I have been reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae with a great deal of annoyed delight.

I say delight because it is wonderful to find someone talking openly about so many of the things I have been thinking about for so long. I’m annoyed because it’s so frustrating to always be discovering that someone has already written the book you wanted to write, and rather better than you could have written it.

I think it was C.S. Lewis and his love of classical art and archetypes that first set me on a similar path to Camille. Or rather, nature itself did. My earliest fascination was with the mystery of woman, which was quite intense in me even at my earliest remembered age. There were deep cthonic secrets to be discovered, hidden away in plain sight in the hidden recesses of half the ordinary population.

Lewis united my Apollonian understanding with those heathen passions and provided a bridge for understanding. His love of Greek poetry gave me the language. G.K. Chesterton and Charles Williams took me deeper into that realm, people I read largely because of their association with Lewis. Orthodoxy taught me about the romance of the ordinary, the mad divinity of the commonplace miracles we’re surrounded by. Chesterton also had a certain perverse wit that delighted in overturning apple carts and toppling walls of safety, leaving you exposed to the raw miracles and terrors of daily life. He was engaged in restoring the romance and mystery in the hearts of men, that the impulsive, tawdry affairs and technical power and understanding of modern man had stripped from the world.

Between Lewis and Chesterton, they put the cthonic mysteries back on their proper divine pedastal, and then raised God even higher above them, bringing order on top of mystery. As I believe Chesterton said, Paganism was the biggest thing ever, until Christianity. Both he and Lewis did not see in paganism a goddess humiliated by the church, but rather elevated and transfigured through being wedded to it.

Charles Williams took things a step further, although his direction was less clear. I remember two of his novels in particular. One was Descent into Hell, a psychological novel in which the innate underlying selfishness of humanity, moderated by art, swallows one of the main characters into the abyssal depths of his own inner hell. He paints a picture of an endless, dark pit we each carry around within us, and into which we can descend into inky, velvety pre-consciousness and pre-morality, if we allow ourself. Life is lived on a rope up which we climb, hanging over an infinite dark abyss of time and unawareness, the lack of sight. The journey into the self, rather than leading to freedom or revelation, simply leads back to the freedom of premoral, animal unconsciousness and solipsism, a world without vision or value beyond the walls of the self.

The second book of his I read, I don’t remember the title, was about the victory of dark, bloody, shamanistic mysticism over an anemic, Apollonian modernism, grown weak and indecisive in its technological superiority and decadence. It was the triumph of the wtich doctor over the scientist. I wasn’t sure what to think about it. It was weird. Especially to a rural high-schooler reading it in the 1980s. It was a fantasy designed to make you rethink the strength of the hidden power of the dark and mystical currents that lie at the bottom of human history and human experience. That perhaps the nice, tame power of the professional academic, even at its apogee, wielding all the knowledge and powers of the modern age, was less than it imagined itself to be and more subject to vulnerability and reversion than it believed. That the dark and rotting roots from which civilization reached to the heavens had not been fully left behind for more airy and self-supporting vistas.

Dune is another book that helped me walk down that path, imagining a future where human nature had not been tamed or subjugated, but rather had reasserted itself. At some point in the past the consequences of sacrificing our own strength for its incarnation in technological means became too dire. The sacrifice of our responsibility and power for the sake of a technological servant to manage those duties for us caused it to become more human and more divine, and us less and less, until it became a humiliation and abdication we could no longer countenance. Dune pictured a future where we evolved, instead, to bring more of our power and technology into ourselves, into our innate capacity, rather than fixing it in structures and machines around us. Which is frankly far more realistic and true to the actual biological history of humanity. We always became our greatest powers.

For many years my own mystical journey came to a halt. But it was restarted by Jordan Peterson, whose Maps of Meaning explores much of the same territory that Camille Paglia does. At the same time, my own personal interest in understanding myself and my wife as sexual partners drew me into a number of pieces of personal and philosophical exploration. I wanted to understand why I felt the way I did and why things had the meaning they had and where the blood and power and terror in my relationship with my wife came from. I was a worshipper of my wife, a devotee of our relationship, and I wanted to explore the mysteries of how and why that should be.

All that led me to Camille Paglia. Reading her has been a treat, another step in my journey of understanding. It’s useful to have a feminine perspective. She’s an atypical woman, but I think that’s part of what makes her able to talk about women so well. She has insight from the inside but stands a little bit outside. And I think I’m a bit like that as a man. I’ve always lived and operated at the fringes of typical masculinity, but it’s never bothered me. I’ve always felt confident in my own identity as a male, even if I often struggled in the company of other men. Being on the inside but at the edges helps you have a bit of perspective.

Being close friends with many women throughout my life has helped me understand them better than many men and have sympathy for their position. And women have helped me see and understand myself as a man better, too. Getting married is about the most masculine thing you can do, and being married has masculinized me. You become more yourself when you don’t have to be other things, and you become more what you are when you experience it in contrast to something else.

I’ve been the primary caregiver for my kids, done the majority of all the cooking and housework, and I buy most of the clothes and jewelry and makeup and hair products and accessories in our home. Those aren’t typical roles for a husband. But even as I’ve taken on more and more of those duties, and accepted them and invested in them more (because it didn’t happen all at once, and not all as easily as some), it hasn’t made me feel less manly. In fact I feel far more masculine now than I did before I was doing all those things. It’s not easy to quickly explain why. But I did them for masculine reasons. And my wife accepts them as me performing my duties as a husband, and that makes me feel very manly. Abdication of responsibility, impulsive indulgence, and petty conquests may make you feel good, but they don’t make you a man. They make you a boy, an adolescent. A woman, a wife specifically, makes a man out of you. You enter into the fullness of sexually mature development. You become more than just a single human. You develop into part of a functioning, larger pair that were made for one another. And that does make you each develop more along that path. You specialize.

Even when, as in my family, the wife takes up typically masculine duties and the husband typically feminine ones, the underlying dynamic is still there. You can do masculine things for feminine motivations and even in feminine ways, and you can do feminine things for masculine reasons and in masculine ways. It isn’t typical. The average is the average for a reason. Usually because it’s what easy and fits people’s natural inclinations and interests. But even the tail end of a distribution is still part of it. I may be a more maternal man, but I’m still a man and do things like a man. I can’t recommend our situation generally because it’s very specific to us and who each of us are, it’s not a pattern. It’s not the case that anybody could have done it, that anything can be changed in hwo sexual relationships wo without it mattering. But we were able to do it. Because of the specific sort of people my wife and I are. Even then it wasn’t easy. And it might not be how we do things forever. And occasionally you run into things you can’t change and obstacles you can’t overcome, or even just areas where you know you’re going to have to take a loss.

My wife and I aren’t typical, but that doesn’t change the fact that women don’t like it when their partner earns less than them, and that includes my wife. You can deal with that, you can get used to it, you can compensate for it, but it’s always going to be something you have to struggle against. You can’t assume that it won’t matter, that it’s arbitrary. Women have certain needs, desires, and expectations; and men have certain needs, desires, and expectations. How you express and fulfill them can be done pretty creatively. But it’s wrong to assume they won’t need to expressed or fulfilled.

Anyway, to return to realm of mysticism and sexuality, I’m still figuring out exactly I think about Sexual Personae. I think Camille has a very good perspective and I have a lot of learn from her. There are some things I think could be added to her perspective. As much as I like how she perceives things and elaborates the dichotomy between nature and sky god, between Cthonic and Apollonian, I think it’s worth noting that both forces and both instincts are actually part of overall supernature. It’s together that they generate everything we perceive of as the world. Camille has a great perspective. It’s very balanced. But it is a feminine perspective. And it has an absent counterpart. Something very close, but from just over the other wise of the fence. She might enjoy hearing a fringe masculine perspective that mirrors her own work as a fringe feminine perspective. I don’t think I have the education or the skill to fill that role. But I am a great admirer of her work.