A S K    C A M I L L E

Illustration by Zach Trenholm

WHY DOES FEMALE
HOMOSEXUALITY TURN ME ON?

dear Camille: I am as heterosexual a man as you can get -- so why does female homosexuality turn me on more than regular sex? This is getting ridiculous. Seeing two buxom women give each other the glad eye -- the tension of forbidden attraction, the mere possibility in some movie that two beautiful women will fall into a heap -- is infinitely more sexy than anything my own hairy self could possibly be involved in. Please explain this to me. Like Stephen Dedalus, I want to refine myself out of existence -- leaving only Penthouse models with long lashes and enormous breasts. How pathetic! Signed, Sappho-phile Dear Sappho-phile: The forbidden allure of watching nude women cavort with one another can be detected as early as the Greek myth of Actaeon, the hunter who spied on the goddess Artemis bathing with her nymphs. She didn't take it very well: She turned him into a stag torn to pieces by his own hounds, which symbolize his lecherous desires. Girls, girls, girls! Packed in like luscious sardines and undulating like a velvety landscape of swelling bosoms and buttocks, they can be ogled in Ingres' steamy peep-hole painting, "The Turkish Bath," where lesbo fondling is going on amid the usual lute-playing, grape-popping and incense-burning. I made that painting a central exhibit of my book "Sexual Personae," where I try to explain the poet Baudelaire's mysterious preoccupation with lesbians. It all ends up in Courbet's X-rated painting, "The Sleepers," which shows two prostitutes lying voluptuously entwined after what has clearly been a robust, jewelry-scattering encounter. Midol feminism (which suffers from a constant tension headache) sees the harem motif in art as typical male tyranny, making women into passive sex slaves. But I think the fantasy of women together is actually matriarchal: Men know they're peripheral, on the margins, staring helplessly down into Mother Nature's volcanic crater. Lesbian lust is supercondensed female sexuality, all smooth, soft, shiny surfaces, evoking for heterosexual men a subliminal memory of the lost paradise of the maternal body, where they blissfully floated in the warm, sensuous bath of the womb. Man-made lesbo porn is a journey to the heart of creation, where the All-Mother is magically replicating herself by parthenogenesis. The lesbian fantasy obliterates all rival males -- in particular the Oedipal father, who distracted the mother's attention from her ravenous, resentful son. Heterosexual men still want to dive right back and get lost in the fabulous funhouse of funky femaleness. Dear Camille: I'd like to hear your opinions about the recent TV exposé of hazing in the Marines. TV news showed footage of Marine paratroopers having pins shoved into their chests, as if this were totally unheard of and shocking. Hasn't this sort of thing been going on in various cultures for centuries? Plains Indian sun dances and Australian Aboriginal circumcisions come to mind (not to mention the world of S&M sex). Why are people so shocked to discover that the boys in uniform like to play a little rough? Signed, Gung ho Dear Gung ho: Your point is excellent. The kind of cultural relativism about gender that dominates the media and academe these days stubbornly resists the overwhelming evidence that whenever men get together in groups, they behave in remarkably similar ways that social conditioning can't entirely explain. Every effort to ban hazing has ultimately failed, since young men spontaneously generate these gruesome, bloodthirsty rituals on their own. Men's agonized quest for identity is one of the primary energizing forces in the history of civilization. Without that struggle, men will just relapse into the cozy but unchallenging nursery, ruled by women. Because they lack the natural, internal process of menstruation to mark their passage from childhood, men have devised every kind of bizarre, punishing game to weed out the milquetoasts and harden their comrades for citizenship in the masculine. By pain and danger, young men are tested, then welcomed into adulthood. Where the warrior code is not honored and where bourgeois bookworms become the norm, men melt into women and lose their sexual magnetism. Hence the rampant androgyny of the Ivy League, where polite, pallid boys are being honed for the neutered cubicles of office life, whose ideal clone resembles -- well, Bill Gates and Michael Kinsley. When I was an adolescent in upstate New York, there was a great hue and cry over a fraternity hazing where a young man died from asphyxiation after being forced to swallow raw liver. While I was teaching in Connecticut, a freshman boy staggered into class dripping wet and violently shivering: His fraternity brothers had stripped him of his coat and thrown him into a pond in the dead of winter. This same fellow had already been driven in a car trunk far into the woods in the middle of the night and dumped out, dressed only in his briefs, to find his way back to campus. While I was horrified, he found all of it jauntily humorous. Not a month passes without a news report of young men seriously injured or killed by some idiotic, show-offy stunt meant to impress their peers -- drinking a fifth of booze in a minute; shinnying up high-tension poles; diving off cliffs; chicken-racing past oncoming locomotives; lying down in the middle of a superhighway while trucks whiz by. You name it, boys have done it. Women's appeals to common sense are useless. Our chatty, sewing-circle mores, where a pin prick is a big deal, perhaps can never comprehend the gross, brute ethic of masculine action-adventure, which uses an entertaining pinch and a half of torture to steel the will. Dear Camille: I am dogged with desire everywhere I go. Every woman (and some men!) I immediately picture in a sexual setting. Occasionally, my vibe is sensed, and fireworks commence. I live not for just sexuality, but sensuality. I believe it to be an undeniable part of my human existence. But lo and behold, I am a married man. However, my wife knows of my desires. How do I tell her, a traditional Judeo-Christian, that I believe I'm polygamous? This is something I believe will never change, and I want it to be a positive thing. But what is the best way to go about communicating this? Signed, Thinking about it hard in Ohio. Dear Thinking about it hard: Your libido is in a state of high alert, converting each sensory stimulus into the conceptual picture-making that I think more typical of the male than female brain. Your letter reminds me of how Luca Babini, the Italian photographer who is Lauren Hutton's inamorato (and who took the cover picture of me for "Vamps & Tramps"), described his sensations as he walked down temptation-filled city streets. "The penis is a shark," he declared. "It must be fed!" Nature profits from the restless insatiability of male appetite. Men's fertility (look at Anthony Quinn) lasts decades longer than women's. Monogamy is not a universal norm and primarily benefits women, who once depended on marriage for economic support of themselves and their offspring. Polygamy was practiced by the nomadic Hebrew patriarchs and therefore has solid biblical roots. It can be found in the Muslim world as well as in many tribal cultures. When the Mormons revived polygamy, they were unjustly persecuted by the United States government. Liberals who support gay marriage but spurn polygamy are lily-livered hypocrites. Let's give polygamy a try! It will solve the day-care dilemma, divide housekeeping and driving chores, and offer a safety net during family illness and in the vulnerable period before and after childbirth. It will lessen domestic isolation and boredom by recreating the old, pre-industrial, exhilaratingly sociable world of women. By providing a nubile, at-home bedmate, polygamy will also end one of the cruelest practices of Divorce Unlimited, USA: middle-aged men dumping their long-sacrificing, menopausal and non-recyclable first wives to start again with a glitzy trophy wife. Under polygamy, the No. 1 Wife RULES! She takes revenge for her crow feet and cellulite by bossing around the vapid bimbettes whom her husband hornily humps but can't talk to. The polygamous pecking order gave dignity and power to the aging woman, who inevitably loses status under our present, supposedly liberated system. Feb. 18, 1997 Searching in St. Louis? Frazzled in Frisco? Ask the divine Camille at AskCamille@salonmagazine.com and enlightenment will be yours.

A   R   C   H   I   V   E   S