Freud understood that the repression of the libido is the source of civilization. The torment of sexual joy is the main insight of psychoanalysis. We should not be surprised that when we curb male sexuality, as we want to, as we need to, the repressed desire will explode in subterranean fantasies. This process has been understood in the broadest terms for at least a century. If you are civilized, you will create monsters. The monstrosity of pornography is a sign of how civilized we have become.
Between barbarism and civilization, between the wilderness and the law, between the basic unfairness of our bodies and the hope of justice, the intricacies of sexual power and the purity of consent, we struggle to build a life. These struggles will not end if pornography is stripped from the Internet. Silent horror and shaming disgust at male sexuality—Internet porn as “pollution”—cannot be correct responses. We need culture, not piety.
Diogenes brought masturbation into the marketplace, but he also related the story of its origin. The god Hermes taught his son Pan to masturbate to ease the pain of his love for Echo. Pan taught the technique to the lonely shepherds. Masturbation is thus a gift from the gods, like fire, like wine. Maybe that’s all civilization is: a bunch of tricks. Internet porn is just the latest.
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I. Holy crap! Seriously? I’ve seen about a hundred and in the most conventional places: the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves I owned in high school, my childhood friend’s Joy of Sex, Kama Sutra postcards, stuff on art gallery walls, and bits from avant-garde French cinema. As for penises, it’s not how they look, it’s what they do that matters. Many women love porn, but I find just about anything more interesting. Sex for me has nothing to do with voyeurism and everything to do with participation.
II. At the same time that the market for pornography was expanding, there was a serious investment in sexual education and health—largely spearheaded by feminists. I don’t think the power of this massive program of education should be underrated. When I was a teenager I listened to a popular Canadian radio call-in show hosted by a straight-talking nurse named Sue Johanson. I’d listen to it before falling asleep, on headphones attached to a bright yellow Sony Walkman, learning about menstruation, ovulation, masturbation, contraception, conception, lubrication, oral sex. I knew that having agency over my body meant understanding its mechanics. And I was lucky enough to have access to Johanson’s show. Women in less permissive cultures are denied something life-alteringly big when they are denied access to sexual education.
III. Steve is, of course, speaking here about post-Enlightenment contemporary Western culture. Sex is only healthy and open when you are lucky enough to live in a culture where sex is healthy and open. In Toronto at the moment the public schools have introduced a progressive sex ed curriculum that includes homosexuality as just another way to be, and some parents—mostly Muslim and Christian—are pulling their kids out of public schools as a result. We see such culture clashes happening across the Western world. It is not clear, at least not to me, that we won’t regress.
FIVE
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Against Outrage
MAYBE we are between civilizations. The old civilization of male dominance is crumbling under the weight of its absurdity, and the new civilization based on gender equality is ever so slowly rising. The contradictions of the transition torture us; they make us look gross and ridiculous. Intellectual and moral confusion is the natural condition of contemporary gender experience, a confusion we are all constantly trying to suppress and avoid.
This confusion is the stuff of everyday life. Sometimes it can arise from nothing more than silly incongruities. I heard a rumor not long ago that the woman who gave me my first blowjob was about to be named a judge. (It was just a rumor, it turned out.) We lost touch after high school, but I had followed the rapid rise of her career, as you do with people you once crouched with in the ragged patch of adolescent poplars. She had always been brilliant, even when she was sixteen. It was no big deal. But the idea was intensely strange to me, at least momentarily.
Later I was visiting an old friend who teaches sociology at a small university in rural Ontario. We were watching our kids on the playground—my son wrestling in the grass with some boy he’d run into, her daughter sitting in a circle of girls quietly decorating a sandcastle with pinecones. We started chatting about how stark the differences between boys and girls can be, and how unexpected. It’s biological, she said, it has to be—a comment I found funny from a sociologist. You say that to your colleagues? I asked. I don’t, she said, smiling. At home it’s biological. At the university it’s all structure.
Later still I was at a bachelor party, one of those bizarre rituals in which men have to stoop to their stereotype as a kind of recognition of common brutality, and we were all drunkenly heading to a strip club when my wife called. She needed to talk. A man she worked with called her “Honey.”I It pissed her off. It pissed me off. It pissed me off that this classic old-school garbage should survive. And so I found myself enraged, genuinely enraged at the sexism of a world that would call my wife “Honey” just as I was entering a business in which I was going to pay to see women naked.
Such are the everyday minor anti-epiphanies of living through the twenty-first-century rearrangement of gender. They subtract from rather than add to what I thought I knew about myself and others. It would be possible in each case to tease out the strands of the contradiction, to say “Here is adolescent sex, and here is the majesty of law. Here is child rearing, and here is the theory of gender. Here is the powerful woman you love, and here is your brute nature.” The reality seems so much more manageable when separated, and it’s tempting to believe that only the juxtapositions produce the sense of confusion. The point is that the way we live now inevitably puts those juxtapositions in our way. The rearrangement is messy. And the messiest part is that these anti-epiphanies—crumbling ideals, devastated orders—are obviously the moments of maturity.
The messiness of personal politics in our time and place leads, organically, to a state of intellectual and moral hypercertainty, of gender fanaticism—there is on the one hand, the social justice warriors and on the other hand, men’s rights activists. As the experience of being men and women has become more fraught and complicated, the reaction to that experience has become more simplistic and shrill. And the smaller the matter at hand, the shriller the response. Outrage is the automatic response to any subject that falls under the rubric “The personal is political,” whether it’s pornography or housework or what shoes women wear or conversations at parties. The outrage serves mainly to obviate the contradictions that are the substance of our moment, to make its proponents look virtuous.
The deep irony of our moment is that, as historical forces beyond anybody’s control bring men and women closer together, the way we talk about men and women remains resolutely divisive and despairing. The classic human instinct to retreat into oversimplification when confronted by a complex new reality is only a partial explanation. There is also a failure of theory. The intersection of the personal and the political has devolved into moralism, attenuated from facts and self-consuming in its pursuit of ideological purity. Outrage cannot help us understand the new intimacies and the new politics that emerge from the new intimacies.
In that strip club with my brother and his friends, I was talking with one of the naked women, who had come up to try to make me spend twenty dollars to writhe her ass on my thighs for the length of an AC/DC song. A fleet of men in wheelchairs passed by. “Do you get a lot of handicapped guys?” I asked her, for something to ask. She sipped a twelve-dollar vodka tonic I had paid for. “One thing I’ve learned in this job is that we’re all handicapped,” she told me for free.
* * *
“The personal is political” was coined, as so many dubious yet enduring phrases were, in the late 1960s. Carol Hanisch, a pioneer in the women’s liberation movement, wrote the essay of that title as a memorandum on various sessions she had attended with other “m
ovement women” in New York and Gainesville, Florida. In 1969, women in groups discussing their personal struggles as political issues was a radical experiment, akin to acid tests or happenings, perhaps even more radical than those other attempts at the expansion of consciousness, since the women’s sessions drilled into the motives of individual lives and the substructures of social arrangements.
The defensive tone of the essay can be startling, since from our own historical perspective its basic assumptions seem so obvious—that domestic and cultural questions are as vital as explicitly political questions—but it’s also a testament to the strength of the essay. The ideas contained in “The Personal Is Political,” which seemed borderline crazy when written, are now taken for granted.
I believe at this point, and maybe for a long time to come, that these analytical sessions are a form of political action. I do not go to these sessions because I need or want to talk about my “personal problems.” In fact, I would rather not. As a movement woman, I’ve been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing, and in general pretty much in control of my own life. To admit to the problems in my life is to be deemed weak. So I want to be a strong woman, in movement terms, and not admit I have any real problems that I can’t find a personal solution to (except those directly related to the capitalist system). It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.
A profound suspicion motivated “The Personal Is Political,” a suspicion of hypocritical and willful ignorance. While movement women struggled for civil rights, the overthrow of the capitalist system, and the end of the Vietnam War, the men whose struggle they shared expected them to be sexually and domestically docile. In her conversations with ordinary women Hanisch saw that the machinery of gender politics doesn’t run merely through legal and political institutions or factories; it runs through the entire fabric of society: in bed, in the kitchen, in the grocery story, in advertising, in magazines, and in movies.
The argument could have stopped there. Hanisch could merely have pointed out another species of oppression and rested. But she went further. She reflected the insight back at herself, to question her own motives and the nature of the movement to which she was devoted. She had self-identified as a “political woman,” but what did it mean to be political if politics existed as a fragment of exterior life? “I think ‘apolitical’ women are not in the movement for very good reasons,” she wrote, “and as long as we say ‘you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,’ we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of ‘apolitical’ women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have.” This insight requires guts and humility to make. Not only was Hanisch rejecting the Marxist category of materialist struggle, the cornerstone of left-wing politics for a century, but she also cut through the question of style, the question of the political pose. Her politics were not radical chic. The opposite: for her the struggle belonged to the suburban housewife as much as to the Black Panther. From that humility, from that gesture of empathy to the struggles of those who were not like her and did not share her beliefs, Hanisch leaped into a politics as transcendent as it was quotidian, grand in outlook but minutely focused on the daily business of life.
“The Personal Is Political” began as a plea for more complexity, an appeal to widen the ground of feminism to include women who did not call themselves feminists, to look at the entire theater of gender relations. The concept vastly extended the field of thought for feminism; women’s liberation was no longer the dry business of bills making their way through Congress, or amendments to the Constitution, or even equal pay for equal work. The dominant questions were domestic or sexual: the division of housework, violence against women. A world in which women are raped and beaten with impunity is not a liberated one, even if women have the vote.
The essay implied that all personal decisions—what to eat, what to wear, what to read, what to watch—were political decisions. Signs of male power could be found everywhere in the culture to those with the eyes to see. Inevitably that extension of critique involved a diffusion of its direction. The movement shifted from large actions at large institutions, which were few and obviously vital, to critiquing the constant barrage of misogyny. Thus the turn to the fashion industry and the medical profession. Thus Ms. magazine. Thus “fat is a feminist issue.” Thus The Beauty Myth.
The ferocious brand of identity politics that arrived in the 1990s was little more than an extrapolation of “The Personal Is Political,” a potential politicization of all aspects of human expression, from piercings to musical styles, from the consumption of meat to characters in vampire shows. As gender politics extended to embrace every aspect of life, the symptoms of oppression were omnipresent and the source of oppression grew vaguer: patriarchy or some other indefinable concept. The structure of privilege explained all differences, and this structure was taken as given, immemorial, unchanging. Gender politics became afflicted with the oversimplification that afflicts all personal morality: who suffers most is most virtuous. University departments blossomed into the pursuit of panvictimology. A hierarchy of impotence imposed itself. Power was itself a moral failure, and those who came from powerlessness were inherently closer to truth and justice. Validity narrowed and narrowed until it collapsed at the fact that speech itself is power.
The great intellectual advantage of academic identity politics is its simplicity. Panvictimology freezes every group, and every person in those groups, into appointed, unmoving circles of good and evil, defined by structures of privilege and their overthrow by the forces of progress. The development of panvictimology also had an underlying economic motive: its convenience. Rather than having to teach students a methodology or, even more grueling, a body of knowledge, professors merely had to impress an attitude on their students, the attitude of virtue. Then they could cop that attitude and apply it to any situation. Every undergraduate who has taken a course in the humanities understands at least superficially the notion of structures of privilege and understands how to pose correctly when confronted with these structures. (They always insist on replicating those structures in their own lives of course.)
The game is called Check Your Privilege. Another name for it might be Who Is More Righteous Than I? It’s learned in college, but it’s played mostly online. Internet discussion takes the insights found in “The Personal Is Political” and renders them null and void, one by one. The analysis of personal struggle is reduced to stylized masks. The concern for apolitical people, for the lives of those who don’t care about gender politics, vanishes into a vague contempt. Openness and humility toward other modes of life collapse into the opinion echo chamber of like-minded gangs. Meanwhile hope for real change grows less and less relevant. Hashtag activism—utterly impotent—loses sight of everything other than its own brief speechifying.
* * *
When it comes to gender, the Internet is a big scolding machine. Any failure in navigating the most complex rearrangement of social existence in history will automatically be greeted with vast choruses of howls. The smallest questions bring the largest hate. The most vicious debate on the subject of gender over the past couple of years has been on the topic of representation in video game reviewing. A more negligible question is hard to imagine. There is the vital point of context, however; the online space is an environment of horrific, all-consuming, and almost unprecedented misogyny, and the desolation of digital feminism is an inevitable consequence of the climate in which it has arisen.
Online feminists are making their arguments while being chased from their homes by an onslaught of direct, personal attacks. Virtually every feminist scholar and female critic of any kind has to endure outright threats of physical harm. For raising her voice on the matter of video games, Brianna Wu had to move to an undisclosed location. For campaigning to have a woman
on the British ten-pound note, Stella Creasy had to install a panic button in her home. For trying to run Reddit, Ellen Pao was swept away on a tide of abuse. The debate around gender online is not happening in a dignified arena where a healthy spirit of give-and-take meets with a community of like-minded truth-seekers. Who can feel intelligent empathy for a group (in this case men) constantly calling for your rape and murder?
And feminism—a female political agenda—is the only one worth taking seriously online. As for the men’s rights crowd or the seduction artists’ crowd, or The Red Pill sub on Reddit, or Milo Yiannopolous, or the alt right generally—none of them properly rise to the level of argument. They are expressions of pure hostility toward female independence as such, and are of interest only as anthropological phenomena. Intellectually they are literally beneath contempt; they have no ideas worth critiquing.
Men’s rights groups have taken the identity politics of the 1990s and inverted it. Men are the victims now! Men are excluded from jobs because of their gender! Men are victimized because they do all the hard jobs! Men die earlier than women! The claim that straight men in the prosperous democracies today are victims is the sincerest form of flattery to radical feminists. How deeply those men must crave the moral certainties of being the downtrodden, the salve of the sense of injustice. That blind anger is true parochialism. The world doesn’t need a men’s movement. History has been the men’s movement.
The Unmade Bed Page 12