The revolution of 1917 was supposed to be an attempt to implement this programme by modifying the legislative compendium (Svod Zakonov) focused on the familial situation.
In 1918, the law code on civil registry established optional civil marriage. Divorce and legal abortion were both recognised. Two years later, eighteen-year-old youths were invited to register at the ‘Free Love Bureau’. Then, on 1st January, 1927, a new Family Code came into effect. It distinguished between two types of matrimony: registered marriage and ‘de facto marriage’ (Article 11). Divorce could be decreed freely, without even informing the spouse, and husbands could no longer force their wives to adopt their surname or place of residence. Polygamy was no longer a crime, and children were placed in state care.
To use the words of Alexandra Kollontai595 (Communism and the Family, 1920), the family became, at best, ‘a union of comradery, of two equal members of the communist society, both of whom were free, independent and hard-working’.
Furthermore, Alexandra Kollontai reminded pregnant women that they were each ‘creating a new working unit’ and ‘thus acting in support of the community’ (The Labour of Women in the Evolution of Economy, 1923).
In Communism and Marriage (which was published in 1926 and translated into French three years later), David Riazanov, the head of the Marx-Engels Institute of Petrograd, presents the official charter of the new Soviet sexual economy, as well as an overview of the motifs pervading the family code. He mentions Preobrazhensky’s eugenist views in a favourable light, views which advocate ‘society’s imprescriptible right to intervene in people’s sexual life for the purpose of perfecting the race through artificial sexual selection’ (in 1931, Riazanov would be arrested and excluded from the Communist Party before vanishing during the Stalinist purges).
The catastrophic results are immediately visible.
The ebb begins in 1934 with a legislation centred around the protection of mothers and their children. The following year, an editorial published in the Pravda specifies that a bad father cannot be a good citizen and that only ‘simple, pure and proud love’ can and must account for matrimony. On 26th June, 1936, abortion is prohibited. Soon, a natalist policy is implemented. The eradication of the ‘ultra-Left’ and the Moscow trials are simultaneously set into motion.
The fulfilment of the five-year plan takes precedence over the attainment of individual happiness. The state cautions people, reminding them about the decline of a tsarist power that had, during its last years, submitted to Rasputin’s lewd fantasies and whims. As for the topic of sexual freedom, it is labelled ‘Leftist’ and ranked among the ‘bourgeoisie’s ideological arsenal’.
In 1944, the Family Code undergoes definitive reformation. Non-registered marriage is no longer recognised, as cohabitation is discouraged and divorce made more difficult.
As remarked by Mr Julien Cheverny596 in Sexologie de l’Occident597 (Hachette, 1976), ‘the fraternal society of comrades developed into a paternal one. Although women, who had temporarily acted as companions and militants, and both sexual partners and workers, would retain the latter role and play a militant part whenever necessary, they reverted to being housewives or matrons. From the Tsar to the Secretary General, or from Father to Father, it seems that one only tore themselves free from the moral universe of brothels and bourgeois disorder so as to better sink into the dismal comfort and cheap conveniences of barracks and moralism’.
As a result, Freudo-Marxists proceeded to revive the ‘right to pleasure’. Wilhelm Reich, a man according to whom our sexual life represents ‘the cardinal issue of our entire social existence’, embraced exile in order to participate in ‘man’s sexual reconstruction’. In the end, he would be driven mad.
In 1959, as part of a book on The Issues of Sexual Education, Soviet physician T. S. Atariv asserted that chastity was most useful in ‘counteracting the erosion of revolutionary energy’; by contrast, sexual promiscuity often leads to ‘premature ageing’.
The Kremlin’s position has never varied since. In the pamphlet entitled What Is Communism? (Novosti Press Agency, Moscow, 1974), one finds the following response to the question of whether the family can subsist under Communism or not: ‘Could men ever renounce the incomparable happiness bestowed upon them by their relationship with their own children and shun their role of primary mentors? It is our firm conviction that the answer is no’.
In answer to the question ‘What is the communist attitude to free love?’, one encounters the following statement: ‘Communists categorically reject the opinion according to which the satisfaction of one’s own sexual instincts is as simple and inconsequential an act as swallowing a glassful of water. Genuine love always requires a specific sort of purity and mutual solicitude. The prospect of childbirth imposes enormous responsibility both towards one’s own beloved and offspring and towards society itself. Communists do not preach ascetism, nor simplify the relationship between men and women, but are, generally speaking, impervious to excesses, depravation and a frivolous approach to love and marriage’.
This criticism of ‘sexual liberation’ was developed in East Germany, in Walter Hollitscher’s Der überanstrengte Sexus. Die sogennante sexuelle Emanzipation im heutigen Kapitalismus (Akademie Verlag, East Berlin, 1975).598
The ‘Freudian-Marxist’ Mistake
According to Wilhelm Reich, ‘sexual misery’ is caused by an authoritarian society that masks ‘sexual naturality’, curbing it by means of cultural or institutional (meaning strictly human) prohibitions. Any normative morality is thus necessarily repressive, as is any hierarchy or institution. Reich proposes that mankind surrender itself to the universal ‘orgasmic flow’ and thus reinstate its lost paradise. This doctrine is particularly made explicit in Sexpol magazine, which has been published in France since 1975.
It is among the ‘Reichians’ that we, once again, encounter the myth of man’s ‘good (sexual) nature’, which has either been alienated or repressed by ‘authoritarian’ structures, with ‘sexual normality’ becoming a more or less shapeless supplement to ‘man’s essence’.
In a book entitled L’univers contestationnaire599 (Payot, 1969), two French psychoanalysts writing under the pseudonym ‘André Stéphane’ express the conviction that Leftist ‘sexual’ demands constitute the ultimate avatar of the messianic utopia espoused by great psychopathic dreamers: the dissenters mistake their wishes for reality because there is no possible reality in which their desires could take shape and because they are unable to assume their own responsibilities in the face of life.
As explained by Doctor Muldworf, the major mistake made by the ‘Reichian’ current consists in confusing the sexual repression whose origin is of a social nature with the one that is an inherent part of one’s emerging desire. As regards the ‘anti-authoritarian’ rebellion, it is based on the erroneous postulate of a radical severance between the subject and the object: ‘The power of the superego (the prohibiting or repressive moral authority) is not the direct reflection of a parental or paternal attitude or severity; it is, instead, the result of a compromise taking place within the subject between the strength of his impulses, his aptitude to bear the resultant anguish, and his parents’ explicit or implicit educational behaviour’.
In conclusion, he makes the following clarification: ‘A major part of our current mental pathology is a pathology of paternal deprivation’.
Doctor Muldworf is both a psychiatrist and a spokesman for the French Communist Party, and the Party is unwilling to have neurotics among its own ranks.
***
Sexualité et féminité,600 an essay by Bernard Muldworf, Ed. Sociales, 96 pages.
***
The Status of Women
In Sexual Politics (Stock, 1971), Kate Millett, the theoretician of the American Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), states that ‘sexual stereotypes lack any and all biological basis’.
Mrs Stassinopoulos responds: ‘Experiments conducted on animals have confirmed what has been implied by a
ccident studies among humans: by varying the amounts of androgens that a foetus is exposed to, researchers can, at will, trigger male or female behaviour in the young animal’.
Arianna Stassinopoulos is a woman of Greek origin who completed her studies in the UK. Her book bears a most revelatory subheading: ‘Against feminism, for femininity’. It targets ‘female women’, meaning all those who long for emancipation yet do not believe that the latter should be channelled through social chaos and the rejection of motherhood.
The fundamental idea behind the WLM is that beyond sexual differences, meaning functional ones in the reproduction process, there are no innate (physiological or psychological) differences between men and women. All human beings are thus more or less ‘bisexual’, and the differences that are noticeable at every given moment are said to be solely due to ‘conditioning’: since early childhood, men and women are allegedly conditioned to play the social role assigned to their gender through clothes, games, and vocabulary.
Within an egalitarian society, it would, in other words, suffice to give little girls toy lorries and little boys dolls to witness the inversion of their ‘social roles’.
In a book initially published in 1973 and entitled Little Girls: Social Conditioning and Its Effects on the Stereotyped Role of Women During Infancy, Mrs Elena Gianini Belotti601 declares: ‘Differentiated instruction according to the sex represents a genuine form of violence’. She then adds the following statement in the UNESCO courier (August–September 1975): ‘It is not evident in any way that there are psychological and intellectual divergences that stem from the biological differences between males and females’.
On her part, Mrs Evelyne Sullerot602 writes: ‘The terms “masculine values” and “feminine values” are extremely inaccurate phrases that I only use with caution. They do not seem to relate to any essential reality whatsoever’ (Demain, les femmes,603 Laffont-Gonthier, 1965). As for Mrs Gisèle Halimi,604 she coldly states: ‘The acquired is a hundred times more powerful than the innate’ (La cause des femmes,605 Grasset, 1974). Not to be outdone, Mrs Françoise d’Eaubonne606 exclaims: ‘The very notion of human behaviour imposed upon us by certain chromosomes is outdated and obsolete!’
There is but a single step that separates such people from asserting that gender is nothing but an illusion; and it is a threshold that the most extreme ne0-feminists are more than willing to cross. They thus refer to Simone to Beauvoir, who declares (in The Second Sex, Gallimard, 1949): ‘One is not born but rather becomes a woman’.
The idea that man ‘invents’ woman (just as the anti-Semite ‘invents’ the Jews) draws inspiration from the Sartrean theory of ‘being-for-others’: we are but what others choose to see or what they believe they distinguish in us. In actual fact, Others do not even exist; it is we who bestow upon them their existence. Mrs Suzanne Lilar607 remarks: ‘Basically, Simone de Beauvoir had always been inconvenienced by the fact that there could actually be some “others”. She therefore attempted to resolve the matter by denying it: there are no women, and there are no differences’.
The ‘Bisexuality’ Myth
Mrs Stassinopoulos displays a certain amount humour when demonstrating that we have thus reached a paradoxical situation where, as a result of its obsessional desire to minimise the ‘biological’ in comparison with the ‘social’, the WLM sinks into neopuritanism. She writes: ‘When it comes to genital organs, the attitude of WLM members is remarkably Victorian. These organs must be kept rigorously separate from other organs that are both purer and nobler and pertain to thought and sensitivity. The reproductive function thus reverts to being unpleasant, wicked and devoid of any and all importance — this time, however, it is not because sex is pernicious, but because it is a despicable reminder of the fundamental differences between women and men’.
This ‘neopuritanism’ can be likened to the Christian theory according to which ‘sexual differentiation can never prevail over the universality of our human nature’ (Jean-Marie Aubert, La femme. Antiféminisme et christianisme,608 Cerf-Desclée, 1975).
The ‘bisexuality’ myth is, likewise, directly connected to the notion that gender is only ‘superficially’ determined at birth and that it is only genuinely molded through familial education and social relations.
The 7th issue of Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse609 focused on ‘bisexuality and gender differences’. In it, J-B Pontalis’610 students attempted to revive the Hermaphrodite topic by extrapolating Freud’s theories on alterity. Joyce McDougall611 writes: ‘The hermaphroditic ideal is rooted in the fusional ideal that unites a child to the maternal bosom’ (see also Groddeck’s speculations on the ‘male pregnancy fantasy’, and its outline by Mrs. Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni612 in Partage des femmes,613 Seuil, 1976).
Doctor Gérard Zwang connects this theory to a denial of reality. He writes: ‘The human condition can only be experienced as a man or a woman. As soon as fertilisation takes place, the die is cast. There are some who delight in musings about the bisexuality of each human being. Such a conception, however, does not exceed the scientific level of living-room conversations. […] Somatic sexual inheritance cannot be denied. The man-like attitudes of certain women and the effeminate behaviour of certain men could never change anything about their reproductive polarity. As for the transsexuals who have their breasts or genitals mutilated, or acquire udders through hormonal means, they are all stricken with grave mental illness’.
It is neither coincidence nor social structures, therefore, that are responsible for the fact that, having been born a boy or a girl, a child retains its gender throughout its life. It is our cells’ chromosomal contents that determine our sex. (It should also be noted that if there were indeed such a thing as biological bisexuality, only men could claim to have it, since they alone bear both sexual chromosomes, X and Y, while women are defined by two allosomic Xs.)
In this regard, researchers specify that the differences that are deemed ‘scandalous’ by the WLM do not solely relate to (primary and secondary) sexual characteristics, but range from endocrinal secretions, reactions to morbid stimuli, pathology, and resilience to both effort and pain all the way to hypothalamic functioning. Even the potency of medicines and toxins vary in accordance with the gender. One could, on the basis of different parenchymas such as enzymes, speak of ‘biochemical sexes’. In the case of certain substances, an activity-related sexual difference and, in parallel, a metabolic one can be brought into evidence (see P. Binet’s L’activité des medicaments et des toxiques en function du sexe,614 Doin, 1972).
Professor Gilbert-Dreyfus, an endocrinologist, has made the following declaration: ‘Some of the functions of the hypothalamus, an agglomeration of nerve fibres and nuclei that plays an essential role in the brain, vary from one gender to the other. The brains of men and women, and consequently, their respective ways of thinking, are certainly not identical; and I, for one, take issue with the assertion that there is neither a masculine nor a feminine brain, but rather a single one, namely that of the human race’. He then adds: ‘By resorting to dresses and dolls, one risks turning boys into neurotic children, children that will nonetheless still remain boys. Ever embarrassed for being the way they are and maladjusted to the surrounding world, they would thus, at best, be ideal candidates for transvestism and even homosexuality’.
Due to the organism’s psychophysiological solidarity, the difference between men and women can be found, most logically, in virtually all of our psychological and temperamental predispositions.
A good example is that of the tendency towards aggressiveness, which is blatantly more pronounced in the masculine gender. As a result of the higher androgen level in men, this difference already manifests itself during the very first months of our lives. ‘Power, resistance, energy, combativeness, a hunter’s instinct, and an impulse to conquer and dominate are all masculine characteristics that contrast with feminine attributes, namely submission, passivity, sensitivity, tenderness, receptiveness, intuition and an eye of subtl
e details’ (as stated by professor Gilbert-Dreyfus).
With women, all physical and mental constitutional traits that lean towards preservation are greatly accentuated. Since their primary biological role is to give life and foster its preservation, women are inclined to embrace tradition (defined as a repetition of things that have already proven their worth) and education (understood as the learning of certain models and their subsequent replication). Men, by contrast, have a tendency to seek innovation, even when the latter comprises a certain risk. Despite tiring more easily, women can withstand much greater physical strain and generally live longer than men. They are also endowed with superior pain tolerance. Their biological superiority as far as resistance and vitality are concerned is as famous as that of men when it comes to the prompt use of force, maximalisation and localised effort. It is the continuous that serves as basis for women’s superiority; for men, by contrast, it is the discontinuous.
A Complementarity of Temperaments
The same difference is encountered in matters of intelligence: despite the presence of equal averages, the magnitude of I.Q. variations is greater among men than among women.
Mrs Stassinopoulos explains: ‘Men are less average than women. It is amongst them that one finds both geniuses and idiots; both giants and dwarves. This greater variability among men cannot be accounted for by environmental influence, as could a simple average difference. If the smaller proportion of women at the highest levels of society is due to the fact that as a result of being considered mentally inferior to men, they actually become so, how does the WLM explain the higher percentage of idiots among men? Why is it that remedial classes are filled with boys? And why is there a greater number of mentally disabled men in psychiatric hospitals’?
Systems and Debates Page 31