Of Bundling, Love, and Farmers' Daughters

3 Quarks Daily has just posted my Bundling, Dream Space, Love, and the Farmer’s Daughter, which is revised from something I'd posted a few years ago at New Savanna. For one thing I wanted to include some relevant source material that Charles Cameron had posted; it's about religious practices where clerics live and often sleep with women without, however, having sex. I put one such passage below. You might also want to look at From Ishmael to Joey and Ross: Whither American Manhood? by Gregory Jusdanis, which has this passage:

Ishmael wakes up one morning in a hotel in the whaling town of New Bedford to discover an “affectionate arm” around him. He and the stranger, whose name is Queequeg, are sleeping “socially,” having become “bosom buddies.” As he gradually opens his eyes he realizes that “you had almost thought I had been his wife.” Try as Ishmael might, he can’t unlock Queequeg’s “bridegroom clasp,” hugging him so “tightly.” The following evening Ishmael waits impatiently for Queegueg’s embrace.

Although most American men of the nineteenth century would not have described this occurrence as a marriage, they would have been used to sleeping with other men. Boys became accustomed to sharing beds with their brothers and then with their roommates in college, and with strangers when traveling. So did soldiers. Physical intimacy between men was economically enforced and privacy not available. And before central heating the male body lying next to you was a literal source of warmth. Men, in short, were familiar with the smell and touch of other men.

This Google query on "bundling board" ("bundle" alone is uselessly general) turns up quite a number of hits.

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Sex and Metaphysics

It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that we humans are obsessed with sex, but only a bit. The question is: Why? Yes, sex is necessary for reproduction and, in consequence, sexual feelings are very strong and insistent. Sex is often, though not always, pleasurable.

But that’s not enough. Oh, it may be enough for evolutionary psychologists, but they don’t demand much of their psychology. Even at that, the biological rules of sex are, still, a bit obscure. The cultural games we play with them, they are infinitely varied.

Take that Shakespeare sonnet I’ve been exploring, 129, The expense of spirit. That’s about sex. But it’s also about desire, pleasure, guilt, will and reason. All of those things intermingled. It’s about metaphysics.

There’s the rub: How’d sex become metaphysical? Just what is the knowledge in carnal knowledge?

Consider this Wikipedia passage about Tantric ritual; notice all the technical terms (in Sanscrit):

When enacted as enjoined by the Tantras, the ritual culminates in a sublime experience of infinite awareness for both participants. Tantric texts specify that sex has three distinct and separate purposes—procreation, pleasure, and liberation. Those seeking liberation eschew frictional orgasm for a higher form of ecstasy, as the couple participating in the ritual lock in a static embrace. Several sexual rituals are recommended and practiced. These involve elaborate and meticulous preparatory and purificatory rites. The sexual act itself balances energies coursing within the pranic ida and pingala channels in the subtle bodies of both participants. The sushumna nadi is awakened and kundalini rises upwards within it. This eventually culminates in samadhi, wherein the respective individual personalities and identities of each of the participants are completely dissolved in a unity of cosmic consciousness.

What are they talking about? Liberation — from what? Cosmic consciousness — what’s that? What’s this about dissolving? Whatever this is, it isn’t monkey glands on overdrive, it’s something else. Those Tantra adepts are using biology for something that transcends biology. But what?

‘Transcend’ — that’s a term that comes up often in such discussions, along with ecstasy, union, dissolution. All are common to the discourse of mysticism as well. Sex and mysticism, two peas in a pod — whoops! there’s a biological metaphor. Mystics use sexual metaphors, and sexuality drives even the prosaic among us to the edge of mysticism.

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I’ve got two guesses. One: While ecstasy and transcendence are available anytime, anywhere, while doing anything — so sayeth the Zen masters ZAP! — they’re most likely to sneak up on us during sex. If so, then, one would like to know why.

My other guess is not unrelated to the first, but it’s more complicated.

The basic circuits for sexuality, like other biological drives, is located deep in the core of the brain in the limbic system. Except for sexuality, those drives are active from birth. But much of the brain is quite immature at birth, especially the neocortex, which is phylogenetically the newest part of the brain. And it’s where our ‘higher’ capacities are more or less localized. All the other emotional and motivational equipment becomes integrated into the ever more sophisticated patterns of thought, desire, and action that are realized in the maturing cortex.

Along comes adolescence and WHAM! the whole system becomes unglued. All of a sudden distinctly new feelings and motivations have to be integrated into one’s repertoire of thoughts and actions. Even if you grow up in a culture that more or less “makes room” for sexuality, it still comes as a shock. Knowing it's going to happen, play-acting at more adult behavior when you're a child, that doesn't really prepare you for having to deal with a whole new hormonal riot. What’s new and confusing is the riot itself.

Now, let’s put sexuality aside for a moment and look at cognitive development. Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, worked out the theory of stages on cognitive development starting with sensorimotor, then pre-operational, concrete operations, and then, at adolescence, formal operations. Formal operations allows for abstract thought, thoughts about god and country, but also mathematics and philosophy.

And that leads to my second guess. Sex becomes intertwined with metaphysics because our sexual impulses become active during the same period in development that abstract thought emerges. For reasons I've never really attempted to work out, I suspect that if the capacity for abstract thought becomes established before hormonal puberty, there's a chance that the new feelings and motives will be treated as foreigners, strangers that have taken refuge in one's own body.

And that's what's so freaky about sex. None of our feelings and emotions are under control of the will. But they’re all familiar to us as we move into adolescence. We’re used to them. They have their homes in our lives, their paths and hangouts. We know them even if we cannot control them.

Sexuality is a stranger.

In that strangeness it, more than any other behavioral system, links our most basic and primitive capacities with our most abstract. At once act and thought, deed and desire, it is metaphysics in life.

Note: These two posts aren't quite about sex. But they're in the same neighborhood: bundling, romantic love.

Bundling, Dreamspace & the Farmer’s Daughter

The other day I was reading a post an eBuddy of mine, Michael Cobb Bowen, had written about the possible advent of a female viagra-type drug. He ended his post with this statement:

Sex is dirty, complicated and embarrassing. You have to get naked and vulnerable. In fully formed human beings, that takes some doing and some mutual obligation. More than we think we know, and more than most are willing to say.

In thinking about it – how, say, vulnerability “takes some doing” in “fully formed human beings” – my mind wandered to bundling, an old courtship practice I’d learned about in my youth and thought rather prudish and quaint. Here’s a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry:

Traditionally, participants were adolescents, with a boy staying at the residence of a girl. They were given separate blankets by the girl's parents and expected to talk to one another through the night. The practice was limited to the winter and sometimes the use of a bundling board, placed between the boy and girl, ensured that no sexual conduct would take place. More often, this rule was merely implicit, and was not always honored.

I am no longer an adolescent. I’ve read quite a bit about sexual customs in many times and places and I’ve had enough life experience to know that sexuality is not, in reality, so simple as it was in my adolescent fantasy. Perhaps there was a bit of wisdom in bundling.

The fact that precautions were taken against sexual activity indicates that people were fully aware of sexuality, but they wanted to prevent it. That I can understand, but then why incur the risk by having the courting couple sleep together in the first place? If the object is to have them talk, why not let them talk in swing on the front porch, or sitting in the front parlor? Why have them talk at night, and in bed?

When we are sleeping we are, in the crudest possible way, most vulnerable. We are then open to physical attack. Thus we take great precautions to ensure that our sleeping places are safe.

Dreamspace

In this context, of course, we take that for granted. There’s more to bundling than physical safety, which exists in the front parlor as well. No, we’re talking about psychological vulnerability. We’re talking about deep intimacy. It is as though the courting couple was to enter dreamland together and, through talking, share their dreams. I am reminded of a passage from John Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, where he asserts that ”God in the first ordaining of marriage taught us to what end he did it, in words expressly implying the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of solitary life, not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a secondary end in dignity.”

It’s not at all clear to me that the conversation of our bundling couple would be “cheerful,” but I rather doubt that they talked of the weather or the stock market. I can imagine, in fact, that they might well have found that talking a bit difficult and awkward at first, that they had to figure out just how to have intimate conversation, as such does not come naturally. I would like to think that they were learning how to become vulnerable, to return to Bowen’s statement.

That is, part of being a fully formed human being is the capacity for deep intimacy with another. Bundling thus served as a training ground for such intimacy. Perhaps the idea was that if and when the courting couple became married, that they would then be sexually comfortable with one another.

Some Evidence

This is all speculation, of course, but that speculation receives some support from anecdotes collected on this webpage, which reprints “Little Known Facts about Bundling in the New World,” which had been privately printed in 1938. There is, for example, the testimony of one Rev. Samuel Peters (undated):

The women of Connecticut are strictly virtuous, and to be compared to the prude rather than the European polite lady . . . Notwithstanding the modesty of the females is such that it would be accounted the greatest rudeness for a gentleman to speak before a lady of a garter, knee, or leg, yet it is thought but a piece of civility to ask her to bundle; a custom as old as the first settlement of 1634. It is certainly innocent, virtuous and prudent, or the puritans would not have permitted it to prevail among their offspring, for whom in general they would have suffered crucifixion ... I am no advocate for temptation; yet must say, that bundling has prevailed 160 years in New England, and, I verily believe, with ten times more chastity than sitting on a sofa . . . The sofa is more dangerous in summer, than the bed in winter . . .