This merits a much longer piece, but I want to get the idea out there.
In Les Regles de l’Art, Pierre Bourdieu describes the emergence in the 19th century of a concept of autonomy in the sphere of cultural production, whereby progressively artists shook off the constraints of the need to conform to sanctioned norms and/or to communicate a “message”, in favor of “art for art’s sake”. To be an artist was to be someone whose duty of truth to him- or herself took absolute precedence over any other consideration.
This, I see, merely prefigured a wider emancipation of humanity which is still only at its early stages today, and not yet widely recognized as such.
The concern to live a good life has for a long time been the preserve of philosophers and theologians, figures who occupied a consecrated position within the hierarchy of social power. Even the artist’s freedom to create has not always meant a freedom in personal life, an ars vivendi (neither has the philosopher’s souci de soi).
As the social institutions of religion have collapsed in Western society, new religious movements have stepped in to occupy the space vacated. These movements have sometimes been of a mass nature, but also sometimes are little more than a clan. The easy availability of information in the internet age has also had a profound effect on these dynamics, rendering them both more ephemeral and more centripetal. But almost all of these new movements, to this day, seek to do exactly what religion has always sought to do, that is to respond to the human need for community by building social systems in which degree of initiation determines place in the hierarchy and ideas are turned into doctrines and dogmas, falsely dehistoricized to become foundational myths. However, in the modern world it is very hard to monopolize habitus and many forces militate against ever recreating the religious empires of the past.
The discipline of inquiry taught us by the philosophers potentially contains a grain of truth, but since Plato until modern times it is certainly thought of wrongly: as a search for what is “out there”, can be uncovered by reason and accordingly should guide our behavior. As I have argued before, this project in reality (the tyranny of reason) seeks only to control us in the service of a possibly (once) imperative social goal, but not one we have freely chosen or even, frequently, questioned.
Although most of us recognize that there is no “truth” in art, we are still highly conditioned to believe that there is truth in life; a meaning which is external, which some have found and which we can emulate by following in their footsteps.
In my opinion, our relationship to our spiritual forbears should be no different to the relationship of the artist to hers. Spiritual creation is a work of art, which may uncover something of the structure of the universe but which simultaneously embodies what Zola called “the particular language of a soul”, specific to time and place. It is a universality without universalism, and utterly contingent on this impossible paradox.
Is there evidence that this spiritual field, in Bourdieu’s sense, is emancipating itself from religion and coming into an autonomous state of being?
I have of course not done any historical study and it is very much my impression that almost no-one yet understands or espouses this understanding clearly, although there are clearly echoes of it already in systems both ancient and modern. Driven by economic factors, ego, habit or expectations, most spiritual teachers try to keep their disciples on the hook, and many aspire to found their own dynasties.
I say, spiritual truth can only be communicated as art, and the spiritual teacher must have the attitude of an artist and should be thought of in this way; indeed, the attitude of an artist is incumbent upon all of us, for we are all artists of our own life. There is no possible way that the student can emulate the teacher; the student can only express her own essence. As (even) Jesus said, unless the seed falls into the earth and dies, it cannot bring forth fruit.
It is very hard for those of us who seek truth to understand that it does not matter where we look for it; to understand that, in fact, “truth” is not a very good word. We all tend to think that if one person has truth, another does not; that is the nature of positivistic truth and we are accustomed to thinking it is also true of spiritual truth. But it is not. Spiritual truth, like artistic “truth”, is inborn, in our cells and in our consciousness; no-one can transmit it to us, all anyone can ever do is wake us up to it within ourselves, and to do this they are never more than instrumental. The environment around us most propitious to our spiritual awakening is not a problem we need to solve, it is much more an emanation of what is already inside.
We need to cease the search and become artists of our own lives, surrounding ourselves with and attracting other artists, certainly, but purely for the joy of sharing in their beauty.
This piece is the first in two on the question of how to make decisions in life.
Some decisions we simply take too hastily, using cognitive shortcuts pre-programmed in our brains, and we would benefit from slowing down, thinking them through, applying a structured decision framework to them, and so on. A good example of this class of decision problem is investment. Provided you can frame the problem narrowly enough – i.e. that logically prior issues have been solved – investment decisions will be improved by thinking them through, because they will be freed from several cognitive errors which typically characterize them. This type of problem is simple and much has been written on it, so I will put it aside.
I also want to put temporarily aside the “big decisions” of life – whether and whom to marry, whether to have children and how many, and so on. These decisions will have consequences which, obviously, you cannot compute when taking them. I will reincorporate this type of decision in the second piece in this series.
In this article I want to look at decisions which are more everyday, which obviously may also have uncomputable effects (you sign up for the art class, at which you meet someone who changes your life) but which are usually designed to have more prosaic ones. For example: which classes to take at school; which sports to practice; dietary regime and so on. These are decisions in relation to which a certain amount of “evidence” exists, but where this evidence is not conclusive. Those are most decisions in life, and there is a reason why we have evolved cognitive short cuts to deal with them. It is not my intention to argue that there is nothing to be gained from applying more structured thinking to this type of decision (or other decision heuristics which go beyond “gut feeling”). What I do wish to do is to show that, almost inevitably, we think about this sort of decision in the wrong way. In short, we are so conditioned to acknowledge the supremacy of “rational” reasoning over our instincts that in fact we allow ourselves to be swayed by arguments which have the appearance of rationality but suffer from shortcomings which are so pervasive and fundamental that we would almost always do better to ignore these arguments altogether.
I am going to take an entirely typical example, of the kind we encounter many times on a daily basis, at least if we try to keep ourselves abreast of the news. Let us say we read a journalistic article, purported itself to be based on a scientific article, reporting on certain alleged health benefits of yoga. Those benefits speak to some issues or concerns we have with our own health, and so the idea has been put in our minds of giving yoga a go. Should we?
Please note that this example is just that. The media disseminates claims like this all the time. For example, we might read that playing a musical instrument is associated with higher intelligence. Or that bilingualism is negatively correlated with Alzheimer’s. Or that a diet rich in proteins results in more durable weight loss. And so on, and so on (I made all those examples up just to give the flavour of the type of truth claims we are dealing with and the problem which they pose).
Now, let us suppose that the underlying scientific study is at least correctly carried out and that the journalist has not entirely misrepresented its conclusions. Those are already two hefty assumptions which may or may not apply, but the context may give us an indication as to the confidence we can have that they indeed hold (for example, this is, ceteris paribus, more likely to be true of an article on the BBC than in the Daily Mail). What errors may we still make if, on this basis, we allow the article to modify our behavior?
A whole host.
Changing behavior has costs. There are the obvious direct costs, which may be greater or less depending on the case: in the yoga example they are likely to be fairly limited (yoga subscription, transit to the class, kit….). But then, there are also the sizeable opportunity costs. Yes, this may be a good use of my time, but is it the best use? Do I need to pre-commit resources up front?
This question cannot be answered unless you know what your priorities are: those outcomes which will make the biggest difference in your life. Ideally, that would be a pre-existing exercise. But even if you know you need to address a particular issue – say high blood pressure – and the evidence presented in the article actually shows some efficacy for the course of action in question (yoga), you can still go very wrong. By plumping for yoga, you go with the availability heuristic, which privileges the course of action you just heard of over what you might need to do more work to identify. By taking action, you lessen cognitive dissonance, and therefore the nagging feeling inside which might have prompted you to do more serious research or thinking customized to your own situation. Yoga will work on some cellular pathways, but those are certainly not the only factors involved in giving rise to your condition. There may be much more important ones, but ones which you are much more resistant to addressing – say your work, your relationships or where you live.
Even if the information is accurate, it has neither been produced, nor has it reached you, by chance. Someone decided to test a particular yoga program (which may have nothing to do with what is on offer in your locality). They did so because they have a predisposition to finding a favourable effect from yoga. But the same favourable effect might be produced in any of a number of other, unresearched ways – a problem which is particularly acute if the mechanism of action is not elucidated or hypothesized subject to a great degree of speculation. So there is a selection bias. This cannot be ruled out on the part of the media either, and if you got the article second hand, say through Facebook, your friend has also selected it in preference to others – with what reason?
In addition, the study may very well be partly or entirely attributable to the placebo effect (which is a great effect, but could be produced in other ways), with remaining variation explained by factors which yoga shares with other forms of exercise and/or other spiritual practices. The participants in the study may have self-selected, and therefore share attributes which differ from those of the population in general, and perhaps also from you. For example, imagine that those who do yoga are twice as likely to be vegetarian. Correlation is not causation: it could be their diet that explains all or part of the variation observed. You, in any case, are not Ms or Mr Average – you are older or younger, fitter or less fit. Yoga may be a fit for your other activities, or it may duplicate the benefit of them.
Now, I am certainly not saying you shouldn’t do yoga, nor that it doesn’t have benefits. I am saying that it’s almost worthless to read the article, and it may be worse than worthless to produce or distribute it. This article has in all likelihood not given you any new information at all. All it has done is make an incremental contribution to the “brand” of yoga as perceived by you. This, by itself, is not the core of the problem, however. The core is the idea you have that science shouldbe your main tool to solve the problem you started out with. Although you have this idea, you have not in fact been scientific at all. You could have been more scientific – for example, read a book that discusses a series of approaches to your problem. That would probably have been a good idea (the article you read was not some kind of breaking news, so no need to be afraid that the book would be out of date). But even if you had done this, the problem would still have been orders of magnitude too complex for you to decide it on the basis of science alone. You not only will decide it on the basis of factors which you cannot really rationalize. But this is the only way to decide it. All the research you can possibly do is merely preparation, hopefully valuable preparation to make a better decision (there is, of course, a trade-off with the time you invested), but it will never provide an algorithm which decides on your behalf. Some people will choose to view this irreducible subjectivity as a lamentable concession to human nature. But, as I will explore in part two, it seems to me that all of the alchemy which turns research into outcomes is there, in the giddying sovereignty of the moment of decision.
Science, just like the mind, is a tool; something else – you – must be in the driving seat. Positivism is unscientific. Science makes a contribution, and yet if you have the belief that your decisions should be guided by science, it is very likely that, in combination with cognitive and selective biases, you in fact are led into decisions which are worse than those you would have made had you not had this belief at all.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act…
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response…
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
“Orgasm is the body’s natural call to feminist politics” – Naomi Wolf (*).
Many feminists take a dim view of the use made of images of women in advertising and in pornography. They argue that such images almost invariably involve an objectification of women, a reduction of them to little more than a collection of sexual attributes, devoid of personhood and without agency, confined in a role dictated to them by patriarchal society and arrayed for consumption by the male sexual appetite.
This argument is partly tautological (in the sense that images are necessarily objects), and often modified in practice by free speech considerations as well as the argument by some that consensual fantasy, even if it depicts scenarios which draw on patriarchy for their erotic value, does not necessarily reinforce patriarchal values themselves (even if it leaves them unchallenged) and should be embraced as a safer outlet for fantasies which it would be more prejudicial to pursue in the real world. Nevertheless, feminist objections to female iconography betray an underlying preference on the part of many women, unsure as to what a “depatriarchalized” female sexuality actually would look like, to choose to behave in such a way as to avoid being branded a slut, which is perceived as, and indeed is, effectively a form of social ostracization. This choice is understandable, but it is not neutral or necessarily pro-feminist.
The desire to be taken seriously has historically often required women in different walks of life to forego visual strategies of seduction and those women who pursue a different track – including so-called “sex-positive feminists” – are often suspect outsiders in the feminist community. At best, they may be viewed as serving up a form of feminism designed to appeal to men’s nature or patriarchally conditioned preferences, and thereby denatured ipso facto.
There is no denying that employing those visual elements most often associated with the objectification of women, whether as part of a feminist counteroffensive, or simply because that is what one wants to do, is a tactic fraught with danger and not the best choice for everyone. But in choosing their strategies of resistance, women need to be lucidly conscious of the fact that they are caught in the type of double-bind which typically characterizes symbolic oppression. Either they claim positions in society entirely analogous to those occupied by men, thereby ratifying the patriarchal order, or they align themselves with a socially despised underclass, attracting opprobrium from men and women alike: that is, from all members of that multitude, regardless of their gender, who continue to think, whether or not despite themselves, in patriarchal categories.
For patriarchy, sex is a male drive, and some women are assigned the role of gratifying that drive. This assignment is not willy-nilly of course; it follows a very structured course which allows the drive to be adequately gratified while at the same time ensuring the reproduction of a social system in which all males have a sufficient stake in the status quo to defend it by political and military means. Patriarchy thus has always used the lever of access to women’s bodies in order to achieve its prime historical purpose, which is to control men (although the control of women per se has also become important over the last century and a half as women have gained in societal power). The conditions of expression of sexuality by men are a major theme of patriarchy, but male sexuality itself is not problematized; women’s sexuality on the other hand is assumed either not to exist or, in complete contrast, to be insatiable and dangerous.
Patriarchy, in other words, is neutral towards male sexual expression; but it is not neutral towards love. For the (male) guests at Plato’s Symposium, the idea that one could love a woman with comparable passion to how one might love a man was simply unthinkable. Loving a woman was socially subversive in classical Greece, the stuff perhaps of Gods and heroes in times past but not of free, land owning men today. For them, free women were objects of symbolic trade (and slave women of monetized trade); sentiment could not be allowed to disrupt that economy.
For us moderns, many of whom probably believe we have experienced something which we feel to be biologically innate and which we call “falling in love” (but which may be merely limerence), Plato’s conception of eros seems a surprising drive diversion. And evolutionary considerations would suggest it is. Nevertheless, the strangeness of the Greek romantic imagination should not allow us naively to imagine that our own conception is purely a biological restoration. On the contrary, the conditions under which we are allowed to fall in love are tightly controlled by society. Absent these conditions, it is not simply that we are condemned to fail in our amorous endeavors; in fact we are little more likely than the ancients to notice or acknowledge our feelings at all. For this reason, we have little idea what the experience we call “falling in love” would have looked or felt like in the ancestral environment, even if I would not exclude that a phenomenological or anthropological enquiry might tell us something (of which I might be ignorant).
So, the kind of feminism I would like to see might better be termed “love-positive” than “sex-positive”; that women adopt a positive attitude towards the biological capacity for physical pleasure with which they are born seems like something that should be able to be taken for granted. It would be good if feminism were to insist on our capacity as a species to love and nurture, including, but not limited to, heart-based, non-exclusive sexuality. Nevertheless, I fear that a “love-positive feminism” would quickly be assimilated to a desexualized one because of the sublimination of sexuality we are all conditioned to operate.
The conversion of the female body into an object of consumption is indeed an artefact of patriarchy. Nevertheless, the role of female iconography in contemporary society also differs vastly from that in Antiquity. Although clothing has a longer history, techniques of mass visual reproduction are very recent. Even the depiction of the female nude in painting only really took off with the Renaissance, and it was a radical break with earlier Byzantine norms (even if, it seems, rapidly embraced by the Papacy…).
Of course, this Renaissance artistic movement was no resurrection of Hellenistic esthetics, but a creation which drew on Greek and Roman archetypes for its own purposes. Representation of men was far more common than that of women in Hellenistic art, and female representations are essentially unknown in the classical period; in Renaissance art this proportion was completely reversed, with the female body, and erotic scenes featuring it, clear themes of predilection. The purpose of this can scarcely have been anything other than male titillation, but the bringing of the female form out of the whorehouse and into courtly palaces represents a concession to its erotic power which must have been profoundly disturbing to indentured wives, daughters and maidservants, and probably to many men within courtly families also. This development, I believe, can hardly be seen as a further reinforcement of patriarchy, hypothetically confident enough to bring into the light those practices which previously had been reserved for the shadows; rather, these inanimate forms, fantasy women created by men for men, represent to my mind the first stages of the crumbling of patriarchy under the weight of its biological, and increasingly social, contradictions: a process which continues to this day and is, of course, still far from complete.
Over the course of history, patriarchy has effected a constitutive bifurcation of women into two antagonistic groups, imposing monoandry on, and denying sexual agency to, the one (essentially those women engendered within patriarchal clans), whilst making the second (slaves and outcasts) available for the use of the males of the society as a whole. Almost all of the portrayal of women in art from the Renaissance onwards has been of courtesans and concubines, or of figures adopting their attributes. The allegedly higher status, but desexualised, class of women qualifying as wives is absent from the collective imagination. This bifurcation, which doubtless stretches back into remote antiquity, gave rise to what Freud called the Madonna-Whore complex. This is certainly a hypocritical double standard. But it is also inherent to the intersection of male sexual drives and patriarchy.
What is new with the Renaissance is that the courtesan is celebrated in art rather than despised. It is important, indeed, to note that these two archetypes are not equal alternatives. The Madonna archetype enjoys superior (if still limited) social status and is unmarked; the whore archetype is stigmatized, including by the madonna herself, and is marked. The subordination by patriarchy of the whore to the madonna has fundamental consequences for thinking through strategies of symbolic resistance.
The patriarchally assigned bifurcation of the female, in fact, has been subject to constant erosion over the last ten centuries of Western history as properties of the courtesan have been transferred to the sought object of legitimate romantic passion, bringing love into the matchmaking paradigm and subverting more strictly patriarchal norms of arranged marriage. Courtly love was the first manifestation of this slow cultural earthquake, in which for the first time romantic passion was admitted into the public arena, provided that it did not interfere with matrimonial arrangements and was sublimated. The right of women – or men – to marry for love, however, took a long time to be established, at least in courtly and developing bourgeois circles, and is not, indeed, even fully acquired in Europe today (never mind, of course, the rest of the world). Its acceptance has been at the price of the assimilation of marriage-for-love to marriage-by-arrangement, with which, however, it shares little in common (and compared to which it is notoriously less stable).
The whorehouse was an accepted and inevitable institution within the social economy of arranged marriage. The position of the whore-as-archetype, became, however, problematic for proponents of marriage for love. By this I mean (though here I may be speculating) that well-born women, having experienced sexual passion in the context of romantic love, came to view it as their birthright, but were nevertheless still constrained by the patriarchal order of marriage – as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary found to her cost. To this we should add, as Michel Foucault has pointed out in La Volonté de Savoir, the increasing importance placed upon sexual exclusivity within marriage within the developing bourgeois ambitions of the 18th and 19th centuries, essentially in order to safeguard the blood line and the accumulation of family wealth.
These social developments, which here I can only evoke briefly, resulted in what has become, today, almost a fusion, and frequently an unbearable one, of the expectations associated with the Madonna and Whore archetypes. Women are asked, in the first instance by women’s media themselves, to be both – even though the combination is well-nigh impossible and in any case unlikely to procure any durable advantage. This continuing demand for both archetypes is certainly an indication of the malleability of patriarchy to changed social circumstances to which Bourdieu refers in Masculine Domination. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily indicative of its perennity; it seems to me that patriarchy is really underpinned by militarism and plutocracy and it is shifts in these social variables which will undermine (or are needed to undermine) its ongoing vitality. What feminism needs to do is to unleash the inherent contradictions in patriarchy which have been visible throughout history and harness other forces in our psyche.
By rejecting sexual empowerment, women reject only one side of the bifurcated patriarchal feminine in favor of the only other of the binary choice of options socially prepared for them. It is very difficult to bring into existence alternative archetypal paradigms, and almost impossible as long as the existing paradigms retain their force and serve their purpose. Choice ratifies and strengthens the bifurcation itself, whilst having no effect on the net exploitation of women, as the patriarchal economic order is left untouched by it, and this order can always create the supply of “whores” which it desires. The only subversive choice – the one made, in his way, by Michel Foucault – is not to choose. But this choice is only subjectively available: not choosing will result in social assignation to women of the “whore” label anyway – because sexual shame structures the entire patriarchal system. In the same way as Foucault was socially assigned to the marked category of gay, though he never made that identification.
It is clearly unfair – in fact it is an oppressive manoeuver – simply to dismiss women as their own worst enemies. Society cannot indoctrinate women with patriarchal views and then complain that they exhibit patriarchal attitudes. By far the most likely reason women engage in slut-shaming is to convince patriarchal males of their own chastity and to reinforce the Madonna-norm to which they have chosen to submit since, having made that choice, they are invested in it. We all know, and feminists better than anyone, that women are in part the vehicles of their own oppression, but that is because the odds are stacked against them by the system within which they are constrained to operate.
There is no Archimedean point outside of the structures of symbolic domination which can be used to bring the whole thing crashing down – we are condemned to work within it and this is what makes the whole enterprise so painstaking slow. Nevertheless, so-called sex-positive feminism, while there is plenty to debate and criticize within it, is not a watered down version of the real thing, designed to avoid the latter’s full social consequences: it is in fact the most subversive form of feminism yet devised precisely because it appeals to men on an instinctual level which bypasses, however temporarily, some part of their patriarchal conditioning. It is a power which merely needs to be self-aware.
“Sex-positive feminists” and “slutwalkers” may be vilified for allowing themselves to be objectified but in fact they do not “allow” this at all, they are merely subject to it because of attitudes embedded in patriarchy – attitudes which need to be challenged and changed. As long as patriarchy prevails, women are likely to be oppressed by one or other of the symbolic categories of oppression, madonna or whore, which constitute the two poles, both socially constructed, of the patriarchal bifurcation of the female. There is no choice which renders neither calumny applicable. The core patriarchal oppression, however, is embodied in the figure of the madonna, not in that of the whore. The whore archetype is a secondary manifestation, structurally dependent for its existence and its power on the primary strategy of denying female agency – of denying, in fact, female humanity. Given this, slut-shaming is a counterproductive response by women, and one which is moreover inoperant since the supply of whores and that of madonnas will always attain a patriarchal equilibrium as long as madonnas themselves continue to exist. If an individual is not sexually empowered, the whole system remains in place; but if all women chose the whore over the madonna, neither would be any more.
Notes
(*) “Feminist Fatale: a reply to Camille Paglia”, The New Republic, March 16, 1992
A couple of days ago, I discussed the problem of sexual labels. In this post, I want to zero in on my own search for an adequate label to represent my approach to relationships (to be distinguished of course from my sexuality) and to suggest that this can only adequately be resolved within the framework of a much wider concept. (The title of the post is a bit of a spoiler: sorry for that!).
At first sight, there are a few alternatives to choose from. Subjectively, however, all of them, to my mind, are not only insufficient but positively distortive. Let me explain in a few words why.
Let’s start by throwing the terms out there. There are three expressions which I have on occasion used, and therefore which presumably displease me less on some level than the others: these are “polyamory“, “open relationship” and “consensual non-monogamy” (CNM). Then there are also terms which I do not use, but are somehow related and therefore potential candidates for my verbal affections: “free love“, “relationship anarchy” (RA) and “swinging“.
The main problem with polyamory, CNM and swinging is that these notions, because they are rather broad and mainly defined by what they are not (i.e. monogamy), do not necessarily imply a commitment to full female agency. Many people pursue polyamory, CNM and swinging because they want to satisfy certain sexual or emotional desires, without necessarily critically reflecting on those desires and without an explicit ethic of either agency or commitment. This is why I have written my own cultural critique of polyamory. The well-known “how-to” book The Ethical Slut is a good example of the problem: it starts from patriarchal norms and imagines itself subversive of them (such as by using the word “slut”) but in fact betrays a considerable concern to reassure as to the compliance of the proposed behavior with unacknowledged patriarchal norms of female behavior (presumably there are also “unethical sluts”). To this I immensely prefer those sex-positive feminists who, whether and to what extent they actually are sex-positive or not, at least claim the right to do what they want sexually and not to have to justify it.
The result is that each of these terms (due of course to the societal base-rate of patriarchal attitudes) is used in practice by considerable numbers of people with values not only different from, but fundamentally opposed to my own: especially men who believe it is OK to impose a restriction on their female partner’s expression of her sexuality towards other men, and women who believe it is OK to acquiesce in such a restriction or are not even aware that they are doing so (which is slightly less blameworthy but still unfortunate).
“Free love” sounds attractive, even self-evident, even if a bit dated. I am guessing though that cultural historians would mostly concur that, whatever the probably considerable cultural impact of the free love movement, freedom of love was not one of its achievements. The free love movement had, and, to the extent it still exists, still has, two major flaws. One, again, is its uncritical attitude vis-à-vis patriarchal norms, which continue to enslave both women and men notwithstanding their desire to constitute themselves as free subjects. The second problem, which is closely related, I believe, to the first, is contained in the notion of “love”. In practice, free love had an ideology of love but focused on abolishing societal values and laws stigmatizing sex (as a result, its ideologues often place undue importance on the legalization of sex work, a position which can be discussed on its own merits, but has nothing whatsoever to do with love).
The societal values opposed by proponents of free love, which I am certainly not defending as such, nevertheless proscribed certain sexual behaviors in an effort to find a socially negotiated equilibrium between women and men. This equilibrium, being negotiated under conditions of patriarchy, obviously was always heavily marked by relations of power. But, nevertheless, simply dropping these norms never meant abolishing the symbolic power of patriarchy, and may even have reinforced it. This is because, while some norms restricting women’s freedoms are indeed patriarchal in nature, other norms restricted men’s freedoms, and historically represent achievements of the feminist movement, however perverse some of those achievements may appear when viewed from the partial angle which the free love movement proposes.
This is most clearly illustrated by the development of norms restricting male polygyny. It is likely, as Foucault implies in L’Usage des Plaisirs, that these norms were initially developed in the interests of militaristic agendas, and so are loosely “patriarchal”, though a more sympathetic historian would probably point to their value in societies subject to external existential threats. If the development of the norms, however, can be viewed as patriarchal until at least recent times, the development of their actual enforcement and subtle ways in which they have changed has been largely driven by feminist demands for status, security and the well-being of offspring. Moreover, patriarchal norms limiting female self-expression are written deep in the structure of society, into women’s very bodies themselves; espousing their abolition, even entirely sincerely, does not bring about their abolition in fact. It is thus a low-cost strategy for a man to espouse “free love”. These deep norms anyway remain in place, while the surface norms which limit a man’s freedom are more easily abandoned. I believe deeply in the ideal of free love, but a social critique of the notion has to take seriously the objection that it is highly asymmetric and does little if anything to empower women sexually in reality.
The same objection can be made to all the other terms. Certainly, under any of these headings, there are people, even many people, who have an ethical commitment to freedom for both women and men. But there are also people, perhaps also many people, and sadly also of both genders, who do not.
This, to my mind fundamental, issue gets obfuscated, frequently violently, because all of these terms are thought of as philosophies of freedom in relationships, and under conditions of patriarchy the realization of these freedoms is always going to be asymmetric. In fact, the case can be made that the demand for freedom itself is not a progressive, but a reactionary demand which is propelled by patriarchal considerations.
Although like anyone I am a big supporter of my own freedoms, this has never been how I thought about relationships. It is not my desire to come up with a concept which ring-fences the scope of restrictions which women’s societal interests might place upon me within relationships. Rather, I have a fundamental ethical repulsion to the idea that I might unnecessarily and unreasonably limit someone else’s freedom in order to further my own self-interest. I am sure I do so unwittingly, and I am aware that societal norms do it for me whether I have active agency in the process or not, but I am committed to self-examination and doing whatever I can around me to counter this bias, including trying to help women to understand that what they “want” is not what they really want.
This is, obviously, an attempt to discover forms of relationship in which women have full agency, forms which, I am convinced, are a lot better for the planet and for men. It is a sort of feminist agenda, but it differs in terms of focus. Feminism, for understandable reasons, deploys most of its energy in the critique of patriarchy. And this is very necessary and must continue. The idea of “post-feminism” I find absurd. However, few feminist thinkers have really imagined a post-patriarchy, or taken full advantage of recent insights into human ethology. They have tended to assume that the patriarchal order suited the interests of men, and been dismissive of the idea, espoused by people like Pierre Bourdieu, that the vast majority of men are also its victim.
As I see it, neither men nor women have the slightest objective interest in patriarchy and we should all unite in a struggle to identify its strategies and disarm it. It is only when we appreciate the mechanisms underlying the social construction and reproduction of patriarchal norms that we can start to do so. The assumption of male agency, and exclusive male agency, in the reproduction of patriarchy is fundamentally distracting.
The notion that men get to control women’s sexuality is not only a cornerstone of patriarchy but doubtless its very keystone. The imposition of monoandry on (most) women, whether freeborn or slaves, appears to have characterized the vast majority of human societies, both in practice and as a matter of ideology, since the beginnings of urban civilization at least. Perhaps we might even go further and speak of anandry, because whilst the man had a right of sexual access to his spouse, not even this much applied in the opposite sense. Women’s sex lives probably varied between deeply unfulfilling and entirely inexistent.
As I said, as far as I am concerned the unconditional and irrevocable abandonment of any claim on the life, affections and behavior of another human being is an ethical imperative and a prerequisite of the spiritual process I have referred to, in baptizing this blog, as “becoming human”. Women and children are not the property of men and cannot be treated as such in a humanism worthy of the twenty-first century; every vestige of such patriarchalism has to be uncovered and uprooted. My concept of becoming human, for all extents and purposes, at least insofar as I am meaningfully able to discuss it intersubjectively, coincides with the dismantling of patriarchy and the restoration of biologically innate behavior (although I am of course aware that there is no such thing as a deculturalized biology, hopefully what I mean by this is sufficiently clear from what I have written elsewhere).
My approach to relationships flows from a constructive engagement with the imperative of building a post-patriarchal social system. This is its essence. I can hardly accept to describe myself using terms which at best relegate this essence to a secondary position and at worst lump me together with people whose ideology I find repugnant.
Therefore I am proposing to coin, or at least promote, a term which surprisingly seems to have little academic pedigree to date. I am going to call the project of creating a society which is rid of the normative and symbolic presence of patriarchy post-patriarchalism. As monogamy is an impossible institution in a post-patriarchal world, this term necessarily implies, in the context of relationships, a form of polyamory which cannot be normatively monoandrous. Post-patriarchalism obviously implies concerns and an agenda which go beyond romantic-sexual relationships. In a broader sense, though, patriarchy (like virility and femininity) is a fundamentally relational term, which only has meaning to describe the social structuration of male-female relationships.
That still doesn’t give me a great word, and it’s a bit of a mouthful. But I hope it at least resolves what for me would be an intolerable ambiguity. I am a post-patriarchalist, committed to the sexual agency of women, whom I definitely trust, if empowered and on aggregate, to make the world a better place than it is now, and men better people. At the same time, we should not be under any illusions: most people, even feminists, are unaware and unsuspecting of how deeply the tentacles of patriarchy reach within them and shape their modes of thought. Men are also disempowered. The very notion of feminism as a marked category relies on patriarchy as an unmarked one. I am fully behind a feminist agenda, and yet it is in the nature of symbolic resistance that it inevitably creates an us-versus-them mentality of which we need to be acutely aware. Feminism is perceived as posing a threat to the relative position of men in the society in which we live because it would operate a rebalancing in favor of women.
This perception, however, aligns the vast mass of disempowered men with the interests of an empowered elite – just as that elite would wish and has always engineered – an elite which, moreover, itself disregards in plain sight the same values which it instrumentalizes and promulgates (again largely unconsciously) for the purpose of social control. In fact, I would go further and say that the control of women’s sexuality has never been a goal in itself: it has “merely” been the means employed by society to control the behavior of men. Thus many men believe they need to struggle against feminism because feminism is opposed to their interests qua men, and therefore they align themselves with the interests of patriarchy, which is much more deeply opposed to their interests. This is precisely the mechanism which reproduces the symbolic domination both of women by men and of men by elite (male) interests.
In a war of men against women, conducted within the symbolic universe of patriarchy and on its terms, it is obvious who will win. Feminist strategies will not eliminate patriarchy even centuries from now unless they address the central facts of symbolic domination. Thus, feminism is commonly thought of as striving for equality for women. However, equality is an extremely loaded term, and one which does not really mean what it says. Entitled groups have long appropriated the struggle for equality in such a way as to ensure it never happens in fact, because what is sought is impossible: it essentially amounts to pretending that disadvantaged groups can one day become advantaged groups. Perhaps a few will, but the vast majority cannot. This is not a strategy for social change but for social reproduction. The problem is not the distribution of advantage, but advantage itself. Thus, feminism will never fully realize its goals if all it seeks to do is extend male advantage to women. This is playing the patriarchal game by the patriarchal rules. It’s fully legitimate and I would never oppose it, but it is not strategic. Given that patriarchy oppresses both men and women, and given that its abolition would benefit both men and women, a way needs to be found to coopt all those of good will which does not frame the issue only as one of men vs. women. Men need to understand that they enjoy a relative advantage over women as a result of patriarchy, but they also pay a huge price for this; women’s emancipation is not a zero-sum game, but an intrinsic consequence of a whole new project of a much better society.
We are certainly not in a world where the goals of the feminist movement have been realized: far from it. Nor would I advocate shedding the label. But I think we need to be aware of some of its limitations and look for complementary notions which make clear that women and men have a common enemy, which is patriarchy. Those women and men who are reaching for personal empowerment need to strive to reinvent social institutions freed from all traces of patriarchy, not just from male privilege. These institutions need to do much more than make men and women formally equal: they need also to make them happy. Therefore women and men should unite under the banner of post-patriarchalism in their, and everyone’s, shared interest. And it seems to me that this must start in the bedroom, and it must start with an unequivocal renunciation, by men, of any attempt to control or limit the sexual and emotional freedom of women. Post-patriarchalism implies non-mononormativity in relationships. Once this is clear, who really cares what we call the relationship structures which will result?
I have never been a huge fan of composer Gustav Mahler, whose work instinctively comes across to me as overdone, bombastic and self-important. Judged by his music, he seems a thoroughly disagreeable fellow. Apparently this is a fairly good approximation of the truth.
In her book Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, Elizabeth Wilson devotes quite some space to the interesting question of why female artists in the century from about 1850 to 1950 never attained anything like the recognition of their male counterparts. The book lacks social theory or particular psychological insight, largely contenting itself with colorful stories. But let’s see what we can do with that.
Alma Mahler
In painting and sculpture there are a few figures to which (patriarchal) criticism has ascribed minor note, in music none at all. Clara Schumann probably comes closest, but she was to write “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it“. Alma Mahler, née Schindler, Mahler’s wife until he died at the age of 51, was a socialite in fin-de-siecle Vienna and had also been a promising composer in her youth. When she became engaged to Gustav, who was at that time director of the Viennese opera, however, “he sent me a long letter with the demand that I instantly give up my music and live for him alone“. She had her personal reasons for her decision, but apparently they did not include an admiration of his art: as it does for me, she confided that “his art leaves me cold, so dreadfully cold. In plain words, I don’t believe in him as a composer“.
One of the reasons Alma accepted Gustav’s to my mind outrageous preconditions seems to have been the hope of salvation in married life from a deep sense of shame about her youthful impulses. Wilson reports her as writing in her diaries that “He wants me different, completely different… And that’s what I want as well“. Gustav accused her of having been “seduced by the false and detestable antimoralism of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch“, a claim I can only take as direct testimony to her moral qualities…
I have the good fortune to be partnered with a female artist and it seems to me that men have a responsibility not simply not to stand in the way of women’s épanouissement, but to be aware that women themselves are as much prisoners of symbolic domination as men (and make no mistake, most men are prisoners of it too; they may, as may women, be its unwitting agents, but they are far from being its architects). This means that they do not only often lack self-confidence or face a skeptical world, but they themselves lack the symbolic constructs needed to imagine themselves differently(*). You cannot simply take a woman’s self-limiting beliefs (and a fortiori sexual attitudes) and accept them in the name of “respect”; this is all too easy and scarcely disturbs a typical man’s patriarchal smugness. You have to work alongside her to help her discover herself without any consideration of self-interest (such a consideration could only be a miscalculation in any case, it seems to me). This also means loving confrontation.
It takes, inevitably, a great spirit of self-awareness and vulnerability to play this role in a way which escapes the pitfalls of being a new form of domination. And I am not saying, of course, that I succeed in that consistently (or at all). However, Mahler’s manipulation of Alma into the role of muse (and even this she did not get to play – with him anyway) is patent to modern eyes, as is the skepticism with which we are forced to assess both Alma’s and Clara Schumann’s self-analysis.
Alma and Clara were the victims of symbolic domination, with or without male agency (it seems that Robert Schumann was a good deal more enlightened and supportive than Gustav Mahler – but what could he do against a whole social system?). This generation and the next of women artists, musicians, poets, doctors, stateswomen and business leaders should not be. And that is our shared duty as it is indubitably a path also of male liberation.
Notes
(*) As Bourdieu puts it, “Les dominés appliquent des catégories construites du point de vue des dominants aux relations de domination, les faisant apparaitre ainsi comme naturelles. Ce qui peut conduire a une sorte d’auto-depréciation, voir d’auto-dénigrement systématiques… La violence symbolique s’institue par l’intermédiaire de l’adhésion que le dominé ne peut pas ne pas accorder au dominant (donc a la domination) lorsqu’il ne dispose, pour le penser et pour se penser… que d’instruments de connaissance qu’il a en commun avec lui” – Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination Masculine, Paris: Seuil 2002, p.55
These days it seems there is an ever increasing list of terms that people use to refer to their sexuality. As Dan Savage humorously put it in reply to a polyamorous letter writer, who was asking to join the LGBT acronym, “We are no longer the LGBT community. We are the LGBTQLFTSQIA community, aka the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, leather/fetish, two-spirit, questioning, intersex, and asexual community/communities. I don’t see why [not…]?“.
What’s going on here? Are we uncovering ever finer detail of the deep structure of the human psyche by successive iterations? Obviously not.
When a new term is coined, there are people who adopt it because they feel it avoids some of the connotations of existing terms with which they were uncomfortable. If, however, they are already invested in the existing term, they may do this only with reluctance or not at all. This is because new terms have their origin in a sense of dissatisfaction with the assumptions about oneself inherent in existing terms, but once they are coined they become an element of identity. The search for identity by means of the adoption of labels sounds a lot like it is a quest for personal meaning, but in fact it is something else: labels are an instrument of social structuration and our predilection for them derives its origins from our tribal nature. We use labels – sexual or otherwise – because we find them to be a key to unlock social doors; to pre-identify as “one of us” and thereby lower the barriers to acceptance, perhaps even claim a right to inclusion.
It is common to say that, these days, we live in a world of overlapping identities. What this means in essence, and this is probably a better way of putting it, is that each of us is simultaneously a member of multiple tribes, some quite local and, in this, more resembling ancestral tribes, others quite open-ended imagined communities (a term Benedict Anderson first applied to the social construction of nation states). These multiple loyalties may coexist peacefully, but also may come into painful conflict.
When one points these simple – and widely recognized – facts out to persons who strongly identify with one or other label, often one gets into very hot water. But what were queer people before the word “queer” was invented? What were “relationship anarchists” before that expression was created? The history of language shows that there will be more words created that suddenly people will cling to as “the” word that captures who they are. These words are social constructions, strategies in a struggle against symbolic domination.
To understand the meaning of words, as philosophers and sociologists have argued ever since Wittgenstein’s symbolic revolution in the theory of language, we need to look at the uses made of them. People are inclined to imagine that words such as “heterosexual” or “straight” describe something that has existed since time immemorial. This is far from the truth: they are neologisms (“heterosexual” first attested in 1892, in common use only since the 1960’s; “straight” in this meaning first attested in 1941; source: etymonline.com). These words have come into the language and are used exclusively in opposition to oppressed categories of thought and behavior, first and foremost within oneself. Critical social thought has to identify hidden motivations in the structure of discourse. All of us have many deep seated fears. Biologically, everyone can enjoy same-sex intimate touch. Those who choose to exclude it categorically do so, ultimately, and whatever their rationalization, out of fear.
The war of words is fundamental to social progress or, conversely, social regression (as so well illustrated in Orwell’s 1984). Nevertheless, the only coherent attitude is one of non-identification. Although a universal strategy, it really makes no sense to identify with labels, because a label is a word, and each of us is a living being. In the same way as Magritte’s painting of a pipe is not a pipe: it is a painting, a signifier and not what is signified. There is nothing wrong with labels, obviously: we need them to carry on a discussion. There is only something wrong with how we think about language: it does necessarily name preexisting “things out there. There is such a thing as a lemon, arguably, but there is no such “thing” as polyamory, it is just a word, used by people to try to communicate their values and lifestyle in opposition to perceived social norms, It is a term those people have chosen, and it means what they want it to mean, i.e. different things for different people. Any one person’s meaning of it evolves over their lifetime, and it may be that at some point they will find another label that better describes them as they then are. Throughout the process, it is not only unnecessary, but it is illogical, to identify with the label. But this is difficult because labels create tribes, and people naturally love their tribe.
This is not to say that there are no “things” at all, no biological or physical basis for the terms we use, no logical distinctions at all: merely that these “things” are not coextensive with the label. Thus being same sex attracted may be a birth condition, but it isn’t necessarily, and so, as Foucault has shown, “homosexual” is a social construction, not a thing in itself. Indeed, everything about sexuality is socially constructed. The very word “sexuality” is a social construction, which has been used with its current meaning only since the 1980’s. The sexual trajectory of some persons who identify as “homosexual” may encompass (or have encompassed) members of the opposite sex at some point, even if in most cases it seems that it may never. Whatever the reasons for our sexuality we have a right to express it (consensually of course). But one should not choose a label and then preclude self-development for fear of exclusion from the tribe which it names and to which it is assumed to belong.
For those of us who think of ourselves as being on a spiritual path, it should be evident that we cannot simply decide that something we are now is what we will be for the rest of our life, we have to stay open to change: because being on a spiritual path, a path of inner inquiry, is the same thing as recognizing that we do not yet know ourselves fully.
So why are many people so virulent when it comes to anything perceived as calling into question their labels, even when there is no question of adopting a repressive stance towards the behavior which they name? I think for two reasons. Firstly, because it is such a relief to have a term which affirms an aspect of ones personality which had been unnamed and in all likelihood repressed. Finding a term means that giving up on repressive social norms does not mean, as it otherwise might, exclusion from society; it can be used to find others whose worldview does not depend on the norm in question; perhaps it can change society itself. But in the same way the virulence also betrays insecurity: insecurity as to the acquired status of the legitimacy of the behavior in question, but also as to the adequacy of the definition we have found. Is this really me? Or am I once again only finding myself to lose myself again?
We are accustomed to think of the act of “coming out” as one of moral courage, and indeed it often is; but Foucault’s unwillingness to do so surprises us all the more for a moral courage which is even greater, no denial of his nature but a willingness to live unnamed. For someone so aware of how language shapes thought, and in turn behavior and society, this was perhaps the only coherent choice.
Yesterday I cited in annex to my post on Sex at Dusk what is a very handy summary of the post-structural turn in the social sciences. Do check it out: it is a comparatively accessible explanation of what is wrong with how most of us view the world. To summarize it in even fewer words: social categories (like “gay” or “straight”, “handicapped”, “sick”, “mad” etc), don’t exist “out there”, they are made up and in constant flux, on the one hand socially negotiated and on the other subject to individual agency. This field of meaning both transmits and transforms culture intergenerationally. The world is the product of our thoughts, and our thoughts can change it; which of course does not mean that absolutely anything is possible, but it does mean that social institutions are a lot more fluid than we are in the habit of thinking, even when their design is not explicitly addressed in the public debate.
It usually astonishes people when I point out how few human generations separate us from what we are used to thinking of as inconceivably remote historical, or even prehistorical, events. They haven’t done the simple math. So here goes: take your pick*.
French Revolution (1789):
9
Trial of Galileo (1633):
15
Excommunication of Martin Luther (1521):
20
Coronation of Charlemagne (800):
49
Sack of Rome by the Goths (410):
64
Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain (55 BC):
83
End of the Minoan civilization (1420 BC):
(Approximate end of the Bronze Age)
137
Great Pyramid of Giza (2560 BC):
183
Foundation of Byblos (approx. 5000 BC):
(The world’s oldest city)
280
Earliest settled agriculture (approx. 8000 BC):
400
It’s nothing, guys. A drop in the ocean. Each of us has only to go back a few dozen generations, if that, before we find officially pagan ancestors, and only a few more before some of them would have been hunter-gatherers. Even if all of your ancestors were agriculturalists, over 95% of your family line as anatomically modern humans were hunter-gatherers.
Every generation recreates for itself the patent illusion of living in a socially stable world. But on Chris Ryan’s most recent podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell mentioned that a number of historians would qualify middle Victorian England as more oppressive than contemporary Saudi Arabia. The same guy managed to get himself fired from Columbia for not much more than applying modern social theory to the history of the United States: analyzing it on the basis of the conflict between individual drives and the norms of the social elite, rather than class struggle or the progress of liberal enlightenment. This is a world that changes at a helter-skelter pace, in ways which of course are both good and bad, but on the whole I doubt if any of us would, if he or she were able, voluntarily choose to live at an earlier period of the history of our culture. I know I feel born too early, and certainly not too late. History is going in the direction which I already manifest in my life. There are certainly major ecological challenges, but socially, what basis is there for anything other than optimism?
So we really should cut out the endless droning on about the supposedly catastrophic destination towards which we all are hurtling and, especially, our supposed inability to do anything about it. By writing these words, which seems a solitary, even solipsistic act, I am already doing something about it. Ultimately, it is words and concepts which generate culture and society. This is a missionary endeavor in which each of us imagines the future into being, as it were colonizes it. We are not powerless at all: and frankly it is both intellectually misconceived and cowardly to imagine we are. As Martin Luther King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Notes
(*) I have assumed for the purposes of the calculation that the average age of ones parents at birth over the period is 25, which seems a conservative figure, as it is the average over both parents and all children
For those who do not know it, “Sex at Dusk” is a book by Lynn Saxon which purports to “debunk” Sex at Dawn. Everyone seems to be agreed that Saxon has a lot of science at her fingertips and that this unreadable book nevertheless makes a number of valid points.
What people are missing in this debate is, however, fundamental. It seems to me that Saxon commits an error of method, epistemological in nature, and an error of genre.
The question in which the readers of Sex at Dawn are interested is what is the most plausible account of evolved human sexuality given the balance of the evidence. This question is not answered by pointing out errors and misinterpretations in the book. Even if couched in scientific terms, this comes pretty close to an ad hominem attack. On the contrary, given all the obvious societal interests vested in the “standard narrative”, it is the scientific underpinning of that narrative regarding which we should be particularly attentive and skeptical. This is clear from Kuhn, Popper, Bourdieu, and any number of other philosophers and sociologists of science. If you have to choose a null hypothesis, it would be better to go with S@D and not with the standard narrative because this would at least counterbalance to some extent almost everyone’s internalized biases. This would be good and correct scientific method, just as it is the church that should have had to prove the terracentric view of the universe and not Galileo the heliocentric one, once 51% of the evidence was on Galileo’s side. What evidence is there that S@D’s conclusions are wrong, not just that the authors made some errors getting there? The conclusions can only be wrong (in the normal sense of this word within the social sciences) if there are other conclusions which are more plausible. What are these conclusions? A vision of a more “polyamorous” ancestral environment is not scientifically suspect just because the Church Fathers have indoctrinated us with the idea that it is morally suspect. This is an epistemological error which I personally find inexcusable on the part of a contemporary social scientist.
This brings me to the error of genre. S@D is a work of popular science. The intention of the authors is demonstrably to affect the terms of the broader, and hugely important, social debates which sexuality feeds into. They do this by presenting science, but they are allowed, and even required, to be selective given how biased much of the “evidence” is. They are even allowed (thank you, Seneca) to make mistakes. It is a book with an agenda (as all books have an agenda, for, as Derrida famously observed, “there is no text without context”). That is why Saxon’s book can only be an ad hominem attack. Her choice of method condemns her to this. If Saxon believes the balance of evidence points towards monogamy then that is the book she should write. This would, however, be surprising as I think one of the criticisms one might make of S@D is that the “standard narrative” is not actually a standard narrative from a scientific perspective. What it is, is a socially standard narrative (something very different) which is a hidden bias in much scientific writing, especially the more distant the theme of that writing is from actually investigation into evolved human sexuality. Saxon’s book, less excusably given its subject matter, inadvertently proves the point. Barash and Lipton (The Myth of Monogamy, 2001) do the same when they show that we are not naturally monogamous and then claim that we “should” be anyway.
The point is that what we “should” be is up for grabs. We no longer have to take Plato’s word on it. This emancipation from the patriarchal bias in classical moral thought around sexuality, so brilliantly analyzed by Foucault (The Use of Pleasure, 1984), is what S@D sought to achieve, and what it has achieved. S@D has been justly successful in reaching its goals because it is engaging, humanistic, humorous, optimistic, and entertaining. This is how you change the world, if you are courageous enough not merely to analyze it, and particularly in ways that have an unrecognized bias towards the status quo. Wanting to change the world is not illegitimate and the fact that so many in the scientific community seem to think it is shows, I think, something of the power relations between vested social interests and the scientific establishment.
I am not saying that S@D is the last word on the subject, or even that it is a Copernican moment (and the authors are very quick to disown such an idea, as witnessed by Chris Ryan’s comment on one of my earlier articles). There are elements in the conclusions which I myself have argued are incomplete. In a way, in places it’s an engaging caricature. Perhaps this is a moral failing on my part, but I find it hard to be appalled by that. I think what it nevertheless is, is a brilliant popularization of the relevant science combined with true wisdom and compassion for the human condition. This makes it, as I think its short history has shown, a defining moment in the Kuhnian process (which is to be interpreted in a post-structuralist sense given the nature of “truth” in the social sciences(*)) by which one scientific paradigm is replaced by another. The authors achieve this by undermining the forces which maintain the status quo. They manage to dissipate some of the fear inculcated in us by established social discourses according to which we have to hang on for dear life to the disintegrating institution of monogamy because of the imagined catastrophic social consequences of giving it up; rather, we can trust our biology and imagine better ways of ordering our affairs than those which served Roman and later European militaristic expansion so well, and therefore survived that “evolutionary” race, but perhaps are not relevant to life on the planet in the 21st century.
Note
* Cf V. Romania (2013), Pragmatist Epistemology and the Post-Structural Turn of the Social Sciences, in Philosophy Today, Summer 2013 (link).
PS: Before anyone is tempted to conclude anything from the ratings of Saxon’s book on Amazon, do recall selection bias and confirmation bias…
“It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” – Darwin, The Descent of Man
Let me add a few more words of explanation to what I wrote yesterday on the subject of mononormativity, a term coined by Pieper and Bauer (2005) to refer to the normative social matrix of monogamy in its various cultural manifestations. Sociological research into mononormativity is very much in its infancy, meaning that unfortunately there is not a lot I can base myself on in order precisely to map the concept and its influence (I think we have some idea of the economic circumstances under which the monogamous norm developed, but little real grasp on the social mechanisms which maintain and enforce it).
When I was fourteen, the world around me, uninvited, started changing. The hitherto somewhat annoying subspecies known as “girls” suddenly became objects of intense fascination – and intense fraternal rivalry. Handicapped by my childhood emotional injuries, and with no manual to follow, I was ill-placed to play this game. It didn’t take long for this to become clear to me, and so, rather than make a fool of myself, I placed my erotic ambitions on hold; instead I focused on getting into a position of financial independence from which I imagined I would be better able to shape my life. At fifteen, I developed generalized fasciculations which, though it turned out they were benign, I was convinced were the onset of a muscular wasting disease. This was the state in which I spent all of my later teens and my college years.
My pubescent sexuality was born into a social context, one in which I knew, was linked to and cared about the objects of my affection; but it was soon divorced from it. Unable to develop in an integrated way, the sexual drive was transferred to images and fantasms, objects without social context and unable to receive love, with which I engaged in a perplexed monologue. I am sure I am describing here the sexual development of a majority of teenage boys of my cohort in our culture.
Several years ago I did quite a bit of work on my childhood traumas, but this particular, pubescent trauma I never paid much attention to. I have at least the impression that it is generally supposed in psychoanalysis that the resolution of earlier experiences will also resolve later ones and that these latter need no special attention. But this, I now think, is not true; this part of my life also needed to be revisited. Until recently, I had never given it much thought.
In fact I did not give it any thought recently either, but I received a gift of healing during a shamanic soul retrieval session which specifically related to this, and since then I have actively been trying to make friends again not only with my inner child, but also my inner fourteen-year-old : a much unloved and forgotten creature. That I suddenly adopt a caring attitude to him, asking him to contribute to my adult life, is, I am sure, a great and unexpected relief to him.
Pubescent male sexuality is a bubbling soup. The objects of ones affections are not chosen according to some fixed set of preferences: it is a time of experimentation, and tactical opportunism, a game in which one seeks to optimize a complex equation involving not only the girl one is dating and sexual payoffs, but also ones reputation and position in the group. Exclusive partnering, advocated usually by the girls, who to be fair also need a mating strategy, is discovered to be part of the rules of the game, adaptation to which is a pragmatic necessity; it is, however, absolutely alien to the subjective experience and every teenage boy knows it. We are by nature polyamorous, but once we discover the sweet pleasures of the union of body and soul, we dive deeply into it, forgetting, in the intoxication, that the circumstances which enabled it had a lot to do with pure chance and assuming that the rules we played by enabled the reward we obtained.
I think it is by now an established scientific fact that, even if sexual appetite may experience a monogamous phase at the outset of a relationship, this does not last for very long. Monogamy in the early days of a relationship may be natural, but subsequently it is only a choice – or no choice at all. Nevertheless, not only the myth, but the institutions of monogamy pervade society, compelling an unnatural compliance with their dictates on pain of social disopprobium, ostracism or worse. In the same way as society is androcentric and heteronormative, it is mononormative.
Mononormativity does violence to our biological nature and severely limits our extraordinary ability and desire to love. And as I have argued elsewhere, restoration of our biological nature is a prerequisite of sustained spiritual growth, at least at the community level, because human beings are not going collectively to be happy in an environment to which they are biologically unadapted.
In its origins, tantra was as iconoclastic in regard to mononormativity as it was in relation to other social institutions such as diet and the caste system. Tantric practitioners frequently did not even know the identity of the person with whom they entered into sacred union. All this though, of course, was devised in a world far removed from our own. Today, the central image of Shiva and Shakti in yabyum enjoys wide appeal in part because it can easily seem (although this is clearly an incorrect interpretation) to endorse the primacy of monogamy – these primal characters are indeed destined to each other and alone in the universe.
Now, while some schools of tantra orient themselves towards couples practice, this is certainly not generally the case: indeed I know few practitioners who are, by conviction, much less de facto, monogamous in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I would maintain that societal mononormativity influences practice more subtly. People may embrace a rarefied, ritualized interaction with the opposite sex, even a very intimate one, but they do it in a spirit of dissociation from the biological foundation of their sexuality, in a way which is almost ascetic, and certainly unerotic.
My inner fourteen-year-old is mystified by this disenchantment. He wants a place at the table. He likes it messy and raw. Indeed, this for him is alignment with ecstasy; the ascetic, transcendent imagery is incomprehensible.
We can live a life in alignment with spirit only if we are aligned with our biological nature. Then life’s experiences wake us up, move us in new directions, bring healing and creativity; just as falling in love always has, the world over. We are in a state of bliss when we are constantly falling in love with all around us, the physical and biological world and also our fellow human beings. For me, if I review my life, my sexual instinct has always been the major driver of healing and renewal. But that instinct, like the spirit, blows where it will. I am not its master; and in fact I am not the master of anything about myself, I am more like a servant of myself, curious to discover who I am and what I can do and experience in the world. This attitude of humility and service towards ones own essence is, I think, key to the spiritual life and to alignment and abundance.
This is why I insist that all notions of mononormativity within a couple must be banished if its component parts are serious about their spiritual life, and indeed about living their relationship as an adventure in growth and healing. One simply cannot place any a priori constraints on where the breath of spirit may blow. Because we have absolutely no idea, not even the remotest basis for an idea. Radical honesty within a couple only makes any sense if it is based on radical honesty to oneself, a person one cannot presume to know but is always discovering. One cannot bind this unknown self. Indeed, the discovery of self, this unbinding of Prometheus, is the spiritual path.
I do not think this makes dyadic relationships impossible or even undesirable, but I think it is a very strict condition regarding which, at the level of aspiration and shared values at least, no compromise is possible. When desire taps on my shoulder, that is a moment of opportunity and rebirth. I owe it to myself, my partner, and the world, to greet her with open arms.
Amongst those interested in tantra, there is often a tendency to view sacred union in an abstract, metaphysical way which rarely corresponds to people’s experience. This is particularly so when tantra is repackaged as feel-good practices for couples. The striving after cosmic orgasm in union becomes, I have no doubt, a complete illusion for many, which entirely masks the essential radicalism which tantra embodies.
I suggest that, in so doing, we reify an abstraction, while allowing ourselves to maintain an ambiguous relationship towards that which concretely points towards it – its sociobiological context.
A sacred approach to sexuality has to begin at the roots and must be absolutely free of any social discourse which attempts to frame its expression. Transcendence in union, I suggest, is the end result of a process that begins in our bodies. We often try to judge and direct this process, either suppressing sexual instincts or, on the contrary, obsessively stimulating our sexual imagination in order to obtain a response which is not organically present. However, like everything else in life, we cannot productively force sexual feeling either into being or into non-being; we must let it come to us, bestow its gifts, and lead where it will.
We fear the destination of a liberated sexuality only because we bring to it too little awareness or we emancipate ourselves only from a part of the oppressive framing discourse. So many voices in society tell us that if we feel something then it “must mean” X, or if we do not feel it then it “must mean” Y. But feeling a sexual response preordains absolutely nothing, and presents a useless degree of risk only if you are not ready to be free. Otherwise it shows only that you are alive, and offers a bliss beyond analysis, just as does any other transcendent experience such as a sunset, a butterfly, or the laughter of a child. We are always free to choose how we respond to any stimulus, and to my mind this response, whilst not unimportant, is secondary. We may often be lying to ourselves if we claim to admit the feeling but manage the response, but still it is fundamentally true that no feeling requires a certain response. It merely opens our eyes to something that our biological nature wants, to a certain beauty which is already present within.
We cannot claim to consider the sexual act as sacred unless we begin by honoring the drive and allowing it to lead us into plenitude. It may well be a hard teacher, but if we are serious about living in alignment with our nature then we must embrace all of its wisdom and teachings. I see the sexual drive as an inner guru attempting to lead us into the light, but one which is so often suppressed that its distorted, violent manifestations are frequently catastrophic – a fault which is roundly to be ascribed to the distorting discourse and not to the drive itself.
To allow this energy to guide us, it is clear to me, though, that we have to abandon mononormativity. We need also, though, to maintain an incredible openness of heart and hence vulnerability; this is the only way that we will learn lessons and not simply get hurt. Paradoxically it is only by opening ourselves to feeling pain in the short run that we can avoid it predominating over the long run.
This process of opening up has of course to take place in stages. I am not advocating a great leap forwards, and it is fine for me that all sorts of things exist which allow people to take things at their own pace, and even take time out or place limits which they never deconstruct. However, I do not think that it is ethically justified, as some do, to market something in a form which does not make sense just because it allows people indefinitely to maintain a comfortable illusion.
In my opinion, mononormative tantra is simply an oxymoron. Either you remain behind in your nest, or you abandon yourself to the winds.
