History suggests that millenarian fears of social breakdown are a device which has often been generated and instrumentalized by the establishment in moments of existential threat. Even if such fears reach the extreme stage of collective psychosis, this does not mean there is a real prospect of such breakdown, and in fact the social conditions which have sometimes underpinned descents into authoritarianism in the past are fundamentally different at the present juncture and hardly seem prone to reconstitution. Insofar as such fears bring latent conflicts into the open, whilst they certainly raise concerns and have unpredictable consequences, they also offer an opportunity to unmask these conflicts and to reshape social institutions. Continue reading “Apocalypticism and the next social revolution”
Tag: feminism
Trump versus Clinton – political psychology and patriarchy
If the US Democratic party had chosen Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate – which of course they didn’t, but that’s another subject – there seems little doubt that he would be on course for a landslide in today’s presidential election. Instead, we might wake up tomorrow and find that it is Donald Trump: despite his displaying an abundance of characteristics any one of which would classically have sunk the chances of any previous presidential contender. The world could very easily, therefore, have been very different from how it will now be even if Clinton wins. And yet surely any voter who would have voted for Sanders would rationally prefer Clinton to Trump. What explains the dynamics of this process?
Continue reading “Trump versus Clinton – political psychology and patriarchy”
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
Sex-positive feminism
“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
Post-patriarchalism
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?
Mahler and Me
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.
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
Tolerance and civil rights in the internet age: an essay in honor of national coming out day
Tomorrow is (inter)national coming out day.
I strongly believe that coming out – if you can do so safely – is both personally and ethically imperative. The personal imperative behind coming out is to live ones life in the light rather than in the closet. As LGBT writers and activists have made clear, living life in the closet, though it may be a necessary survival strategy, has extremely perverse effects. The Wikipedia article notes that reasons not to come out include (a) societal homophobia and heterosexism, which marginalize and disadvantage LGBT people as a group, resulting in potential negative social, legal, and economic consequences such as disputes with family and peers, job discrimination, financial losses, violence, blackmail, legal actions, restrictions on having or adopting children, criminalization, or in some countries even capital punishment as well as (b) internal conflicts involving religious beliefs, upbringing, and internalized homophobia in addition to feelings of fear and isolation. Coming out of the closet has even been shown by researchers in Montreal to have significant positive effects on health.
As an ethical matter, one should come out – in Western democracies at least – because the right to do so has been hard-won, and because doing so makes it harder to discriminate against ones community. It encourages others to follow in ones own footsteps, diminishing the personal cost to them of living their life in the light. It also avoids the risk of being blackmailed when ones sexual orientation inadvertently comes to light, and of living ones life in fear. For persons in the public eye this is particularly important.
The Montreal study cited above also contains the interesting observation that “contrary to our expectations, gay and bisexual men had lower depressive symptoms and allostatic load levels than heterosexual men.” (emphasis added)
This may well have been contrary to the researchers’ expectations, but it perfectly coincides with mine. We heterosexuals live our lives in the closet in numerous ways, including but not limited to the sexual. For my part, I can share that I am “monogamish” (that is, de facto socially but not sexually monogamous) and to some degree heteroflexible. In both regards (social monogamy merely being a choice of lifestyle and not an orientation), it is my belief and current understanding, as frequently argued on this blog, that I merely represent what a typical male of our species would be if social restrictions on these ways of thinking and being were removed.
Since I therefore belong to the entitled majority – albeit that majority may beg to differ – it shouldn’t be too difficult to out myself as a member of it. But it is non-trivial all the same. First I had to understand these facts about myself and accept them, which has taken half a lifetime (on an optimistic reckoning: and there may well be more I do not yet know) and then I, just like my LGBT brothers and sisters, have still needed to look societal prejudice in the eye (as well as consider the interests of my family) and say: tough, this is me (and by the way, it’s quite likely to be you too). Like I say, I don’t consider this act by a typical member of the entitled majority particularly brave. I think if I could not say these facts about myself publicly, I would be an outrageous wimp and betray generations of civil rights activists who have fought for the freedoms I now take for granted. I would be free-riding, and possibly living on borrowed time, instead of making my own contribution to a better, more tolerant and loving future for all of humanity. The ethical imperative is so overwhelming it is the greatest no-brainer I know of.
Today I read – I believe it was in Flemish daily Het Nieuwsblad, though I haven’t found a link to the article – that new rules requiring telecoms operators to log internet use are likely shortly to become law in Belgium. According to the article, these rules go beyond a European guideline of 2006, and it has been argued by police and judicial authorities that they need to do so in order to keep up with technological developments and stay ahead of criminals using new technology to dissimulate their plans. The article didn’t talk about civil right safeguards or give much detail on the specific arguments behind the plans. Although I certainly start from a position of caution regarding limitations on freedom, I don’t want to judge these plans here, and certainly not on the basis of that one article. But what does seem to be the case is that the space for freedom of expression which the internet has opened over the last decade and a half is starting, globally, to become a little less private than we thought it was. And this means, the closet is being busted into. Aside from the benefits of coming out, the closet is no longer a safe place to stay.
In the space of only a few years, we have become used to a freedom we never before imagined. The internet has been so tremendously successful as a social platform because it addresses basic human needs to communicate and build community. But long before the state surveillance angle became a topic of discussion, it was already clear that the explosion in the social use of the internet and in self-publishing meant that society was faced with a choice between one of two paths: either to embrace greater tolerance and diversity or to foster an environment in which everyone was enabled and hence driven to share, but nervously required, like in the communist societies of the past (and many of course still today), to look over their shoulder at the possible worst-case social consequences of their sharing.
As time has gone on, this social choice has become more and more stark. It is now certain that both governments and major corporations have the means to put together a very detailed picture of any internet user, even the more careful – their political and religious views, sexual orientation, fantasies and paraphilia, their friends and family, socioeconomic status, and a host of consumption preferences. To some extent the use of this information is constrained by the law: currently insufficiently, but conceivably and hopefully more robust legal safeguards will be put in place. Jurisdictions with stronger rules on online privacy may find themselves at a competitive advantage to host social internet services. Strong encryption systems and distributed peer-to-peer application topologies may wrest a certain level of control back for the user.
But I suspect it will always remain an uphill battle. And the consequence of this is that anything about which you may feel personal shame, or which may be societally disapproved of, always may come to light. Unless, that is, you bury it deeper than your relationship to it may make possible.
This in turn means that a host of situations in which collectively vast numbers of people are implicated and which today exist in a tolerated, if sometimes disapproved of, grey area, may tomorrow have to choose if they are black or white. Legal norms against widespread practices are routinely subject to a degree of latitude in their implementation. But if, tomorrow, we cannot leave this equilibrium untouched, we will have to legislate more sensibly and with considerably more regard for the facts relative to populist sentiment. Not only legislation, though, will have to change merely to maintain the status quo: ultimately, it is societal attitudes which will have to become considerably more accommodating if we are not to find the space for freedom and diversity shrinking intolerably and ourselves facing the prospect of a totalitarian control of society which formerly could only be imagined as the grimmest of science fiction.
I want our societies to be safe, and I want us to stay ahead of terrorist and criminal threats. This is not only a legitimate role of government, but one of its basic functions. Both sensationalist reaction and counterreaction are dangerous, and must make way for serious and informed debate. At the same time, democratic controls over the use of personal data by governments and corporations must be put in place and procedural safeguards made robust.
I also value the ease with which the internet makes information available and allows us all to grow in our knowledge of the world and of each other. The benefit to all of humanity of this must far outweigh the danger which this same fact poses in relation to persons with malicious intent.
Ultimately, we are only going to get this balance right if, collectively, we all grow up. In the internet age, every civil rights issue you ever heard of has merged with a host more of which you have not. We are all interdependent and the freedoms of all depend on the freedoms of each. I feel very close to the LGBT community, as I do to feminist thought and anti-racist campaigners. Ultimately, all of these have a single message: my right to be me. Society, whether through government or private initiative, has a right to limit self-expression only when there is an overwhelming, objective need to do so – not just out of political expediency in response to populist sentiment. This basic unifying principle must be placed at the heart of democratic institutions and of the law and replace the partial protections of the past – based on sexual orientation, race, gender, disability or religion – with a full protection of the human being as such. It must be constitutionally guaranteed.
Religion is the best example of what I am talking about, because unlike all of the other attributes it is not objective : I can change my religion in a way I cannot change my race, gender or sexual orientation. In fact I personally have done so more than once in my life, and am still not too sure what term to apply.
Although religion is not an objective attribute, the protection of religious minorities in fact antedates by far the protection accorded to any of the other categories. This is the consequence of one simple fact: the murderous wars of religion and the eventual realization, first tentatively recognized in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, that it was only if the mutual right to exist was guaranteed by law that sectarian strife could be brought under control and stable, prosperous societies emerge (“Pour ne laisser aucune occasion de troubles et differendz entre noz subjectz, [nous, i.e. the King] avons permis et permettons à ceulx de ladite Religion pretendue reformée vivre et demourer par toutes les villes et lieux de cestuy nostre royaume et pays de nostre obeïssance sans estre enquis, vexez, molestez ny adstrainctz à faire chose pour le faict de la religion contre leur conscience, ne pour raison d’icelle estre recherchez ez maisons et lieux où ilz voudront habiter“).
Yet although religious rights antedate other minority rights by a substantial margin, it is not very clear – any more – what a religion is. Is there a positive list or can anyone found one? In the latter case, is there a presumption of legality, or a process to become included in the positive list? When religions fracture, do all groups acquire the rights of the parent religion, or do some have to reapply? What rights apply to individuals, and which to the religion as such? Do some religions have a more restrictive set of rights than others? What is a critical set of beliefs (or number of adherents) which sets a “religion” apart from a simple philosophical worldview? And so on.
I am sorry if this sounds ill-informed about the jurisprudence on this topic: it certainly is. But the point is that religion, if it ever was a simple matter, is so no longer. The reality is that each of us, today, is free to make up his own religion, and many of us actually do (if you want to try, Daniele Bolelli has even written a “how-to book without instructions“).
In the past, religion involved a choice between a very limited number of options and religions as such could have rights, not just individuals qua members of that religion. Now, many people espouse a religious identity with no audit trail of “membership”, chop and change, may differ widely in beliefs from any sanctioned mainstream dogma, and some religions (such as, to its credit, Islam) never had a single voice of authority in the first place.
Under these circumstances, religious rights cannot mean what they meant in the past – they must extend to the right to live ones life in any way one personally finds meaningful and which is not demonstrably and significantly dangerous to the rest of society or to vulnerable groups (like children) within it, whose constitutional rights may override religious ones. The rest of society may not like a particular worldview, agree with it or (even more likely) for that matter understand it: if it is my own, ever-changing worldview then the latter is certainly the case (not even I could tell you exactly what it is today but it certainly differs from what it will be tomorrow). But my right to hold it must be at least as sacred as the rights of Quakers, or Baha’i, Sufis or whomever. I should not have to seek sanctuary within any of these groups if I do not wish. As I argued in a recent post, true spirituality is creative and actually requires me to be different from anyone else – I cannot follow a dogma.
The internet age demands extraordinary efforts of adaptation on the part of society, but we have the resources we need, in the form of long-cherished principles of political liberalism, to seize this opportunity to build a stronger, better and more inclusive world. By standing up for who we are and what we believe, placing ourselves proudly within the illustrious heritage of all those courageous predecessors, each of us brings that world a little closer.
Cycles of sexual history
I was just listening to an episode of Chris Ryan’s excellent podcast, Tangentially Speaking, in which he talks with Tony Perrottet, who is a historian and travel writer one of whose main themes is sexual practices in times past. By the way, let me in passing rave about the podcast. Ever since leaving Cambridge I have felt deprived of the kind of intelligent and wide-ranging conversation committed to understanding and to changing the world which characterizes undergraduate life there. The podcast is like a window on a lost world which one day I hope to rediscover…
Anyway, in the discussion the theme comes up of whether the sexual mores of past civilizations were more liberated than our own and whether perhaps there is some cyclicality involved. The most abrupt transition they discuss is that between a supposedly libertine 18th century and the Victorian 19th, epitomized by the difference in attitudes between the puritanical Charles Darwin and his paternal grandfather Erasmus, a social progressive and supposedly an avowed libertine (though this appears incidental to his biography).
Is this a correct characterization and, if so, what forces are at work?
I believe this characterization has the potential to be very misleading. The periods in question certainly were characterized by different attitudes to sex, which may have involved sex with more partners or in a wider range of styles, at least in certain strata of society, but leaping to qualify this as more liberated or less repressed is, I think, mistaken.
These styles of sexuality, at least the 18th century aristocratic one which may in large part anyway be accessible to us only through the vehicle of myth, are in many ways reminiscent of things to be found in today’s swinging and BDSM communities. In my opinion, it is problematic to qualify sexuality in these communities as, on the whole, less repressed; to do so rests on a misconception of sexuality which Ryan’s account invites us to reconsider, since it is clear throughout the pages of Sex at Dawn that sexuality plays in human evolutionary biology a social role.
What Sex at Dawn shows us is that this social role remains programmed into our biology and that, therefore, sex in forms which seem superficially to resemble the forms it took in the past are continually sought after. Ryan makes the point that many pornographic memes are likely to be remnants of this collective memory (many of course are not). However, reenacting orgies a la Eyes Wide Shut, where absolutely nothing other than lust drives the proceedings, may well, for a time, be liberating because one dimension of the social taboos on sexuality is momentarily lifted, but it is lifted at the cost of repressing the social dimension of sexuality to which monogamous institutions and their mythology give at least some expression. It is therefore hard to qualify one set of values and practices as more or less repressed than the other, though it is psychodynamically and therefore sociohistorically unsurprising that there may be an oscillation between the two.
The French revolution vectored egalitarian notions which were opposed to the corruption and decadence of the Ancien Regime. The revolutionaries were scarcely prudes, but partook of a widespread indignation at a ruling class which dissipated its sexuality in debauchery and nonetheless repressed the peasantry with great violence (evidence, if ever it were needed, that they were not really sexually liberated, because truly sexually liberated people, like their bonobo cousins, are by default peaceful and loving). The fate of women in this society (whose willing participation, lest I should need to recall this, is required for gratifying heterosexual sex) was a particular concern. Any romanticism regarding a supposedly lost Eden seems to me deeply misplaced.
When we look at classical antiquity we also need to be very careful. Greece and Rome were highly stratified, developed agrarian societies in which, by definition, sexuality no longer played the role it played in primitive societies but was taken up into the mesh of power and property relations upon which such societies were built. Bacchalian orgies were then no more than what they are now: a way to let off steam. The very need to let off steam is perfect evidence of the degree of repression from which natural sexuality suffered at that time.
It seems to me that countless males around the planet are still trapped in this primary patriarchal perversion when they evaluate sexual practices and norms. They display a preference for patriarchal practices and are deaf and blind to the sexual voice of the feminine, which in its turn seeks exasperated refuge in romantic fantasy. In none of these supposedly “liberated” periods did women enjoy anything like an equal voice alongside men in determining the expression of sexuality.
Men have still not ridden themselves of the idea that giving women such a voice would mean behaving in a way which was much less sexually gratifying. They seek to rebuild patriarchal sexual empires, in necessary opposition to an equally powerful social force pulling in the other direction. The primary social neurosis in all of this is the system of property and the violence which it does to our egalitarian tribal nature. In Ancient Greece that had been going on for thousands of years already; it is intrinsically unlikely we should look to such a society for clues as to how to live a more gratifying social life.
I venture to suggest, therefore, that we really are going through a period of transformation which is qualitatively different from what has happened before. I am under no illusion that it will result in a utopia or that it is irreversible, but it is important to see that this phase of sexual history is different from what has gone before for one simple reason. In the past, elevation of the feminine has implied more “repressed” sexual practices and elevation of the masculine, sexual practices which were more “liberated”. But the patriarchy invented sexual repression, even if it dislikes some of its consequences. As it has lost the power to defend its erstwhile islands of “sexual freedom” (brothels, geishas and similar institutions, based on objectivization of women in a state more or less close to slavery), its manifesto has become increasingly opposed to its basic interests. As feminism has made inroads into this system, it starts to reach the point where it can reclaim the primal right from which women have been excluded: their right to an authentic feminine sexuality.
This wave of deconstruction of sexual mores is therefore, using terms admittedly very grossly, led by women/the feminine and mistrusted by entitled males. In this lies the hope that it is really different from the past.
Grrl power
Their aims and methods can be discussed, but the activists of Ukrainian women’s rights organization Femen, which recently opened a “training camp” in Paris, have surely hit on a means of protest – female public nudity – which deserves, and will probably receive, more prominence in the future. This is one of those phenomena which, to me, captures a fundamental shift in the Zeitgeist and may prefigure important and long overdue social changes. For this to happen, however, there is a need for a further shift in feminist self-understanding. Due to recent advances in research into the ontogenesis of patriarchy and its social costs, such a shift, I believe, is at hand; all it needs are sufficiently eloquent advocates.
Femen got started as a means to alert young women in Ukraine to the dangers of the sex industry and to try to get attention from the authorities to this problem. With its move to Paris, a city which once had a global reputation as a cradle of progressive social movements, once wonders if this will change. The group (or incipient movement) has an enviable brand identity, but so far seems lacking in ideological focus.
Femen’s methods are hard to resist because they tap into some deep cultural veins. On the one hand, the patriarchy has, as part of its subversive strategy vis-a-vis female sexuality, offered women a trade-off whereby they have given up their rights to sexual self-expression in return for physical protection and, in recent years, increasing opportunities for personal (of course non-sexual) expression. This protection is far from having been universally effective, but it has entailed inculcating a moral code according to which it is widely considered unmanly to use force against women. Men accordingly, and society as a whole, therefore have difficulties in deflecting these women from their goals, and the more vulnerable they are and the more obvious it is that this is what is going on, the more encumbered is the response of the patriarchy to it, since repression generates greater and greater indignation, even on the part of those who normally tacitly acquiesce in the existing order.
In the past, public nudity might have been enough of a taboo that the fuss around it would have overwhelmed the reaction of solidarity; but it is likely that this is no longer the case. Female public nudity is, in the West, no longer a breach of social contract; violence against women is.
However, aside from this issue of social contract there is also, I believe, a much deeper and far more significant attitude to the naked female body on the part of men which renders this type of protest very powerful in the collective unconscious. This attitude is biologically rather than culturally determined or at least, if culturally determined, draws on archetypes which are much older than agrarian society.
The presence of such a pre-cultural representation of woman in the male imagination underlies Carl Jung’s theory of the anima. This representation portrays women as sexually empowered, strong, intuitive and wise; in many ways the polar opposite of the culturally constructed role – virgin, demure, weak, in need of protection etc – from which almost all seductive power has been eradicated.
Therefore men have created a role for women in which they no longer desire them. This may have seemed to matter little as long as part of the female population was reserved by men to stand outside this stereotype – prostitutes, courtesans, mistresses, priestesses, witches and so on. These women were permitted to don perfectly contrary attributes. And, as time has gone on, men, who have imagined themselves able to get by on images of women quite unlike the culturally manufactured real thing, have had no problem in going on doing so, in art, fiction and pornography. As the man often cares only about the congruence between the image and his anima, projecting this onto the screen of reality through the vehicle of erotic fantasy, this has given birth to a prodigious parallel oeuvre of imaginary social re-engineering.
The imaginary figures to which this oeuvre has given birth are, however, at least as potent a cultural force as their equally imaginary counterpoints. By donning the mantle of the superheroine, Femen rejects the “acceptable” role given to women by society and taps into a powerful erotic script over which the patriarchy is conflicted and to which it therefore has inadequate means to respond. Significantly, this seems almost inevitably to entail an attack on organized religion; consciously or not, the equation between religion, the patriarchy, and the repression of female sexual self-expression seems axiomatic to this new generation of feminist revolutionaries.
In hindsight it seems inevitable that real women would step up to the anima, since in substance it is not a mere projection of the male imagination but an actual, biological representation of innate feminine qualities, albeit (as I understand Jung’s thought) from a male perspective.
Femen make this clear, calling themselves “new Amazons” and adopting a militaristic discourse full of (what is taken to be) characteristically male imagery. But they are equally the symbolic heiresses of historical figures like Joan of Arc, constructed icons like Marianne, and the pantheon of female superheroes so beloved of pubescent boys, from Superwoman through an army of her ever more buxom and unclad avatars: often decried by feminists as sexualized stereotypes and screens for male projection and objectification of women, but in reality not only that: also a hommage to another, indubitably more empowered idea of woman.
The empowered, wild woman is erotically charged for men in a way her tamed sister can never be. This means one simple thing: the male erotic imagination is on the side of this force for social change. And, as women know, this is a very powerful ally.
That they are no longer afraid collectively to appeal to it in defense of their own interests (and of course in reality also of male interests, because humankind has only one set of real interests) represents a sea-change in the balance of power between the sexes. Ultimately, the more authentically we are ourselves, the closer we will come together; this process is naturally self-reinforcing.
What we see at this point of history are social institutions in the eye of a tornado, battered and starting to give way under the accumulated force of our repressed biological nature; they are so weakened that the moment is ripe for something quite new. Beyond their specific social agenda, whatever it may ultimately turn out to be or not to be, Femen points to the coming into being of a fundamentally new space in which conceptions of society will inevitably be reshaped.
Cacocracy
First read this.
Now aside from being brilliant and game-changing relationship advice (it won’t catch on though, mark my words – no one wants to hear the truth that their problems are of their own making, not someone else’s), I want to point out the following.
I am pretty damn sure that almost everyone reading this article, whether they are men or women, and almost regardless even of how strongly they agree with the advice given, in their gut sympathizes with the woman. In fact, I doubt very many people at all – even if, like me, they cried reading this on the train this morning, the delicious yet bittersweet tears of a human being feeling accepted and understood – I doubt that they pause really to think, to dwell on and meditate, the pain of the man.
Vaste swathes of the feminist movement, and of femininity generally, is deeply, indelibly in love with their victim complex. But it is not only women, it is the whole of our culture which is virulently hostile to the emotional, affective and sexual expression of (biological) masculinity and which carries around self-fulfilling stereotypes of “evil, predatory” males and “good, victim” females. And it is very, very hard to resist; to confront it as a man will gain you little recognition as it goes to the core of female neuroses which very few people wish to recognize, and the reaction is likely to be shutting you out of access to even that paltry emotional world of sexual and affective congress that you are allowed to aspire to inhabit. It is, in other words, not incentive-compatible to tell the truth.
We are wedded to the idea that we live in a patriarchy. Some cultural heroes contrast this to an imagined, prehistoric lost golden age of matriarchy. Yet it is a very deep truth, I believe, that both of these terms are meaningless. Male and female can exist in the universe only in equal measure. There can be small amounts of each or large amounts of each, but there cannot be different amounts of each. When neither can flow freely, each will flow in a distorted manner, and these distorsions will be different, but certainly not in any moral sense (there is, after all, no moral sense). And this is what we see – qualitative difference in the expression of the emotional pathology. But not quantitative difference.
I certainly feel compassion for the woman in this story, even if it is hard to feel compassion for someone who is insisting that I make a lie out of my life in order not too much to disrupt her excruciating insecurities. But I also see clearly that making that lie is not simply a least-resistance convenience, without costs. No. It is just as excruciating.
We live in a world where power-over is differently exercised by men and women, in different domains and different ways, but one is not triumphant and the other subordinate. They are simply at war and fight using the tools at hand. Neither can ever win, but they certainly can destroy each other. And this is a reign, not of men over women or of women over men, but of sickness over health or, if you like those terms, of evil over good. A cacocracy.
As the author says (and I hope you read it, but it bears repeating):
There are a few good things in the world. Love is one of them. Love is a gem. Love is one of those rare things in the world that is pretty much good all around. It arises free of cost and does no harm in the feeling of it; it only elevates and brings joy.
I know it also threatens. But for a moment let us please look not at how it threatens but at how it brings spontaneous pleasure. For a moment, why not ask how this gift of human consciousness might serve as the true starting point for relationships? Why not take a risk and see if we can operate on the principle of universal love? What might that show us?
What if it were possible for this man to have an infinite amount of love? What if his love does, in fact, grow the more it is exhausted, the way a muscle grows the more it is exhausted? And what if it shrinks when held immobile, the way a muscle shrinks when held immobile?
And what if your arrangements about sex were a separate matter? What if you were to grant him the freedom to feel what he feels and express it to you as best he can, including the understanding that he tell the complete truth to you, including the truth of whether he has been having sex with this woman, or kissing this woman, or touching her at all? What if you were to abandon all thought of controlling what is to happen next and abandon yourself to the truth, to seek the truth like a thirsty traveler, to lap it up with no thought of what to do with it?
What if we were to use our short time on earth to learn as much as we can about each other by telling each other the truth and listening to the truth? What if truth is painful only because stripping away illusion is painful? What if relationships are a set of dance moves learned in elementary school? What if we have it mostly backward? What if it turns out that what we consider the most healthy relationship is the one that cleaves most fearfully to its model of illusion? What if a “troubled relationship” is merely one that has begun to admit a little truth into its choreography of fairy tales? What if “trouble” is the beginning of “health”?
Exactly. What if trouble is the beginning of health?
One last point. In some comments on this article on Facebook, certain people were tempted to agree with the author on substance, but accused him of adding unnecessary “spiritual mumbo-jumbo” to his case.
The problem with this is that some people are just convinced that human beings are a wretched, mean creature, always selfish, never to be trusted. They hold this view of me, and, presumably, also of themselves (at least I hope they are at least consistent to this very minimal degree). These people will never be persuaded otherwise. There is no hope whatsoever that they will get what the author is talking about unless they can open their eyes to the glory of what surrounds them, figure out that this glory is also inside of them, and finally understand that it is inside of everyone. Yet one can only point it out, and hope. This is what the author does, and I hope I am adding my voice to his.