IDMA Featured Review
“Loving Your Body: A Handbook for Women” by Ludmila Rohr*
Reviewed by Roger Woolger
Ludmila Rohr has given us a much needed and very refreshing book on women’s sexuality. Amid all the debates about sexual freedom, the distressing flood of internet pornography, growing statistics of prostitution and child sexual abuse, it is especially good to have a full-blooded and wise assessment of what healthy and liberated sexuality can mean for a modern woman.
To speak out about our intimate sexual lives—and what is more intimate than sex—requires boldness and clarity. It is not so easy to escape the religious undercurrent of voices that so hate and fear anything that speaks of the erotic life. For the fact is that western culture, for all its surface liberalism, is still deeply saturated with collective memories of over two thousand years of the patriarchal repression of women and the deep puritanical fear that sexual license will destroy society. (A humorist once defined Puritanism as “the nagging fear that somewhere, someone may be experiencing pleasure.”) D. H. Lawrence traced it all back to the early Christian Church Fathers, who were struggling to be pure and holy against all the decadence of Roman religion with its orgiastic, wine-driven worship of the old gods.
“The Christian fear of the pagan outlook,” wrote Lawrence, “has damaged the whole consciousness of [western] man.” With its obsessive cultivation of virginity for monks, nuns and priests the Catholic Church hoped it could banish the devilish seductions of the old earthy and erotic religions. Indeed it succeeded for nearly two thousand years, their efforts culminating in the all the patriarchal pomp of the nineteenth Victorian age—an age noted for sexual frigidity among bourgeois women and hypocritical secret whore-hunting by their husbands! The Victorians and the modern world paid a huge price for its sexual “purity” in the form of what the great Freud would call “repression,” the primary cause of all modern neurosis. The effects of advanced Christian morality on the sexual life of many women is neatly summarized by a joke about a young Englishwoman about to get married. The woman asks her mother: “But Mummy, what do I do about this sex thing?” Her mother replies: “Yes, I know dear, it’s awfully unpleasant. But just lie back, close your eyes, clench your teeth—and think of England!”
Brasil, with its beach and bikini culture and its women celebrated for their beauty, appears on the surface to be healthy and mature in its sexuality. But it is precisely on the surface that the problem lies. For Brazil, as much as in the US and Europe, has become a culture of surfaces. Daily in TV novelas, glossy magazines and huge billboard advertisements, we are bombarded with pictures of seductively and scantily dressed women with perfect hair, perfect bodies and perfect faces—how women presumably should aspire to look—but these are still only images, images that can only be processed at mental level. Such images rarely touch a women’s sensuality at all. Lawrence, a great observer of these perversions, said “all western sexuality has become sex in the head!” For however liberated, fit, healthy or glamorous the women models in these pictures appear, all they are giving women is a way of looking, a model of surface appearance. It is no exaggeration to say that, all over the world, thanks to advertising and the media, woman have become neurotically obsessed with how they look. Indeed feminist sociologists have even called it a cult, which they call, unsurprisingly, “lookism.”
For simply to look sexy has little or nothing to do with real sexuality, deep sensuality and the true joys of eros and lovemaking. All that modern adverting images and media stereotypes do is teach women to present the promise of entry in the Garden of Earthly delights”, without offering any real key to it. The image of the modern “sexy” woman is nothing but an empty promise of eros: a tease, a mirage—all packaging, but no content. All menu (cardapao?) but nothing substantial to actually consume!
Despite their simplistic little articles on “How to have multiple orgasms”, etc, the fashion magazines who serve the vast fashion and cosmetics industries all unconsciously conspire to keep sex on the surface. It remains a mere dream of desire, a fantasy of perfect romantic love, a disembodied ghost of Eros endlessly receding into the sunset. Deeply frustrating to women—and totally bewildering to men!
When there is no fully sensual embodiment, having sex or making love, can easily become purely mechanical, just another performance meant to please, another controlled exercise like working out at the fitness center. Many a modern woman is split off from her own body that only has the most superficial kind of orgasm and barely knows what deep sensual arousal really is. And when mechanical, or what I call “Cartesian” sex, goes on for too long, the body inevitably reacts—skin problems, menstrual irregularity, fibroids and tumors, even cancers of the breast and uterus. Fashionable modern medicine (Cartesian in the extreme) tells us that the “mechanism” of the body is not functioning properly and that dozens of tests are needed to find the culprit hormone or organ. Eros, by this time, has long flown from the nest.
It is a sad fact that so many modern woman have not only lost their ability to feel and be alive in their bodies but most don’t have any idea how to listen to them. As Thorwald Detlefsen showed in his brilliant book A Doenca com Caminho, every physical symptom is the body trying to tell the controlling mind that “something emotional is going on down here.” The symptom itself is trying to tell us something in the only way it knows: very concrete, symbolic body language. For instance, a pancreas that is producing diabetes, may be desperately screaming out a deep longing for “sweetness” in a woman’s emotional life.
An example from my practice also illustrate this. A young woman consulted me who was engaged to be married and was, it seemed, very much in love with her husband. But she complained that their sex life was blocked because of bright red rashes all around her genitals. She was undergoing treatment with antibiotics but the rash refused to go away. I said to her in the session: “Close your eyes and take your awareness down to the area where your genitals are inflamed. Feel this area.” She did so. I then asked: “What would the inflamed area say if it could speak?” Suddenly words jumped to her mouth: “Don’t touch me! Go away” And she burst into tears. Then she admitted that she deeply disliked the very crude way that her fiancé made love when he penetrated her. Sex for her was a painful duty. But he was a fine man and she knew he would be good husband and father. So she went along with the painful sex, saying nothing. But finally her body had rebelled. With acceptable Cartesian logic she could save face and say: “It’s not me pushing him away; it’s just my body doing strange things.”
My client’s story is typical of thousands of women troubled by one clinical ailment or another that disrupts their sex lives and which they innocently take to the doctor for purely physical treatment. The way in which my clients had learned to divide her emotional life and her body into two separate compartments and her inability to express her deep discomfort in her sexuality for the sake of a “good” marriage speaks volumes. It is sadly typical of how centuries of patriarchal Christian values have taught women to be mutely submissive. The previous Pope reinforced this when he said publicly that it is an honor for women to suffer in childbirth—they recall the crucifixion of Christ in their bodies!
When the early Christians threw out the pleasure principle and substituted purity, virginity and asceticism as ideals of love, they tried to throw out an ancient Goddess, at that time called Afrodite, whose ruling principle was her son, the divine Eros. This sublime Goddess embodied a fusion, today lost to us, of spiritual and sensual love. But as I show in my book A Deusa Interior, Afrodite (and her sister Goddesses) don’t disappear but simply go underground in the West. Nevertheless, although deeply wounded by centuries of patriarchy and Christian puritanism, Afrodite and the pleasure principle are once more re-emerging to help us rediscover a healthy love of body and sensuality, passion and romance and even the “true love” (fins amor) which the troubadours once celebrated in honor of their divine Lady.
However, when Afrodite re-surfaces in the modern world her manifest charms be intoxicating and over-seductive to men—the pornography obsession—and her return inevitably brings with it the haunting suffering of our ancestors. The pain, the abuse, the despair, the frigidity, the shame, the loneliness that have been the real symptoms of Afrodite’s wounding for countless generations are also part of her lost legacy and require patience and loving attention to fully heal.
Fortunately modern psychotherapy and holistic healing practices have come a long way in helping restore Afrodite to us and heal her wounds. Today there are many simple, but profound practices and changes of mental habit that can speed up Afrodite’s healing in us all, leading to the re-awakening and liberation of that mischievious (safado) winged god of sexuality, Eros.
So it is a wonderful gift to have Ludmila’s extraordinarily practical, charming and enlightening book. Here is a healthy, frank, straightforward guide to being a fully sexual and passionate women using a rich collection of eminently do-able exercises and wise commentary. In America Ludmila’s book would be called a “how to” (como fazer?) book. It doesn’t preach. It doesn’t moralize. It doesn’t make any woman (or man) feel inferior because we don’t understand these things. Instead it informs, it encourages, and without any inhibition celebrates the joys of the female body and the glories of fully embodied passionate love.
The first step for a woman to fully recover her sexuality is obvious and fundamental, though it is often ignored in the sexual homilies that we read in women’s magazine—love your body! And added to this every woman must also know her body, accept her body, feel her body fully and above all enjoy her body. When she can do this freely and without guilt, shame or self-criticism, then clothes, make-up, hair-do, ways of making love, finding the right man etc—all this will flow quite naturally, spontaneously and joyfully. A woman who is fully embodied, sensual and loving becomes, in the words of the English poet Keats “a joy forever.” And for her lover or husband such a woman shines resplendent in his eyes like a Goddess, like Shakespeare’s immortal Cleopatra:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety
[A idade nao podem muchar-a, nem tradicao estragar sua variadade infinita]
Of course, it is not always easy to let go of the compulsion of generations of sexual fear and loathing passed on by patriarchal indoctrination about the dangers of women’s “unbridled lust.” For many women it involves reclaiming what Jung calls a “shadow” figure in their forbidden fantasies—the inevitable seductress, siren or whore who dwells somewhere in that sleazy part of the town she would never dream of visiting; or else a dark, bitter and pleasure hating witch figure who for generations has sat at the back of family consciousness destroying all attempts at happy conjugal relationships. Not for nothing are TV novellas full of such figures.
For a woman to awaken into her fully embodied sensual and sexual being often means the redemption and loving rescue of a part of the feminine soul lost and despised for literally millennia. Like Maria Magdalena, forced unjustly to be penitent for the sins that really belong to the Fathers, the lost Afrodite in every woman’s body may at first seem shy, fearful, sad, abused, misunderstood, unloved and deeply rejected. But with the simple exercises, tender compassion and wise counsel that Ludmila’s lovely book brings to us, the lost Afrodite can start to re-emerge in every woman. And the world can rejoice that a great and a sacred power has once more returned to dwell among us, spreading Her infinite love and blessings all around!
*To be published in Brazil in Portuguese and possibly English in 2009