Tag: jealousy

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 at Dawn, revisited

Almost exactly two years ago I reviewed Sex at Dawn on this blog. One of the things I predicted was that it would sollicit a massive counterattack on the part of those who found its central tenets too threatening. I am happy to say that this reaction has been a lot more muted than I expected, despite the book’s success. Our species is readier than I thought to look at its image in the mirror.

A lot of the criticism of the book that we have seen in fact does nothing to invalidate its core conclusions – it’s more like sniping from the bushes than all-out warfare. And I do not doubt that some of those who criticise it really think some important ideas are missing, and some of them are right. However, tedious trawling over references misses the central point: there never was any scientifically reasonable account of a monogamous organization in pre-agricultural human societies, and other accounts are much more plausible. Having shown this, Sex at Dawn has, for now, become the standard narrative. The authors don’t have to show beyond all possible doubt that their account of early human sexuality is correct in every detail, because they are not taking on an established scientific theory, they are taking on a cultural narrative which has polluted the science. There never was any monogamy “theory” worthy of the name.

I am therefore unimpressed by and, given that I am a multidisciplinarian, not a narrow specialist, do not intend to read, reviews which purely criticize this or that aspect of what ithe authors say. I invite the critics to correct the account so we can get to a more accurate and plausible story than Ryan and Jetha have managed. I myself can see that there are some phenomena which their theory does not explain (it is after all not a theory of everything). I do not doubt at all that future accounts will differ in many respects from theirs, but they will not differ in respect of the central conclusion – there never will be a robust theory of primitive monogamy.

I also believe that there is quite a volume of evidence which I believe points in a convergent direction and Sex at Dawn does not even review, in particular the evidence from the psychoanalytic tradition and recent work on somatoform disorders. To my mind, Sex at Dawn does not really endeavor to explain those elements of contemporary behavior which some might (and do) cite as evidence in support of primitive monogamy, but had it had this goal, there is plenty more it could have done.

This article for instance sheds light on the (predictably) almost ignored subject in psychiatry of morbid jealousy, and to my mind is highly suggestive of the conclusion that jealousy itself is part of a neurotic complex due to the system of property which has been overlaid on human nature. Definitely, jealousy does have a psychodynamic explanation as the theory of the Oedipus complex implies; in that sense it is “natural”. No one is saying that there is no competition within the cooperative unit of the tribe. But it is expressed in contemporary society in ways, under circumstances and with consequences which would certainly not have arisen in primitive societies. This is extensively discussed in Salovey’s 1991 compilation of essays on the psychology of jealousy and envy which presents plenty of reasons to caution against highly simplistic conclusions about innate human nature based on how jealousy is experienced and expressed in contemporary society.

Essentially, the cooperative tribal unit becomes competitive when resources are scarce – including when scarcity is manufactured. The socially manufactured scarcity of sexual expression and opportunity leads to jealousy very predictably, and replacing it by abundance erodes jealousy even today, as plenty of couples can testify. Simply put, jealousy is a capacity we all have to employ emotional manipulation in order to hoard scarce resources to the detriment of wider social units. Sexual jealousy would have been highly disruptive of primitive tribal societies for the reasons which Ryan and Jetha point out. That it occurs under entirely different circumstances today does not tell us anything relevant at all In fact, in bonobos it seems that sex serves precisely the opposite purpose, namely to elicit sharing of resources such as food where it might otherwise not have occurred. This leads to group cohesion and greater resilience vis a vis external threats.

So Sex at Dawn has done better than I had hoped – it seems there is no longer anyone seriously defending the naturalness of sexual exclusivity as a social institution on the basis of scientific evidence. That means the way is open to investigate a host of issues which until now have been taboo.

Ultimately, I doubt though that paleoanthropology will tell us much more about human nature than it already has. The great appeal of Sex at Dawn is that it makes sense of feelings we may all have, but have been taught to suspect. In this way it  opens a way forward for a much more generous humanity than we have been conditioned to believe possible. The sentiments on which proponents of monogamy base their conclusions have in reality been generated by they themselves, and we are at liberty to construct alternative narratives. I am told I should love only my children, but in fact I love all children. I am told I should desire only my spouse, but in fact desire is much broader. I am told I should be jealous of men who are interested in my spouse, but in fact it has the propensity to create a deep bond with them. And I am told that if I display any of these sentiments there must be something “wrong” with me or my primary relationship, but in fact acknowledging all of this makes both my sense of self and my relationship only stronger.

In fact, all of the inherited narrative (as I shall henceforth call what Ryan and Jetha call the “standard narrative”) seeks to constrain me; I do not recognize myself in it all and see it only as a tool of social control. It would not exist if most did not take the opposite view; but that is proof only of its perfidy, not of its truth.

Sex, pain, and the death instinct, revisited

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been reading a book by Joachim Bauer entitled Warum ich fuehle, was du fuehlst (“Why I feel what you feel”), which is basically a mixture of science and conjecture about the function of the human mirror neuron system. It turns out that the same neurons fire when we perform an act ourselves and when we see it performed by someone else, and this, it is argued, lies at the basis of our ability to experience empathy and to intuitively read the emotional state and intentions of the other.

A leitmotiv of the book is the idea that social interaction performs an essential role in neurobiological development. Famously, though probably apocryphally, Frederick II is said to have conducted an experiment whereby children were raised without hearing human language; deprived of this stimulus, they are said to have died. Perhaps more believably, controversial experiments on macaque monkeys have shown that, deprived of social contact, they develop psychosis. This conclusion is not new, but it appears we are starting to uncover some of its neurobiological foundation.

Controlled scientific experiments cited by Bauer in the book show that social exclusion can generate pain in the same centers that register physical pain. We have for some time known that the perception of physical pain is not a simple function of external stimulus, but also factors in, and fundamentally, psychological aspects – what that pain means, or is thought or feared to mean, to the perceiver. Now further we know, and this is backed up in a 2005 paper by Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Liebermann, entitled Why It Hurts to Be Left Out, that purely social factors can induce pain which is similar in all respects to “physiological” pain (indeed, it is physiological pain).

Interjecting a couple of points of my own here: firstly, pain is something we are wired to avoid. Indeed, we avoid it instinctively, even if we are consciously prepared to confront it knowing it has certain benefits (or more accurately, is a by-product of processes which have such benefits). The greater the pain we experience, the more we privilege its avoidance over any rational assessment of the benefits to ourselves of enduring it. Secondly, what is already true for physiogenic pain is true, of course, a fortiori for psychogenic pain (or perhaps I should call it “sociogenic pain”), namely the pain we actually experience is a function of our psychological state at the moment of the stimulus. There are common features, perhaps, but there is no standard human response to life events which modify our social constellation such as bereavement, loss of ones job, retirement and so on. Just as touch, which might otherwise procure pleasure, will feel painful when applied at a point where we have open wounds, so also the same life event will be experienced by some even pleasurably whereas it might have the most excruciating effect on others. In medicine this is called hyperalgesia.

Indeed, this is true to such an extent that it leads to a necessary qualitative distinction in any discussion of psychogenic versus physiogenic pain. Certain life events, such as bereavement, are probably universally painful in at least some degree, and therefore comparable to fractures, burns, stings and so on. In other words they signal to us a real and universal need to bring the healing resources of the body to bear on the wound inflicted. The vast majority of situations and events which cause psychogenic pain, however, are not like this at all – our reaction to them is intensely personal and someone else’s reaction to the same events could be totally different.

As I am in the business of giving personal development suggestions in this blog, and not just describing things, allow me then to say that it is extremely important to make this distinction. There are many things in the world in relation to which vast swathes of the population are in a neurotic state. It is thus statistically common to observe a similar reaction to these things in many people. Nonetheless, this does not make these things natural or inevitable sources of pain. They may even be natural sources of pleasure.

This is likely the case in many instances where many people – men and women – experience sexual jealousy. There are many grounds to suspect that observing ones partner and other people one loves being sexually intimate with others, or to learn about it or hear of it, is in fact naturally pleasurable, and was experienced as such in our Urwelt. Just to cite a few: there is the vicarious experience of pleasure which I mentioned before; the social bonds which it creates to the new sexual partner; the prospect of half-siblings improving the life chances of ones own offspring; the prospect of ones own enhanced sexual gratification as a result; and so on. Perhaps most convincingly, there are people who enjoy it. There are not many who enjoy objective sources of physical pain.

Nonetheless, many people experience this as pain. What to do? It is easy enough to say that one should stick out the pain and eventually it will die down and be replaced by pleasure. However, as any sufferer from chronic pain will tell you, this is not even necessarily true, much less is it a sufficient motivation to endure a potentially long and painful journey to a seemingly uncertain destination.

I do not have a simple answer either, but I think some reflection on what causes this hyperalgesia may point the way. Already when it is understood that the person suffering from jealousy experiences physical pain, it becomes clearer than it might otherwise have been that their reaction to this experience is, to a significant degree, outside of their control. Anger or recriminations in relation to it are pointless. Indeed, worse than pointless – such a reaction invites the sufferer to feel guilty, deny their pain, or submit to the other, refreezing and reinforcing the factors which led to the experience of jealousy in the first place.

Jealousy is felt as alienation – a withdrawal behind the defenses of the ego and a loss of the sense of contact with the world, a sense which was clearly tenuous to begin with. Alienation in childhood becomes self-fulfilling prophecy in adulthood. The cycle can only be broken by showing empathy and connection – not by withdrawing it and leaving yet another victim abandoned carelessly on life’s highway.

And this really brings me back to the essentiality of social contact, of touch and of sexual expression also. It appears that there is nothing in humanity’s basic repertoire of interaction which is merely “nice to have”, which we can ignore or neglect without fear of consequences. The idea of freedom without community – cultivated the world over as a spiritual value – is in fact a nonsense, or at best something which is only possible on the basis of a very strong foundation of community in the past.

Bauer tells familiar stories and some less so. That the passage into retirement is an explanatory variable for mortality rates. How couples seem so often to die in close proximity to each other. But also of how persons condemned for their crimes by the community to expulsion, voluntarily take on themselves the duty to die. The biological stress engendered by social exclusion is a self-destruction program, eerily like (though Bauer does not make the connection), Freud’s posited death instinct (Reich’s response to which I discussed here). And I guess this makes some sense, both because there does, after all, appear to be such an instinct in the animal kingdom* (though this certainly does not mean that Freud’s treatment of it was correct) and because it is something that many character types may intuitively understand – not only masochists.

Persons experiencing jealousy have an injured sense of connection to the world, such that they need to hold on to symbols of that connection and turn particular people (often partners, but also kids) into such symbols. They respond to perceived threats to those symbols – perceived through a magnifying lens of paranoia – with self-destructive behavior, just like those on whom the tribal shaman has pronounced a curse.

All too often, fearful of the intensity of this reaction – which is truly akin to a reaction to a life-threatening situation – and burdened anyway with their own sense of shame and guilt, their partners will apologize, try to reassure, try to salvage the fragile trust which existed, or seemed to, before. It is in the nature of things that this is not possible. This type of connection to the world is too tenuous and artificial to be anything more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. What the jealous partner needs in such moments is empathy, grounding, and connection – not desperate attempts to re-become a shattered symbol, but the shattering of the symbolic and its replacement by the real.

Genies do not go back into bottles. In such moments we can meet as demons to each other, or both decide to meet as humans. Almost everything in life that generates emotional pain has great potential for healing, but it is a potential which almost always goes unexploited because the insecurities are not just on one side, but on both. When we decide to meet as vulnerable, hurting beings it may just be that we finally realize we are not, and cannot be, alone.

Notes

* Illustrated at cellular level by the process of apoptosis, and also observed in many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder where the underlying monotrauma results from a direct human agent.

Jealousy

Today I took my little boy to the childminding service at the school which is organized before classes start.

By way of background, I am probably the most obsessed person in the known universe on the subject of the attitudes of adults towards my children (and in fact all children). I am infinitely sensitive to the frequent occasions when those adults project their own neuroses and unresolved emotions onto the kids. When I see or feel it, there is no room for compromise. I am also in love with my little boy. I rely on him for most of the spiritual enlightenment I am ever likely to obtain. He is amazingly charming, almost always happy and playful and he has a really tender side also. He’s three (nearly).

Despite being impossible to please, I am pretty happy with the school. It’s not perfect of course, but it could be a lot worse. We feel comfortable sending him there.

The lady in charge of the childminding service seems to love him particularly. Whenever he arrives, he is greeted with open arms and a warm heart. As I love him and care for his wellbeing, what more could I want?

So, where I stand on this is pretty clear.

To my surprise, though, this morning, how I feel about it apparently is not. Continue reading “Jealousy”