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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

No regrets
I was an unashamed mistress.
By Anna Sorelli
[11/17/99]

This Is Now
Ask the madame: Two days of foreplay does the trick

[11/17/99]

That Was Then
Keep it clean

[11/17/99]

"Drop 'em, babe!"
I have two words for married twosomes: Oral sex.
By Carol Ormandy
[11/16/99]

A cooler head prevails
Psychologist Robert Firestone rejects the quick fix for bad marriage.
By Fred Branfman
[11/16/99]

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To explain the other woman, the one who preceded Eve, legend holds that Lilith fought with Adam for dominance. It's an open question as to who lost, since Lilith fled to the sea, only to return as the serpent who tempted Eve -- leading to the expulsion of mankind from the Garden of Eden, to mortality and, of course, to sex.

Whither marriage? For a week, Mothers Who Think examines the battered but unbowed institution No regrets I was an unashamed mistress. Wisdom ancient and new That was Then: Keep it clean This is Now: Ask the madame: Two days of foreplay does the trick - - - - - - - The winners of "Is this marriage doomed?" First place Second place Third place

Lilith may be the closest thing the modern mistress has to a patron saint. If Eve is the perfect companion, Lilith is the perfect seductress. In her presence the whole of paradise isn't worth the price of an apple. She's independent, mysterious, every wife's worst nightmare. Tradition maintains that Lilith gives men wet dreams. She has all the talent, all the skill a mistress needs to succeed at her art, which is just a polite way of saying that Lilith is the first narcissist.

She certainly isn't the the last one. Through the ages, mistresses have practiced their narcissism, sometimes exquisitely tortured, other times smashingly tragic, to rapt audiences and rave reviews. They've called it "romance." They've called it "love." And some -- including Victoria Griffin in "The Mistress: Histories, Myths and Interpretations of the 'Other Woman'" -- have even enlisted Lilith herself to make their case.

After all, she's the one whose temptations lead to man's sexual awakening, the woman who, while Eve is busy making babies, taunts Adam by hovering forever at the vanishing point of erotic promise.

How pathetic, then, that the mistress -- smitten by self-love -- never recognizes that she's as incidental as a midwife. True, by drawing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Lilith makes possible their sexual union. But that union is with each other, not with her.

The biblical term "to know" is more than a prudish euphemism. Adam knows Eve in every sense -- from bunny-fucking familiarity to lovey-dovey intimacy -- and all Lilith can hope for is to serve as a cheap bit of porn thrown into connubial foreplay. Lilith can only help Adam know Eve better: If Eve is Adam's wife, Lilith is their marital aid.

So why is the woman depicted by history, literature and art as a virtuoso of deception so deceived by her own striptease as to believe that she loves the man she services -- and that he loves her? That is the question that Griffin has put it upon herself to answer.

"My basic position," claims the author, "is that I stand alone and find security only in myself. This is actually true for everyone, but it is not generally recognized; the popular conception of marriage deliberately blinds people to it, with the erroneous idea that security can be found in another person and be guaranteed by legal and/or sacred contract."

It's hardly surprising that the mistress sets herself against the wife; the mistress needs the wife to legitimize her role, to provide the groundwork on which she can pitch her tent as "the other." What's interesting is why the mistress needs that groundwork at all, why she so desperately wants to camp out.

The reason is that the mistress sets possession in opposition to love. Taken seriously, marriage entails monogamy: The married woman agrees to be the possession of her husband, and the married man agrees to be the possession of his wife. They are shared property; only the mistress, living outside the marital bond, operates under no obligations whatsoever. Alas, what she never sees is that wedlock demands of love more than the periodic four-star triple-X orgasm.

To reduce love to sexual intercourse is to lose all context, to mistake laying bricks for making a home. Bricks are cheap because they're interchangeable, whereas a home, made unique by the dirty, gritty effort of living in it, is priceless: To lose a home is emotionally devastating not because it entails losing a bunch of building supplies, but because it involves cutting short a narrative.

The monogamous love of marriage demands emotional engagement in the absolute. That lifelong commitment, and all the dents and scratches it acquires through the work of carrying it out for richer and poorer, through sickness and health, gives anything that happens in marriage an emotional depth of a magnitude unimaginable in a casual context. In a society otherwise devoid of permanence, a world otherwise lacking any sense of purpose whatsoever, married fighting is the most painful, married sex the most pleasurable, married love the most meaningful.

Next page | Marriage stands alone against the ephemeral world