Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body.

By Riane Eisler. New York: Harper Collins 1995, 495 pages. Hardcover, $25.00.

Reviewed by Gina Ogden, Ph.D., Independent Practice, 36 Shepard Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Sexual science traditionally defines sex not by its pleasure quotient, but by what can be measured, clocked, and readily compared. The resulting discourse revolves around preference, performance, orgasm, hormones, pornography, and titillating variations on the theme of "normal." Sexual behavior is thus physicalized and set apart from daily life, from spiritual matters, and certainly from significant worldly activities such as the making of public policy. No wonder women's most common complaint in sex-therapy offices is lack of desire.

Riane Eisler's literate and feminist Sacred Pleasure broadens the discourse on human sexuality and places sexual pleasure where it belongs, as central to the main drama of history, not as a peep-show obscenity. Part One investigates human sexual origins. Ice Age art, hymns of love, myths and mystical traditions, chronicles of laws, marriages, wars, migrations, and social structures all reveal the roots of our sexual institutions today. Part Two focuses on contemporary sexual traditions, including the shifting balances of power between women and men. Chapters range over subjects as diverse as language, chemistry, spirituality, repression, morality, ethics, war, AIDS, feminism, power, economics, and family values. In the final chapter, Eisler explores the future of sex, love, and pleasure as informed by their eons of ancestry. Eighty pages of references, notes, and bibliography contain useful information and quotations.

Long a pioneer in the male-dominated field of evolutionary theory, Eisler puts women center stage as she discloses a spectrum of controversial issues that lead directly from ancient erotic sacred Mysteries to present day right-wing religious control of sexual behavior. Applying to the biorhythms of history the Dominator-Partnership model she introduced in her previous book, The Chalice and the Blade, she chronicles the struggle between partnership values--a sexual ethic based on equality, empathy and pleasure, and dominator resistance--a sexual ethic based on classism, ownership, and coercion. At the cusp of the 21st century, she points out, the dominator ethic prevails on a global scale, creating what amounts to a cultural missionary position, man on top. However, observes Eisler, there is evidence that dominator institutions are disintegrating, albeit not without a fight. A key to reinstating partnership values is to act fast and act locally, by claiming the sacred in our own sexual relationships.

In linking sex so definitively with spirituality, Eisler intimates a sexual revolution beyond the one triggered by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. This "phase two" revolution (as she calls it) has the power to broaden the concept of sex--as a life force "that encompasses economics, politics, family, literature, music, and all other aspects of social and cultural life" (p. 11). Admitting these dimensions into contemporary sexual experience narrows the gender gap, not by plunking women on top but by acknowledging the intelligence of the body and providing the richness and meaning that women crave as crucial to sexual satisfaction.

Because she focuses on cultural dynamics rather than on the details of sexual response, and on accountability rather than on blame or pathology, Eisler is able to tread creatively through an intellectual minefield that has blown apart arguments of other sexologists and feminists. For example, she outlines centuries of the victimization of women while never casting women as unmitigated victims--Bedouin wives (she writes), chatteled and veiled to symbolize the shame of their gender and their sexuality, still found ways to create haunting erotic poetry (p. 98). She delineates the systematic dehumanization of men without casting all men as monsters. Counter-culture men, too, have made their poems--also longing for tenderness and trust.

Although Eisler is even-handed and quick to give credit, thank Goddess she is not non-judgmental-that first commandment of the anything-consensual-goes school of sexology. She is quick to dismiss the "objectivity" so dear to sexual scientists: "what is lacking . . . is feeling, or more specifically, empathy--a lack that has all too often made modern science a tool for maintaining the massive inequities and imbalances inherent in a dominator status quo" (p. 304). And here is Eisler tackling one of sexology's icons, Wilhelm Reich: "in the end, Reich again drifted off into the all-too-familiar male-centered scholarship. And he thus lost sight of the centrality of something he himself noted: that at the heart of the sexual and political oppression he so deplored lies the sexual and political domination of women by men" (p. 215).

Some of Eisler's most powerful ideas concern what she labels "the erotization of violence," that is, the aphrodisiac properties of rape, pillage, and murder: "in the dominator mind making love is making war" (p. 222). Informing every major argument in Sacred Pleasure are themes of pain and pleasure, manipulation and freedom, dominion-over and partnership-with. Eisler poses questions--and often enigmas--about abuse, bondage, masochism, and warfare: Do the Wehrmacht officers on page 231 actually yearn for human connection as they bludgeon the bodies of Jewish women? Eisler's narrative compels readers to sift and evaluate the complexities of sexual behavior for themselves--and always at both a personal and an institutional level. Finally, the sheer weight of her evidence differentiates the sentient, empathic embrace of pleasure from narcissistic acting out and brutality.

Sacred Pleasure is a call for reconstruction, not deconstruction; for a shift to a partnership society in which both institutions and individuals "would find it more difficult to get pleasure from acts that deliberately hurt someone else" (p. 328). By shining the full light of transformational analysis on the interface of sex and spirit, Eisler legitimizes erotic pleasure and passion, both ancient and modern. Her vision of a contemporary politics of partnership includes respect, responsibility, and empathy. It also includes ecstasy and other "altered" states of consciousness. What better way to welcome in the new millennium?

I routinely recommend this book to educators, therapists, and clients who want a broad view of sexuality rather than a quick-fix approach. It is a book to which I return often, because its information is far reaching and scholarly and because it is rich with ideas that challenge my thinking. Moreover, I have found the Dominator-Partnership model of human interaction to be a useful and positive method of explaining the dynamics of sexuality, spirituality, and gender relationships to students, professionals, and diverse audiences.