When Cupid Aims, You’d Better Duck
Today the air in America is thick with Cupid’s arrows--”moonlight and love songs,” red hearts and roses, candy and lacy lingerie, candlelit dinners and avowals of eternal love and soul-transforming passion. On Valentine’s Day, we celebrate romantic love, perhaps our strangest cultural ideal: that our ultimate fulfillment as a person happens only when we lose ourselves in an exclusive sexual relationship--one whose intensity signifies the depth and essence of our spirit or soul.
But this idealization of sex as a force of personal liberation and fulfillment would have struck most peoples before the modern age as dangerously naive. Even the Greeks, Western culture’s icons of pagan sexual liberation, viewed sex very differently than we romantics do. To the Greeks, eros was a powerful force of nature, volatile and destructive. It was an energy necessary for life to continue but one prone to sudden uncontrollable excess. Rather than our soul-nurturing fire, eros was the blaze that burned Troy and left its plains strewn with corpses, the flame kindled by Paris and Helen’s illicit passion.
Indeed, Greek literature invented a whole repertoire of images that communicated erotic destructiveness; fire, insanity, disease, storms and the violence of war--all expressed the lethal, mind-destroying power of sex. But 25 centuries later, this inherited imagery has been emptied of its sinister connotations and now, in a thousand pop lyrics and advertisements, signifies instead our sexual sentimentalism.
Take Eros, the Greek Cupid, that chubby putto with his “weak, childish bow.” We feel no threat in his arrows, no danger in his aim. Yet to a people like the Greeks, who knew firsthand the excruciating pain of barbed steel and infected flesh, the image was more grimly potent. Imagine Eros brandishing an Uzi like some infant Terminator, and you can begin to understand why the Greeks would call Eros a “killer” or “monster” or “destroyer.”
Given the baneful power of sex, then, the Greeks understood that cultural and social controls were necessary both to limit the force of sex and to exploit its creative energy. Sexual taboos, institutions like marriage, emotions like guilt and shame, reason itself all were devices for clipping Eros’ wings. Philosophers and tragedians may have debated whether these devices ultimately could work, but no one believed that Eros could be “liberated” from social checks and limits and left in the hands of the individual alone.
Then we liberated Eros. We weakened those traditional social restraints as archaic, repressive impediments to the marriage of true hearts and minds. We dismissed them as puritanical inhibitions stifling the expression of our authentic selves. Guilt and shame were discarded as hurtful and hypocritical; no-fault divorce reduced marriage to a lifestyle choice as changeable as a car or a job; reason was dismissed as the instrument of repression and neurosis.
The result of this novel experiment? Look around you--venereal plagues, illegitimacy, weakening of the nuclear family, debasement of women, vulgarization of sex in popular culture, chronic dissatisfaction with our sexual identities--all testify to the costs of slighting Eros’ dark power. A modern-day Medea drowns her two children because her boyfriend doesn’t want them; a kindergarten beauty queen is raped and murdered; countless women are stalked and butchered by estranged and deranged boyfriends and spouses. We search everywhere for the answer except in the nature of eros itself and its potential for madness and violence.
Yet to speak of sex in these deadly terms is out of fashion. These days everybody endorses sexual expression, even fundamentalist Christians, though they restrict it to marriage. Radical feminists who meticulously catalog the depredations of heterosexual eros are silent about the darker side of homosexual sex. Consumerism and popular culture love a liberated sexuality; witness the recent cinematic apotheosis of pornographer Larry Flynt.
Meanwhile, we cling to broken images as our sexual environment grows ever more polluted. We indulge the sentimental rhetoric that only blinds us to the poison dripping from Eros’ arrows that today we will blithely fire at the objects of our affection.
