Easter Is Heterosexual Pride Day

Yesterday, I saw a woman having sex with a jaguar. The beauty lay on her back with legs widespread, as his beastly haunches thrust and recoiled like the machinery on a steam locomotive. Both seemed totally in the moment. Yet there was an eternal element, as he planted seed deep into the moist furrow of her overgrown South pasture. This beastiality was a sacred procreative act. This booty-call was a stone Olmec sculpture.

I was standing in San Lorenzo, Mexico, where once stood the first city of the Americas. There Olmecs invented aquaducts and chocolate. Not bad! Still, like most ancient Mesoamerican cultures, they were more amazed by nature's technology of fertility. Their holy carvings revered milk-producing she-breasts and seed-planting man-sticks to such an extent that a Mexican museum once kept them locked in a men-only cigar room.

We modern urbanites are ignorant about nature. When rain began to fall on San Lorenzo, I instinctively perceived it as a fashion-destroyer, rather than a life-sustainer as Olmecs did. My water comes from plastic bottles. These bottles, which pollute oceans and landscapes around the globe, derive from petroleum extraction, which now contaminates the very ground where Olmecs founded civilization due to an abundance of fresh water. We are often eco-fools.

Likewise, Vatican philosophers argue sex is primarily for procreation, because they must defend stale dogma that pleasure is sinful. Supreme court justices contend sex is primarily for recreation, because they must support current pop dogma that gay sex is just as natural/valuable as boy-on-girl action. This is not surprising. No humans have a greater tendancy to be book smart and street dumb than priests and lawyers.

Back in reality land, if sex aint fun, you aint doin' it right, and the anatomical backdoor is a fun place to visit but a lousy place to procreate - unless you're a bacteria. While the arrogant American and Vatican empires have a few centuries under their belts, people have been celebrating Heterosexual Pride Day everyday from the dawn of time. (Now, don't go calling me a homophobe. While I suspect that 3 or 4 of my girly-man friends could organize and kick my ass, do you really think I'd be afraid of just one pretty boy? Surely you jest.)

Remember that moment in Jackson's King Kong when beautiful petite Naomi Watts took refuge beside the big hairy gorilla, who proudly beat his chest and defended his newly-beloved against a predatory dinosaur? Was it silly? Sure. Is there still some timeless magic in the moment when boy meets girl, then boy adores girl, then boy is ennobled by devoting his savage, testosterone-tormented self to his girl? You damn well better believe it.

Don Henley had an old song where a French painter enlightened an American artist, "Don't you know that women are the only works of art; you're driving with your eyes closed." Whether we learn about life from a French painter or an Olmec sculptor, we all need to ignore the mental masturbations of priests and lawyers, open up our eyes, and see the wondrous world of reality.

Long after the Olmec cult ceased to sculpt, Blue Oyster Cult sang the lyrics of Godzilla: history shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men. (If you want to read more about nature's primal wisdom, check out my new book Fresh Wind & Strange Fire.) Kong and Godzilla movies exploit our deep awareness that the animal forces of the cosmos will never be neatly contained under our technological control. Attempts to abolish or ignore the male/female energy dynamic by interoffice memo or congressional decree are laughable.

This week, as "elementary" students were showing and telling their classmates how Olmec-like chocolate-bunny fertility-figurines symbolize the springtime resurrection of the plants and Jesus, America's loftiest lawyers strove to figure out whether two guys putting their round pegs in the wrong holes equal the tribe's most essential relationship: marraige. Good luck with that, you jurisprudential geniuses!

On a personal level, relationships with the opposite sex can truly seem as painful and difficult as sex with a jaguar. Nevertheless, quitters never prosper. As Tom Hanks quipped in A League of Their Own, "The hard is what makes it great." Ladies who don't fully grasp why "the hard" makes it great are urged to contact me immediately.