by Heinz Bude
Why else do we look at fashion photography – at the street pictures and portraits of Will McBride from the early 1960s, or of Richard Avedon from the early 1980s and Jürgen Teller from the early 2000s? Because we want to know how erotic differences were displayed, how lust concealed itself, what betrayed the loneliness of lovers. How many shirt buttons did men leave undone? How proudly did women show their legs, cover their bosoms and emphasize their backsides? How brutally did youth revel in itself? If men stop wearing hats (and start wearing caps) and if women stop wearing dresses (and start wearing trouser suits), then the times have changed. Even the transgender code, which abandons the heteronormativity of binary sexual signs in favour of a sophisticated unisex casual look, is discerning about material, looseness of waist, concealment under the hood, all of which create an erotic element. The mood of society is documented in the fashion of the sexes.
It is women who are responsible for shifting the balance. There are still highly educated, confident and professionally successful women who, anticipating the long road of motherhood ahead, choose to break off their careers and leave the role of breadwinner to the man alone. However, they are making a personal biographical choice among many possible lifestyles rather than bowing to the pressure of a gender role that offers them no alternative. The arrangement between the sexes, in which it is mainly the man who brings home the money for the family, posing as the normative authority for the basic unit of society while effectively leaving it to the woman to take responsibility for running family life and doing the housework – this division of familial labour belongs to the past. The vast majority of couples want domestic equality, regardless of their level of education. Both ideally want jobs and a career, while at the same time having a happy family life where the men are active fathers and the women are responsible for more than just cooking and child rearing. Anyone, man or woman, who holds the opinion that a woman’s place is in the home needs to have strong backing in a corresponding ideological milieu. Whoever agrees with (or without) Simone de Beauvoir that men equal transcendence, and that their role belongs outside the home, where they earn the money, while women represent immanence and are responsible for making the home comfortable, providing emotional support and looking after the children, does so knowing they are in the minority. After the Second World War, male dominance in societies like ours forfeited its hypnotic power, as Virginia Woolf put it.1 The mythical boundaries between the sexes, which once made gender roles so rigid, have collapsed.
This is another way of saying that women have been the primary beneficiaries of the education expansion and are now valued on labour markets as employees with high reserves of human capital. Replacing the young woman from a conservative, rural working-class household as the benchmark for a compensatory education policy is the urban male youth from a migrant family with no history of advanced education. Not only do more girls take A levels than they did, they also outperform boys and do better at university. It won’t be long before they break through the glass ceiling of graduate studies, at least in the subjects they prefer. This applies even more to ambitious young women with migration backgrounds.
However, it isn’t just better preconditions for female careers that are putting women ahead. Changes in self-perception are also crucial. For young women today, it goes without saying that a happy life includes both a good job and a family. They don’t want to compromise on either of these two goals. Women who have prioritized their careers over children are seen as negative examples. Despite the overwhelming evidence of a persistent gender pay gap in the labour markets, women’s employment rate continues to rise. In some branches, particularly the corporate service sector and professions like medicine, law and psychotherapy, women will soon overtake men, even if their income remains average.
In a thought-provoking book, the American author Hanna Rosin anticipates the ‘end of men and the rise of women’.2 She refers to the situation in 2008, when the politically induced collapse of Lehman Brothers left many family men without a job, unable to repay their mortgages and facing ruin. Germany experienced something similar in the final stages of the Second World War, during the aerial bombardment and the mass exodus of refugees from the eastern territories. In this hour of extreme need, women came to the rescue.3 Faced with the complete failure of their men, amidst social collapse and under deeply adverse conditions, the ‘weaker sex’ revealed its strength, putting on a show of incredible resilience and adaptability.
Hanna Rosin infers from this that, in the future, women will take the lead in globalized societies. Because of their educational advantage and emotional reserves, they are far better equipped than men to deal with ‘normal catastrophes’,4 difficult circumstances and uncertain situations. Soft skills like team-play ability, collaborative talent and a subtlety become evolutionary advantages in an economy marked by rapid change, deep social divisions and extended interconnectivity. Methods of power have become more fluid, mobile and ramified, promoting women who make decisions as ‘female’ but acting as ‘male’.
What does this irrevocable shift in the balance between the sexes mean for the mood of society?
There is no denying that men’s loss of effortless privilege, the result of the vigorous rise of opportunities for women, has affected the relationship between the sexes at the deepest and most private levels. However, the dynamic of social equality has not been simultaneous with a change in erotic tension, in the sexual script and in the feeling of being desirable, attractive and in demand, whatever one’s sexual orientation. A woman in a senior position with three well-adjusted children can suffer because her husband has forgotten how to seduce her in bed. On the other hand, a man with only moderate professional success and personal sophistication, but who still enjoys ‘a bit of nookie’, may find he is enjoying more popularity with the opposite sex.
The rituals of eroticism often originate in a different era than the rules of sexual equality. Of course, one shouldn’t confuse things: a wink across the desk can quickly become sexual harassment and an invitation to dinner an attempt at bribery. However, the two levels can’t be separated entirely. The relationship between the sexes, at work and in public, always entails tension which is reflected in the erotic musicality of social relations. That is why the frisson between Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca of 1942, reflects the wartime mood of the forties; why the love affair between the youthful Mariel Hemingway and the middle-aged charmer Woody Allen in Allen’s Manhattan of 1979 captures something of the downbeat mood of the seventies; and why the romance between the ageing couple Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in Nancy Meyers’s Something’s Gotta Give of 2003 conveys a sense of passing time typical of the 2000s.
Sexologists are unanimous that the modernization of sexual mores and sexual self-perception has given rise to a negotiational or consensual morality5 that allows for mixes of freedom and civility, desire and courtesy, transgressive self-gratification and acute awareness of boundaries. One feels confident to do what one likes, while at the same time making sure that the other consents to one’s preferences or fantasies. Everything is possible, so long as you stick to the rules of taboo-free negotiation and mutual consent. It is not institutions like the church or the state that determine sexual mores, but sexual partners themselves. Regardless whether you are religious, consider yourself a loyal citizen or even hold public office – everyone has sex in their own way and won’t let anybody tell them otherwise. You need not have a BDSM fetish; you can also live a chaste married life or get your sexual fulfilment from the missionary position – the main thing is autonomy and mutual respect.
This communicative sexual morality can be understood as the result of two discursive shifts in attitudes towards sex. First, the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s, which in communes, holiday resorts and self-awareness groups brought a fundamental liberalization of sexual desire. Slogans like ‘make love not war’, controversies over clitoral and vaginal orgasm, or theories about
sexual frigidity and petit-bourgeois narrow-mindedness opened up a new way of thinking about the truths of sex. This was followed, however, by the free-choice discourse of the 1980s, which placed limits of civility on the deregulated sexual marketplace. Feminists, ‘safe house’ activists and men writing about ‘male fantasies’ took the innocence out of sex. It was revealed how the aristocracy of manhood formed itself through constant, silent and imperceptible commands intended to make women and other non-men willing to accept arbitrary prescriptions and prohibitions as natural, obvious and self-evident.6 Perhaps the most important development of all, in view of AIDS and its many victims, was the debate about the methods of responsible sexual autonomy. Since then, sexual freedom has meant being liberated, relaxed and curious, but always with mutual feedback and without hierarchies and coercion. In other words: safe, sane and consensual. For cultural critical post-’68ers like Michel Houellebecq, whose bleak satire takes aim at the rebel generation and its illusions of emancipation, the modernization of sex ends in the puritan, demystified and dreary mood of ‘social democratic sexuality’.
At the same time, this open-minded, consensual-negotiational morality disrupts the automaticity of sexual interaction for its protagonists.7 The claim that ‘she was asking for it’, invoked afterwards by a disrespectful masculinity, is no longer tenable. The ethos of negotiation demands particular sensitivity towards boundaries drawn both verbally and non-verbally. Women and men are empowered to decide and define at every stage in the erotic sequence; to signal stop and go to the other. A kiss is just a kiss, a passionate embrace is merely the expression of physical attraction, an invitation to come upstairs for coffee is really just an invitation to a cup of coffee, or at least not necessarily more than that. The collapse of the conventional automatisms of sexual interaction supposedly gives women more freedom for erotic initiative and sexual assertiveness and enables men to try out a more relaxed and passive interpretation of the gender role imposed on them. Neo-sexualities can emerge that cannot immediately be labelled feminine or masculine. Sex propagates itself, engenders hybrids and transgresses boundaries.
But what does this new ethos of erotic-sexual negotiation look like in reality? Has the mood between the sexes become more relaxed or more strained, calmer or tenser, more liberated or more hung up?
Instructive here is a study of couples which, in so far as the man is no longer the breadwinner, can be seen as absolutely modern.8 One couple belongs to a milieu where individual fulfilment is the highest good. The woman provides for the relationship as a well-paid business consultant, the man pursues his vocation as a poorly paid translator. They agree that they need enough for a halfway comfortable life but that money is by no means all that matters. The woman doesn’t mind maintaining her partner and the man doesn’t find it odd to be maintained. They defend their unconventional lifestyle, to which both contribute. The woman admires the man for his independence and single-mindedness but can’t deny that she would like to see a bit more professional ambition. Despite being unhappy with his small income, the man doesn’t dispute this. Beyond this silent quarrel, however, there has not yet been a serious conflict between the two.
The problem is that their feelings refuse to play along: the woman admits to being plagued by the traditional need to be taken out to a nice restaurant and be desired and seduced as a woman. The man finds this conventional and leaves her alone with the problem. Sex turns out to be the sore spot in the relationship. More could be going on, the woman thinks. One could attempt to reassure them that after a certain point in a steady relationship, usually between four and seven years, sexual desire fades. However, the partners refuse to settle for this commonplace. The more the woman wants to be desired, the less the man wants to desire her. It is the man’s lack of sexual interest and not the woman’s that increasingly becomes a problem for the relationship.
This case is proof of the paradoxical relationship between social equality and erotic disappointment. The reversal of social roles cannot allow a re-reversal of erotic roles. Otherwise, everything would be perfect: thanks to the woman, the man could escape the strain of professional rivalries and dedicate himself to his true interests, while continuing to play the role of seducer and phallic conqueror. The woman could surrender herself sexually to the man and no longer be confined to her role as breadwinner. This cannot happen, however, since the man would feel that the woman had triumphed over him completely. Both partners end up withdrawing into the shells of their selves, celebrating the phantom normality of the emancipated couple, as Erving Goffman might have put it.9
Does this explain the game of auto-erotic hide-and-seek that so many partners play? That is to say, the preference for masturbation over mutual gratification. It would also account for the extra-erotic dissipation of masculinity in extreme sports, and the notable irritability of professionally successful women of around forty with big handbags and extra-large cups of coffee.
But let’s not delude ourselves: things look even worse outside relationships. Today, around 95 per cent of all sexual contact takes place between long-term partners. Singles make up 25 per cent of the population but get only 5 per cent of sexual contact.10 Life as a single is clearly pretty frustrating sexually.
After looking at different types of relationship, which vary greatly according to social milieu, the authors of the study arrive at a more diagnostically open formulation:
It seems that the more uncertain female and male identities become in modern life, the more significance is placed on the sphere of eroticism and sexuality as an outlet for ‘forbidden’ yearnings for archaic roles and traditional forms of femininity and masculinity. It seems to be the only area where gender, i.e. the radical difference between man and woman, can be pleasurably performed and ritually expressed.11
This interpretation corresponds with sexologists’ observation of a need for a new performance of gender difference.12 There is now discussion of the difference between the privileges of social gender and the representation and performance of cultural gender through outfit, gesture and attitude. Difference encourages exhibitionism in public, in photos or as online avatars. Gender distinctions offer a vast cultural register for the creation of surfaces intended for the gaze of others. I want to create an effect with my sexuality, make myself attractive through my difference, exhibit myself in various ways. It should also be added, however, that the talent for such performative pleasure is not equally distributed between the sexes.
Reporting on an audition marathon with aspiring actors at a regional theatre, a journalist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung makes the following observations:
These women don’t want to be beautiful, dreamy or even emotional. None of Chekov’s sisters are on stage here, at most a Viola swearing in Swiss dialect. And yet these young women play their vulgarity with wonderful grace; they yet again celebrate the end of male dominance with such pleasure that it is a delight to watch. And the men? They breathe heavily. In contrast to their female colleagues, whose acting appears effortless, whose rage and hysteria seem to come so easily, they need lots of accessories, lots of external help, to create an effect. They wrap themselves in black leather jackets, bite on blood capsules and fling themselves onto the stage with torn shirts and soaking hair, screaming and whispering, stamping and wailing. And taking care that their freshly shaven armpits don’t get dirty. They are sensitive and metro and want so dearly to come across as proletarian-archaic.13
Notes
1. Virginia Woolf (2001), Three Guineas, Oxford, p. 104.
2. Hanna Rosin (2012), The End of Men and the Rise of Woman, New York.
3. Christian Graf von Krockow (1998), Die Stunde der Frauen. Bericht aus Pommern 1944 bis 1947, 4th edn, Stuttgart.
4. Charles Perrow (1991), Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, Princeton, NJ.
5. Gunter Schmidt (2014), Das große Der Die Das. Über die Modernisierung des Sexuellen, 4. komplett überarbeitete und aktualisierte Neuauflage, Giessen; and Volkmar S
igusch (2013), Sexualitäten. Eine kritische Theorie in 99 Fragmenten, Frankfurt am Main and New York.
6. Pierre Bourdieu (2001), Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice, Stanford, p. 56.
7. Schmidt, Der Die Das, 12.
8. Cornelia Koppetsch and Sarah Speck (2015), Wenn der Mann kein Ernährer mehr ist. Geschlechterkonflikte in Krisenzeiten, Berlin, esp. p. 185ff.
9. Erving Goffman (1963), Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, New Jersey.
10. See Volkmar Sigusch (2015), ‘Ich bin in Rage angesichts unserer Sexualmoral’, interview in Magazin der Süddeutschen Zeitung 21.
11. Koppetsch and Speck, Wenn der Mann kein Ernährer mehr ist, p. 206.
12. Schmidt, Der Die Das, p. 103ff.
13. Simon Strauss (2015), ‘Sklavenhändler, hast du Arbeit für mich?’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (14 November), p. 15.
The Mood of the Future
In his famous ‘postscript’, Gilles Deleuze described our society as a society of self-control.1 Families are centred on children, who are supported along their life’s path by attentive, empathetic and encouraging parents. Schools subscribe to the principle of individual support and treat learning as an independent process with teachers acting as companions. Universities offer the full breadth of knowledge while leaving aside the question of truth. Companies are enterprises with open-plan offices, flexitime and flat hierarchies. Hospital treatment is geared towards short stays and self-healing. Formerly, one had to start each phase of life anew, graduating further only after the successful completion of various ‘developmental tasks’. Today, in the age of pleasurable creativity, lifelong learning and eternal play, we are never finished with our lives. The limited freedoms of the past, whether during youth, at the weekend or on holiday, are replaced by permanent deferral. To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.