The new year brings a call for "intelligent reappraisals of romantic love" ¹ and a plea that we "allow magic to reign where we find it, lest we color the world gray." I applaud these bold words of Cristina Nehring but wonder if it isn't time for reappraisal of a more suspect and yet more magical realm: the intersection of love and lust.  This site takes a shot at it.   Thus,

•   I explore through power-laden ballads of erotic encounter a myth of magically strong lovemaking, the celebration not of rape but of rapture.  My starting point is the ballad of the lady and the lusty smith or "The Twa Magicians" (no typo here, "twa" is simply Scots for "two") -- a ballad sometimes seen as "rapist," though on both sides of its applauded action, and in ballads sharing much the same erotic assumptions, women of extraordinary energy and wilfulness play starring roles. In these ballads, the celebration of masterful male force and female "defeat" as part of a core sexual mystery does not appear to be in any way a celebration of female victimhood, but of something more interesting and altogether more life-affirming.
•   The larger context for my project is an erotically heightened world of spontaneous animal delight (the so-called "pastoral") which polite society has long taken for man's domain, woman entering it only as hapless object-of-desire. Its special focus is the cocky virgin, whose contradictory sexual feelings (betrayed in flaunted sexual resistance) seem to me both natural and a vital part of the applauded erotic narrative.
•   In realistic terms, my defense of this animal world and its warrior values doesn't mean that I dismiss rape or the anguish of real rape victims (and any man who thinks I am encouraging "pushiness" should skip to my "Pastoral Misadventure" for a sobering reality check). It's just that I see both sexes normally having good reason to avoid any such ugly conflict -- that, as balladry suggests and my own unsought field experience confirms, the pastoral "power problem" is sometimes a problem of sexual theatre which an image-conscious age mistakes for (and may well convert to) oppressive reality.
•   It's also a problem, historically and in polite literature, of pastoral "enclosure" -- a myth of sexual enchantment turning indeed to the shape of oppression as the "feminine" is both elevated and enervated. Privileged polite "femininity" has thus come to mean something more fragile, more fearful and naturally more prone to victimhood than its folk counterpart. Moreover, in the grip of this misconstrued and much enfeebled myth, radical cultural feminism invests an act most women want to approve with a meaning -- sex-as-rape -- they cannot possibly approve. For heterosexual women of an ideological bent (i.e., with no more pressing matters at hand!) it cannot be a happy state of affairs.