My initial reaction to this book, formed when I was less than a third of the way into it, was that it’s rare for someone to speak or write about a political affiliation of the social-change-seeking variety that centralizes the passion of the connection to the others instead of the intellectually reasoned rationales for embracing the principles. And Lise Weil does so.
Even among feminists — the people who have “the personal is political” emblazoned on their t-shirts — I think there’s still the attitude that to have a commitment of this sort because of how belonging to the movement makes you feel is doing it for illegitimate or infantile reasons. So it is radical, and brave, to do this as Weil does here, and without an apologetic preface at that.
Some would say I am in no position to write a review of this book. It’s very specifically about lesbianism and lesbian feminism, the loving of women on every level, giving one’s energies and all of one’s focus to women as a woman who loves women.
I am not a lesbian; I am not female. That doesn’t mean I’ve never had my nose pressed to that window. I’m a sissy femme and I grew up admiring and emulating the girls in my class, and — in contrast to conventional legend and expectation — I also found myself attracted to them. So…people who love women as one of the same, and who find women’s form erotic and desirable? Mutuality and mirror?
There do exist other people much like myself, people whose mom’s obstetricians also marked down “male” when filling out their birth certificates, but who, unlike me, do consider themselves female. Some of them do identify as lesbians.
If there’s a second theme that perhaps eventually looms larger than the first, it’s the divisiveness and polarization of identity politics. Not that Weil is saying that the politics of identity necessarily has to be that way, but there are perennially recurrent “you are either with us or against us” attitudes that she finds so frustrating and hurtful. The “whose side are you on anyway” antagonism and the polarization into warring camps. All that either-or stuff. In Search of Pure Lust isn’t a screed or a polemic about divisiveness. It’s a personal testimonial about how it feels, when you love the participants on all sides of these divides and hate to see the division.
I nodded; I know that one firsthand, too. Lise Weil’s colleagues Mary Daly and Jan Raymond would probably agree that I don’t belong at a Cris Williamson concert. My transgender sisters would be appalled that I’d be willing to attend one. And I’m left sad and crying that we can’t transcend long enough to have a conversation even if we subsequently walk out of the truce tent in separate directions.
Closely kin to the divisiveness issue is the notion that anything has a single inevitable meaning. Weil describes how it was decided that Daly’s book Gyn/Ecology was racist and therfore did not deserve to be read by feminists who care about racial equality. Discussion over, end of story, as if all the important and relevant people had weighed in on the subject and you would now be recognized as a racist yourself if you were to see matters differently.
Maybe we all need to retain some sympathy for people who need absolutes and simple answers and certainty. I’m not entirely a stranger to embracing an ideology as if it were a light that could shine into every corner and make utter sense of the world. Lise Weil takes us along with her on the winding path of actual experience and how real life — and its real politics — is messy and complicated and entwined with nuance.
Love and desire and ideological commitment, it turns out, may be necessary preconditions or acceleratives that make a relationship of the purest and lustiest variety possible, but they may not be sufficient. Not unto themselves.
Weil describes the vulnerability that comes with involvements of this intensity, and how power enters in whether one is seeking it and rejoicing in having it, or instead is trying to forge relationships where its oppressive presence isn’t intruding. The frighteningly short path that sometimes links ecstatic devotion and pathetic dependency and neediness. The agony of needing, the threatening coerciveness of being needed.
When we define ourselves as only doing respectful equal consensual and mutual it can be difficult to speak of the ways in which that is not always how it actually is. Whips and chains are overt about unequal power but when one lover is more desperately craving more from the relationship than the other, who feels trapped or unable to give what is demanded, that’s unequal too.
Against the everyday-life backdrop of the rising and falling fortunes of passionate relationships, Weil talks about the division between the sex-positive feminists who were inclined to accept and embrace S & M and the feminists appalled at the patriarchal presence of dominance and submission in what was supposed to be an egalitarian lesbian community. Again, the divisions and the polarization and the “whose side are you on” questions.
I do not feel gleeful that the ones I have envied have to work at it too. A little relief, perhaps. We all bring ourselves to every interaction and so to some extent the resulting experience is our experience of ourselves and not just our experience of what we love. Real passion is chaotic and doesn’t color inside the lines. The ideals and clear visionary understandings are important and real as well — they are part of what we’re passionate about, after all — but if we were the children of patriarchy yesterday we are still children today and we will stumble and fumble as we learn, and need to be able to do so, to be in the process and not to declare ourselves to have already arrived at the solution.
In Search of Pure Lust, Lise Weil, SheWrites Press 2018 (with purchase links)
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It’s a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women’s Studies once they come out.
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