"Twerk" on MTV, Miley Cyrus Did

In 2013, 'twerk' was added to the Oxford Dictionary Online. The dictionary said the word had been around for 20 years, but the evidence for it to be included in the dictionary had tipped the scale when U.S. pop star Miley Cyrus gave a controversial and headline-producing twerking dance at the MTV Video Music Awards on August 25, 2013.

— Wikipedia          

The verb "twerk," says the Oxford dictionary, means "dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance."

Much debate ensued after Miley Cyrus "twerked" onscreen at MTV. Was her performance appropriate, the multitudes asked, or not?

Miley Cyrus on MTV

More Miley

I say not. My thought is that it extended a long-term trend a bridge too far. When I was in college at Georgetown in the late 1960s, the university enforced a rule against "public display of affection": no kissing or petting outdoors or in public view. The more general rule, at G'town and in society, was that sex is to be kept private. If it's sexual, hide it from public view.

The rule was coming apart at the seams even then. It had been doing so for decades, going back to the ending of the Victorian era of the final two-thirds of the nineteenth century. "Victorian morality can describe any set of values that espouse sexual restraint, low tolerance of crime and a strict social code of conduct," says Wikipedia. Strict restraints on sexual attitudes and behavior meant men and women wore clothes that covered all and that emphasized nothing that might arouse sexual feelings. Sex obviously happened, and a lot of it was downright illicit. There's no doubt about it. But it was done in private.

My generation was not the first to rebel, but in our own nineteen-sixties sexual revolution the gloves — and much else besides — came all the way off. Ample justification was given: that getting rid of repression and of hypocrisy would make society and its citizens all that much healthier.

Now we have a 20-year-old former child star looking to extend her something-very-like-a-career by a twerking display on TV. We have rampant sexual abuse in the U.S. military. "More than 70% of male Internet users from 18 to 34," according to Wikipedia, "visit a pornographic site in a typical month." Priestly child sexual abuse has racked the Catholic Church. Scandal after scandal has cut short a host of political careers and besmirched the memory of one of the most revered of college football coaches.

All because sex is, I believe, now more public than private. Not the act itself (at least for the most part) buts its hintings, simulacra, and accouterments.

You might think — and a lot of people actually do think — there's no reason why the loosening of nineteenth-century moral strictures that was supposed to make us saner would instead be making us sicker. You might think that between Queen Victoria's corsetings and Miley's MTV cavortings there ought to be a sweet spot which society can occupy, with only a few depraved outliers to either side of the sensible median strip.

It hasn't happened. The depraved outliers are everywhere. So I'd say we need to rein ourselves in. The only way to do that, I think, is to take sex back into the privacy of the boudoir an keep it under demure covers.

How might that happen? We need to start by shrinking the boundary of personal behavior that is considered appropriate. I have in mind, to begin with, a new reticence about stuff that really isn't all that naughty, in the grand scheme of things. For example: no posterior anatomy visible for guys with low-slung belt lines; no visible bra straps for gals. Start with tiny little things like those.

Start with making this taboo ...

... and this.

Whoa! I hear voices raised in protest already. These infractions are, to the extent they are sexual displays at all, very minor ones. They are matters of personal choice and free individual expression. Every generation since Victoria passed away in 1901 has shown more and more anatomy, more and more underwear, and where do you draw the line? Isn't this all just a Trojan horse for a thoroughgoing new Victorianism?

I hope not. But it isn't at all clear to me that there really exists a viable sweet spot between Victorian deprivation and no-holds-barred depravity — it has to be one that the bulk of us can hold to — unless it is also one that abhors (for example) hordes of us "sexting" up a storm or assiduously "tweeting our junk" at every conceivable opportunity. Such activities are not necessarily immoral but, as I hope we are learning, they straddle the increasingly invisible line between public and private. Which is why we all now know so well the name of former-Rep. Anthony Weiner.

So, no more "sexting." No more "tweeting our junk." No more peeking-out bra straps. No more visible vertical smiles. And no more of the many other "innocent" behaviors that put us on a slippery slope to less-minor infractions and then to much more that is far worse.

Notice that I am saying nothing about what can or ought to happen between consenting adults in their bedroom or boudoir. I make no claim to knowing what kinds of sex are quote-unquote bad, or, for that matter, good. All I am saying is give sexual privacy a fighting chance. Keep sex, its stand-ins, its simulacra, and its accouterments well out of public view, and we will see whether I am right and the abuses diminish.

A New Awakening, Part 18

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I'm calling a new awakening of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Now that I've finally finished reading Fr. Richard Rohr's excellent book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, I've been racking my brain trying to see how to sell its insights, along with a vaunted "new awakening" of myth-oriented spirituality, to a skeptical younger generation. In the middle of the night recently I awoke with an answer: the hero's journey.

Joseph Campbell cut his academic teeth in the late 1940s with the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a comprehensive study of hero myths throughout the ages. He told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the universal characteristics of the  "journey," actual or metaphorical, taken by the mythic hero. The hero sets out on a perilous quest, often in order to locate someone or something of great importance, such as the Holy Grail, that is lacking/missing/lost in the day-to-day world the hero knows. On his (or possibly her) journey, he undergoes many trials, tests, and ordeals; he may have close brushes with death; and, first with the help of wise mother figures and then of demanding father figures, he ultimately succeeds in his quest. After he wins, despite great adversity, he closes the circle of his journey, returning home with a boon in tow. The boon can be tangible or intangible, yet it must always be something beneficial to the hero's community. The benefit can be internal (spiritual) or external (physical, practical).

The latter sort of boon might be a sign that the hero has "performed a courageous act in battle or saved a life." The former kind is more subtle:

" ... the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message."

The Buddha

The beneficent "message" is like the one related by the Buddha, whose "journey" was partly geographic and partly a metaphorical one. After contemplating the true nature of reality while sitting under the famous Bo tree, he went around teaching others what he had discovered. Basically, the Buddha taught the various paths to a full "awakening" of the human soul.

* * * * *

A general description of the hero that Campbell gives to Moyers is:

"The hero is the one who comes to participate in life courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge."

Another is:

"Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself."

The hero can be a woman. Campbell, for example, tells Moyers:

"Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another."

The boon which the hero-mother carries back from her "journey" into childbirth is, of course, the child itself. The new human infant as a female hero's boon is a tangible reality as well as a spiritual one.

* * * * *

Yet the mythic hero, male or female, is not one who seeks ultimate union with "transcendence," a desideratum which Campbell identifies as the final destination of the human spirit. Rather:

"The hero’s sphere of action is not the transcendent but here, now, in the field of time, of good and evil — of the pairs of opposites."

The pairs of opposites? Why are they important in this discussion? Campbell says:

"Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites. One has eaten of the tree of knowledge, not only of good and evil, but of male and female, of right and wrong, of this and that, and of light and dark. Everything in the field of time is dual: past and future, dead and alive, being and nonbeing."

So the mythic hero operates in the dualistic "field of time," rather than seeking blissful unity with the eternal source of being. He is participating in life's game, says Campbell — a game which Campbell insightfully calls "a wonderful, wonderful opera — except that it hurts."

* * * * *

Joseph Campbell with
his wife, the dancer
Jean Erdman

Parallel with the distinction between, on the one hand, the field of time and its pairs of opposites, and, on the other hand, the eternal source of all that has being, there are two distinct aspects of mythic aware­ness. Campbell says:

"There’s a fine saying in India with respect to ... two orders of myths, the folk idea and the elementary idea. The folk aspect is called desi, which means 'provincial,' having to do with your society. That is for young people. It’s through that that the young person is brought into the society and is taught to go out and kill monsters. 'Okay, here’s a soldier suit, we’ve got the job for you.' But there’s also the elementary idea. The Sanskrit name for that is marga, which means 'path.' It’s the trail back to yourself. The myth comes from the imagination, and it leads back to it. The society teaches you what the myths are, and then it disengages you so that in your meditations you can follow the path right in."

The first aspect, desi — as in "Here’s a soldier suit, now go out and kill monsters ... " — seems to me to match up well with Richard Rohr's first-half-of-life description in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Rohr even calls the transition to true second-half-of-life spirituality "discharging our loyal soldier," by which he means getting clear of that system of "impulse control" which has gotten us safely through the first half of life. Yet I think he misses, in this part of his discussion, the myth-hero aspect of wearing "a soldier suit" and slaying "monsters" which threaten the larger society.

Campbell does not miss it. He sees the value "for young people" of such soldier-suit heroism ... even if he, too, talks to Moyers more of the ultimate "trail back to yourself," or marga, that seems to me to correspond well with Rohr's notion of second-half-of-life spirituality.

* * * * *

My thought is that our churches and religions aren't teaching and supporting the "hero's journey" which our young people need first to set forth on, if they are ever to reach their "discharging their loyal soldier" transition into second-half-of-life spirituality. I believe (or so I suddenly find) that if religions did this, you wouldn't be able to keep the youngsters out of today's places of worship that are pretty much empty, or else filled with gray heads like mine.

Instead, the young are flocking to movie palaces to see the likes of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia, and the "Harry Potter" series. All of these — and, I assume, newer films I have yet to see — are fundamentally about (you guessed it) heroes and their mythic journeys.

Some churches today are quite focused on teaching the (absent/not listening) youth "impulse control." By that I mean the traditional list of sins and taboos, sexual and otherwise. There's a very real place for that, of course, as necessary guidelines to keeping the hero's journey on track, rather than having it run off the rails. But "control" without "mission" is sterile; would-be heroes find it irrelevant to their needs.

* * * * *

Frodo Baggins

The mythic hero of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is a Hobbit named Frodo Baggins. The Wizard Gandalf tells the diminutive Frodo that the land of Middle Earth is doomed to serve a power-mad, bodiless master of evil, Sauron, unless a certain golden ring is carried out of the Shire where the Hobbits have blissfully lived since time immemorial. The task falls to Frodo, who begins the story totally ignorant of any imminent danger. The danger now arises because Frodo's Uncle Bilbo had brought the One Ring back with him from his own youthful hero's journey.

The now-aged Bilbo knows full well he needs to relinquish the ring to his nephew, now that Bilbo is about to leave the Shire for the second time, to go off to Rivendell, elsewhere in Middle Earth, to write his memoirs. But somehow the ring keeps finding its way back into Bilbo's vest pocket — he hesitates to put it on his finger, because doing so renders him invisible to all but the maleficent Eye of Sauron. Gandalf has to remind Bilbo repeatedly to leave the ring behind.

The ring is a metaphor. It symbolizes, among other things, the psychological inertia that can keep us from crossing each necessary threshold into a new phase of life. Bilbo is about to enter the phase associated with old age, which, like all the successive stages of life, requires of him a new mindset. He will cultivate that mindset as he writes There and Back Again, recounting the tale of his first threshold-crossing when he as a young Hobbit set out on the hero's quest that Tolkien told of in his earlier book titled The Hobbit.

The One Ring
in Lord of the Rings

Once Frodo takes the ring, his own adventure begins. Accompanied by fellow Hobbit Samwise Gamgee, whom Gandalf adjures to keep watch over Frodo, and by two other Hobbits, Merry and Pippin, Frodo treks out of the Shire and soon has a near brush with death at the hands of the soulless Ring-Wraiths, who at Sauron's bidding seek to restore the One Ring to its evil master. To ward off his momentary demise, Frodo hastily puts the One Ring on his finger and disappears.This act, however, is the one thing Gandalf has told him he must never do, since it alone renders him visible to the archenemy.

This or any other use of the power of the ring, however well motivated, constitutes the equivalent of a sin; on this particular hero's journey, it is Frodo's taboo. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and although there is no reference to religion in Lord of the Rings, it is not hard to discern religious motifs just under the surface.

One such motif has to do with the self-sacrifice entered into willingly by Frodo, once it has become clear to him that he alone can carry the ring to the destroying fires of the Cracks of Doom, in Sauron's home realm of Mordor. Frodo ultimately succeeds in his arduous quest, but at the cost of losing his psychological ability to return to his home in the Shire and take up ordinary life there ever again. Instead, he goes off with the immortal Elven-folk as they retire from Middle Earth to the Undying Lands of the Valar.

The parallel in Christian belief is Christ's ascension into heaven. When Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the canonical adventure of the mythic hero, as found in all the world's mythologies, he includes Christ's birth, sojourn in the desert for 40 days, being thrice tempted by the devil, return to society with a message, death on a cross, resurrection, descent into hell to retrieve lost souls, and eventual ascension into heaven as an example of a mythic hero's journey.

Frodo can destroy the One Ring and save his Shire and all the other lands in Middle Earth only with the help of an extended band of heroes that include the four Hobbits; the Wizard Gandalf; Aragorn, the self-exiled King of Gondor; his steward Boromir and Boromir's brother Faramir; the Elf Legolas; and the Dwarf Gimli. This is the Fellowship of the Ring. Each member brings both weaknesses and strengths to what amounts to a mutually enabling "ring" of heroes who work together to destroy the physical One Ring, it's immaterial master Sauron, and Sauron's henchman, the turncoat Wizard Saruman.

The Eye of Sauron

So we have a symbolic contrast. The One Ring works to impede what might be called the soul's natural itinerary across life's thresholds toward ever greater consciousness, as Frodo finds when he learns one hard-to-accept truth after another over the course of his hero's adventure. His Fellowship of the Ring, by supporting him in his quest, nevertheless works to "unbind" all Middle Earth from the "One Ring to rule them all/And in the darkness bind them." Two "rings," as it were, exist: the first is a demonic parody of the life-affirming second.

The lesson here is that the greater conscious awareness each new life-stage brings — Campbell refers to it as an increased "experience" of being alive, and in the Bible we find the notion of attaining a greater "abundance" of life — is always paid for by some heroic sacrifice. Symbolically, when Aragorn's resumed reign at the end of the Lord of the Rings tale brings renewed joy to him and all his kingdom of Gondor, and when Sam Gamgee returns to the Shire to marry the true love who awaits him, it is due to Frodo's heroic self-sacrifice on behalf of all Middle Earth. The seeming distinction here between the hero and the beneficiary is, however, an arbitrary one. In actuality, just as we are all said to possess a "Christ within," we can likewise be said to possess a "Frodo within." Something old within us has to "die and go to heaven" each time something new is born.