have figured out that the world is a sphere, that no one is going to row their boat right off its delicate flatness, why has our view of women’s sexuality in some essential way remained medieval, ancient, perhaps even prehistoric?
But let’s assume, for argument’s sake that Delilah and Joy Silverman were both sexually manipulative. Let’s assume they used their sensual arts to drag men down. They were, indeed, duplicitous, and, by extension, all women are duplicitous. Well, so what? What do you expect? In both instances they were using what little power they had to get what they wanted. And in both instances, that was not anything so outrageous: they both wanted committed, respectful relationships. The only reason either lashed out (besides that both were provo
ked by the secret police, the CIA, etc.) was that what they wanted was not forthcoming. In this world women have very little recourse, and the solace of knowing there will always be another man is not much relief when there have already been more than enough. We only know how to use what we have, and some of us know how to use sex as a weapon. The details of both the Delilah story and the Joy Silverman story make it clear that it is not so simple—both women were being engaged in battle by many decidedly nonsexual forces—but every time I hear a story of a woman leaving a man in a flurry of heartbreak, in jail, at the gallows, desperate, psychotic, on medication, in a straitjacket—every time I hear a Delilah story, I have to smile. Because the problem is not that women bring men down—it is actually that men bring women down, refusing to fulfill our needs, failing to give us what we want, knowing in some sadistic way that we don’t have forever to wait the way men seem to. Biologically, and often socially and economically, men have all the power. And if, every so often, a woman comes along and inverts the order of things just a bit—well, who am I to deny my delight?
Society has made women the sex objects—men at best are matinee idols—but it bristles when women take up that role at inappropriate moments. In truth, over and over women learn that sex is their only weapon—the only professions in which women get paid more than men are modeling, stripping and prostitution. As long as that is true—and it will be a while yet—we will all walk around knowing that while women can certainly be valued for their minds, they are extra specially valued for their bodies. This is not an opinion; this is simple economics. Even women who work as corporate attorneys, bond traders, legislators, advertising executives, news anchors and investigative reporters know that it pays to be sexy.
And yet, when anyone flaunts this a tiny bit too much, when any woman is revealed to actually have been sufficiently aware of her physical endowments to have gone to the Playboy Club looking for a job like Kimba Wood, or, as was the case with Diane Sawyer, to have posed a bit too provocatively in Vanity Fair, everyone just gets unnerved. Men have made us into sex objects—every last one of us, but the pretty girls, the daddy’s little pumpkins, the baby dolls among us especially—and the fact that we have actually managed to learn a few other tricks, which is to say how to make a living with our clothes on and our torsos vertical, ought to be considered nothing less than a tribute to our ingenuity and the indomitable human spirit that wishes to be mind as well as body. But damn it, do you know how dull life will be when the only women allowed to be sex objects are Cindy Crawford and Victoria’s Secret models? It’s to the point where no one is even protesting, we all accept that all of us—men and women—would rather look at Pamela Anderson in Playboy than at just about any of the men in Playgirl. We’ve accepted that the vitality of heavy-breathingness belongs to woman alone. And we also accept that nobody ought to start stripping in a corporate boardroom. But the fact that women have carried on in previous incarnations, or continue to go on after hours, with all the sexy bravado that we allow to men should not be a problem any longer. And to say that, for instance, posing nude is inconsistent with being a serious scholar or a credible manager or a dynamic leader means we’re also going to have to start saying that fucking the slave girls makes Thomas Jefferson unworthy of having been President or makes the Declaration of Independence a null and void document, sleeping with a thousand women makes Wilt Chamberlain a lousy basketball player.
Life is strange; to expect people to be all one way or all another way is stupid.
Delilah’s most astonishing distinction, one overlooked amid all the attention to hair and muscle and sensual pleasure, is her independent status. Unlike just about every other woman in the Bible, Delilah is introduced as simply Delilah. She is not called “daughter of” or “wife of,” she is her own person. It is often assumed that this lack of marital or familial association marks her as a prostitute or, more likely, since she is acquainted with all the higher-ups, a courtesan in Philistine noble circles. But since the Bible is fast to identify women who ply their wares in the sex trade, I’d prefer to think of Delilah as a precursor to all strong, modern, willful women—even independent career women—who are so feared because even at this late date they continue to threaten the social order. I’m not referring to women who work for a living, because nowadays, married or not, that is usually an economic necessity; I’m talking about women who forgo the whole business, don’t bother with husbands or children, or wait until they are good and ready to settle down. Women who just do what they want.
Well before Delilah appeared as the agent of her own desire, the wife of Potiphar made a less advanced attempt at claiming a right to self-determination of some sort—even though she never is named as anything but somebody’s spouse. But feminist scholars, so busy mainly trying to show how Joseph escapes a fate that no female character could get away from without a scrape, don’t bother to notice what an extraordinary and revolutionary character she is. Reported by later interpreters to be named Zuleikha, this horny housewife is married to the viceroy who Joseph serves. One fine day, she makes a pass at the pretty slave boy, he rebuffs her, and in her humiliation she tells her husband that Joseph raped her. Latter-day readers of this tale often find themselves believing that she’s telling the truth: he did rape her. But that’s not the point. It’s more interesting to assume that she jumped him. If that’s the case, the wife of Potiphar is the first exemplar of the female gaze, the first woman to objectify a man, to look at him and say, He’s hot; I want him. She is the first woman of desire, with desires, and the daring to express them. An early Mrs. Robinson, but perhaps every powerful woman who has become attracted to the hired help: Lady Chatterley, Madonna, Bess Myerson, Elizabeth Taylor.
And who is really to say that the feeling between them wasn’t mutual: she is the wife, hanging around the house all day, stuck at home while Potiphar is off doing battle, and probably finding herself chummy with the hired hands, because the help are the only ones who are there. Perhaps romance between the two was entirely possible. Patty Hearst married her bodyguard; Madonna had a baby with her trainer. Lina Wertmuller’s brilliant film Swept Away posits the possibility of a boat yeoman and a millionairess falling in love when they are trapped on a desert island. Why not in desert Egypt? Certainly more than one porn flick has involved the acrobatic possibilities of the plumber, the gardener, the carpenter. Not to mention the pool boy, or the boy in the pool, as was the case in the dangerous liaisons between Mrs. Robinson and Ben, and Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Lonely glamorous women with irregular social lives can find that their most continual sources of intimacy are household laborers. But even if we discount the possibility that Joseph and this woman so much as liked each other, there is something commendable about a woman at long last asking for it—even begging for it. And, in fact, it is such an oddity, one that is never again repeated in the Old Testament, that it makes me assume that she was probably telling the truth. He probably did jump her. Horny young kid and all. It is only his luck that the word of a woman was so worthless that all he got was a prison sentence. But actually, it’s more interesting to assume she was the seducer who got elbowed. It’s exciting.
In conceiving the wife of Potiphar as a pioneer of female desire, it’s not an evolutionary overstep to say that there is, outside of all logical explanations for Delilah’s behavior, one that is more visceral and pure. One that is about emotional mayhem, about dreams of wildness, about thrill-seeking and troublemaking simply for its own sake. Of wanting to be as big and bad as Samson, and doing the only thing that came close: destroying him for want of the possibility of creating herself. What horror I felt to hear she was a villainess when it seemed to me there was little evidence to support it. It seemed to me it was about wanting to define her, to line-draw her as if she were Jessica Rabbit and not a spirit too free to obey their rules. In fact, whose rules were they? Even Michel de Montaigne, a man himself, had the good sense to point out all the way back in the sixteenth century: “Women are not in
the wrong when they decline to accept the rules laid down for them, since men make these rules without consulting them. No wonder intrigue and strife abound.”
I’ve always loved the old folk song “Samson and Delilah,” which most people who know it at all know from Grateful Dead concerts. But actually there is a much more rowdy, angry version done by the group called the Washington Squares. If I’m in the right mood, if I’m the right amount angry, that song can sound like the best thing in the world—especially the chorus, the frustrated insistence: “If I had my way / If I had my way in this wicked world / If I had my way I would tear this building down.” Now, of course, it’s Samson who’s supposed to be saying this, he’s the one with all the destructive might. But recently when I was listening to this song, I had this riled-up euphoria and I thought about that feeling that I have all the time, that if I had my way, I would tear this building down, I would tear lots of other things down. I was thinking that I am just so full of unexpressed rage.
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