Women, Passion & Celibacy

Sally Cline challenges the assumptions that genital satisfaction will automatically lead to other forms of fulfillment in life and that it is required for emotional maturity, health, and happiness. Cline focuses on women and the climate in which most women must try to make sense of their sexuality. She does not discuss the effect on men of this same climate. This leads some reviewers to see it as an "angry" book or as "too feminist." Rather than faulting Cline for focusing on women, however, it would make more sense for men to discuss the effects of hearing throughout their lives that they are naturally aggressive and warlike, have animal natures that are basically uncontrollable, and need a regular diet of release to keep them from sexual frenzy.The fact is, neither gender is offered celibacy as an option for themselves as ordinary mortals--either temporarily or as a regular practice. Cline, who comes from a Jewish family and spent a number of years in a Catholic convent school, has a firm grasp of the messages to girls from both traditions--insistence on marriage in the one; the idealization of virginity in the other. Cline suggests that if we are repeatedly told that sexual pleasure is evil or dangerous and can only be had under certain stringent conditions (the old script) or that sexual pleasure is obligatory (the new script), it is still a script. Celibacy, for many, is partly a challenge to *both* of these scripts and partly the logical extension of a need for plain ol' solitude, friendships, and creative work. One of the big problems, especially for men but also for many women, is that emotional intimacy and genital intimacy have been so intertwined for so long that it can be difficult even to imagine meaningful emotional connections without genital intimacy. Celibacy, therefore, conjures up an image not simply of *genital* inactivity or quiescence, but of emotional isolation. Autonomy--again especially for too many men--has been defined as "separation from other people, a freedom without belonging, something that has to be gained aggressively at the expense of others;..." Some women, on the other hand, are learning to see autonomy as "prioritizng oneself within a context of intimate relationships," or as Cline puts it, "connected autonomy." Cline's last chapter, "Creative Solitude," might actually be the key to the entire conundrum. Anthony Storr, whom Cline quotes several times, suggests that parents would do their children a great favor by consciously helping them learn to live creatively and comfortably with solitude, starting with being "alone in the presence of another." Cline also gives a vivid account of her own work on developing the capacity for solitude.The capacity for solitude might even be one the best predictors of positive relationships in which, as Antoine de St.-Exupery says, "love is not gazing into each other's eyes but looking together in the same direction." Under this definition, the genital fixation seems someho