TODAY’S CREATIVE LOVING PROFILE
"Miss Pussy," as she calls herself, sings one particularly funny song, "Free Pussy," in which she imagines putting on her high heels and going out for a stroll, looking particularly fine. In fact, she looks so fine that she is arrested for "looking too good ... for getting folks hot and juicy." Jailed, she wails over and over, "Free Pussy!"
The song is a bump-and-grind anthem about sexual freedom and the body, of course. I usually ask clients, regardless of sex, to move their hips to Miss Pussy's tragic tale of imprisoned libido. And almost without exception people who are creatively frozen cannot move their hips. They can be 25 and their hips have the mobility of granite. They have lost their juice.
Freud, no matter what you think of his often kooky theories, rightly observed that sexual repression is the great problem of modernity. When the culture conspires to keep people sexually repressed, when eros has become brittle and immobile by convention, life becomes stagnant for the culture and its members. A puritanical life, whether characterized as "spiritual," "tasteful" or "healthy," is not usually a creative one.
The terror of eros and the body has been well demonstrated recently in the utterly ridiculous brouhaha over "booty dancing." In case you live in a vacuum, booty dancing basically looks like danced frottage that emulates rear-entry copulation. The female partner bends over and backs up to the male and they grind to the music. It's popular all over the country, and parents and educators are in a terrible froth over it.
Witnessing young people in the throes of the erotic, adults who once did the twist or the bump or screwed stoned in the mud at a love-in feel an utter compulsion to throw cold water on their children. Fayetteville even closed a teen club after someone made a hidden-camera video of the shocking scene of young people joyously using dance to explore their sexuality. School dances in some places are patrolled by parents who send dirty dancers to a kind of detention hall to cool their, um, heels until they can return and act right. A thousand excuses are cited:
"It's too much sexual energy too soon."
"Dancing should involve form and discipline as well as sexual expression."
"It's not tasteful."
And naturally if someone like me objects to the censorship, I'm told I can't understand because I don't have children.
Of course what's really happening here is that parents and educators are trying to control yet another form of expression to lower their own anxieties -- perhaps in the face of being reminded of their own loss of sexual freedom, perhaps in their understandable fear of losing their children to the world of adult pleasure. But I have yet to read of a case of rape attributed to booty dancing and, in a world of unpleasant possibilities that may befall a child now, it is astonishing that danced sexual play should receive so much attention.
Booty dancing's crime is its joyful openness. It is not nearly as extreme as the alternatives. When the erotic is repressed -- or literally oppressed as in this case, so much like Pussy Tourette's story -- it finds symptomatic expression. That was Freud's observation of the hysterics and erotomaniacs of the Victorian age that filled his consulting room. You demonize the erotic and it shuts your body down, like those temporarily granite-hipped people at my workshops, or you begin a life of sexual hiding, perhaps by patronizing America's vapidly unimaginative multi-billion-dollar porn and sex industry.
Of course, you could argue that booty dancing itself is symptomatic. Its extremity in this argument is itself a response to the erotophobia of parents and the culture they represent. It is unlikely, however, that American parents are going to invite their children into any kind of playful and open experiment with erotic energy. In Spain, during the Bienal de Flamenco last September, I often went to midnight concerts at Seville's Hotel Triana. There, entire gypsy families would dance together on stage. Children and old people alike danced with one another in hip-gyrating, whistling eros in the damp moonlight. I'm not talking about sex alone but a play with the fundamental energy of life -- the "green fuse that drives the flower" of Dylan Thomas' imagining, the energy that is at times sexual, at other times purely creative.
I saw the same thing in a recent performance of The Leopard Tale, by Atlanta's Ballethnic Dance Company. Waverly Lucas' brilliant choreography, with echoes of everything from booty dancing to classic ballet and African dance, engaged a huge cast of young people. Lucas' ballet explores the intersections of animal and human life, the relationship of eros to death. As such, it is about this green fuse, this chaotic drive that so terrifies Americans. I couldn't help wondering why an ethnic dance collective, a drag queen in San Francisco and gypsies in Southern Spain seem so much more comfortable with what appears to especially terrify the white middle class of America.
I bet you can figure it out.
