Gmail kac attac Firestone 1/2 kac attac Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 1:37 PM To: Stefan Kac throughout time. Even in matriarchies where woman's fertility is worshipped, and the father's role is unknown or unimportant, if perhaps not on the genetic father, there is still some depend- ence of the female and the infant on the male. And though it is true that the nuclear family is only a recent development, one which, as I shall attempt to show, only intensifies the psycho- logical penalties of the biological family, though it is true that_ throughout history there have been many variations on this biological family, the contingencies I have described existed in all of them, causing specific psychosexual distortions in the human personality. x But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals, And the kingdom of nature does not reign absolute. As Simone de Beauvoir herself admits: The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some important truths. Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis - in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action. Thus the 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value. Humanity has begun to transcend Nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it (see Chapter IO). The problem becomes political, demanding more than a comprehensive historical analysis, when one realizes that, though man is increasingly capable of freeing himself from the biological conditions that created his tyranny over women and children, he has little reason to want to give this tyranny up. As Engels said, in the context of economic revolution: It is the law of division of labour that lies at the basis of the division into classes. [Note that this division itself grew out of a fundamental biological division.] But this does not prevent the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the working class, from turning its social leadership into an intensi- fied exploitation of the masses. IO Though the sex class system may have originated in fundamental biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological basis of their oppression has been swept away that women and children will be freed. On the contrary, the new technology, especially fertility control, may be used against them to reinforce the entrenched system of exploitation. So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of repro- duction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility - the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing, And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimina- tion of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimina- tion of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital x differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud' 'polymorphous perversity' ° - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened depend- ence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken. x And with it the psychology of power. As Engels claimed for strictly socialist revolution: "The existence of not simply this or that ruling class but of any ruling class at all [will have] become an obsolete anachronism.' That socialism has never come near IT reforms - a correction of the most blatant inequalities on the books, a few changes of dress, sex, style ("you've come a long way, baby*), all of which coincidentally benefited men. But the power stayed in their hands. II THE FIFTy-YEAR RIDICULE How did the Myth of Emancipation operate culturally over a fifty-year period to anesthetize women's political consciousness? In the twenties eroticism came in big. The gradual blurring together of romance with the institution of marriage began ('Love and marriage, Love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage ..'), serving to repopularize and reinforce the failing institution, weakened by the late feminist attack, But the convalescence didn't last long: women were soon reprivatized, their new class solidarity diffused. The conservative feminists, who at least had viewed their problems as social, had been co- opted, while the radical feminists were openly and effectively ridiculed; eventually even the innocuous committee women of other movements came to appear ridiculous. The cultural campaign had begun: emancipation was one's private responsi- bility; salvation was personal, not political. Women took off on a long soul-search for *fulfilment' Here, in the twenties, is the beginning of that obsessive modern cultivation of 'style', the search for glamour (You too can be Theda Bara), a cultural disease still dissipating women today - fanned by women's magazines of the Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan variety. The search for a 'differ- ent' , personal, style with which to 'express' oneself replaced the old feminist emphasis on character development through responsibility and learning experience. In the thirties, after the Depression, women sobered. Flap- perism was obviously not the answer: they felt more hung up and neurotic than ever before. But with the myth of emancipa- ton going full blast, women dared not complain. If they had gotten what they wanted, and were still dissatisfied, then some- thing must be wrong with them. Secretly they suspected that maybe they really were inferior after all. Or maybe it was just 24 the social order: they joined the Communist party, where once again they empathized mightily with the underdog, unable to acknowledge that the strong identification they felt with the exploited working class came directly from their own experience of oppression. In the forties there was another world war to think about, Personal hangups were temporarily overshadowed by the spirit of the war effort - patriotism and self-righteousness, intensified by a ubiquitous military propaganda, were their own kind of high. Besides, the cats were away. Better yet, their thrones of power were vacant. Women had substantial jobs for the first time in several decades. Genuinely needed by society to their fullest capacity, they were temporarily granted human, as op- posed to female, status. (In fact, feminists are forced to welcome wars as their only chance.) The first long stretch of peace and affluence in some time occurred in the late forties and the fifties. But instead of the predictable resurgence of feminism, after so many blind alleys, there was only 'The Feminine Mystique', which Betty Friedan has documented so well, This sophisticated cultural apparatus was hauled out for a specific purpose: women had gotten hired during the war, and now had to be made to quit. Their new employment gains had come only because they had been found to make a convenient surplus labour force, for use in just such time of crisis - and yet, one couldn't now just openly fire them. That would give the lie to the whole carefully cultivated myth of emancipation. A better idea was to have them quit of their own volition. The Feminine Mystique suited the purpose admirably. Women, still frantic, still searching (after all, a factory job is no man's idea of heaven either, even if it is prefer- able to woman's caged hell), took yet another false road. This one was perhaps worse than any of the others. It offered neither the (shallow) sensuality of the twenties, the commitment to a (false) ideal of the thirties, nor the collective spirit (propa- ganda) of the forties. What it did offer women was respectability and upward mobility - along with Disillusioned Romance, plenty of diapers and PTA meetings (Margaret Mead's Mother Nurture), family arguments, endless and ineffective diets, TV 25 Peace Corps; others went underground. But wherever they went they brought their camp followers. Liberated men needed groovy chicks who could swing with their new life style: women tried. They needed sex: women complied. But that's all they needed from women. If the chick got it into her head to demand some old-fashioned return commitment, she was "uptight' 'screwed up', or worse yet, a *real bringdown. A chick ought to learn to be independent enough not to become a drag on her old man (trans. 'clinging). Women couldn't register fast enough: ceramics, weaving, leather talents, painting classes, lit. and psych. courses, group therapy, anything to get off his back. They sat in front of their various easels in tears. Which is not to suggest that the 'chicks' themselves did not originally want to escape from Nowheresville. There was just no place they could go. Wherever they went, whether Greenwich Village c. r96o, Berkeley or Mississippi c. I964, Haight-Ashbury or the East Village c. 1967, they were still only "chicks" invisible as people. There was no marginal society to which they could escape: the sexual class system existed everywhere. Culturally immunized by the antifeminist backlash - if, in the long blackout, they had heard of feminism at all, it was only through its derogation - they were still afraid to organize around their own problem. Thus they fell into the same trap that had swallowed up the women of the twenties and thirties: the search for "the private solution" The 'private solution' of the sixties, ironically, was as often the 'bag' of politics (radical politics, thus more marginal and idealistic than the official - segregated - arenas of power) as it was art or academia. Radical politics gave every woman the chance to do her thing. Many women, repeating the thirties, saw politics not as a means towards a better life, but as an end in itself. Many joined the peace movement, always an acceptable feminine pastime: harmless because politically impotent, it yet provided a vicarious outlet for female anger. Others got involved in the civil rights movement: but though often no more directly effective than was their participation in the peace movement, white women's numbered days in the black movement of the early sixties proved to be a more valuable 27 experience in terms of their own political development. This is easy to detect in the present-day women's liberation movement. The women who went South are often much more politically astute, flexible, and developed than women who came in from the peace movement, and they tend to move towards radical feminism much faster. Perhaps because this concern for the suffering of the blacks was white women's closest attempt since 1920 to face their own oppression: to champion the cause of a more conspicuous underdog is a euphemistic way of saying you yourself are the underdog. So just as the issue of slavery spurred on the radical feminism of the nineteenth century, the issue of racism now stimulated the new feminism: the analogy between racism and sexism had to be made eventually. Once people had admitted and confronted their own racism, they could not deny the parallel. And if racism was expungable, why not sexism? I have described the fifty-year period between the end of the old feminist movement and the beginning of the new in order to examine the specific ways in which the Myth of Emancipation operated in each decade to defuse the frustrations of modern women. The smear tactic was effectively used to reprivatize women of the twenties and the thirties, and thereafter it com- bined with a blackout of feminist history to keep women hyster- ically circling through a maze of false solutions: the Myth had effectively denied them a legitimate outlet for their frustration. Therapy proved a failure as an outlet (see the following chapter). To return to the home was no solution either - as the generation of the forties and the fifties proved. By r97o the rebellious daughters of this wasted generation no longer, for all practical purposes, even knew there had been a feminist movement. There remained only the unpleasant residue of the aborted revolution, an amazing set of contradictions in their roles: on the one hand, they had most of the legal freedoms, the literal assurance that they were considered full political citizens of society - and yet they had no power, They had educational opportunities - and yet were unable, and not expected, to employ them. They had the freedoms of clothing 28 to the specific racism or sexism that limits one's potential from the very beginning. One must abandon all attempts at self- definition or determination. Thus, in Marcuse's view, the process of therapy becomes merely *a course in resignation', the differ- ence between health and neurosis only "the degree and effective- ness of the resignation'. For, as in the often-quoted statement of Freud to his patient (Studies in Hysteria, 1895), [A great deal will be gained if we succeed through therapy in] transforming your hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness.' And as all those who have undergone therapy can attest, that's just about the size of it. Cleaver's description of his analysis in Soul on Ice speaks for the experience of any other oppressed person as well: I had several sessions with a psychiatrist. Ilis conclusion was that I hated my mother. How he arrived at this conclusion I'll never know because he knew nothing about my mother, and when he'd ask me questions I would answer him with absurd lies. What revolted me about him was that he had heard me denouncing whites, yet each time he deliberately guided the conversation back to my family life, to my childhood. That in itself was alright, but he deliberately blocked all my attempts to bring out the racial question, and he made it clear that he was not interested in my attitudes towards whites. This was a Pandora's box he did not care to open. Theodor Reik, perhaps the prototype of the crackerbarrel layman's Freud, exemplifies the crassness and insensitivity of most psychoanalysts to the real problems of their patients. It is remarkable that, with so many writings on the emotional differences between men and women, Reik should never have discovered the objective difference in their social situations. For example, he observes in passing differences like the following without ever drawing the right conclusions: Little girls sometimes whisper to each other 'Men do' this or that. Little boys almost never speak of women in this way. A woman gives much more thought to being a woman than a man to being a man. Most women, when they ask a favour of a man, smile. In the same situation men rarely smile. To be a ladies' man means somewhere not to be much of a man. 59 the artificial cutoff from the young, but it is not until they are mired in pregnancies and Pampers, babysitters and school problems, favouritism and quarrelling that they again, for a short period, are forced to see that children are just human like the rest of us. So let's talk about what childhood is really like, and not of what it is like in adult heads. It is clear that the myth of child- hood happiness flourishes so wildly not because it satisfies the needs of children but because it satisfies the needs of adults. In a culture of alienated people, the belief that everyone has at least one good period in life free of care and drudgery dies hard. And obviously you can't expect it in your old age. So it must be you've already had it. This accounts for the fog of sentimentality surrounding any discussion of childhood or children. Everyone is living out some private dream in their behalf. Thus segregation is still operating full blast to reinforce the oppression of children as a class. What constitutes this oppres- sion in the twentieth century ? Physical and Economic dependence. The natural physical inferiority of children relative to adults - their greater weakness, their smaller size - is reinforced, rather than compensated for, by our present culture: children are still ' minors' under the law, without civil rights, the property of an arbitrary set of parents. (Even when they have "good' parents, there are just as many "bad' people in the world as 'good' _ and the 'bad' people are considerably more likely to bear children.) The number of child beatings and deaths every year testifies to the fact that merely unhappy children are lucky. A lot worse could happen. It is only recently that doctors saw fit to report these casualties, so much were children at the mercy of their parents. Those children with- out parents, however, are even worse off (just as single women, women without the patronage of a husband, are still worse off than married women). There is no place for them but the orphanage, a dumping ground for the unwanted. But the oppression of children is most of all rooted in economic dependence. Anyone who has ever observed a child wheedling 85 to transfer his identification from the mother to the father, thus to eradicate the female in himself, so too the black male, in order to "be a man', must untie himself from his bond with the white female, relating to her if at all only in a degrading way. In addition, due to his virulent hatred and jealousy of her Posses- sor, the white man, he may lust after her as a thing to be con- quered in order to 'get whitey'. Thus, unlike the more clear-cut polarization of feelings in white women, the black man's feelings about the white woman are characterized by their ambivalence - their intense mixture of love and hate; but however he may choose to express this ambivalence, he is unable to control its intensity. LeRoi Jones's early play Dutchman illustrates some of these psychological tensions and ambivalences in the relationship of the black man to the white woman. In a subway encounter, Clay, a young bourgeois black, and Lula, a blonde vampire, personify them: Clay's contempt for Lula as the white man's plaything mixed with a grudging erotic attraction, her deep and immediate understanding of him, and finally her betrayal ending with a literal backstab (after which she cries 'rape' getting off scot free - one must presume to destroy more young black men who were only minding their own business). This is a black man's inner view of the white woman. Lula never comes across as a real woman, so much is she a product of the racial Oedipus Complex I have described. The relationship of the black man with the white man, similarly, duplicates the relationship of the male child to the father. We have seen how at a certain point, in order to assert his ego, the child must transfer his identification from the female (powerless) to the male (powerful). He hates the power- ful father. But he is offered the alternative: if he does make that transition (on the father's terms, of course), he is rewarded; if he denies it, his 'manhood' (humanity) is called into question. A black man in America can do only one of the following: (r) He can give in to the white man on the white man's terms, and be paid off by the white man (Uncle Tomism). (2) He can refuse such an identification altogether, at which he often surrenders to homosexuality. Or he may continue des- 100 6 Love A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure. For love, perhaps even more than child- bearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today. I realize this has frightening implications: do we want to get rid of love? The panic felt at any threat to love is a good clue to its political significance. Another sign that love is central to any analysis of women or sex psychology is its omission from culture itself, its relegation to 'personal life'. (And whoever heard of logic in the bedroom?) Yes, it is portrayed in novels, even metaphysics, but in them it is described, or better, re-created, not analysed. Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated. There is reason for this absence of analysis: women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very struc- ture of culture. The tired question "What were women doing while men created masterpieces? deserves more than the obvious reply: women were barred from culture, exploited in their role of mother. Or its reverse: women had no need for paintings since they created children. Love is tied to culture in much deeper ways than that. Men were thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are preoccupied with love. That women live for love and men for work is a truism. Freud was the first to attempt to ground this dichotomy in the individual psyche: the male child, sexually rejected by the first person in his attention, his mother, 'sublimates' his 'libido' his reservoir of sexual (life) energies - into long-term projects, 113 in the hope of gaining love in a more generalized form; thus he displaces his need for love into a need for recognition. This process does not occur as much in the female: most women never stop seeking direct warmth and approval. There is also much truth in the clichés that " behind every man there is a woman', and that ' women are the power behind [read: voltage in] the throne'. (Male) Culture was built on the love of women, and at their expense. Women provided the substance of those male masterpieces; and for millennia they have done the work, and suffered the costs, of one-way emotional relationships the benefits of which went to men and to the work of men. So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (male) culture is parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity. Moreover, we tend to forget that this culture is not universal, but rather sectarian, presenting only half the spectrum of experience. The very structure of culture itself, as we shall see, is saturated with the sexual polarity, as well as being in every degree run by, for, and in the interests of male society. But while the male half is termed all of culture, men have not for- gotten there is a female 'emotional' half: they live it on the sly. As the result of their battle to reject the female in themselves (the Oedipus Complex as we have explained it) they are unable to take love seriously as a cultural matter; but they can't do without it altogether. Love is the underbelly of (male) culture just as love is the weak spot of every man, bent on proving his virility in that large male world of 'travel and adventure' Women have always known how men need love, and how they deny this need. Perhaps this explains the peculiar contempt women so universally feel for men (' men are so dumb"), for they can see their men are posturing in the outside world. I How does this phenomenon 'love' operate? Contrary to popular opinion, love is not altruistic. The initial attraction is based on curious admiration (more often today, envy and resentment) for the self-possession, the integrated unity, of 114 the other and a wish to become part of this Self in some way (today, read: intrude or take over), to become important to in that psychic balance. The self-containment of the other creates desire (read: a challenge); admiration (envy) of the other becomes a wish to incorporate (possess) its qualities. A clash of selves follows in which the individual attempts to fight off the growing hold over him of the other. Love is the final opening up to (or, surrender to the dominion of) the other. The lover demonstrates to the beloved how he himself would like to be treated. ('I tried so hard to make him fall in love with me that I fell in love with him myself.) Thus love is the height of selfishness: the self attempts to enrich itself through the absorption of another being. Love is being psychically wide-open to another. It is a situation of total emotional vulnerability. Therefore it must be not only the incorporation of the other, but an exchange of selves. Any- thing short of a mutual exchange will hurt one or the other party. There is nothing inherently destructive about this process. A little healthy selfishness would be a refreshing change. Love between two equals would be an enrichment, each enlarging himself through the other: instead of being one, locked in the cell of himself with only his own experience and view, he could participate in the existence of another - an extra window on the world. This accounts for the bliss that successful lovers experi- ence: lovers are temporarily freed from the burden of isolation that every individual bears. But bliss in love is seldom the case: for every successful contemporary love experience, for every short period of enrich- ment, there are ten destructive love experiences, post-love *downs' of much longer duration - often resulting in the des- truction of the individual, or at least an emotional cynicism that makes it difficult or impossible ever to love again. Why should this be so, if it is not actually inherent in the love process itself? Let's talk about love in its destructive guise - and why it gets that way, referring once more to the work of Theodor Reik. Reik's concrete observation brings him closer than many better minds to understanding the process of 'falling in love', but he is off insofar as he confuses love as it exists in our present society with love itself. He notes that love is a reaction formation, II5 a cycle of envy, hostility, and possessiveness: he sees that it is preceded by dissatisfaction with oneself, a yearning for something better, created by a discrepancy between the ego and the ego-ideal; that the bliss love produces is due to the resolution of this tension by the substitution, in place of one's own ego-ideal, of the other; and finally that love fades " because the other can't live up to your high ego-ideal any more than you could, and the judgement will be the harsher the higher are the claims on oneself'. Thus in Reik's view love wears down just as it wound up: dissatisfaction with oneself (whoever heard of falling in love the week one is leaving for Europe?) leads to astonishment at the other person's self-containment; to envy; to hostility; to possessive love; and back again through exactly the same process. This is the love process today. But why must it be this way? Many, for example Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World, have tried to draw a distinction between roman- tic "falling in love' with its "false reciprocity which disguises a twin narcissism' (the Pagan Eros) and an unselfish love for the other person as that person really is (the Christian Agape). De Rougemont attributes the morbid passion of Tristan and Iseult (romantic love) to a vulgarization of specific mystical and religious currents in Western civilization. I submit that love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon - it becomes complicated, corrupted, or obstructed by an unequal balance of pomer. We have seen that love demands a mutual vulnerability or it turns destructive: the destructive effects of love occur only in a context of inequality. But because sexual inequality has remained a constant - however its degree may have varied - the corruption 'romantic' love became characteristic of love between the sexes. (It remains for us only to explain why it has steadily increased in Western countries since the medieval period, which we shall attempt to do in the following chapter.) How does the sex class system based on the unequal power distribution of the biological family affect love between the sexes? In discussing Freudianism, we have gone into the psychic structuring of the individual within the family and how this organization of personality must be different for the male and II6 the female because of their very different relationships to the mother, At present the insular interdependency of the mother/ child relationship forces both male and female children into anxiety about losing the mother's love, on which they depend for physical survival. When later (Erich Fromm notwithstand- ing) the child learns that the mother's love is conditional, to be rewarded the child in return for approved behaviour (that is, behaviour in line with the mother's own values and personal ego gratification - for she is free to mould the child * creatively' however she happens to define that), the child's anxiety turns into desperation. This, coinciding with the sexual rejection of the male child by the mother, causes, as we have seen, a schizo- phrenia in the boy between the emotional and the physical, and in the girl, the mother's rejection, occurring for different reasons, produces an insecurity about her identity in general, creating a lifelong need for approval. (Later her lover replaces her father as a grantor of the necessary surrogate identity - she sees everything through his eyes.) Here originates the hunger for love that later sends both sexes searching in one person after the other for a state of ego security. But because of the early rejection, to the degree that it occurred, the male will be terrified of committing himself, of "opening up' and then being smashed. How this affects his sexuality we have seen: to the degree that a woman is like his mother, the incest taboo operates to restrain his total sexual/emotional commitment; for him to feel safely the kind of total response he first felt for his mother, which was rejected, he must degrade this woman so as to distinguish her from the mother. This behaviour reproduced on a larger scale explains many cultural phenomena, including perhaps the ideal love-worship of chivalric times, the forerunner of modern romanticism. Romantic idealization is partially responsible, at least on the part of men, for a peculiar characteristic of 'falling' in love: the change takes place in the lover almost independently of the character of the love object. Occasionally the lover, though beside himself, sees with another rational part of his faculties that, objectively speaking, the one he loves isn't worth all this blind devotion; but he is helpless to act on this, 'a slave to love'. II7 More often he fools himself entirely. But others can see what is happening ('How on earth he could love her is beyond me!'). This idealization occurs much less frequently on the part of women, as is borne out by Reik's clinical studies, A man must idealize one woman over the rest in order to justify his descent to a lower caste) Women have no such reason to idealize men - in fact, when one's life depends on one's ability to 'psych' men out, such idealization may actually be dangerous - though a fear of male power in general may carry over into relationships with individual men, appearing to be the same phenomenon. But though women know to be inauthentic this male 'falling in love', all women, in one way or another, require proof of it from men before they can allow themselves to love (genuinely, in their case) in return. For this idealization process acts to equalize artificially the two parties, a minimum precondition for the development of an uncorrupted love - we have seen that love requires a mutual vulnerability that is impossible to achieve in an unequal power situation. Thus falling in love' is no more than the process of alteration of male vision - through idealization, mystification, glorification - that renders void the woman's class inferiority. However, the woman knows that this idealization, which she works so hard to produce, is a lie, and that it is only a matter of time before he "sees through her'. Her life is a hell, vacillating between an all-consuming need for male love and approval to raise her from her class subjection, to persistent feelings of inauthenticity when she does achieve his love. Thus her whole identity hangs in the balance of her love life. She is allowed to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love. But if we could eliminate the political context of love between the sexes, would we not have some degree of idealization remain- ing in the love process itself? I think so. For the process occurs in the same manner whoever the love choice: the lover 'opens up' to the other. Because of this fusion of egos, in which each sees and cares about the other as a new self, the beauty/character of the beloved, perhaps hidden to outsiders under layers of defences, is revealed. 'I wonder what she sees in him', then, means not only, *She is a fool, blinded with romanticism', but, I18 *Her love has lent her x-ray vision. Perhaps we are missing something.' (Note that this phrase is most commonly used about women. The equivalent phrase about men's slavery to love is more often something like, 'She has him wrapped around her finger ", she has him so "snowed' that he is the last one to see through her.) Increased sensitivity to the real, if hidden, values of the other, however, is not 'blindness' or "idealization' but is, in fact, deeper vision. It is only the false idealization we have described above that is responsible for the destruction. Thus it is not the process of love itself that is at fault, but its political, i.e. unequal power context: the who, why, when and where of it is what makes it now such a holocaust. II But sophisms about love are only one more symptom of its diseased state. (As one female patient of Reik so astutely put it, "Men take love either too seriously or not seriously enough.') Let's look at it more concretely, as we now experience it in its corrupted form. Once again we shall quote from the Reikian Confessional. For if Reik's work has any value it is where he might least suspect, i.e. in his 'trivial feminine' urge to 'gossip' Here he is, justifying himself (one supposes his Superego is troubling him): A has-been like myself must always be somewhere and working on something. Why should I not occupy myself with those small ques- tions that are not often posed and yet perhaps can be answered? The "petites questions' have a legitimate place beside the great and funda- mental problems of psychoanalysis. It takes moral courage to write about certain things, as for example about a game that little girls play in the intervals between classes. Is such a theme really worthy of a serious psychoanalyst who has passed his 77th year? (Italics mine) And he reminds himself: "But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order not to be told.' Thus he rationalizes what in fact may be the only valuable contribution of his work. Here are his patients of both sexes speaking for themselves about their love lives: IIQ WOMEN: Later on he called me a sweet girl , . I didn't answer. . . what could I say?.. but I knew I was not a sweet girl at all and that he sees me as someone I'm not. No man can love a girl the way a girl loves a man. I can go a long time without sex, but not without love. It's like H,O instead of water. I sometimes think that all men are sex-crazy and sex-starved. All they can think about when they are with a girl is going to bed with her. Have I nothing to offer this man but this body? I took off my dress and my bra and stretched myself out on his bed and waited. For an instant I thought of myself as an animal of sacrifice on the altar. I don't understand the feelings of men. My husband has me. Why does he need other women? What have they got that I haven't got? Believe me, if all wives whose husbands had affairs left them, we would only have divorced women in this country. After my husband had quite a few affairs, I flirted with the fantasy of taking a lover. Why not? What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose . But I was stupid as a goose: I didn't have it in me to have an extramarital affair. I asked several people whether men also sometimes cry themselves to sleep. I don't believe it. MEN (for further illustration, see Screw): It's not true that only the external appearance of a woman matters. The underwear is also important. It's not difficult to make it with a girl. What's difficult is to make an end of it. The girl asked me whether I cared for her mind. I was tempted to answer I cared more for her behind. 'Are you going already?' she said when she opened her eyes. It was a bedroom cliché whether I left after an hour or after two days. Perhaps it's necessary to fool the woman and to pretend you love her. But why should I fool myself? When she is sick, she turns me off. But when I'm sick she feels sorry for me and is more affectionate than usual. 120 It's not enough for my wife that I have to hear her talking all the time - blah, blah, blah. She also expects me to hear what she is saying. Simone de Beauvoir said it: The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings which divide them,' Above I have illustrated some of the traditional differences between men and women in love that come up so frequently in parlour discussions of the 'double standard', where it is generally agreed: that women are monogamous, better at loving, possessive, 'clinging' more interested in (highly involved) 'relationships' than in sex per se, and they confuse affection with sexual desire. That men are interested in nothing but a screw (Wham, bam, thank you M'am!), or else romanticize the woman ridiculously; that once sure of her, they become notorious philanderers, never satisfied; that they mistake sex for emotion. All this bears out what we have discussed - the difference in the psychosexual organizations of the two sexes, determined by the first relation- ship to the mother. I draw three conclusions based on these differences: (r) That men can't love. (Male hormones?? Women tradi- tionally expect and accept an emotional invalidism in men that they would find intolerable in a woman.) (2) That women's 'clinging' behaviour is necessitated by their objective social situation, (3) That this situation has not changed significantly from what it ever was. Men can't love. We have seen why it is that men have difficulty loving and that while men may love, they usually *fall in love' - with their own projected image. Most often they are pounding down a woman's door one day, and thoroughly disillusioned with her the next; but it is rare for women to leave men, and then it is usually for more than ample reason. It is dangerous to feel sorry for one's oppressor - women are especially prone to this failing - but I am tempted to do it in this case. Being unable to love is hell. This is the way it proceeds: as soon as the man feels any pressure from the other partner 12I to commit himself, he panics and may react in one of seyeral Ways: (1) He may rush out and screw ten other women to prove that the first woman has no hold over him. If she accepts this, he may continue to see her on this basis. The other women verify his (false) freedom; periodic arguments about them keep his panic at bay. But the women are a paper tiger, for nothing very deep could be happening with them anyway: he is balancing them against each other so that none of them can get much of him. Many smart women, recognizing this to be only a safety valve on their man's anxiety, give him 'a long leash'. For the real issue under all the fights about other women is that the man is unable to commit himself, (2) He may consistently exhibit unpredictable behaviour, standing her up frequently, being indefinite about the next date, telling her that "my work comes first', or offering a variety of other excuses. That is, though he senses her anxiety, he refuses to reassure her in any way, or even to recognize her anxiety as legitimate. For he needs her anxiety as a steady reminder that he is still free, that the door is not entirely closed. (3) When he is forced into (an uneasy) commitment, he makes her pay for it: by ogling other women in her presence, by com- paring her unfavourably to past girlfriends or movie stars, by snide reminders in front of friends that she is his "ball and chain', by calling her a 'nag' ", a 'bitch", 'a shrew', or by suggest- ing that if he were only a bachelor he would be a lot better off. His ambivalence about women's 'inferiority' comes out: by being committed to one, he has somehow made the hated female identification, which he now must repeatedly deny if he is to maintain his self-respect in the (male) community. This steady derogation is not entirely put on: for in fact every other girl suddenly does look a lot better, he can't help feeling he has missed something - and, naturally, his woman is to blame. For he has never given up the search for the ideal; she has forced him to resign from it. Probably he will go to his grave feeling cheated, never realizing that there isn't much difference between one woman and the other, that it is the loving that creates the difference. 122 There are many variations of straining at the bit. Many men go from one casual thing to another, getting out every time it begins to get hot. And yet to live without love in the end proves intolerable to men just as it does to women. The question that remains for every normal male is, then, how do I get someone to love me without her demanding an equal commitment in return? * Women's 'clinging' behaviour is required by the objective social situation. The female response to such a situation of male hysteria at any prospect of mutual commitment was the development of subtle methods of manipulation, to force as much commitment as could be forced from men. Over the centuries strategies have been devised, tested, and passed on from mother to daughter in secret tetè-à-têtes, passed around at 'kaffee-klatsches' ("'I never understand what it is women spend so much time talking about!*), or, in recent times, via the telephone. These are not trivial gossip sessions at all (as women prefer men to believe), but desperate strategies for survival. More real brilliance goes into one one-hour coed telephone dialogue about men than into that same coed's four years of college study, or for that matter, than into most male political manoeuvres. It is no wonder, then, that even the few women without *family obligations' always arrive exhausted at the starting line of any serious endeavour. It takes one's major energy for the best portion of one's creative years to " make a good catch', and a good part of the rest of one's life to 'hold' that catch. ('To be in love can be a full-time job for a woman, like that of a profession for a man.') Women who choose to drop out of this race are choosing a life without love, something that, as we have seen, most men don't have the courage to do. But unfortunately the Manhunt is characterized by an emotional urgency beyond this simple desire for return commit- ment. It is compounded by the very class reality that produced the male inability to love in the first place. In a male-run society that defines women as an inferior and parasitical class, a woman who does not achieve male approval in some form is doomed. To legitimate her existence, a woman must be more than woman, 123 she must continually search for an out from her inferior defini- tion;1 and men are the only ones in a position to bestow on her this state of grace. But because the woman is rarely allowed to realize herself through activity in the larger (male) society - and when she is, she is seldom granted the recognition she deserves - it becomes easier to try for the recognition of one man than of many; and in fact this is exactly the choice most women make. Thus once more the phenomenon of love, good in itself, is corrupted by its class context: women must have love not only for healthy reasons but actually to validate their existence. In addition, the continued economic dependence of women makes a situation of healthy love between equals impossible. Women today still live under a system of patronage: with few exceptions, they have the choice, not between either freedom or marriage, but between being either public or private property. Women who merge with a member of the ruling class can at least hope that some of his privilege will, so to speak, rub off. But women without men are in the same situation as orphans: they are a helpless sub-class lacking the protection of the powerful. This is the antithesis of freedom when they are still (negatively) defined by a class situation: for now they are in a situation of magnified vulnerability. 1 To participate in one's subjection by choosing one's master often gives the illusion of free choice; but in reality a woman is never free to choose love without ulterior motives. For her at the present time, the two things, love and status, must remain inextricably intertwined. Now assuming that a woman does not lose sight of these fundamental factors of her condition when she loves, she will 1. Thus the peculiar situation that women never object to the insulting of women as a class, as long as they individually are excepted. The worst insult for a woman is that she is "just like a woman', i.e. no better; the highest compliment that she has the brains, talent, dignity, or strength of a man. In fact, like every member of an oppressed class, she herself participates in the insulting of others like herself, hoping thereby to make it obvious that she as an individual is above their behaviour. Thus women as a class are set against each other ['Divide and Conquer'], the 'other woman' believing that the wife is a' bitch who "doesn't understand him', and the wife believ- ing that the other woman is an 'opportunist' who is 'taking advantage' of him - while the culprit himself sneaks away free. 124 never be able to love gratuitously, but only in exchange for security: (1) the emotional security which, we have seen, she is justified in demanding; (2) the emotional identity which she should be able to find through work and recognition, but which she is denied - thus forcing her to seek her definition through a man; (3) the economic class security that, in this society, is attached to her ability to hook a man. Two of these three demands are invalid conditions for love, but are imposed on it, weighing it down. Thus, in their precarious political situation, women can't afford the luxury of spontaneous love. It is much too dangerous. The love and approval of men is all-important. To love thought- lessly, before one has ensured return commitment, would endanger that approval. Here is Reik: "It finally became clear during psychoanalysis that the patient was afraid that if she should show a man she loved him, he would consider her inferior and leave her.' For once a woman plunges in emotionally, she will be helpless to play the necessary games: her love would come first, demanding expression. To pretend a coolness she does not feel, then, would be too painful, and further, it would be pointless: she would be cutting off her nose to spite her face, for freedom to love is what she was aiming for. But in order to guarantee such a commitment, she must restrain her emotions, she must play games. For, as we have seen, men do not commit themselves to mutual openness and vulner- ability until they are forced to. How does she then go about forcing this commitment from the male? One of her most potent weapons is sex - she can work him up to a state of physical torment with a variety of games: by denying his need, by teasing it, by giving and taking back, by jealousy, and so forth. A woman under analysis wonders why: There are few women who never ask themselves on certain Occasions "How hard should I make it for a man?" I think no man is troubled with questions of this kind. He perhaps asks himself only, " When will she give in?"' Men are right when they complain that women lack discrimination, that they seldom love 125 a man for his individual traits but rather for what he has to offer (his class), that they are calculating, that they use sex to gain other ends, etc. For in fact women are in no position to love freely. If a woman is lucky enough to find 'a decent guy' to love her and support her, she is doing well - and usually will be grateful enough to return his love. About the only discrimination women are able to exercise is the choice between the men who have chosen them, or a playing off of one male, one power, against the other. But provoking a man's interest, and snaring his commitment once he has expressed that interest, is not exactly self-determination, Now what happens after she has finally hooked her man, after he has fallen in love with her and will do anything? She has a new set of problems. Now she can release the vice, open her net, and examine what she has caught. Usually she is dis- appointed. It is nothing she would have bothered with were she a man. It is usually way below her level. (Check this out sometime: Talk to a few of those mousy wives.) 'He may be a poor thing, but at least I've got a man of my own' is usually more the way she feels. But at least now she can drop her act. For the first time it is safe to love - now she must try like hell to catch up to him emotionally, to really mean what she has pretended all along. Often she is troubled by worries that he will find her out. She feels like an imposter. She is haunted by fears that he doesn't love the 'real' her - and usually she is right. ("She wanted to marry a man with whom she could be as bitchy as she really is.') This is just about when she discovers that love and marriage mean a different thing for a male than they do for her: though men in general believe women in general to be inferior, every man has reserved a special place in his mind for the one woman he will elevate above the rest by virtue of association with himself. Until now the woman, out in the cold, begged for his approval, dying to clamber onto this clean well-lighted place. But once there, she realizes that she was elevated above other women not in recognition of her real value, but only because she matched nicely his store-bought pedestal. Probably he doesn't even know who she is (if indeed by this time she herself knows). 126 He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies. Though she knew his love to be false, since she herself engin- eered it, she can't help feeling contempt for him. But she is afraid, at first, to reveal her true self, for then perhaps even that false love would go. And finally she understands that for him, too, marriage had all kinds of motivations that had nothing to do with love. She was merely the one closest to his fantasy image: she has been named Most Versatile Actress for the multi- role of Alter Ego, Mother of My Children, Housekeeper, Cook, Companion, in his play. She has been bought to fill an empty space in his life; but her life is nothing. So she has not saved herself from being like other women. She is lifted out of that class only because she now is an appendage of a member of the master class; and he cannot associate with her unless he raises her status. But she has not been freed, she has been promoted to 'housenigger', she has been elevated only to be used in a different way. She feels cheated. She has gotten not love and recognition, but possessorship and control. This is when she is transformed from Blushing Bride to Bitch, a change that, no matter how universal and predictable, still leaves the individual husband perplexed. (*You're not the girl I married.') * The situation of women has not changed significantly from what it ever was. For the past fifty years women have been in a double bind about love: under the guise of a 'sexual revolution' , pre- sumed to have occurred ('Oh, c'mon Baby, where have you been? Haven't you heard of the sexual revolution?"), women have been persuaded to shed their armour. The modern woman is in horror of being thought a bitch, where her grandmother expected that to happen as the natural course of things. Men, too, in her grandmother's time, expected that any self-respecting woman would keep them waiting, would play all the right games without shame: a woman who did not guard her own interests in ( this way was not respected. It was out in the open. But the rhetoric of the sexual revolution, if it brought no improvements for women, proved to have great value for men. By convincing women that the usual female games and demands 127 were despicable, unfair, prudish, old-fashioned, puritanical, and self-destructive, a new reservoir of available females was created to expand the tight supply of goods available for traditional sexual exploitation, disarming women of even the little protection they had so painfully acquired. Women today dare not make the old demands for fear of having a whole new vocabulary, designed just for this purpose, hurled at them: 'fucked up', "ballbreaker? "cockteaser'. 'a real drag', , 'a bad trip' - to be a 'groovy chick' is the ideal. Even now many women know what's up and avoid the trap, preferring to be called names rather than be cheated out of the little they can hope for from men (for it is still true that even the hippest want an 'old lady' who is relatively unused). But more and more women are sucked, only to find out too late, and bitterly, that the traditional female games had a point; they are shocked to catch themselves at thirty complaining in a vocabulary dangerously close to the old I've-been-used-men-are-wolves- they're-all-bastards variety. Eventually they are forced to acknowledge the old-wives' truth: a fair and generous woman is (at best) respected, but seldom loved. Here is a description, still valid today, of the 'emancipated' woman - in this case a Green- wich Village artist of the thirties - from Mosquitoes, an early Faulkner novel: She had always had trouble with her men . Sooner or later they always ran out on her ... Men she recognized as having potentialities all passed through a violent but temporary period of interest which ceased as abruptly as it began, without leaving even the lingering threads of mutually remembered incidence, like those brief thunder- storms of August that threaten and dissolve for no apparent reason without producing any rain. At times she speculated with almost masculine detachment on the reason for this. She always tried to keep their relationships on the plane which the men themselves seemed to prefer - certainlv no woman would, and few women could, demand less of their men than she did. She never made arbitrary demands on their time, never caused them to wait for her nor to see her home at inconvenient hours, never made them fetch and carry for her; she fed them and flattered herself that she was a good listener. And yet - She thought of the women she knew; how all of them had at least one obviously entranced male; she thought of the women she had observed; how 128 they seemed to acquire a man at will, and if he failed to stay acquired, how readily they replaced him. Women of high ideals who believed emancipation possible, women who tried desperately to rid themselves of feminine *hangups', to cultivate what they believed to be the greater directness, honesty, and generosity of men, were badly fooled. They found that no one appreciated their intelligent conversa- tion, their high aspirations, their great sacrifices to avoid developing the personalities of their mothers. For much as men were glad to enjoy their wit, their style, their sex, and their candlelight suppers, they always ended up marrying the Bitch, and then, to top it all off, came back to complain of what a horror she was. "Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie: men were all too glad to use them and then sell them out, in the name of true friendship. ("I respect and like you a great deal, but let's be reasonable... And then there are the men who take her out to discuss Simone de Beauvoir, leaving their wives at home with the diapers.) *Emancipated' women found out that men were far from "good guys' " to be emulated; they found out that by imitating male sexual patterns (the roving eye, the search for the ideal, the emphasis on physical attraction, etc.), they were not only not achieving liberation, they were falling into some- thing much worse than what they had given up. They were imitating. And they had inoculated themselves with a sickness that had not even sprung from their own psyches. They found that their new cool' was shallow and meaningless, that their emotions were drying up behind it that, they were ageing and becoming decadent: they feared they were losing their ability to love. They had gained nothing by imitating men; shallowness and callowness, and they were not so good at it either, because somewhere inside it still went against the grain. Thus women who had decided not to marry because they were wise enough to look around and see where it led found that it was marry or nothing. Men gave their commitment only for a price: share (shoulder) his life, stand on his pedestal, become his appendage, or else. Or else - be consigned forever to that limbo of 'chicks' who mean nothing, certainly not what mother 129 meant, Be the 'other woman' for the rest of one's life, used to provoke his wife, prove his virility and/or his independence, discussed by his friends as his latest "interesting' conquest. (For even if she had given up those terms and what they stood for, no male had.) Yes, love means an entirely different thing to men than to women: it means ownership and control; it means jealousy, where he never exhibited it before - when she might have wanted him to (who cares if she is broke or raped until she officially belongs to him: then he is a raging dynamo, a veritable cyclone, because his property, his ego extension have been threatened); it means a growing lack of interest, coupled with a roving eye. Who needs it? Sadly, women do. Here are Reik's patients once more: 'She sometimes has delusions of not being persecuted by men any- more. At those times of her nonpersecution mania she is very depressed.' And: 'All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate - and I wish I could find one.' We have seen that a woman needs love, first, for its natural enriching function, and second, for social and economic reasons which have nothing to do with love, To deny her need is to put herself in an extra-vulnerable spot socially and economically, as well as to destroy her emotional equilibrium, which, unlike most men's, is basically healthy. Are men worth that? Decidedly no. Most women feel that to do such tailspins for a man would be to add insult to injury. They go on as before, making the best of a bad situation. If it gets too bad, they head for a (usually male) shrink: A young woman patient was once asked during a psychoanalytic consultation whether she preferred to see a man or woman psycho- analyst. Without the slightest hesitation she said, 'A woman psycho- analyst because I am too eager for the approval of a man. 130 Gmail kac attac Firestone 2/2 kac attac Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 1:56 PM To: Stefan Kac 7 The Culture of Romance So far we have not distinguished 'romance' from love. For there are no two kinds of love, one healthy (dull) and one not (painful) ('My dear, what you need is a mature love relationship. Get over this romantic nonsense), but only less-than-love or daily agony. When love takes place in a power context, everyone's 'love life' must be affected. Because power and love don't make it together. So when we talk about romantic love we mean love corrupted by its power context - the sex class system - into a diseased form of love that then in turn reinforces this sex class system. We have seen that the psychological dependence of women upon men is created by continuing real economic and social oppression. However, in the modern world the economic and social bases of the oppression are no longer alone enough to maintain it. So the apparatus of romanticism is hauled in. (Looks like we'll have to help her out. Boys.) Romanticism develops in proportion to the liberation of women from their biology. As civilization advances and the biological bases of sex class crumble, male supremacy must shore itself up with artificial institutions, or exaggerations of previous institu- tions, e.g., where previously the family had a loose, permeable form, it now tightens and rigidifies into the patriarchal nuclear family. Or, where formerly women had been held openly in contempt, now they are elevated to states of mock worship. I Ro- manticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions. It is especially needed - and therefore I. Gallantry has been commonly defined as *excessive attention to women without serious purpose', but the purpose is very serious; through a false flattery, to keep women from awareness of their lower-class condition, 13I strongest - in Western countries with the highest rate of industrialization. Today, with technology enabling women to break out of their roles for good - it was a near miss in the early twentieth century - romanticism is at an all-time high, How does romanticism work as a cultural tool to reinforce sex class? Let us examine its components, refined over centuries, and the modern methods of its diffusion ~ cultural techniques so sophisticated and penetrating that even men are damaged by them. (r) Eroticism. A prime component of romanticism is eroticism, All animal needs (the affection of a kitten that has never seen heat) for love and warmth are channelled into genital sex : people must never touch others of the same sex, and may touch those of the opposite sex only when preparing for a genital sexual encounter ("a pass*). Isolation from others makes people starved for physical affection; and if the only kind they can get is genital sex, that's soon what they crave. In this state of hypersensitivity the least sensual stimulus has an exaggerated effect, enough to inspire everything from schools of master painting to Rock 'n' Roll. Thus eroticism is the concentration of sexuality - often into highly-charged objects ('Chantilly Lace') - signifying the dis- placement of other social|affection needs on to genital sex. To be plain old needy-for-affection makes one a 'drip' , to need a kiss is embarrassing, unless it is an erotic kiss; only 'sex' is OK, in fact it proves one's mettle. Virility and sexual performance become confused with social worth,2 Constant erotic stimulation of male sexuality coupled with its forbidden release through most normal channels are designed to encourage men to look at women as only things whose resistance to entrance must be overcome. For notice that this eroticism operates in only one direction. Women are the only 'love' 2. But as every woman has discovered, a man who seems to be pressuring for sex is often greatly relieved to be excused from the literal performance: his ego has been made dependent on his continuously proving himself through sexual conquest; but all he may have really wanted was the excuse to indulge in affection without the loss of manly self-respect. That men are more restrained than are women about exhibiting emotion is because, in addition to the results of the Oedipus Complex, to express tenderness to a woman is to acknowledge her equality. Unless, of course, one tempers one's tenderness - takes it back - with some evidence of domination. - 132 objects in our society, so much so that women regard themselves as erotic. This functions to preserve direct sex pleasure for the male, reinforcing female dependence: women can be fulfilled sexually only by vicarious identification with the man who enjoys them. Thus eroticism preserves the sex class system. The only exception to this concentration of all emotional needs into erotic relationships is the (sometimes) affection within the family. But here, too, unless they are his children, a man can no more express affection for children than he can for women. Thus his affection for the young is also a trap to saddle him into the marriage structure, reinforcing the patriarchal system. (2) The sex privatization of women. Eroticism is only the top. most layer of the romanticism that reinforces female inferiority. As with any lower class, group awareness must be deadened to keep them from rebelling. In this case, because the distinguish- ing characteristic of women's exploitation as a class is sexual, a special means must be found to make them unaware that they are considered all alike sexually ('cunts"). Perhaps when a man marries he chooses from this undistinguishable lot with care, for as we have seen, he holds a special high place in his mental reserve for 'The One', by virtue of her close association with himself; but in general, he can't tell the difference between chicks (blondes, brunettes, redheads).+ And he likes it that way. ('A wiggle in your walk, a giggle in your talk, THAT'S WHAT I LIKEI* When a man believes all women are alike, but wants to keep women from guessing, what does he do? He keeps his beliefs to himself, and pretends, to allay her suspicions, that what she has in common with other women is precisely what makes her different. Thus her sexuality eventually becomes synonymous with her individuality. The sex privatization of women is the process whereby women are blinded to their generality as a class which renders them invisible as individuals to the male eye. Is not that strange Mrs Lady next to the President in his 3. Homosexuals are so ridiculed because in viewing the male as sex object they go doubly against the norm: even women don't read Pretty Boy maga- zines. 4. 'As for his other sports,' says a recent blurb about football hero Joe Namath, 'he prefers Blondes, 133 entourage reminiscent of the discreet black servant at White House functions? The process is insidious; When a man exclaims, "I love Blondes!' all the secretaries in the vicinity sit up; they take it personally because they have been sex-privatized. The blonde one feels personally complimented because she has come to measure her worth through the physical attributes that differen- tiate her from other women. She no longer recalls that any physical attribute you could name is shared by many others, that these are accidental attributes not of her own creation, that her sexuality is shared by half of humanity. But in an authentic recognition of her individuality, her blondness would be loved, but in a different way: she would be loved first as an irreplaceable totality, and then her blondeness would be loved as one of the characteristics of that totality. The apparatus of sex privatization is so sophisticated that it may take years to detect - if detectable at all. It explains many puzzling traits of female psychology that take such form as: Women who are personally complimented by compliments to their sex, i.e., 'Hats off to the Little Woman!' Women who are not insulted when addressed regularly and impersonally as Dear, Honey, Sweetie, Sugar, Kitten, Darling, Angel, Queen, Princess, Doll, Woman. Women who are secretly flattered to have their asses pinched in Rome. (Much wiser to count the number of times other girls' asses are pinched!) The joys of 'prickteasing' (generalized male horniness taken as a sign of personal value and desirability). The 'clotheshorse' phenomenon. (Women, denied legitimate outlets for expression of their individuality, "express themselves physically, as in "I want to see something " different". These are only some of the reactions to the sex privatization process, the confusion of one's sexuality with one's individuality. The process is so effective that most women have come to believe seriously that the world needs their particular sexual contributions to go on. (*She thinks her pussy is made of gold.) But the love songs would still be written without them. 134 Women may be duped, but men are quite conscious of this as a valuable manipulative technique. That is why they go to great pains to avoid talking about women in front of them (*not in front of a lady*) - it would give their game away. To overhear a bull session is traumatic to a woman: so all this time she has been considered only "ass' "meat" "twat' Or "stuff', to be gotten a 'piece of°, 'that bitch , or this broad' to be tricked out of money or sex or lovel To understand finally that she is no better than other women but completely indistinguishable comes not just as a blow but as a total annihilation. But perhaps the time that women more often have to confront their own sex privatization is in a lover's quarrel, when the truth spills out: then a man might get careless and admit that the only thing he ever really liked her for was her bust (Built like a brick shit- house') or legs anyway ('Hey, Legs'), and he can find that somewhere else if he has to. Thus sex privatization stereotypes women: it encourages men to see women as 'dolls' differentiated only by superficial attri- butes - not of the same species as themselves - and it blinds women to their sexploitation as a class, keeping them from uniting against it, thus effectively segregating the two classes. A side-effect is the converse: if women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are. Women, because social recognition is granted only for a false individuality, are kept from developing the tough individuality that would enable breaking through such a ruse. If one's exist- ence in its generality is the only thing acknowledged, why go to the trouble to develop real character? It is much less hassle to "light up the room with a smile' - until that day when the 'chick' graduates to "old bag', to find that her smile is no longer "inimitable*, (3) The beauty ideal. Every society has promoted a certain ideal of beauty over all others. What that ideal is is unimportant, for any ideal leaves the majority out; ideals, by definition, are modelled on rare qualities. For example, in America, the present fashion vogue of French models, or the erotic ideal Voluptuous Blonde are modelled on qualities rare indeed: few Americans 135 are of French birth, most don't look French and never will (and besides they eat too much); voluptuous brunettes can bleach their hair (as did Marilyn Monroe, the sex queen herself), but blondes can't develop curves at will - and most of them, being Anglo-Saxon, simply aren't built like that. If and when, by artificial methods, the majority can squeeze into the ideal, the ideal changes. If it were attainable, what good would it be? For the exclusivity of the beauty ideal serves a clear political function, Someone - most women - will be left out. And left scrambling, because as we have seen; women have been allowed to achieve individuality only through their appearance - looks being defined as "good' not out of love for the bearer, but because of her more or less successful approximation to an external standard. This image, defined by men (and currently by homosexual men, often misogynists of the worst order), becomes the ideal. What happens? Women everywhere rush to squeeze into the glass slipper, forcing and mutilating their bodies with diets and beauty programmes, clothes and makeup, anything to become the punk prince's dream girl. But they have no choice. If they don't the penalties are enormous: their social legitimacy is at stake. Thus women become more and more look-alike. But at the same time they are expected to express their individuality through their physical appearance. Thus they are kept coming and going, at one and the same time trying to express their similarity and their uniqueness. The demands of Sex Privatiza- ton contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance. But this conflict itself has an important political function. When women begin to look more and more alike, distinguished only by the degree to which they differ from a paper ideal, they can be more easily stereotyped as a class: they look alike, they think alike, and even worse, they are so stupid they believe they are not alike. * These are some of the major components of the cultural appara- tus, romanticism, which, with the weakening of "natural' limitations on women, keep sex oppression going strong. The 136 political use of romanticism over the centuries became increas- ingly complex. Operating subtly or blatantly, on every cultural level, romanticism is now - in this time of greatest threat to the male power role - amplified by new techniques of com- munication so all-pervasive that men get entangled in their own line. How does this amplification work? With the cultural portrayal of the smallest details of existence (e.g., deodorizing one's underarms), the distance between one's experience and one's perceptions of it becomes enlarged by a vast interpretive network; if our direct experience contradicts its interpretation by this ubiquitous cultural network, the experience must be denied. This process, of course, does not apply only to women. The pervasion of image has so deeply altered our very relationships to ourselves that even men have become objects - if never erotic objects. Images become exten- sions of oneself; it gets hard to distinguish the real person from his latest image, if indeed the Person Underneath hasn't evaporated altogether. Arnie, the kid who sat in back of you in the sixth grade, picking his nose and cracking jokes, the one who had a crook in his left shoulder, is lost under successive layers of adopted images: the High School Comedian, the Campus Rebel, James Bond, the Salem Springtime Lover, and so on, each image hitting new highs of sophistication until the person himself doesn't know who he is. Moreover, he deals with others through this image-extension (Boy-Image meets Girl- Image and consummates Image-Romance). Even if a woman could get beneath this intricate image façade - and it would take months, even years, of a painful, almost therapeutic relationship - she would be met not with gratitude that she had (painfully) loved the man for his real self, but with shocked repulsion and terror that she had found him out. What he wants instead is the Pepsi-Cola Girl, to smile pleasantly to his Johnny Walker Red in front of a ski-lodge fire. But, while this reification affects both men and women alike, in the case of women it is profoundly complicated by the forms of sexploitation I have described. Woman is not only an Image, she is the Image of Sex Appeal. The sterotyping of women ex- pands: now there is no longer the excuse of ignorance. Every 137 woman is constantly and explicitly informed on how to 'improve' what nature gave her, where to buy the products to do it with, and how to count the calories she should never have eaten - in- deed, the 'ugly' woman is now so nearly extinct even she is fast becoming 'exotic. The competition becomes frantic, because everyone is now plugged into the same circuit. The current beauty ideal becomes all-pervasive ("Blondes havemore fun . . ). And eroticism becomes erotomania. Stimulated to the limit, it has reached an epidemic level unequalled in history. From every magazine cover, film screen, TV tube, subway sign, jump breasts, legs, shoulders, thighs. Men walk about in a state of constant sexual excitement. Even with the best of intentions, it is difficult to focus on anything else. This bombardment of the senses, in turn, escalates sexual provocation still further: ordinary means of arousal have lost all effect. Clothing becomes more provocative: hemlines climb, bras are shed. See-through materials become ordinary. But in all this barrage of erotic stimuli, men themselves are seldom portrayed as erotic objects. Women's eroticism, as well as men's, becomes increasingly directed towards women. One of the internal contradictions of this highly effective propaganda system is to expose to men as well as women the stereotyping process women undergo. Though the idea was to better acquaint women with their feminine role, men who turn on the TV are also treated to the latest in tummy-control, false eyelashes, and floor waxes (Does she . . . or doesn't she?). Such a crosscurrent of sexual tease and exposé would be enough to make any man hate women, if he didn't already. Thus the extension of romanticism through modern media enormously magnified its effects. If before culture maintained male supremacy through Eroticism, Sex Privatization, and the Beauty Ideal, these cultural processes are now almost too effectively carried out: the media are guilty of 'overkill'. The regeneration of the women's movement at this moment in history may be due to a backfiring, an internal contradiction of our modern cultural indoctrination system. For in its amplifica- tion of sex indoctrination, the media have unconsciously exposed the degradation of 'femininity? 138 In conclusion, I want to add a note about the special difficul- ties of attacking the sex class system through its means of cultural indoctrination. Sex objects are beautiful, An attack on them can be confused with an attack on beauty itself. Feminists need not get so pious in their efforts that they feel they must flatly deny the beauty of the face on the cover of Vogue. For this is not the point. The real question is: is the face beautiful in a human way - does it allow for growth and flux and decay, does it express negative as well as positive emotions, does it fall apart without artificial props - or does it falsely imitate the very different beauty of an inanimate object, like wood trying to be metal? To attack eroticism creates similar problems. Eroticism is exciting. No one wants to get rid of it. Life would be a drab and routine affair without at least that spark. That's just the point. Why has all joy and excitement been concentrated, driven into one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience, and all the rest laid waste? When we demand the elimination of eroticism, we mean not the elimination of sexual joy and excite- ment but its rediffusion over - there's plenty to go around, it increases with use - the spectrum of our lives. 139 8 (Male) Culture Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. Simone de Beauvoir The relation of women to culture has been indirect. We have discussed how the present psychical organization of the two sexes dictates that most women spend their emotional energy on men, whereas men 'sublimate' theirs into work. In this way women's love becomes raw fuel for the cultural machine. (Not to mention the Great Ideas born rather more directly from early-morning boudoir discussions.) In addition to providing its emotional support, women had another important indirect relation to culture: they inspired it. The Muse is female. Men of culture were emotionally warped by the sublimation process; they converted life to art, thus could not live it. But women, and those men who were excluded from culture, remained in direct contact with their experience- fit subject matter. That women were intrinsic in the very content of culture is borne out by an example from the history of art: men are erotically stimulated by the opposite sex; painting was male; the nude became a female nude. Where the art of the male nude reached high levels, either in the work of an individual artist, e.g., Michelangelo, or in a whole artistic period, such as that of classical Greece, men were homosexual. The subject matter of art, when there is any, is today even more largely inspired by women. Imagine the elimination of women characters from popular films and novels, even from the work of*highbrow' directors - Antonioni, Bergman, or Godard; 140 there wouldn't be much left. For in the last few centuries, particularly in popular culture - perhaps related to the proble- matic position of women in society - women have been the main subject of art. In fact, in scanning blurbs of even one month's cultural production, one might believe that women were all any- one ever thought about. But what about the women who have contributed directly to culture? There aren't many. And in those cases where individual women have participated in male culture, they have had to do so on male terms. And it shows. Because they have had to com- pete as men, in a male game - while still being pressured to prove themselves in their old female roles, a role at odds with their self-appointed ambitions - it is not surprising that they are seldom as skilled as men at the game of culture. And it is not just a question of being as competent, it is also a question of being authentic. We have seen in the context of love how modern women have imitated male psychology, confusing it with health, and have thereby ended up even worse off than men themselves: they were not even being true to home- grown sicknesses. /And there are even more complex layers to this question of authenticity: women have no means of coming to an understanding of what their experience is, or even that it is different from male experience. The tool for representing, for objectifying one's experience in order to deal with it, culture, is so saturated with male bias that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes/ So that finally, signals from their direct experience that conflict with the prevailing (male) culture are denied and repressed.) Thus because cultural dicta are set by men, presenting only the male view - and now in a super-barrage - women are kept from achieving an authentic picture of their reality. Why do women, for example, get aroused by a pornography of female bodies? In their ordinary experience of female nudity, say in a gym locker room, the sight of other nude females might be interesting (though probably only in so far as they rate by male sexual standards), but not directly erotic. Cultural distortion of sexuality explains also how female sexuality gets twisted into narcissism: women make love to themselves vicariously through I4I the man, rather than directly making love to him. At times this cultural barrage of man/subject, woman/object desensitizes women to male forms to such a degree that they are orgasmically affected.I There are other examples of the distorting effects on female vision of an exclusively male culture. Let us go back to the his- tory of figurative painting once again; we have seen how in the tradition of the nude, male heterosexual inclinations came to emphasize the female rather than the male as the more aesthetic and pleasing form. Such a predilection for either one over the other, of course, is based on a sexuality which is in itself artificial, culturally created. But at least one might then expect the oppo- site bias to prevail in the view of women painters still involved in the tradition of the nude. This is not the case. In any art school in the country one sees classrooms full of girls working diligently from the female model, accepting that the male model is somehow less aesthetic, at best perhaps novel, and certainly never questioning why the male model wears a jock strap when the female model wouldn't dream of appearing in so much as a G-string. Again, looking at the work of well-known women painters associated with the Impressionist School of the nineteenth century, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, one wonders at their obsessive preoccupation with traditionally female subject matter: women, children, female nudes, interiors, etc. This is partially explained by political conditions of that period: women painters were lucky to be allowed to paint anything at all, let alone male models. And yet it is more than that. These women, for all their superb draughtsmanship and compositional skill, remained minor painters because they had 'lifted' a set of traditions and a view of the world that was inauthentic for them. They worked within the limits of what had been defined as female by a male tradition: they saw women through male eyes, painted a male's 1. Female inability to focus on sexual imagery has been found to be a major cause of female frigidity. Masters and Johnson, Albert Ellis, and others have stressed the importance of "sexual focusing' in teaching frigid women to achieve orgasm. Hilda 'Hare in International Journal of Sexology correctly attributes this problem to the absence in our society of a female counterpart for the countless stimulants of the male sexual urge. 142 idea of female. And they carried it to an extreme, for they were attempting to outdo men at their own game; they had fallen for a (lovely) line. And thus the falseness that corrupts their work, making it *feminine', i.e. sentimental, light. It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to (produce even a true "female' art. For a woman who participates in (male) culture must achieve and be rated by standards of a tradition she had no part in making - and certainly there is no room in that tradition for a female view, even if she could dis- cover what it was. In those cases where a woman, tired of losing at a male game, has attempted to participate in culture in a female way, she has been put down and misunderstood, named by the (male) cultural establishment "Lady Artist', i.e. trivial, inferior. And even where it must be (grudgingly) admitted she is *good' it is fashionable - a cheap way to indicate one's own "seriousness' and refinement of taste - to insinuate that she is good but irrelevant. Perhaps it is true that a presentation of only the female side of things = which tends to be one long protest and complaint rather than the portrayal of a full and substantive existence - is limited. But an equally relevant question, one much less fre- quently asked, is: Is it any more limited than the prevailing male view of things, which - when not taken as absolute truth . is at least seen as "serious', relevant, and important? Is Mary McCarthy in The Group really so much worse a writer than Norman Mailer in The American Dream? Or is she perhaps describing a reality that men, the controllers and critics of the Cultural Establishment, can't tune in on ? That men and women are tuned to a different cultural wave- length, that in fact there exists a wholly different reality for men and women, is apparent in our crudest cultural form - comic books. From my own experience: When I was little my brother had literally a room-size collection of comic books. But though I was a greedy reader, this vast comic book library interested me not in the least. My literary taste was completely different from his. He preferred heavies' like War Comics (Aak-Aak- Aak]) and Superman; and for relief, *funnies' like Bugs Bunny, Tweetie and Sylvester, Tom and Jerry, and all the stuttering 143 pigs who took forever to get a rather obvious message out. Though these "funnies' grated on my more aesthetic sensibili- ties, I would read them in a pinch. But had I had an allowance as big, and as little parental supervision, I might have indulged in a 'heavy' library of Love Comics (LARGE TEAR. On Tod, don't tell Sue about us, she'd die), an occasional True Confessions, and for 'light' relief, Archie and Veronica. Or the occasional more imaginative variations of boys' comics, like Plasticman (Superman with a rubber arm that could reach around blocks) or Uncle Scrooge McDuck editions of Donald Duck; I loved the selfish extravagance of his bathing in money. (Many women - deprived of Self - have confessed the same girlhood passion.) Even more likely, I would not have invested in comic books at all. Fairy tales, much less realistic, were a better trip. My brother thought girls' taste was drippy', and I thought he was a crude slob. Who was right? We both were; but he won (he owned the library). This division continues to operate at higher cultural levels. I had to force myself to read Mailer, Heller, Donleavy, and others for the same reasons that I couldn't stand my brother's library: to me they seemed only complex versions of (respec- tively) Superman, Aak-Aak-Aak, and the Adventures of Bugs Bunny. But though the 'male' library continued to repel me, in the process of developing 'good taste' (male taste), I also lost my love for the 'female' library, indeed I developed an abhor- rence; and I would - I'm ashamed to admit it - far sooner have been caught dead with Hemingway than with Virginia Woolf in my hands. In order to illustrate this cultural dichotomy in more objective terms, we don't need to attack the more obvious paper tigers (all senses implied) who consciously present a 'male' reality - viz. Hemingway, Jones, Mailer, Farrell, Algren, and the rest. The new Virility School in twentieth-century literature is in itself a direct response, indeed a male cultural backlash, to the growing threat to male supremacy - Virility, Inc., a bunch of culturally deprived "tough guys', punching away to save their manhood. And though they get more credit, these artists write about the "male' experience no more perceptively than Doris Lessing, I44 Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin have written about the female experi- ence. In fact they are guilty of a mystification of their experience that makes their writing phony. Instead, we will examine a bias more insidious (because less obvious) in male writers who honestly attempt to describe the whole spectrum of male/female experience - Bellow, Malamud, Updike, Roth, etc. - but who fail because, often without realiz- ing it, they have described this whole from a limited (male) angle. Let's look briefly at a story by Herbert Gold, not a 'male' writer in either style or subject matter. He writes about what concerns women, that is, relationships, preferably male/female; marriages; divorces; affairs. In this story, "What's Become of Your Creature?', he describes the affair of a harassed young college professor with his blonde, Bohemianish student. The picture we get of Lenka Kuwaila from the male charac- ter's view is only sensual, if sensitive on those terms. The story begins: A girl. A gay, pretty, and sullen girl, with full marks for both sweetness and cruelty. When he looked in her desk for cigarettes, there was a silken pile of panties folded like flowers, dizzying him with the joy of springtime. When she put on a pair of them, suddenly filling out the tiny pair of petals of cloth in two paired buds, it was as if the sun had forced a flower into delicate Easter bloom. Oh, he needed her, loved her, and so for honour to them both, let us tell the truth, as straight as truth comes. But the truth that we get 'straight as truth comes' is only his view of the truth: There is a time in the life of every man when he can do anything. It was this time in the life of Frank Curtiss. Despair with his wife had given up to deep gratification with a beautiful girl; he even did better at home; matters cooled and calmed; his work went well; he hardly needed sleep and did not suffer his usual rose fever during the spring he knew Lenka. No sniffles, no pink eyes. Expanded breathing, sharp sight. Of the occasional headache of fatigue and excess he was cured by the touch of her hand, her welcome when he came smiling, showing teeth, through her window. But her truth must have been an altogether different one, a truth of which there is no trace in the story until one day (out 145 of the blue) Lenka writes his wife a long letter. The failing marriage that had been improving steadily since Frank began his affair with Lenka is destroyed for good: Lenka left New York without seeing him after his anguished phone call to her: 'Why? Why? Why did you have to do it that way, Lenka? Can't you see how it destroys everything between us, even the past?' "I don't care about memories, What's over means nothing. Over. You didn't want to do more than crawl through my window a couple of times a week . "But to write to her like that - what meant - how ) "You cared more about a cold bitch than you cared for me. Just because you had a child.' "Why, why?' She hung up on him. He stood shrugging at the telephone. Women were hanging up on him all over the world, He was disconnected. Feeling betrayed and tricked, Frank bewilderedly nurses his wounds; throughout the rest of the story one feels his puzzle- ment: he does not understand what led her to do it, he does not "understand women'. Finally he lets it rest by granting her *full marks for cruelty' as well as sweetness. But Lenka's 'cruelty' is the direct result of his inability to see her as more than "a girl' (gay, pretty, or sullen), as, instead, perhaps, a complex human being with a self-interest not identical with his. However, due to Gold's authentic recounting of inci- dent and dialogue, a sensitive (probably female) reader might read between the lines: Lenka was the one betrayed. Here is Frank a few years later in Manhattan: He found a girl to join him in biting into an apple, sucking the sweet juice of it at dawn, finally kissing in good friendship and turning on their sides to sleep . . . He felt free .. He threw away his bottle of aspirins. His married vision of himself as a heavy, shaggy, weary buffalo, head low and muzzle hurt, gave way to another image - he was lean, his posture was good, he was an agile bucko. When his former wife remarried, his last vestige of guilt disappeared. Free, free. He played badminton twice a week with a French girl who pronounced it 'Badd-ming-tonn' A gay bachelor now, Frank impulsively calls Lenka up one day: But after he told her how long he had been in New York, she said that she was not interested in seeing him. 146 "I held a grudge, you can understand that,' he said. *I still think you were very wrong, but I'm grateful anyway. It worked out for the best.' "And it's over,' she said. Later he runs into her to find her wasted on junk, whoring for a black musician: She may have invented a foolish lie [in order to invite him up to her 100m], but she recognized the glare of contempt on his face, and in her life of now a quarter of a century, she had learned only one way to answer the judgement of men, She slid against him, on her face a mixture of coyness and dread, a flirtatious half-smile, a slinking catlike practiced leaning against him, and her eyes filled with tears as she shut them, tears balanced on her wetted lashes, slipping down her cheeks. "Frank,' she said haltingly. "I stopped remembering for a long time, I don't know, things were difficult, I thought you were too angry. .. But I've been remembering . . • That's why . . . Forgive . He put his arms around her, held her to him, but with more confusion than either amorousness or tenderness. Then he thought of the letters she had just now lied about, and suddenly, as she turned her head up wanting to be kissed, his most vivid fantasy was this one: She was unclean. His uncurbed dread ran towards a muddle - deceit, illness, secret pity, slime, and retribution. Not knowing what he feared, he thought only: filth, cunning, running filth, blotches, sores. Because he could not bear her sorrows, he thought: Deceit and cunning and disease! He pulled away before their mouths touched; her nails clawed along his arm, shredding skin; he fled, hearing her sobs at the open door as he careened down the infected stairs and into the free air of the street. Curtain: Frank caresses his newly pregnant wife, wondering whatever-happened-to-Lenka. This is not a male story in subject, and it is not a 'male' story in style - there is enough description of emotion in it to shame any male writer. But it is still a 'male' story by virtue of its peculiar limitation of vision: it does not understand women. Lenka's sensuality and loveliness is as much of her as Frank is able to comprehend. Her motives for writing to his wife, her refusal to see him, her attempted seduction, described with such guilty loathing - these Frank can't deal with, just as in real life men can't deal with them (' Because he could not bear her sorrows, 147 N he thought: Deceit and cunning and disease!'). To know a woman beyond the level of her delightfulness is too much for him, Women are judged only in terms of himself, and what they can bring to him, whether beauty and joy or pain and sorrow. Whichever it is, he does not question it, not under- standing that his own behaviour had been or could be a deter- mining influence. One can imagine an entirely different story of the same affair, even using the same information and dialogue, only this time written by Lenka. Her behaviour then might appear not irrational, but entirely understandable; instead, the male character would come out shallow. Perhaps, indeed, we might end up with more than just an opposite sexual bias. We might get as much as three quarters of the picture (i.e. Frank shallow male psychology than vice versa.) But this has seldom happened in literature, for most Lenkas are sufficiently destroyed by their use and abuse never to write their own stories coherently. Thus the difference between the 'male' approach to art and the 'female', is not, as some like to think, simply a difference of "style' in treating the same subject matter (personal, subjective, emotional, descriptive vs. vigorous, spare, hardhitting, cool, objective) but the very subject matter itself. The sex role system divides human experience; men and women live in these differ- ent halves of reality; and culture reflects this. Only a few artists have overcome this division in their work. And one wonders whether homosexuals are correct in their claim. But if not through physical expression, then in some other way the greatest artists became mentally androgynous. In the twentieth century, for example, writers of the stature of Proust, Joyce, Kafka did it either by physically identifying with the female (Proust), by imaginarily crossing the line at will (Joyce), or by retreating to an imaginary world rarely affected by the dichotomy (Kafka). But not only do most artists not over- come, they are not even aware of the existence of a cultural limitation based on sex - so much is the male reality accepted by both male and female as Reality, 148 And what about women artists? We have seen that it has only been in the last several centuries that women have been per- mitted to participate - and then only on an individual basis, and on male terms - in the making of culture. And even so their vision had become inauthentic: they were denied the use of the cultural mirror. And there are many negative reasons that women have entered art: affluence always creates female dilettantism, e.g., the Victorian 'young lady' with her accomplishments, or the arts of the Japanese geisha - for, in addition to serving as a symbol of male luxury, women's increasing idleness under advancing industrialism presents a practical problem: female discontent has to be eased to keep it from igniting. Or women may be entering art as a refuge. Women today are still excluded from the vital power centres of human activity; and art is one of the last self-determining occupations left - often done in solitude. But in this sense women are like a petty bourgeoisie trying to open up shop in the age of corporate capitalism. For the higher percentages of women in art lately may tell us more about the state of art than about the state of women. Are we to feel cheered that women have taken over in a capacity soon to be automated out? (Like 95 Percent Black at the Post Office, this is no sign of integration; on the contrary, undesir- ables are being shoved into the least desirable positions - Here, now get in and keep your mouth shut!) That art is no longer a vital centre that attracts the best men of our generation may also be a product of the male/female division, as I shall attempt to show in the next chapter. But the animation of women and homosexuals in the arts today may signify only the scurrying of rats near a dying body.? But if it has not yet created great women artists, women's new literacy has certainly created a female audience. Just as male audiences have always demanded, and received, male art to reinforce their particular view of reality, so a female audience 2. However, women's presence in the arts and humanities is still viciously fought by the few males remaining, in proportion to the insecurity of their own position - particularly precarious in traditional, humanist schools, such as figurative painting. 149 demands a "female' art to reinforce the female reality. Thus the birth of the crude feminine novel in the nineteenth century, leading to the love story of our own day, so ever-present in popular culture ('soap opera*); the women's magazine trade; Valley of the Dolls, These may be crude beginnings. Most of this art is as yet primitive, clumsy, poor. But occasionally the female reality is documented as clearly as the male reality has always been, as, for example, in the work of Anne Sexton. Eventually, out of this ferment - perhaps very soon - we may see the emergence of an authentic female art. But the develop- ment of "female' art is not to be viewed as reactionary, like its counterpart, the male School of Virility. Rather it is progressive: an exploration of the strictly female reality is a necessary step to correct the warp in a sexually biased culture. It is only after we have integrated the dark side of the moon into our world view that we can begin to talk seriously of universal culture. * Thus, all of culture has been to different degrees corrupted by sexual polarization. We can summarize the various forms this corruption takes in the following way: (r) Male protest art. Art that self-consciously glorifies the male reality (as opposed to taking for granted that it constitutes reality itself) is only a recent development. I see it as a direct response to the threat to male supremacy contained in the first blurring of rigid sex roles. Such an art is reactionary by defini- tion. To those men who feel that this art best expresses what they are living and feeling, I recommend a major overhaul of personality. (2) The Male Angle. This art fails to achieve a comprehensive world view because it does not recognize that male reality is not Reality, but only one half of reality. Thus its portrayal of the opposite sex and its behaviour (half of humanity) is false: the artist himself does not understand female motives. Sometimes, as in the Herbert Gold story quoted, the women characters can still come through if the author has been faithful to at least the how - if not the why - of their behaviour. A better-known example; the character of Catherine in 150 Truffaut's film Jules and Jim is drawn from real life. There are many such vamps and femmes fatales around, in reality nothing more than women who refuse to accept their powerlessness. To keep an illusion of equality and to gain an indirect power over men, Catherine must use "mystery' (Sphinx), unpredictability (jumping in the Seine), and wiles (sleeping around with Mystery Men to keep Him dangling). When, in the end, as all women must, she loses even this illegitimate power, her pride will not admit defeat: she kills the man who had dared escape her, along with herself. But even here, in an accurately drawn art, the male bias comes out. The director goes along with the Mystery Woman mystique, does not probe to find out what's beneath it. Moreover, he doesn't want to know: he is using it as a source of eroticism. The picture we get of Catherine comes only through a veil. (3) (Individually cultivated) androgynous mentality. Even when the sex limitations have been overcome by the individual artist, his art must reveal a reality made ugly by its cleavage. A brief example, again from film: though the Swedish directors have been notably free from personal sex prejudice - the women they portray are human first and female second - Liv Ullman's portrayal of Noble Wife faithfully accompanying her husband into his growing madness (Bergman's Hour of the Wolf) or loving him through his moral degeneration (Bergman's Shame) or Lena Nyman's confused sensitivity in Sjoman's I Am Curious (Yellow) are descriptions not of a liberated sexuality but of a still-unresolved conflict between the sexual and the human identity. (4) Female art. This is a new development, not to be confused with "male' art, even if, so far, it has been guilty of the same bias in reverse. For this may signify the beginnings of a new consciousness, rather than an ossification of the old. Within the next decade we may see its growth into a powerful new art perhaps arising in conjunction with the feminist political move- ment or at its inspiration - that will, for the first time, authentic- ally grapple with the reality that women live in. We may also see a feminist Criticism, emphasizing, in order to correct, the various forms of sex bias now corrupting art. 151 However, in our third category, that art which is guilty only of reflecting the human price of a sex-divided reality, great care would have to be taken that criticism be directed, not at the artists for their (accurate) portrayal of the imperfect reality, but at the grotesqueness of that reality itself as revealed by the art,. Only a feminist revolution can eliminate entirely the sex schism causing these cultural distortions. Until then 'pure art' is a delusion - a delusion responsible both for the inauthentic art women have produced until now, as well as for the corruption of (male) culture at large. The incorporation of the neglected half of human experience - the female experience - into the body of culture, to create an all-encompassing culture, is only the first step, a precondition; but the schism of reality itself must be overthrown before there can be a true cultural revolution, 152 9 Dialectics of Cultural History So far we have treated 'culture' as synonymous with 'arts and letters' or at its broadest, "humanities'. This is a common enough confusion. But it is startling in this context. For we discover that, while only indirectly related to art, women have been entirely excluded from an equally important half of culture: science. If at least with the arts we could find enough material about the relationship of women to culture - whether indirectly as influence, stimulus, or subject matter, or even occasionally as direct participants - to fill at least a chapter, we can hardly find a relationship of women to science worthy of discussion. Perhaps in the broadest sense our statement that women are the emo- tional force behind all (male) culture holds true - but we are stretching the case to include modern science, where the empirical method specifically demands the exclusion of the scientist's personality from his research. Satisfaction of his emotional needs through a woman in his off hours may make him more stable, and thus steadier on the job, but this is far- fetched. But if even the indirect relationship of women to science is debatable, that there is no direct one is certainly not. One would have to search to find even one woman who had contributed in a major way to scientific culture. Moreover, the situation of women in science is not improving. Even with the work of discovery shifted from the great comprehensive minds of the past to small pragmatic university research teams, there are remarkably few women scientists.I I. I was struck by this at a recent women's liberation workshop scheduled by the science department of a top-level eastern university; of the fifty women present, only one or two were engaged in research, let alone high-level 153 This absence of women at all levels of the scientific disciplines is so commonplace as to lead many (otherwise intelligent) people to attribute it to some deficiency (logic?) in women themselves. Or to women's own predilections for the emotional and subjective over the practical and rational. But the question cannot be so easily dismissed. It is true that women in science are in foreign territory - but how has this situation evolved? Why are there disciplines or branches of inquiry that demand only a "male' mind? Why would a woman, to qualify, have to develop an alien psychology? When and why was the female excluded from this type mind? How and why has science come to be defined as, and restricted to, the 'objective'? I submit that not only were the arts and humanities corrupted by the sex duality, but that modern science has been determined by it. And moreover that culture reflects this polarity in its very organization. C. P. Snow was the first to note what had been becoming increasingly obvious; a deep fissure of culture - the liberal arts and the sciences had become incomprehensible to each other. Again, though the universal man of the Renaissance is widely lamented, specialization only increases. These are some of the modern symptoms of a long cultural disease based on the sex dualism. Let us examine the history of culture according to this hypothesis - that there is an underlying dialectic of sex. T THE TWO MODES OF CULTURAL HISTORY For our analysis we shall define culture in the following way: culture is the attempt by man to realize the conceivable in the possible. Man's consciousness of himself within his environment distinguishes him from the lower animals, and turns him into the only animal capable of culture. This consciousness, his highest faculty, allows him to project mentally states of being that do not exist at the moment. Able to construct a past and future, he becomes a creature of time - a historian and a prophet. More than this, he can imagine objects and states of being that research. The others were lab technicians, graduate assistants, high school science teachers, faculty wives, and the like. 154 have never existed and may never exist in the real world - he becomes a maker of art. Thus, for example, though the ancient Greeks did not know how to fly, still they could imagine it. The myth of Icarus was the formulation in fantasy of their conception of the state "flying But man was not only able to project the conceivable into fantasy. He also learned to impose it on reality: by accumulating knowledge, learning experience, about that reality and how to handle it, he could shape it to his liking. This accumulation of skills for controlling the environment, technology, is another means to reaching the same end, the realization of the conceiv- able in the possible. Thus, in our example, if, in the B.C. era, man could fly on the magic carpet of myth or fantasy, by the twentieth century, his technology, the accumulation of his practical skills, had made it possible for him to fly in actuality - he had invented the aeroplane. Another cxample: In the Biblical legend, the Jews, an agricultural people stranded for forty years in the desert, were provided by God with Manna, a miraculous substance that could be transformed at will into food of any colour, texture, or taste; modern food processing, especially with the 'green revolution', will probably soon create a totally artificial food production, perhaps with this chameleon attribute. Again, in ancient legend, man could imagine mixed species, e.g., the centaur or the unicorn, or hybrid births, like the birth of an animal from a human, or a virgin birth; the current biological revolution, with its increasing knowledge of the repro- ductive process, could now - if only the first crude stages - create these ' monstrosities' in reality. Brownies and elves, the Golem of medieval Jewish lore, Mary Shelley's monster in Frankenstein, were the imaginative constructions that preceded by several centuries the corresponding technological acumen. Many other fantastical constructions - ghosts, mental telepathy, Methuse- lah's age - remain to be realized by modern science. These two different responses, the idealistic and the scientific, do not merely exist simultaneously: there is a dialogue between the two. The imaginative construction precedes the technological though often it does not develop until the technological know- how is 'in the air'. For example, the art of science fiction 155 developed, in the main, only a half-century in advance of, and now co-exists with, the scientific revolution that is transforming it into a reality - for example (an innocuous one), the moon flight. The phrases "way out', 'far out', "spaced', the observa- tion 'it's like something out of science fiction' are common language. In the aesthetic response, because it always develops in advance, and is thus the product of another age, the same realization may take on a sensational or unrealistic cast, e.g., Frankenstein's monster, as opposed to, let us say, General Electric's CAM (Cybernetic Anthropomorphic Machines) Handyman. (An artist can never know in advance just how his vision might be articulated in reality.) Culture then is the sum of, and the dynamic between, the two modes through which the mind attempts to transcend the limitations and contingencies of reality. These two types of cultural responses entail different methods to achieve the same end, the realization of the conceivable in the possible. In the first,? the individual denies the limitations of the given reality by escaping from it altogether, to define, create, his own possible. In the provinces of the imagination, objectified in some way - whether through the development of a visual image within some artificial boundary, say four square feet of canvas, through visual images projected through verbal symbols (poetry), with sound ordered into a sequence (music), or with verbal ideas ordered into a progression (theology, philosophy) - he creates an ideal world governed by his own artificially imposed order and harmony, a structure in which he consciously relates each part to the whole, a static (and therefore "timeless') construction. The degree to which he abstracts his creation from reality is unimportant, for even when he most appears to imitate, he has created an illusion governed by its own - perhaps hidden - set of artificial laws. (Degas said that the artist had to lie in order to tell the truth.) This search for the ideal, realized by means of an artificial medium, we shall call the Aesthetic Mode. 2. The idealistic mode, corresponding roughly to the suprahistorical, non- materialist * metaphysical' mode of thought against which Marx and Engels revolted. 156 In the second type of cultural response the contingencies of reality are overcome, not through the creation of an alternate reality, but through the mastery of reality's own workings: the laws of nature are exposed, then turned against it, to shape it in accordance with man's conception. If there is a poison, man assumes there is an antidote; if there is a disease, he searches for the cure: every fact of nature that is understood can be used to alter it. But to achieve the ideal through such a procedure takes much longer, and is infinitely more painful, especially in the early stages of knowledge. For the vast and intricate machine of nature must be entirely understood - and there are always fresh and unexpected layers of complexity - before it can be thoroughly controlled, Thus before any solution can be found to the deepest contingencies of the human condition, e.g., death, natural processes of growth and decay must be catalogued, smaller laws related to larger ones. This scientific method (also attempted by Marx and Engels in their materialist approach to history) is the attempt by man to master nature through the complete understanding of its mechanics. The coaxing of reality to conform with man's conceptual ideal, through the application of information extrapolated from itself, we shall call the Techno- logical Mode. We have defined culture as the sum of, and the dialectic between, the two different modes through which man can resolve the tension created by the flexibility of his mental faculties within the limitations of his given environment. The correspond- ence of these two different cultural modes with the two sexes respectively is unmistakable. We have noted how those few women directly creating culture have gravitated to disciplines within the Aesthetic Mode. There is a good reason for this: the aesthetic response corresponds with "female' behaviour. The same terminology can be applied to either: subjective, intuitive, introverted, wishful, dreamy or fantastic, concerned with the subconscious (the id), emotional, even temperamental (hysteri- cal). Correspondingly, the technological response is the mascu- line response: objective, logical, extroverted, realistic, concerned with the conscious mind (the ego), rational, mechanical, prag- matic and down-to-earth, stable. Thus the aesthetic is the 157 cultural recreation of that half of the psychological spectrum that has been assigned to the female, whereas the technological response is the cultural magnification of the male half. Just as we have assumed the biological division of the sexes for procreation to be the fundamental *natural' duality from which grows all further division into classes, so we now assume the sex division to be the root of this basic cultural division as well. The interplay between these two cultural responses, the " male' Technological Mode and the 'female' Aesthetic Mode, recreates at yet another level the dialectic of the sexes - as well as its superstructure, the caste, and the economic-class dialectic. And just as the merging of the divided sexual, racial, and economic classes is a precondition for sexual, racial, or economic revolution respectively, so the merging of the aesthetic with the technological culture is the precondition of a cultural revolution. And just as the revolutionary goal of the sexual, racial, and economic revolutions is, rather than a mere levelling of imbal- ances, of class, an elimination of class categories altogether, so the end result of a cultural revolution must be, not merely the integration of the two streams of culture, but the elimination of cultural categories altogether, the end of culture itself as we know it. But before we discuss this ultimate cultural revolution or even the state of cultural division in our own time, let us see how this third level of the sex dialectic - the interaction between the Technological and Aesthetic Modes - operated to determine the flow of cultural history. * At first technological knowledge accumulated slowly. Gradu- ally man learned to control the crudest aspects of his environ- ment - he discovered the tool, control of fire, the wheel, the melting of ore to make weapons and ploughs, even, eventually, the alphabet - but these discoveries were few and far between, because as yet he had no systematic way of initiating them. Eventually however, he had gathered enough practical know- ledge to build whole systems, e.g., medicine or architecture, to create juridical, political, social, and economic institutions. Civilization developed from the primitive hunting horde into an 158 agricultural society, and finally, through progressive stages, into feudalism, capitalism, and the first attempts at socialism. But in all this time, man's ability to picture an ideal world was far ahead of his ability to create one. The primary cultural forms of ancient civilizations - religion and its offshoots, mythology, legend, primitive art and magic, prophecy and history - were in the aesthetic mode: they imposed only an artificial, imaginary order on a universe still mysterious and chaotic. Even primitive scientific theories were only poetic metaphors for what would later be realized empirically. The science and philosophy and mathematics of classical antiquity, forerunners of modern science, by sheer imaginative prowess, operating in a vacuum independently of material laws, anticipated much of what was later proven: Democritus atoms and Lucre- tius "substance' foreshadowed by thousands of years the dis- coveries of modern science. But they were realized only within the realm of the imaginary aesthetic mode. In the Middle Ages the Judaeo-Christian heritage was assimilated with pagan culture, to produce medieval religious art and the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, Though concurrently Arab science, an outgrowth of the Greek Alexandrian Period (third century B.C, to seventh century A.D.), was amassing considerable information in such areas as geo- graphy, astronomy, physiology, mathematics - a tabulation essential to the later empiricism - there was little dialogue. Western science, with its alchemy, its astrology, the 'humours' of medieval medicine, was still in a 'pseudo-scientific' stage, or, in our definition, still operating according to the aesthetic mode. This medieval aesthetic culture, composed of the Classical and Christian legacies, culminated in the Humanism of the Renais- sance. Until the Renaissance, then, culture occurred in the aesthetic mode because, prior to that time, technology had been so primitive, the body of scientific knowledge so far from complete. In terms of the sex dialectic, this long stage of cultural history corresponds with the matriarchal stage of civilization: the Female Principle - dark, mysterious, uncontrollable - reigned, elevated by man himself, still in awe of unfathomable Nature, Men of 159 160 culture were its high priests of homage: until and through the Renaissance all men of culture were practitioners of the ideal aesthetic mode, thus, in a sense, artists. The Renaissance, the pinnacle of cultural humanism, was the golden age of the aesthetic (female) mode. And also the beginning of its end. By the sixteenth century culture was undergoing a change as profound as the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy in terms of the sex dialectic, and corresponding to the decline of feudalism in the class dialectic. This was the first merging of the aesthetic culture with the technological, in the creation of modern (empirical) science. In the Renaissance, Aristotelian Scholasticism had remained powerful though the first cracks in the dam were already apparent. But it was not until Francis Bacon, who first proposed to use science to ' extend more widely the limits of the power and the greatnesses of man', that the marriage of the modes was consummated. Bacon and Locke transformed philosophy, the attempt to understand life, from abstract speculation detached from the real world (metaphysics, ethics, theology, aesthetics, 161 logic) to an uncovering of the real laws of nature, through proof and demonstration (empirical science). In the empirical method propounded by Francis Bacon, in- sight and imagination had to be used only at the earliest stage of the inquiry. Tentative hypotheses would be formed by induction from the facts, and then consequences would be deduced logically and tested for consistency among themselves and for agreement with the primary facts and results of ad hoc experiments. The hypothesis would become an accepted theory only after all tests had been passed, and would remain, at least until proven wrong, a theory capable of predicting phenomena to a high degree of probability. The empirical view held that by recording and tabulating all possible observations and experiments in this manner, the Natural Order would emerge automatically. Though at first the question 'why' was still asked as often as the question 'how' after information began to accumulate, each discovery building upon the last to complete the jigsaw, the speculative, the intui- tive, and the imaginative gradually became less valuable. When once the initial foundations had been laid by men of the stature of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, thinkers still in the inspired "aesthetic' science tradition, hundreds of anonymous technicians could move to fill in the blanks, leading to, in our own time, the dawn of a golden age of science - to the technological mode what the Renaissance had been to the aesthetic mode. IT THE TwO CULTURES TODAY Now, in 1970, we are experiencing a major scientific break- through. The new physics, relativity, and the astrophysical theories of contemporary science had already been realized by the first part of this century. Now, in the latter part, we are arriving, with the help of the electron microscope and other new tools, at similar achievements in biology, biochemistry, and all the life sciences. Important discoveries are made yearly by small, scattered work teams all over the United States, and in other countries as well - of the magnitude of DNA in genetics, or of Urey and Miller's work in the early fifties on the origins of life. Full mastery of the reproductive process is in sight, and there has been significant advance in understanding the basic life and death process. The nature of ageing and growth, sleep and hibernation, the chemical functioning of the brain and the development of consciousness and memory are all beginning to be understood in their entirety. This acceleration promises to continue for another century, or however long it takes to achieve the goal of Empiricism: total understanding of the laws of nature. This amazing accumulation of concrete knowledge in only a few hundred years is the product of philosophy's switch from the aesthetic to the technological mode. The combination of *pure' science, science in the aesthetic mode, with pure tech- nology, caused greater progress towards the goal of technology the realization of the conceivable in the actual - than had been made in thousands of years of previous history. Empiricism itself is only the means, a quicker and more effective technique, for achieving technology's ultimate cultural 162 goal; the building of the ideal in the real world. One of its own basic dictates is that a certain amount of material must be collected and arranged into categories before any decisive com- parison, analysis, or discovery can be made. In this light centuries of empirical science have been little more than the building of foundations for the breakthroughs of our own time and the future. The amassing of information and understanding of the laws and mechanical processes of nature (*'pure research*) is but a means to a larger end: total understanding of Nature in order, ultimately, to achieve transcendence. In this view of the development and goals of cultural history, Engels's final goal, quoted above in the context of political revolution, is again worthy of quotation: 'The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and have hitherto ruled him, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real conscious Lord of Nature.' Empirical science is to culture what the shift to patriarchy was to the sex dialectic, and what the bourgeois period is to the Marxian dialectic - a latter-day stage prior to revolution. Moreover, the three dialectics are integrally related to one another vertically as well as horizontally: The empirical science growing out of the bourgeoisie (the bourgeois period is in itself a stage of the patriarchal period) follows the humanism of the aristocracy (the Female Principle, the matriarchy) and with its development of the empirical method in order to amass real knowledge (development of modern industry in order to amass capital) eventually puts itself out of business. The body of scientific discovery (the new productive modes) must finally outgrow the empirical (capitalistic) mode of using them. And just as the internal contradictions of capitalism must become increasingly apparent, so must the internal contradic- tions of empirical science - as in the development of pure know- ledge to the point where it assumes a life of its own, e.g., the atomic bomb. As long as man is still engaged only in the means - the charting of the ways of nature, the gathering of 'pure' knowledge - to his final realization, mastery of nature, his knowledge, because it is not complete, is dangerous. So danger- us that many scientists are wondering whether they shouldn't 163 put a lid on certain types of research. But this solution is hope- lessly inadequate. The machine of empiricism has its own momentum, and is, for such purposes, completely out of control. Could one actually decide what to discover or not discover? That is, by definition, antithetical to the whole empirical process that Bacon set in motion. Many of the most important discover- les have been practically laboratory accidents, with social implications barely realized by the scientists who stumbled into them. For example, as recently as five years ago Professor F. C. Steward of Cornell discovered a process called "cloning: by placing a single carrot cell in a rotating nutrient he was able to grow a whole sheet of identical carrot cells, from which he eventually recreated the same carrot. The understanding of a similar process for more developed animal cells, were it to slip out - as did experiments with *mind-expanding' drugs - could have some awesome implications. Or, again, imagine partheno- genesis, virgin birth, as practised by the greenfly, actually applied to human fertility. Another internal contradiction in empirical science: the mechanistic, deterministic, "soulless' scientific world-view, which is the result of the means to, rather than the (inherently noble and often forgotten) ultimate purpose of, Empiricism: the actualization of the ideal in reality. The cost in humanity is particularly high to the scientist himself, who becomes little more than a cultural technician. For, ironically enough, to properly accumulate knowledge of the universe requires a mentality the very opposite of comprehensive and integrated. Though in the long run the efforts of the individual scientist could lead to domination of the environment in the interest of humanity, temporarily the empirical method demands that its practitioners themselves become 'objective' mechanistic, overprecise. The public image of the white-coated Dr Jekyll with no feelings for his subjects, mere guinea pigs, is not entirely false: there is no room for feelings in the scientist's work; he is forced to eliminate or isolate them in what amounts to an occupational hazard. At best he can resolve this problem by separating his professional from his personal self, by compart- mentalizing his emotion. Thus, though often well-versed in an 164 academic way about the arts - the frequency of this, at any rate, is higher than of artists who are well-versed in science - the scientist is generally out of touch with his direct emotions and senses, or, at best, he is emotionally divided. His 'private and "public' life are out of whack; and because his personality is not well-integrated, he can be surprisingly conventional ('Dear, I discovered how to clone people at the lab today. Now we can go skiing at Aspen.) He feels no contradiction in living by convention, even in attending church, for he has never integrated the amazing material of modern science with his daily life. Often it takes the misuse of his discovery to alert him to that connection which he has long since lost in his own mind. The catalogue of scientific vices is familiar: it duplicates, exaggerates, the catalogue of 'male' vices in general. This is to be expected: if the technological mode develops from the male principle then it follows that its practitioners would develop the warpings of the male personality in the extreme. But let us leave science for the moment, winding up for the ultimate cultural revolution, to see what meanwhile had been happening to the aesthetic culture proper. With philosophy in the broadest classical sense - including 'pure' science - defecting, aesthetic culture became increas- ingly narrow and ingrown, reduced to the arts and humanities in the refined sense that we now know them. Art (hereafter referring to the 'liberal arts' especially arts and letters) had always been, in its very definition, a search for the ideal, re- moved from the real world. But in primitive days it had been the handmaiden of religion, articulating the common dream, objectifying 'other' worlds of the common fantasy, e.g., the art of the Egyptian tombs, to explain and excuse this one. Thus even though it was removed from the real world, it served an important social function; it satisfied artificially those wishes of society that couldn't yet be realized in reality. Though it was patronized and supported only by the aristocracy, the cultured elite, it was never as detached from life as it later became; for the society of those times was, for all practical purposes, synony- mous with its ruling class, whether priesthood, monarchy, or nobility. The masses were never considered by " society' to be 165 a legitimate part of humanity, they were slaves, nothing more than human animals, drones, or serfs, without whose labour the small cultured elite could not have maintained itself. The gradual squeezing out of the aristocracy by the new middle class, the bourgeoisie, signalled the erosion of aesthetic culture. We have seen that capitalism intensified the worst attributes of patriarchalism, how, for example, the nuclear family emerged from the large, loose family household of the past, to reinforce the weakening sex class system, oppressing women and children more intimately than ever before. The cultural mode favoured by this new, heavily patriarchal bourge- oisie was the 'male' technological mode - objective, realistic, tactual, 'commonsense' - rather than the effeminate, other- worldly, 'romantic idealist' aesthetic mode. The bourgeoisie, searching for the ideal in the real, soon developed the empirical science that we have described. To the extent that they had any remaining use for aesthetic culture, it was only for 'realistic' art, as opposed to the "idealistic' art of classical antiquity, or the abstract religious art of primitive or medieval times. For a time they went in for a literature that described reality - best exempli- fied by the nineteenth-century novel - and a decorative easel art: still lifes, portraits, family scenes, interiors. Public museums and libraries were built alongside the old salons and private galleries. But with its entrenchment as a secure, even primary, class, the bourgeoisie no longer needed to imitate aristocratic cultivation. More important, with the rapid development of their new science and technology, the little practical value they had for art was eclipsed. Take the scientific development of the camera; the bourgeoisie soon had little need for portrait painters; the little that painters or novelists had been able to do for them, the camera could do better. "Modern' 9 art was a desperate, but finally self-defeating, retaliation ('pater le bourgeois") for these injuries: the evapora- tion of its social function, the severance of the social umbilical cord, the dwindling of the old sources of patronage. The modern art tradition, associated primarily with Picasso and Cézanne, and including all the major schools of the twentieth century cubism, constructivism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism, 166 abstract expressionism, and so on - is not an authentic expression of modernity as much as it is a reaction to the realism of the bourgeoisie. Post-impressionism deliberately renounced all reality-affirming conventions - indeed the process began with impressionism itself, which broke down the illusion into its formal values, swallowing reality whole and spitting it up again as art - to lead eventually to an art-for-art's-sake so pure, a negation of reality so complete as to make it ultimately meaning- less, sterile, even absurd. (Cab drivers are philistine: they know a put-on when they see one.) The deliberate violating, deforming, fracturing of the image, called 'modern' art, was nothing more than a fifty-year idol smashing - eventually leading to our present cultural impasse. In the twentieth century, its life blood drained, its social function nullified altogether, art is thrown back on whatever wealthy classes remain, those nouveaux riches - particularly in America, still suffering from a cultural inferiority complex - who still need to prove they have 'arrived' by evidencing a taste for culture. The sequestering of intellectuals in ivory tower universi- ties, where, except for the sciences, they have little effect on the outside world, no matter how brilliant (and they aren't, because they no longer have the necessary feedback); the abstruse often literally unintelligible - jargon of the social sciences; the cliquish literary quarterlies with their esoteric poetry; the posh 57th Street galleries and museums (it is no accident that they are right next door to Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller) staffed and supplied by, for the most part, fawning rich-widows' hairdresser types; and not least the vulturous critical establish- ment thriving on the remains of what was once a great and vital culture - all testify to the death of aesthetic humanism. For in the centuries that Science climbed to new heights, Art decayed. Its forced inbreeding transformed it into a secret code. By definition escapist from reality, it now turned in upon itself to such degree that it gnawed away its own vitals. It became diseased - neurotically self-pitying, self-conscious, focused on the past (as opposed to the futurist orientation of the technolo- gical culture) and thus frozen into conventions and academies - orthodoxies of which 'avant-garde' is only the latest - pining for 167 remembered glories, the Grand Old Days When Beauty Was In Flower; it became pessimistic and nihilistic, increasingly hostile to the society at large, the 'philistines'. And when the cocky young Science attempted to woo Art from its ivory tower - eventually garret - with false promises of the courting lover (You can come down now, we're making the world a better place every day'), Art refused more vehemently than ever to deal with him, much less accept his corrupt gifts, retreating ever deeper into her daydreams neoclassicism, romanticism, expressionism, surrealism, existentialism. The individual artist or intellectual saw himself as either a member of an invisible élite, a 'highbrow', or as a down-and- outer, mingling with whoever was deemed the dregs of his society. In both cases, whether playing Aristocrat or Bohemian, he was on the margins of the society as a whole. The artist had become a freak. His increasing alienation from the world around him - the new world that science had created was, especially in its primitive stages, an incredible horror, only intensifying his need to escape to the ideal world of art - his lack of an audience, led to a mystique of 'genius'. Like an ascetic Saint Simeon on his pedestal, the Genius in the Garret was expected to create masterpieces in a vacuum. But his artery to the outside world had been severed. His task, increasingly impossible, often forced him literally into madness, or suicide. Painted into a corner with nowhere else to go, the artist has got to begin to come to terms with the modern world. He is not too good at it: like an invalid shut away too long, he doesn't know anything about the world anymore, neither politics, nor science, nor even how to live or love. Until now, yes, even now, though less and less so, sublimation, that warping of personality, was commendable: it was the only (albeit indirect) way to achieve fulfilment. But the artistic process has - almost - outlived its usefulness. And its price is high. The first attempts to confront the modern world have been for the most part misguided. The Bauhaus, a famous example, failed at its objective of replacing an irrelevant easel art (only a few optical illusions and designy chairs mark the grave), ending up with a hybrid, neither art nor science, and certainly not the 168 sum of the two. They failed because they didn't understand science on its own terms; to them, seeing in the old aesthetic way, it was simply a rich new subject matter to be digested whole into the traditional aesthetic system. It is as if one were to see a computer as only a beautifully ordered set of lights and sounds, missing completely the function itself. The scientific experiment is not only beautiful, an elegant structure, another piece of an abstract puzzle, something to be used in the next collage - but scientists, too, in their own way, see science as this abstraction divorced from life - it has a real intrinsic mean- ing of its own, similar to, but not the same as, the 'presence' the "en-soi' , of modern painting. Many artists have made the mistake of thus trying to annex science, to incorporate it into their own artistic framework, rather than using it to expand that framework. Is the current state of aesthetic culture all bleak? No, there have been some progressive developments in contemporary art. We have mentioned how the realistic tradition in painting died with the camera. This tradition had developed over centuries to a level of illusionism with the brush - examine a Bouguereau - that was the equal of, better than, the early photography, then considered only another graphic medium, like etching. The beginning of the new art of film and the realistic tradition of painting overlapped, peaked, in artists like Degas, who used a camera in his work. Then realistic art took a new course: either it became decadent, academic, divorced from any market and meaning, e.g., the nudes that linger on in art classes and second- rate galleries, or it was fractured into the expressionist or sur- realist image, posing an alternate internal or fantastical reality. Meanwhile, however, the young art of film, based on a true synthesis of the aesthetic and technological modes (as Empiri- ism itself had been), carried on the vital realistic tradition. And just as with the marriage of the divided male and female prin- ciples, empirical science bore fruit; so did the medium of film. But, unlike other aesthetic media of the past, it broke down the very division between the artificial and the real, between culture and life itself, on which the aesthetic mode is based. 160 Other related developments; the exploration of artificial materials, e.g., plastics; the attempt to confront plastic culture itself (pop art); the breakdown of traditional categories of media (mixed media), and of the distinctions between art and reality itself (happenings, environments). But I find it difficult un- reservedly to call these latter developments progressive: as yet they have produced largely puerile and meaningless works. The artist does not yet know what reality is, let alone how to affect it. Paper cups lined up on the street, pieces of paper thrown into an empty lot, no matter how many ponderous reviews they get in Art News, are a waste of time. If these clumsy attempts are at all hopeful, it is only in so far as they are signs of the break- down of "fine' art. The merging of the aesthetic with the technological mode will gradually suffocate 'pure' high art altogether. The first breakdown of categories, the re-merging of art with a (technolo- gized) reality, indicates that we are now in the transitional pre- revolutionary period, in which the three separate cultural streams, technology ('applied science'), "pure research', and "pure' modern art, will melt together - along with the rigid sex categories they reflect. The sex-based polarity of culture still causes many casualties. If even the 'pure' scientist, e.g., nuclear physicist (let alone the "applied' scientist, e.g., engineer), suffers from too much 'male', becoming authoritarian, conventional, emotionally insensitive, narrowly unable to understand his own work within the scienti- fic- let alone cultural or social - jigsaw, the artist, in terms of the sex division, has embodied all the imbalances and suffering of the female personality: temperamental, insecure, paranoid, defeatist, narrow. And the recent withholding of reinforcements from behind the front (the larger society) has exaggerated all this enormously; his overdeveloped "id' has nothing left to balance it. Where the pure scientist is 'schiz', or worse, ignorant of emotional reality altogether, the pure artist rejects reality because of its lack of perfection, and, in modern centuries, for its ugliness. And who suffers the most, the blind (scientist) or the lame (artist)? Culturally, we have had only the choice between one 170 sex role or the other: cither a social marginality leading to sclf- consciousness, introversion, defeatism, pessimism, oversensitiv- ity, and lack of touch with reality, or a split *professionalized' personality, emotional ignorance, the narrow views of the specialist. THE ANTIKULTUR REVOLUTION I have tried to show how the history of culture mirrors the sex dichotomy in its very organization and development. Culture develops not only out of the underlying economic dialectic, but also out of the deeper sex dialectic. Thus, there is not only a horizontal dynamic, but a vertical one as well: each of these three strata forms one more story of the dialectics of history based on the biological dualism. At present we have reached the final stages of Patriarchy, Capitalism (corporate capitalism), and of the Two Cultures at once. We shall soon have a triplicate set of preconditions for revolution, the absence of which is respon- sible for the failure of revolutions of the past. The difference between what is almost possible and what exists is generating revolutionary forces.3 We are nearing - I believe we shall have, perhaps within a century, if the snowball of empirical knowledge doesn't smash first of its own velocity a cultural revolution, as well as a sexual and economic one. The cultural revolution, like the economic revolution, must be predi- cated on the elimination of the (sex) dualism at the origins not only of class, but also of cultural division. What might this cultural revolution look like? Unlike 'cultural revolutions' of the past, it would not be merely a quantitative escalation, more and better culture, in the sense that the Renaissance was a high point of the aesthetic mode, or that the present technological breakthrough is the accumulation of centuries of practical knowledge about the real world. Great as they were, neither the aesthetic nor the technological culture, even at their respective peaks, ever achieved universality - either it was wholistic but divorced from the real world, or it achieved "progress*, at the price of cultural schizophrenia, and the falseness 3. Revolutionaries, by definition, are still visionaries of the aesthetic mode, the idealists of pragmatic politics, ITI and dryness of objectivity.' What we shall have in the next cultural revolution is the reintegration of the Male (Technological Mode) with the Female (Aesthetic Mode), to create an androgynous culture surpassing the highs of either cultural stream, or even of the sum of their integrations. More than a marriage, rather an abolition of the cultural categories themselves, a mutual cancelation a matter- antimatter explosion, ending with a poof! culture itself. We shall not miss it. We shall no longer need it: by then humanity will have mastered nature totally, will have realized in actuality its dreams. With the full achievement of the conceivable in the actual, the surrogate of culture will no longer be necessary. The sublimation process, a detour to wish fulfillment, will give way to direct satisfaction in experience, as felt now only by children, or adults on drugs.* (Though normal adults play' to varying degrees, the exam- ple that illustrates more immediately to almost everyone the intense level of this future experience, ranking zero on a scale of accomplishment--'nothing to show for it'-but nevertheless somehow always worth everyone's while, is lovemaking.) Control and delay of 'id' satisfaction by the 'ego' will be unnecessary; the id can live free. Enjoyment will spring directly from being and acting itself, the process of experience, rather than from the quality of achievement. When the male Technological Mode can at last produce in actuality what the female Aesthetic Mode had envisioned, we shall have eliminated the need for either. hippie) * Recent attempts of the youth culture to return to this state of simplicity drug -even if one turns into a 'head' by artificial means of chemical stimulation. are bound to fail. People have developed layers of repression and defenses only because they must to live in our current real world. One now can achieve at best a (mannered and self-conscious) 'direct experience' only by 'dropping out,' ignoring the real world, for example, moving to Colorado (circa 1878) with people of like mind, and hoping hard they won't bother bombing out there. This is naïve--and reactionary, regres- sive, ahistorical, utopian, etc.. -but above all, it is ineffective. I74 impossible. so, the system stinks, but you haven't got any- thing better ...) to hysteria (inhuman . unnatural ... sick. .. perverted . . communistic . . . 1084 .. . what? creative motherhood destroyed for babies in glass tubes, monsters made by scientists?, etc.'). But we have seen that such defensive reactions on the contrary may signify how close we are hitting: revolutionary feminism is the only radical programme that immediately cracks through to the emotional strata underlying ' serious' politics, thus reintegrating the personal with the pub- lic, the subjective with the objective, the emotional with the rational - the female principle with the male. What are some of the prime components of this resistance that is keeping people from experimenting with alternatives to the family, and where does it come from? We are all familiar with the details of Brave New World: cold collectives, with indivi- dualism abolished, sex reduced to a mechanical act, children become robots, Big Brother intruding into every aspect of private life, rows of babies fed by impersonal machines, eugenics mani- pulated by the state, genocide of cripples and retards for the sake of a super-race created by white-coated technicians, all emotion considered weakness, love destroyed, and so on. The family (which, despite its oppressiveness, is now the last refuge from the encroaching power of the state, a shelter that provides the little emotional warmth, privacy, and individual comfort now available) would be destroyed, letting this horror penetrate indoors. Ironically, one reason for the continual recurrence of"1984' so frequently is that it grows directly out of, signifying an exag- geration of, the evils of our present male-supremacist culture. For example, many of its visual details are lifted directly from our orphanages and state-run institutions for children.? This is 2. Though it is true that children in orphanages do not get even the warmth and attention that parents give a child, with crippling results - tests have shown IQ's of children in institutions to be lower, emotional maladjustment higher, and even, as in the famous experiment with monkeys deprived of motherly care, sexual functioning to be crippled or destroyed - those who quote these statistics so triumphantly to discredit radical alternatives do not recognize that the orphanage is the antithesis of a radical alternative, that in fact it is an outgrowth of what we are trying to correct. The orphanage is the underside of the family, just as prostitution is the 188 a vision of a society in which women have become like men, crippled in the identical way, thus destroying a delicate balance of interlocking dependencies. However, we are suggesting the opposite: rather than the concentration of the female principle into a "private? retreat, into which men can periodically duck for relief, we want to rediffuse it - for the first time truly creating society from the bottom up. Man's difficult triumph over Nature has made it possible to restore the truly natural: he could undo both his own and Eve's curse, to re-establish the earthly Garden of Eden. But in his long toil his imagination has been stifled: he fears rather the enlargement of his drudgery, the addition of Eve's curse to his own. But there is a more concrete reason why this subliminal horror image operates to destroy serious consideration of feminism: the failure of past social experiments. Radical experiments, when they have solved problems at all, have created an entirely new and not necessarily improved - set of problems in their place. Let us look briefly at some of these radical experiments to deter- mine the causes of their failure - for I believe that in no case was direct result of the institution of patriarchal marriage. In the same sense as prostitution complements marriage, the orphanage is the necessary com- plementary evil of a society in which the majority of children live under a systein of patronage by genetic parents. In the one case, because women exist under patronage, unclaimed women pay a special price; in the other, because children are possessions of specific individuals rather than free members of the society, unclaimed children suffer. Orphans are those unfortunate children who have no parents at all in a society that dictates that all children must have parents to survive. When all adults are monopolized by their genetic children, there is no one left to care about the unclaimed. However, if no one had exclusive relationships with children, then everyone would be free for all children. The natural interest in children would be diffused over all children rather than narrowly concentrated on one's own. The evils of this orphanage system, the barracks-like existence, the impersonality, the anonymity, arise because these institutions are dumping grounds for the rejected in an exclusive family system; whereas we want to spread family emotions over the whole society. Thus child institutions and their consequences are at the furthest remove from revolutionary alternatives because they violate almost all of our essential postulates: the integration of children into the total society, and the granting of full economic and sexual freedoms. 189 the failure surprising given the original postulates of the experi- ment, within its particular social context. We can then use this information as another valuable negative guideline, teaching us what most to avoid in our own programme. Of all the modern social experiments the most important failure was that of the Russian communes. (The failure of the Russian Revolution in general is a thorn in every radical's side; but its direct relation to the failure of the communes is seldom noted.) It led, ironically, to the assumption of a causal connec- tion between the abolition of the family and the development of a totalitarian state. In this view, the later Russian reinstitution of the nuclear family system is seen as a last-ditch attempt to salvage humanist values - privacy, individualism, love, etc., by then rapidly disappearing. But it is the reverse: the failure of the Russian Revolution to achieve the classless society is traceable to its half-hearted attempts to eliminate the family and sexual repression. This failure, in turn, was due to the limitations of a male-biased revolutionary analysis based on economic class alone, one that failed to take the family fully into account even in its function as an economic unit. By the same token, all socialist revolutions to date have been or will be failures for precisely these reasons, Any initial liberation under current socialism must always revert back to repression, because the family structure is the source of psychological, economic, and political oppression. Socialist attempts to soften the structure of power within the family by incorporating women into the labour force or army are only reformist. Thus it is no surprise that socialism as it is now constituted in the various parts of the world is not only no improvement on capitalism, but often worse. This develops a major component of 1984: the destruction of the family as the last refuge for intimacy, comfort, privacy, individualism, etc., and the complete encroachment of the superstructure economy into all aspects of life, the drafting of women into a male world, rather than the elimination of sex class distinction altogether. Because no provision has been made IQO to re-establish the female element in the outside world, to incorporate the 'personal' into the 'public', because the female principle has been minimized or obliterated rather than diffused to humanize the larger society, the result is a horror. Wilhelm Reich in The Sexual Revolution summarized the specific objective reasons for the failure of the Russian com- munes in the best analysis to date: (r) Confusion of the leadership and evasion of the problem (2) The laborious task of reconstruction in general given the cultural backwardness of Old Russia, the war, and famine. (3) Lack of theory. The Russian Revolution was the first of its kind. No attempt had been made to deal with emotional- sexual-familial problems in the formulation of basic revolu- tionary theory. (Or, in our terms, there had been a lack of 'consciousness raising' about female/child oppression and a lack of radical feminist analysis prior to the revolution itself.) (4) The sex-negative psychological structure of the individual, created and reinforced throughout history by the family, hindered the individual's liberation from this very structure. As Reich puts it: "It must be remembered that human beings have a tremendous fear of just that kind of life for which they long so much but which is at variance with their own structure. (5) The explosive concrete complexities of sexuality. In the picture that Reich draws of the time, one senses the immense frustration of people trying to liberate themselves without having a well-thought-out ideology to guide them. In the end, that they attempted so much without adequate pre- paration made their failure even more extreme: To destroy the balance of sexual polarization without entirely eliminating it was worse than nothing at all. Another experimental communal system, widely touted, is the kibbutz in Israel. Here, though, the failure is not extreme: the most common criticism is that children of the kibbutz lack individualism, that there is a 'groupiness' in their psychology that is the price of elimination of the family. (' And if you want to pay the price ... well. . .) Here, though there are many IQI studies of the effects of kibbutz life, I prefer to present my own experience. The division of labour remains. In my short stay, I observed the following: an American registered nurse could not land a job in the infirmary - because all women were needed in the Kitchen. A job in the sandal shop was given to a boy apprentice, rather than a woman skilled in leatherwork. Only foreign girls were so naive as to question why women aren't out in the fields, but instead confined to the laundry, the sewing room, or at best, the chicken house. (One woman explained to me that driving a tractor is apt to ruin a woman's complexion.) Children identify strongly with their genetic parents (one hears over and over again the words Ema Shel, Abba Shel, 'My mother, My father, in the same tone as every child on every block in the US says, 'If you don't do it I'll tell my Dad', or 'My moma's gona beat your ass*). Family ties remain strong, even if their worst consequences have been avoided. Above all, children are still segregated into their own special facilities and programmes; miniature animal farms, special mealtimes, etc. Schooling follows the European model, even if some of its worst aspects, such as 'grades', have been eliminated: the classroom continues, with its twenty-to-one ratio, adult approval still the final goal rather than learning for its own sake. Sex role models are fostered, sexegration not eliminated (there are different bathrooms for male and female), and homo- or bi-sexuality so unheard of that when I brought it up several women walked out of the room in protest. All rumours to the contrary, the kibbutz is increasingly conservative sexually (if it is embarrassing for a single woman to ask for birth control pills, VD is a disgrace), and any alliance other than a long-term one with a socially approved partner is frowned upon, Sexuality on the kibbutz remains conventionally organized, little different from the sexuality of the larger society. The incest taboo with all its repressive consequences has simply been extended from the family to the peer group. In fact the kibbutz is no radical experiment, but a limited communalism instituted to further specific agricultural aims. The kibbutz is nothing more than a community of farming 192 pioneers temporarily forced to sacrifice traditional social struc- tures to better adjust to a peculiar set of national conditions. If and when these conditions change, the kibbutz reverts to "nor- mal'. For example, women on the far left kibbutz at which I stayed were concerned with demanding private kitchens in addition to the communal one from which meals were served six times a day. They were still cast in the role of Gracious Wife, but had been denied the proper equipment to play the part. Their interest in clothing, fashion, makeup, glamour, not easy to indulge, resembled, indeed was, the longing of the farm girl for the vices of the big city - the more as intense in fantasy as it was difficult to achieve in practice. Or, going through the residential section of the kibbutz in the early evening, I could easily imagine that I was walking through a small town or a quiet suburbia in the US A: the matchbox homes were cared for with the attention to private property of any petit bourgeois, the decoration of apartments just as devoted. (The reversion back to property was explained to me as 'only realistic'. Formerly kibbutzniks had shared even personal clothing, but soon got sick of this.) Property is still the necessary extension of a deficient self - because children are still property. The line of Little Ones following Big Mama out of the House of Children looks like that of any kindergarten anywhere. Children are still oppressed. What is remarkable is that despite the lack of depth in the kibbutz experiment it turned out as well as it did. The propor- tionate results of even a weakening of the division of labour, the nuclear family and the resulting of sex repression, property mentality, etc., are spectacular. My impression was that the children were healthier physically, mentally, and emotionally than their counterparts in the American family structure; that they were friendlier and more generous, with great curiosity about the world outside; that their parents were not so nervous and hassled, and thus were able to maintain better relationships with them; and that their creativity and individuality were encouraged as much as the community could afford. * 193 multiple options to exist simultaneously, interweaving with each other, some transitional, others far in the future. An indivi- dual may choose one 'life style' for one decade, and prefer another at another period. (1) Single professions. A single life organized around the demands of a chosen profession, satisfying the individual's social and emotional needs through its own particular occupational structure, might be an appealing solution for many individuals, especially in the transitional period. Single professions have practically vanished, despite the fact that the encouragement of reproduction is no longer a valid social concern. The old single roles, such as the celibate reli- gious life, court roles - jester, musician, page, knight, and loyal squire - cowboys, sailors, firemen, cross-country truck drivers, detectives, pilots had a prestige all their own: there was no stigma attached to being professionally single. Unfortunately, these roles seldom were open to women. Most single female roles (such as spinster aunt, nun, or courtesan) were still defined by their sexual nature. Many social scientists are now proposing as a solution to the population problem the encouragement of 'deviant life styles' that by definition imply nonfertility. Richard Meier suggests that glamorous single professions previously assigned only to men should now be opened to women as well, for example, "astronaut. He notes that where these occupations exist for women, e.g., stewardess, they are based on the sex appeal of a young woman, and thus can be only limited way stations on the way to a better job or marriage. And, he adds, 'so many limita- tions are imposed [on women's work outside the home] . . that one suspects the existence of a culture-wide conspiracy which makes the occupational role sufficiently unpleasant that go per cent or more would choose homemaking as a superior alterna- tive'. With the extension of whatever single roles still exist in our culture to include women, the creation of more such roles, and a programme of incentives to make these professions reward- ing, we could, painlessly, reduce the number of people inter- ested in parenthood at all. (2) 'Living together.' Practised at first only in Bohemian or intellectual circles and now increasingly in the population at 204 large - especially by metropolitan youth - "living together' is becoming a common social practice. "Living together' is the loose social form in which two or more partners, of whatever sex, enter a non-legal sex/companionate arrangement the dura- tion of which varies with the internal dynamics of the relation- ship. Their contract is only with each other; society has no interest, since neither reproduction nor production - depend- encies of one party on the other - is involved. This flexible non- form could be expanded to become the standard unit in which most people would live for most of their lives. At first, in the transitional period, sexual relationships would probably be monogamous (single standard, female-style, this time around), even if the couple chose to live with others. We might even see the continuation of strictly non-sexual group living arrangements (roommates'). However, after several generations of non-family living, our psychosexual structures may become altered so radically that the monogamous couple, or the *aim-inhibited' relationship, would become obsolescent. We can only guess what might replace it - perhaps true 'group marriages', trans-sexual group marriages which also involved older children? We don't know. The two options we have suggested so far - single professions and 'living together' -already exist, but only outside the main- stream of our society, or for brief periods in the life of the normal individual. We want to broaden these options to include many more people for longer periods of their lives, to transfer here instead all the cultural incentives now supporting marriage making these alternatives, finally, as common and acceptable as marriage is today. But what about children? Doesn't everyone want children some time in their lives? There is no denying that people now feel a genuine desire to have children, But we don't know how much of this is the product of an authentic liking for children, and how much is a displacement of other needs. We have seen that parental satisfaction is obtainable only through crippling the child: the attempted extension of ego through one's children - in the case of the man, the "immortalizing of name, property, class, and ethnic identification, and in the case of the woman, motherhood as the justification of her existence, the resulting 205 attempt to live through the child, child-as-project - in the end damages or destroys either the child or the parent, or both when neither wins, as the case may be. Perhaps when we strip parent- hood of these other functions, we will find a real instinct for parenthood even on the part of men, a simple physical desire to associate with the young. But then we have lost nothing, for a basic demand of our alternative system is some form of intimate interaction with children. If a parenthood instinct does in fact exist, it will be allowed to operate even more freely, having shed the practical burdens of parenthood that now make it such an anguished hell. But what, on the other hand, if we find that there is no parent- hood instinct after all? Perhaps all this time society has per- suaded the individual to have children only by imposing on parenthood ego concerns that had no proper outlet. This may have been unavoidable in the past - but perhaps it's now time to start more directly satisfying those ego needs, As long as natural reproduction is still necessary, we can devise less des- tructive cultural inducements. But it is likely that, once the ego investments in parenthood are removed, artificial reproduction will be developed and widely accepted. (3) Households. I shall now outline a system that I believe will satisfy any remaining needs for children after ego concerns are no longer part of our motivations. Suppose a person or a couple at some point in their lives desire to live around children in a family-size unit. While we will no longer have reproduction as the life goal of the normal individual - we have seen how single and group non-reproductive life styles could be enlarged to become satisfactory for many people for their whole lifetimes and for others, for good portions of their lifetime - certain people may still prefer community-style group living perman- ently, and other people may want to experience it at some time in their lives, especially during early childhood. Thus at any given time a proportion of the population will want to live in reproductive social structures. Correspondingly, the society in general will still need reproduction, though reduced, if only to create a new generation. The proportion of the population will be automatically a select group with a predictably higher rate of stability, because 206 they will have had a freedom of choice now generally unavail- able. Today those who do not marry and have children by a certain age are penalized: they find themselves alone, excluded, and miserable, on the margins of a society in which everyone else is compartmentalized into lifetime generational families, chauvinism and exclusiveness their chief characteristic. (Only in Manhattan is single living even tolerable, and that can be debated.) Most people are still forced into marriage by family pressure, the "shotgun', economic considerations, and other reasons that have nothing to do with choice of life style. In our new reproductive unit, however, with the limited contract (see below), child-rearing so diffused as to be practically eliminated, economic considerations nonexistent, and all participating members having entered only on the basis of personal preference, "unstable' reproductive social structures will have disappeared. This unit I shall call a household rather than an extended family. The distinction is important: the word family implies biological reproduction and some degree of division of labour by sex, and thus the traditional dependencies and resulting power relations, extended over generations; though the size of the family - in this case, the larger numbers of the 'extended' family - may affect the strength of this hierarchy, it does not change its structural definition, Household', however, connotes only a large grouping of people living together for an unspecified time, and with no specified set of interpersonal relations. How would a 'household' operate? Limited Contract. If the household replaced marriage perhaps we would at first legalize it in the same way - if this is necessary at all. A group of ten or so consenting adults of varying ages° could apply for a licence as a group in much the same way as a young couple today applies for a marriage licence, perhaps even undergoing some form of ritual ceremony, and then might pro- ceed in the same way to set up house. The household licence would, however, apply only for a given period, perhaps seven to ten years, or whatever was decided on as the minimal time in which children needed a stable structure in which to grow 9. An added advantage of the household is that it allows older people past their fertile years to share fully in parenthood when they so desire. 207 up - but probably a much shorter period than we now imagine. If at the end of this period the group decided to stay together, it could always get a renewal. However, no single individual would be contracted to stay after this period, and perhaps some members of the unit might transfer out, or new members come in. Or, the unit could disband altogether. There are many advantages to short-term households, stable compositional units lasting for only about a decade: the end of family chauvinism, built up over generations, of prejudices passed down from one generation to the next, the inclusion of people of all ages in the child-rearing process, the integration of many age groups into one social unit, the breadth of personality that comes from exposure to many rather than to (the idiosyn- crasies of) a few, and so on. Children. A regulated percentage of each household - say one third - would be children. But whether, at first, genetic children created by couples within the household, or at some future time - after a few generations of household living had severed the special connection of adults with *their' children - children were produced artificially, or adopted, would not matter: (minimal) responsibility for the early physical dependence of children would be evenly diffused among all members of the household. But though it would still be structurally sound, we must be aware that as long as we use natural childbirth methods, the "household' could never be a totally liberating social form. A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort "belongs' to her ('To think of what I went through to have you!). But we want to destroy this possessiveness along with its cultural reinforce- ments so that no one child will be a priori favoured over another, so that children will be loved for their own sake. But what if there is an instinct for pregnancy? I doubt it. Once we have sloughed off cultural superstructures, we may uncover a sex instinct, the normal consequences of which lead to pregnancy. And perhaps there is also an instinct to care for the young once they arrive. But an instinct for pregnancy itself would be superfluous - could nature anticipate humanity's mastery of reproduction? And what if, once the false motivations for pregnancy had been shed, women no longer wanted to "have' 208