Tag: pornography

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

Porn as meditation

In which I blast my blog into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Well, we’ll see. There is no intention to court controversy, but, as always, there are some things I just have to say.

Google these two words – porn and meditation – together, and what you’ll get is mostly links to pseudo-oriental “treatments” for (so-called) “porn addiction”. Although many people enjoy (so-called) porn, and sex-positive activists have generally embraced its production and consumption, at least within certain limits/genres, it seems that it has yet to make its way into the mainstream, or even any sidestream, of new spirituality. Continue reading “Porn as meditation”

Of Gods and Goddesses

Our general understanding of the ontogenesis of polytheistic systems in the space which came to constitute the Indo-European world is approximately as follows, and owes a lot to Marija Gimbutas.

Prior to the Indo-European incursions, the religion of Europe, but probably also of central and south Asia, was essentially matriarchal in form (or “matristic” to use Gimbutas’ preferred term). The central Goddess-figure embodied fertility, the earth and procreation, and by extension the nurturing values of motherhood. The ancient world also knew, however, a variety of other female goddesses having varying personalities and attributes. The Triple Goddess is widely attested, representing the phases of the moon and the phases of the life of a woman through youth, maturity and old age. Other Goddesses offer other role-models or express other, “darker” dimensions of womanhood – think of Kali, Astarte or Hera.

Gimbutas doesn’t make a big point of it as far as I know, but we need to supplement this description with certain other elements. Primitive religion certainly knew divinities who were emanations of natural phenomena – the Sun, moon and other planets; rivers and seas; mountains; the weather, and so on – all the forces to which primitive humans were subject or which filled them with awe. We do not know if these divinities were endowed with gender from earliest times. All pre-Indoeuropean languages of Eurasia which are attested (Basque, Etruscan, Kartvelian, Iberian, etc) do not have grammatical gender, so the assignation of gender to forces of nature was presumably not self-evident. It seems also likely that phallic cults predate the Indo-Europeans; certainly they do so in the Indus Valley civilization, but it seems very likely that the various phallic gods attested from European religion – of which the most notable would be Priapus and Pan – in fact belong to a pre-Indoeuropean stratum of religiosity which recognized not only the nurturing role of the earth-mother but also the complementary roles of both sexes in procreation, something reflected in the metaphysics of ancient near eastern creation myths as well.

Into this somewhat pacific universe characterized by a complex female and rather simple male divinity accompanied by various nature-divinities, erupted the Indo-European warrior class which bore androcratic religious traditions, mirroring their social organization; these traditions then took precedence over, though they existed alongside, traditional beliefs.

It is easy to speculate that, whatever complexities there may have been in pre-existing cults devoted to male fertility (sublimited as the essence of the male in the word “virility”), these were swiftly ousted or relegated to a secondary position by the rich array of male divinities which the conquerors brought with them. Where it suited them, nature-divinities could also easily be shared out between the genders and, indeed, on more than one occasion have their gender changed from female to male, as happened when traditional Tibetan religion (Bön) was supplanted by Tibetan tantric buddhism.

The Goddess, on the other hand, while subordinate to the male divinities, suffered from no such process of substitution and continued to merit the devotion of indigenous populations. Even in her much-disguised Marian incarnation, numerous local specificities and attributes continue to exist to this day. In Ancient Greece she seems to have survived particularly well, and with the rise of neoclassicism, Goddess worship found its way back into the mainstream of the European tradition, albeit in disguised forms. Many men practise it in a transparently pagan form to this day – there is a mass market for portrayals of beautiful women inaccessible to the majority of males, and I would take issue with the feminist notion that they are routinely viewed by men as mere passive and frequently degraded objects of their sexual satisfaction (although within pornography itself, this unfortunate tendency is probably on the rise). These (abstractions of) women are routinely honored by their male acolytes with the giving of their semen.

Regardless of how accurate this account is from a historical standpoint, it pretty much represents, I believe, our collective preconscious – the array of symbols available to us denoting female and male. Masculinity is associated with a reduced set of militaristic attributes which characterized also the ancient Indo-european male pantheons, whereas femininity is associated with a much wider set of creative, healing and nurturing attributes of which males have no ken.

Whenever it is admitted that men may also possess or develop such attributes, this is invariably referred to as “getting in touch with their feminine side”. Women, on the other hand, rarely get in touch with their “masculine side” – the phrase would rather imply capitulation to the paternalistic world order (which I decry as passionately as anyone).

As a man, I have one thing to say to this: Quatsch!

It is not acceptable for me that women get to relate to such a funky bunch of goddesses, and I have to look  in the poverty of the militaristic traditions of a bunch of destructive barbarians for inspiration as to what my masculinity means. Yet in the Shiva/Shakti dualism, Shakti is the clear inheritor of all pagan Goddess traditions, whereas Shiva, at core, is the Rudra of the Rig-Veda, “fierce like a formidable wild beast”. Not only do I not accept this, moreover – I consider it a ludicrous distorsion of who I am, and a pervasive, destructive cultural meme which impedes anything approaching a full expression of masculinity in the modern world.

Have I committed here tantric theocide? I hope so. For the Oedipus myth teaches us powerfully that only when the father is overthrown can the son come into his power.