"What Planet Are We On?"--conversation with John Gray and Riane Eisler
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What about sexual attraction and desire? What differences do you see between men and women?
Gray: Men start down in the sexual center and go up. Women start in the head and move down. Men will tend to be physically attracted to start with. They may think they’re interested in her, they may feel affectionate towards her, but they’re really just thinking, how can I get her into bed? A woman will tend to find something more personal that she’s interested in getting to know, that then generates affection in her for him, that then creates desire in her.
Eisler: But see, this is really very basic to what we started to talk about, which is the social construction of masculinity and femininity. Women are brought up to focus on relationship, and so it is part of the dimension of sexuality for most women. And after a while, I think, women bought the masculine model of the one-night stand as being “Oh, this is sexual liberation.” Well, was it? Or was it simply stepping into an inappropriate role? Men, however, have been socialized that relationships are not really the most important thing. The most important thing is to get what you want, including . . .
Gray: Sex.
Eisler: Including sex. And so both start with an approach that’s inappropriate to what they want and need.
Gray: It’s very clear to me that when men hunger for sex, what they’re hungering for is connection. And beyond that, they’re looking for the connection with the feminine. Because their own work world keeps them so far away from the feminine, that to love a woman, connect with her, you actually go into her world.
Eisler: I think both women and men have this yearning for connection. An underlying theme of Sacred Pleasure is that this yearning has been distorted by the straitjackets of the gender stereotypes.
Gray: I believe that sex should be shared with someone you truly cherish, not on just a physical level. And the longer you love someone, the more real the experience is. I’ve known my wife for 18 years, and you can’t fathom what it can be until you have gone through those stages and gotten there. I remember once about five years into our marriage, right upstairs in the bedroom above us, making love with her, I said, “this was just fantastic. This was as good as it was in the beginning.” And she had no response. And I said, “Well, wasn’t it as good for you?” And she said, “John, it was much better.” So, my reaction was, “What, were you faking it in the beginning?” She said, “The sex was great in the beginning, but now this is five years of being married. You’ve seen the best of me, you’ve seen the worst of me, and you still desire me, you still passionately adore me. That’s what makes it great.” And I have to say, this is a gift from a woman to a man. I wasn’t aware of that until she said it. And from that day on, I became aware that what made sex great is how much love I could feel while we’re having that experience.
Eisler: For me, there have been tremendously altered states in sexuality where I suddenly understood the rhythm of the seas, the rhythms of the oceans, how everything somehow was a part of the whole. The spiritual dimension of sexuality doesn’t mean that you don’t touch. You know, people have this idea that spirituality is disembodied.
Gray: And you can’t just achieve that by meeting somebody and trying some spiritual exercise in bed. It’s not going to work, and people are going to become disappointed and disillusioned.
So far, you’ve been talking only about heterosexual relationships. What about men and men, women and women? John, are you thinking of writing a book called Mars and Mars or Venus and Venus?
Gray: No, I can’t write that book because I’m heterosexual. I’d feel like I was being an expert on people from another planet that I’m not relating to. However, Men Are from Mars is a big bestseller in the gay community in San Francisco, I’m told.
Eisler: I write about gay and lesbian relationships in Sacred Pleasure, even though my work, too, focuses primarily on heterosexual relations for two reasons – because I personally understand them better but also because historically, the social construction of heterosexual relations has influenced everything, including the social construction of reality of gay and lesbian relations. So if we are going to deal with those internalized obstacles to relating to one another in partnership, it doesn’t matter whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual.
Another subject both of you write about is spirituality.
Gray: Well, I was a celibate monk for nine years. For 12 to 18 hours a day I focused on my spiritual discipline – hatha yoga, body purifications, breathing exercises, meditation. And at a certain point, I had my peak spiritual experience. For me it was angels singing for weeks, and I could have just left my body and gone to heaven. But my brother was a manic depressive and was having another episode, and I had a choice – I could keep meditating or I could help my brother. And that’s where I started coming into the world to study psychology.
Eisler: And in terms of the spirituality as I envision it in a partnership society, what you did when you decided to help your brother was a very spiritual thing.
Gray: That was my revelation as well. All that spirituality was to help me experience heaven. And then you find out when you get to heaven that we came from heaven and that what we’re supposed to do on this planet is to bring heaven here. The real spiritual life is where you live a life filled with love and purposefulness, and bring the higher values into this world. Now I don’t need to have visions, I don’t need psychic powers, I don’t need astral travel. I’ve been there, done that.
Eisler: I, too, have had peak experiences. You know, times that you go without sleep. What I have concluded is that that dimension and that sense of connection with the Divine is really part of the human yearning for connection. It’s not separate from the yearning for connection with a loved one, be it a lover or a child. For me, some of the most profoundly revelatory states have been touching my daughter’s little hand when she was small. Or looking at my husband as we are getting older together. So what I’m trying to explain is anew view of spirituality. A spirituality involving everything in our daily lives – how we relate, how we love.
Gray: Spirituality is a living life in harmony with others, in partnership with others, with the planet, with the opposite sex. We find God within us, then we find god through serving others, through being in the world. There are many ways to get to that place. It’s not only the priests who are connected to god. We can be connected to God.
Eisler: It has helped me to reconceptualize God as not only male. To think of the Goddess. Because when you think of God the Mother in the stereotypical nurturing role of the mother and God the Father in the punitive role, you begin to see how in a dominator model God the Mother just doesn’t have much of a place.
Gray: Whenever I say God and I say “He,” my daughter always says “She,” and I go, “OK.”
Eisler: I think it’s important for people to know that we can change. The change for both women and men to become full human beings may be rooted in very ancient traditions, where women were priestesses as well as men being priests. Women weren’t morally disenfranchised, which is what you are if you can’t be a priest – you can’t say this is right or wrong. It’s important for us to reclaim those traditions not only because they’re fascinating, but because they ground us and they give us a sense of empowerment, both women and men.
What do you see happening today that gives you hope?
Eisler: I see that there’s a tremendous amount of movement towards partnership and tremendous resistance, both in intimate relations and everywhere – socially, economically, religiously and so on. But I also look at the last three hundred years and I see that, well, we couldn’t have had this conversation three hundred years ago because we would have been considered heretics. This is a time of crisis but it’s also a time of opportunity. With rapid technological change, people have been able to challenge entrenched traditions of domination. The challenge to the tradition of men dominating women and children in the so-called castles of their homes is hardly separate from the challenge to the so-called divine right of kings to rule. Or for that matter from the challenge of slavery or to racism – all forms of domination.
Gray: I think changing our intimate relationships is exactly how society will be changed.
Eisler: It’s a threat to the system for people to learn how to relate in partnership because then they carry that expectation into all areas of life with them. But by the same token, it’s also much more difficult for people to relate in partnership as long as they don’t have the social support.
What’s our task for the future – our task for now?
Eisler: I think we need new stories about what it means to be human. We need to explain to young people, like John’s daughter, that we have made progress in the last three hundred years. Because a lot of what’s happening to kids is that they’re presented with this hopeless, cynical picture of human relations, where everybody’s out for themselves and people who aren’t are just a target. We need different stories about family values. We need to tech that dominator families are dangerous not only to the people who live in them but to the whole society.
Gray: My next project is to help people develop new parenting skills. It’s called Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and Children Are from Heaven. The thought of creating a peaceful negotiation without the threat of violence is really impossible unless you’ve raised children in a nonviolent way. I’ve raised three, with no violence, no manipulations, no threats. They are the most incredible kids. And I didn’t want to write this book till they were grown up so I could observe the outcome.
Eisler: And we need to do something in the schools to make them more gender balanced, and to make what I call “partnership literacy” part of what children are taught. I’ve been working for the last two years on a curriculum development guide which 8incudes emotional literacy, spiritual literacy, racial and multicultural literacy – all from a partnership perspective. I want my granddaughter to have a different way of imaging who she is. I want her to have some of the prehistoric images of women as people who are really important and powerful and whose bodies are honored and sacred. And boys need it, too.
Gray: I’m taking a program into the schools to reach parents and teachers. We’re trying to change the impact of the media and TV presenting the idea of sex with no consequences that is enormously overstimulating the youths of the world.
Eisler: Absolutely. We also need a change from the heroes whose violence make them sexy. I have been speaking for a long time about the Disney World attraction with pirates chasing women to rape them. I’ve been telling parents to write letters saying, “This is not how we want our children to se sex when they’re little kids.” Disney finally responded, but it’s such an inappropriate response. They now have it so the pirates are chasing the women for food.
Gray: You should be very proud of that! You made a difference!
Eisler: I made a difference, but they have only gone from A to A-and-a-half. But the point is that change is possible. We can even move a monolith like Disney to respond in some ways. And parents can do that. We all can, once we become conscious.
Gray: That’s where I think our two approaches are so resonant.
Eisler: I think we’re both working for the same goals, and with some of the same sense of spirituality that we want to see in the world.
Gina Ogden, Ph.D., is the author of Women Who Love Sex: An Inquiry into the Expanding Spirit of Women's Erotic Experience and the producer of the video Women Who Love Sex: Creating New Images of Our Sexual Selves, both of which are available from Womanspirit Press. Check out her web site at www.womanspirit.net
Reprinted with permission.
