Tag: criticism

The fetishization of control

 

Here are a number of apparently unrelated behavioral conundrums. In general we take them for granted, but this in itself is curious.

  • Why is it that there is so much uncertainty as to the basic physiology of female sexual arousal and response: can’t women just tell us?
  • Why does mainstream pornography cater almost exclusively for men and focus on the performance of sex acts where even the pretence that the female participants find them enjoyable is a matter of little, if any, cinematographic concern?
  • Why, notwithstanding copious evidence that our species is in no way predisposed to monogamy, does it seem that many women not only retain a social preference for it, but actually eroticize it to such a degree?
  • What’s up with jealousy? Is it sufficient to rationalize it as fear of abandonment in order to explain its intensity and prevalence?
  • Why, in general, do we find it so hard to break destructive patterns of behavior, and not only sexual ones?

The argument associating the sexual subjugation of women with the rise of settled agriculture and associated property rights is convincing as far as it goes. Nevertheless, it does not explain the tenaciousness of these phenomena, their psychodynamics, which cause many phenomenologists with insufficient insight into mental processes to suspect that there must be more to them than culturally revisionist accounts of human origins allow. If the eroticization of control is not innate notwithstanding its pervasiveness, how has it come about?

When a phenomenon which is not “intrinsically” erotic acquires a subjective erotic charge, we speak of fetish, kink or paraphilia. At its most general, a fetish is simply a member of the subclass of subjectively conditioned stimuli (CS) which give rise on the part of the subject to a pleasurable erotic response; further distinctions relating to the intensity of that response (“turn-on”, “preference”…) are merely a matter of degree. As such, fetish is merely the erotic subclass of a more general set of pleasurable conditioned stimuli, which in turn is a subset of all stimuli with a subjective conditioned response, i.e. also those stimuli which elicit fear or pain, which we refer to as phobias. For expositional clarity, I will speak here only of fetish, but it is useful to bear in mind that exactly parallel reasoning applies to all conditioned stimuli.

It follows that a fetish is a subjectively acquired mental association, resulting either from frequent exposure or from exposure under highly emotional conditions, between a particular stimulus and an erotic response. [1]

For the sake of argument, at least, let us assume that there are also stimuli which give rise to an unconditioned erotic response, so-called  “unconditioned stimuli”, US. It should be noted, however, that the categorization of a stimulus as conditioned or unconditioned is not at all self-evident; whilst there do exist truly unconditioned stimuli such as manual stimulation or electric shocks, which are handy for experiments, most stimuli are conditioned to some degree, and even unconditioned stimuli can be subject to a degree of overlaid conditioning which influences the response. Some associations may seem more objectively relevant than others and therefore be frequently and cross-culturally learnt, but they are still learnt behavior. For example, the fact that you salivate when you smell mum’s (or dad’s) baking at home may not seem like a learnt response, but in all likelihood to a substantial degree it is. Unconditioned responses are very much the exception: in more complex matters such as socialization and sexuality, almost everything of relevance is in fact learnt behavior.

This is just classical conditioning and it is a consequence of how our brain works with emotion; how, in fact, emotion and cognition are tied together. The subject who has acquired a conditioning will have a tendency to seek out the conditioned stimulus, believing it will lead to pleasure, even when it no longer does. That is to say, the initial temporal association between the CS and the US, even if it was completely arbitrary, has led to a cathexis of the CS, anticipating the pleasure of the unconditioned response (UR). For example, imagine that society was able to make and enforce a rule whereby all cakes were red, and the use of red in any other context was prohibited. If then the latter rule were abrogated, the sight of the color red alone would still stimulate salivation. This mechanism has been shown in numerous animal studies.

For the sake of argument let us assume that the scent or appearance of cakes stimulates salivation unconditionally (although as just stated this is debatable). The conditioned response (CR) and the unconditioned response are then identical. This, however, in general need not be the case, and even when it is the case the utility of the association is not the same: the response to the scent of baking confers nutritional advantages and additional pleasures which the response to the color red does not. In fact, one might wonder whether salivation in itself actually is pleasurable and not merely a prelude to some other pleasure, in its turn acting as stimulus input to another system which in order to achieve reward prompts certain action, namely the appropriation of the source of the salivatory response. As philosophers have noted, anticipatory pleasure does not require actual anticipation of pleasure. [2] The associations which we make between stimulus and response, while they may give rise to pleasure, creating it in a way ex nihilo, are not, therefore, innocuous – they may lead us astray, perhaps even in ways which we fail to grasp.

In this light, I conjecture that the eroticization by both sexes of control has the character of an endemic fetish. I choose the word “endemic” rather than simply “pervasive” because the fetishization of control is self-reinforcing, the result of a cultural disposition, namely patriarchy, which as we know is highly resistant to inflection even notwithstanding significant underlying changes in the conditions of its cultural production. At the same time, biology is not entirely lost and the body not simply a blank slate on which anything can be writ. In fact, any strategy of resistance to patriarchy has to start with the body because, even if its echoes may be faint, it is an incontrovertibly different and competing reality.

Now, it may seem to us that an association between, say, the color of the walls of a room and the pain of an electric shock is entirely arbitrary; but if that color has always been seen in that context, and never outside of it, to make the association is entirely natural. There is nothing in the logic of the situation which determines what is a relevant and what an irrelevant harbinger of pain or pleasure; we know from analyzing the world that the sound of the lion’s roar is indicative of the presence of an actual lion and that other sounds are not, but the brain works according to instinctive mechanisms which are merely based on temporal association (occurrence together) and specificity (failure to occur in isolation) within lived subjective experience, particularly in heightened states of consciousness. Causality does not need to be established or understood to become hard-wired in emotional response.

When we label certain sexual behaviors as fetishes and others as normal, we make a value judgment which is also not based on any sound understanding of causality. Examples of conditioned behavior which in the past were almost universal, or are so in other societies today, abound, and yet in our contemporary society these patterns of stimulus and response have in many cases been attenuated or entirely lost. Even in the lifetime of an individual, it is quite easy to reprogram many of these associations: for example public nudity is often associated with shame, and yet many subjects have over time completely overcome this. This shows, if any proof were necessary, that statistical near-universality is no proof at all of necessary biological priming.

A fetish, therefore, does not have to be uncommon in order to partake of the  characteristic psychodynamics of fetishism; and by the same token the frequency of occurrence of a certain behavior may be a necessary condition of its potentially being innate, but it is very far from a sufficient one.

It is probably clear to everyone reading this blog that, even if they continue to experience some degree of residual shame, nudity is in fact innocuous; that it is not associated with any necessary negative (or indeed positive) consequences even if in certain social contexts it may well be. Though obvious to my readers, though, this is anything but obvious to most inhabitants of the planet, who may feel the acutest pain even from showing a few square centimeters of flesh in an “inappropriate” context. And so, I invite these same readers to observe that the expressed longing towards monogamy in relationships on the part in particular of women, and also certain common attitudes of passivity and subordination in the sexual realm, may have nothing biological in them at all. No more than the type of male sexual behavior portrayed in pornography which probably seems to everyone (again, meaning all of my readers) in very many respects implausibly to characterize “natural” human behavior.

In a social context which canonically links sex to romantic interest, courtship and love, and which makes it very difficult to obtain in any other way, it is not surprising that these notions end up being associated and therefore eroticized. Whilst I am not arguing (or of the view) that this is the sole reason for the eroticization of control – which also has a biological priming in attraction and pair-bonding – it seems to me that it is certainly sufficient. And so, “normality” is just another form of kink; one which is produced, as it were, by the banal operation of pervasive social norms. We also see, in this light, that the frequent claim that many more men then women are fetishists is based on an excessively narrow as well as patriarchal understanding of fetish.

Again, this may all seem obvious but where I think this insight becomes truly significant is when it comes to the right attitude to adopt to these endemic fetishes. In the sex-positive community, we are encouraged to be tolerant of kinks and to seek to indulge them to the maximum extent possible, to find mutual accommodations rather than to force kinksters into searching for the most statistically improbable compatible partners. When the kink is something relatively trivial (to anyone else) and it does not get in the way of other forms of expression of the relationship important to the other partner(s), then this is not particularly problematic. However, for endemic fetishes and phobias like possession, exclusivity and jealousy this is much harder to do if one does not have the “matching” disposition (assuming there is one). In this case, whilst one may have compassion for it, one cannot and should not necessarily indulge it without reflection; if the relationship is not to run aground and the partners are incapable or unwilling to make the necessary psychological accommodation, then the fetishes in question will need to be adjusted.

This may or may not be easy – we simply don’t know because we usually don’t, in the space of a single lifetime, try. However, it seems to me in any case that there are plenty of examples of its being successfully effected, and that these tend to follow the classic schema of deconditioning, namely, on the one hand, exposure to the unconditioned stimulus in the absence of the conditioned one in order to establish, by virtue of the biological reality of the unconditioned response, the cognitive possibility of these stimuli not being associated, and, on the other, exposure to the object of phobia whilst observing the lack of actual threat, thereby progressively disarming the phobic response. In other words, what is needed is a conscious, intentional and progressive confrontation of one fears to reality, not in a theoretical way but in actual experience.

In my view, reprogramming sexual response is valuable in itself. A fetishist may lose all interest in “unconditioned” stimuli, but then he or she forfeits the pleasure of the “unconditioned” response. Pornography for example can take sometimes entirely displace the desire for actual sex, but it obviously does not afford the same rewards. There seems to be a pleasure premium from aligning ourselves more closely with our biology. Moreover, the fetishization of control represents an attachment to an impossible ideal, a relationship state which at best may be simulated for a few years but is impossible to maintain or, at the very least, subject to severe biological stress. Relatively quickly, it is to be anticipated that an indispensable condition of arousal will wither away, and the subject is then left with a stunted erotic profile (and all of its physiological correlates).

There may be other advantages of deconditioning too. It is astonishing that we know so little of innate patterns of female desire, even on the physiological level. It would seem likely that we are looking in the wrong place. As feminist cultural theorist Luce Irigaray argues, the fetishization of control is testimony to the almost total absence of the feminine in social organization, an absence which has colossal collateral costs. Female sexual models, indeed even the actual physiology of female arousal, are calqued on patriarchal conceptions of male sexuality (the only kind, obviously, with which patriarchy is actually concerned) and taught to girls through socialization. Biology is soon only a faint echo, so faint and so deeply buried that we cannot recover enough of it to say anything with confidence about it; we are only guessing or basing ourselves on intuition. Irigaray says that, culturally, there is only one sex, the male: and the female is just the non-male. It is a terra incognita, peopled by mythical creatures straight out of our subconscious. The theory of endemic fetish which I have outlined offers an explanation as to how and why this eminently curious state of affairs has arisen.

The take-away is: “normal” is just a consecrated type of kink. But it may well be in our best interests to deconsecrate it; it may even be imperative to our survival as a species.

Notes

[1] “All the forms of sexual perversion…have one thing in common: their roots reach down into the matrix of natural and normal sex life; there they are somehow closely connected with the feelings and expressions of our physiological eroti[ci]sm. They are … hyperbolic intensifications, distortions, monstrous fruits of certain partial and secondary expressions of this eroti[ci]sm which is considered ‘normal’ or at least within the limits of healthy sex feeling“, Albert Eulenburg (1914), Ueber sexuelle Perversionen, Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Vol. I, No. 8., translated in Stekel, W. (1940), Sexual aberrations: The phenomena of fetishism in relation to sex, New York: Liveright, p. 4.

[2] Iain Morrison (2008), Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action, Ohio University Press, ch. 2

Five Rhythms

I have been dancing the movement practice called “Five Rhythms” on and off for a couple of years now, and am presently in the middle of a series of workshops which are subbranded “Heartbeat”. As far as I can gather from the founder’s website, which is not however very clear on this, this is intended to be the second of five “levels” in the Five Rhythms practice (the subsequent ones are “Cycles”, “Mirrors” and “the Silver Desert” respectively – the site is in Java so there are no hyperlinks to individual pages but look under “The Dancing Path” and “Becoming a Teacher”). (Roth also calls these the “first five levels”; afterwards there is still “Embodiment” and “Expression”). Our teacher says that Heartbeat is “the name for the emotional work in Five Rhythms dance”.

Whilst there is a lot of wisdom in some of what Roth says and has transmitted to other teachers, it is time for a working hypothesis of my own in relation to what this practice is and is not, the claims it makes and the place it might occupy in ones personal development practice portfolio.

I dance Five Rhythms and will probably go on doing so basically because I find it a very good integrative practice, as well as an enjoyable way to practice embodiment and embodied meditation. The wisdom of the body is there to be discovered in the practice. Five Rhythms is very popular in the tantra community for this reason.

However, whilst it does not appear to eschew portraying itself as such, which I find very regrettable, Five Rhythms is not a transformative or complete practice, and certainly not a rapid and/or deep one. In my opinion Roth, like so many others, has succumbed to commercial temptation and erected her system into a clumsy systematic “theology” of branded personal growth which is as unconvincing as it is inoperative and unnecessary. Just as access to the Godhead is mediated through layers of priesthood in the folk practice of the church (not in its mystical tradition), so layers of practice are interpolated between the practitioner and his or her full embodied expression in Roth’s schema, and the more there are, the more profitable it is. This is not a new strategy. It has been the strategy of religion through the ages.

I am not of course saying that there is no role for trajectories in such practices at all. But all they are is practices. They are not paths. Roth loses sight of this by pushing her initially perfectly valid observations and frameworks into overarching metaphors which are presented as a kind of key to unlock the secrets of the heart and of being human, but which are no such thing.

As any theory which is helpful enough in terms of what it is designed to explain, its reckless extension by analogy produces only increasing distorsion. Roth’s pentateuchal fetishism in these successive layers of practice reaches levels which evoke the spirit of Pythagorean mysticism. What is to be discovered is no longer innate but increasingly arcane. This strikes me as a dance of the mind, fully disconnected from reality, ungrounded and hopeless.

Let me illustrate. A (supposedly positive) review of Roth’s autobiographical handbook Sweat your Prayers on amazon.de states that as a result of movement work with Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt therapy), Roth “came to isolate five rhythms related to five archetypes or states of being“. Now, the description of these as “rhythms” is itself strange, as they of course are not; they are something more like “musical moods”. That there are exactly five such “moods” (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness) is hardly a taxonomy which exists naturally and objectively. Rather there is an infinitive variety of musical moods, which fade indistinctly into each other. Thus Roth has at the outset chosen what can only be reasonably considered a metaphor, and goes on to overapply this metaphor to everything that comes within her sight.

The same source goes on to say that “Roth claims that even terminally inhibited people can learn to enter these rhythms and sense how it feels to inhabit ‘mother, mistress, madonna, father, son and holy spirit.’ The three feminine archetypes follow a flowing rhythm, according to Roth, while the energy of the masculine archetypes corresponds to a staccato rhythm. Roth discovered that when the masculine and feminine fuse, a rhythm of fertile chaos results, as in acts of artistic creation or love. The resolution of chaos is the lightness and liberation of a lyrical rhythm, while stillness is the most profound rhythm of all.”

This is once again a fully extraordinary statement. Firstly, the identification of the Christian trinity as a trinitarian aspect of the masculine akin to the three feminine aspects embodied in the ancient European triple Goddess representation is to my knowledge unprecedented and very odd. Although there is a superficial similarity (the number three), the feminine trinity represents the three phases of the moon and of adult womanhood; the “masculine trinity” (the Christian one at least) represents no such thing. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of the trinity as such is a late innovation which in no way can be or ever was designed to supplant the cult of the triple goddess. The subjugation of female by male deities had been complete millennia earlier. Thus the two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

The inherent counter-intuitive and speculative nature of the “discovery” of the fusion of masculine and feminine into “chaos” and the rest of the ontogenesis of the Rothian pentateuch (which looks like a discovery of three additional genders) I leave as an exercise to the reader…

In the workshops we have been invited to experience more exotic combinations of the “rhythms”. The “five” emotions (which is Roth’s own and certainly not a canonical list) of fear, anger, sadness, joy and compassion are paired with each of the “rhythms” in a way which is not really obvious, nor consistent with the characterization in Roth’s own book Maps to Ecstasy of some of these rhythms as “masculine” and others “feminine”, and the proposition of a fivefold classification of character (with no theoretical or experimental basis at all) corresponding to each of the five “rhythms”. In my view this is absolutely no reasonable basis for a scientific psychotherapy. It is basically, as another reviewer on Amazon characterized it, “cumbersome and tiresome psychobabble”.

We are then invited to experience one rhythm within another, the rhythm with and without the corresponding emotion, lightness within each of them … an utterly confusing attempt at embodied “visualizations” which sollicited the head far too much for a technique supposed to be centered in the body.

The workshops have primarily involved actual dance, but there have also been some exercises, mostly with no particular power to them compared to what I have found in pretty well every tantra workshop I have attended. I have found that in Five Rhythms it is very easy to avoid contact with the other dancers and this is what most people in fact do – contact is only fleeting and never to the point of discomfort which might prompt psychosomatic response. I see no real reason why the practice, relying as I said on “embodied visualizations”, should reorganize the psychic armoring. In my view this is a secondary phenomenon in the workshops which mainly draws on experiences outside of them. When a psychosomatic response does occur, it is not built upon to the benefit of the group – the workshop leader does nothing with it, certainly at group level.

This is why I characterize the practice as “integrative”. The best experiences I have had dancing Five Rhythms have been when I entered the room with a quantity of open psychic material, as a result of life events or of other workshops. I have felt it has an ability to “sew me back together”. But not to rip me apart. Of course to some degree it might if the very fact of engaging in such a practice is challenging for the practitioner. But this strikes me as a relatively low bar to clear. Most people will be well able to engage in the practice without troubling their resistances.

In short, I still like the practice notwithstanding its quasi-metaphysical psychobabble and I have certainly also drawn benefit from it, some of which I will hopefully describe in future posts. However, I think it would be far purer and more useful in a form freed from the oppression of the omnipresent pentateuchal metaphysic, and less comfortably solipsistic. There is a place, undeniably, for gentle approaches which are accessible to a wider audience, and for restorative methods, not only the deconstruction of defenses; but these approaches should be honest about what they can and cannot achieve.