Indeed, the ultimate challenge for Orwell’s imagined state is to repress and eliminate love and sex, including that rich, old English language which feeds and enshrines it. Love, of its very nature, Orwell underlines, breeds unorthodoxy. It’s a loose cannon on the social scene. The imposed daily hate sessions which ritualize the sublimation of sexual energy are vehicles for turning all private love into a love and devotion directed only at Big Brother. The state’s horrifying triumph at the book’s end is marked by the fact that Winston, subjected to an exquisitely mental torture which requires him to betray his love, has subjugated his inner life. He now, at last, loves only Big Brother, the omniscient deity of the post-religious surveillance state, where privacy is outlawed.
In our far more ordinary lives, too, risk, rebellion and danger strengthen the love bond, and provide our inner lives with a range of deeper textures and hues. The combination of danger and sexuality is most potent during the years between puberty and the early twenties. As neuroscientists underline, the adolescent brain is still incompletely formed in its reasoning and planning centres. Charged with disturbing hormonal surges, it is also highly malleable. Just as in earliest childhood, impressions and sensations received during adolescence run deep. This is arguably what makes first love so powerful and memorable that it trails us for life, for good or ill. Some social scientists have even suggested, one would hope ironically, that it might be better somehow to skip its excitements, so as not to damage future, more stable, attachments. ‘In an ideal world you would wake up already in your second relationship. If you had a passionate first relationship and allow that feeling to become your benchmark, it becomes inevitable that future, more adult partnerships will seem boring and a disappointment.’
Happily, we rarely allow social scientists altogether to rule our desires and dreams. Measures to promote our well-being, happiness quantifications, rarely alter the attraction we seem to feel for the torments of love and the anguish of displeasure. We are not in any simple way rational beings, nor do we always know where our satisfactions lie. Counter to rational expectations and despite the weight of a feminist critique of romance, the general belief amongst the young in transformative love remains, whatever the anguish quotient. It persists alongside ironical grumblings and cynical expressions of disbelief, and despite the flux of partners.
The New Religion
In The Normal Chaos of Love, sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim indeed argue that love has far too emphatically taken on a central role in shaping how we think of and live our lives. Love–unlike its nearest kin, the religion it displaced–gives us the illusion of being free agents who make intentional decisions. In an increasingly atomized late-capitalist world, where families are dispersed through financial imperatives, where society has become a matter of virtual networks and where politics has been devalued, love has become the prime measure of individuality and authenticity. It has become our god of privacy, meaning, romance, and all the highs of experience. We expect self-realization through our intimacies. When love is absent, we feel its lack strongly and set out to seek the raptures it may provide.
An overvaluation of passionate love may well bring disappointment in its train, particularly, as the authors argue, in times when parity between partners is seen as crucial. But so too does the kind of pragmatism that shuns any possible intensity and settles for mere convenience in relations.
Despite and alongside our preferred ironic mode, everywhere there are signals of renewed cultural hope in love. The extraordinary worldwide success of Mamma Mia!, the highest-grossing film musical of all time, is one such. A romantic fairy-tale dreamed by baby-boomers, it also acts as a mild corrective to the gender and generational relationships they put in place.
The film’s heroine, Donna, played by Meryl Streep, is a feisty single mother who looks no more than forty. The blurring of time frames is part of the dream: we know she’s sixty and the ABBA music dates from 1976. Donna has lived out her adult life on a paradisial Greek island where she has raised her daughter, Sophie, and built her slightly ram-shackle home-hotel. On the verge of marriage, Sophie feels driven to find out who her father is: she can’t make the leap into matrimony, break away from her mother and her childhood, without acquiring the stamp of paternal legitimacy. Indeed, there is a sense that her project of marriage, whatever love may be involved, is also the enactment of her wish to give her mother a responsible husband. Fathers are crucial, even if only symbolically, for the journey into adulthood, however fully the independent woman may have loved and provided for her child.
Enter three possible candidates, three icons of modern fairy-tale paternity, secretly invited to the wedding by Sophie: the architect, Sam, who drew the design of Donna’s hotel on a sheet of paper; the roving über-male writer-adventurer, Bill; and the shy gay banker, Harry, for whom Donna marked his sole sexual encounter with a woman. Each of these anymen could be the perfect fairy-tale father. Having lived out her generation’s ‘hippy’ and sexy adolescence, Donna has no idea which potential father is the actual one. But it is Sam who is her first and great love and, at the altar, it is he who steps in to be wed to Donna. Having supplied a husband for her mother, Sophie is now free to leave home and travel the world with her boyfriend, without needing to care for her parent, who was not quite complete in her single form. And Donna is free to live out the ultimate romantic fairy-tale, a return to that first transformative love, now publicly legitimized in marriage.
Ironically, the newest of technologies of both dream and information, the Internet, is abetting the traditional power of first love. Social sites such as Friends Reunited and Facebook make it easy to trace ‘friends’ long lost. Life may have ruptured that passionate first love because its partners were simply too young for ‘commitment’, or had disparate universities or jobs to go to. They may, in the intervening years, have married, had children and divorced. Now, through the Internet, they can rekindle that first passion. In an American survey of randomly selected adults, one-third said they would reunite with their first loves if they could. According to anecdotal lore, it’s not altogether unusual for couples to rediscover each other and take up again, if not quite where they left off. Everyone seems to know one such happily-before-and-ever-after couple.
After the upheavals and disillusionments that life brings, it seems that first love can retain its old power and also bring new advantages. The old lover now feels almost familial, easy to be with. The new-old partners are returned to a more carefree youth. Each sees something in the other beyond the accretion of wrinkles. Love, Adam Phillips has noted, is, amongst much else, a recognition or mirroring, a making available through the other of aspects of oneself that have hitherto been occluded. So the return of first love may be a version of Blake’s notion of wise innocence, the ultimate redemptive step after that innocence lost through the journey of experience. In the process, it may well be that our capacity for loving has also grown more generous, less rapacious. If first love is the breaking-out of revolutionary passion, its return, after the disappointments of life, is a form of re-pairing. The best of reparations, it brings youth and age together.
The Question of Sex
Love is the answer, but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some good questions.
Woody Allen
Voluptuous pleasure. All the senses in play–sight, sound, smell, touch. The body rampant, deliciously, supremely alive.
That will do. Sexual pleasure and words aren’t natural bedfellows. If sex scenes have proliferated in contemporary literature, it’s simply because sex for humans, even when performed alone, is rarely simply sex. The physical act with its soaring excitements, its pleasures and pains, usually comes accompanied by a host of often obscure desires, fantasies, needs, aspirations, familial and cultural attitudes–whatever our episodic wishes for a Lawrentian animal spontaneity. Trying to explain to himself the character of G., his revolutionary Don Juan of a protagonist, the writer John Berger reflects:
/> When analyzed, sexual desire has components which are violently nostalgic and lead us as far back as the experience of birth itself: other components are the result of an ineradicable appetite for the unknown, the furthest away, the ultimate of life–which can only be found in its negation–death. At the moment of orgasm these two points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When this happens everything that lies between them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantaneous.
The creation of erotic excitement is rarely a mere matter of the rubbing together of two epidermises. It can be, the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller writes, ‘every bit as subtle, complex, inspired, profound, tidal, fascinating, awesome, problematic, unconscious-stalked, and genius-haunted as the creation of dreams or art’. Brain-imaging studies concur: orgasm is a subtle mixture of psychological and bodily impulses; it also requires ‘a release of inhibitions, engineered by the brain’s centre of vigilance’. In clinical trials of people who complain of low libido, placebo effects work as well (or as badly) as hormonal patches.
So sex begins well before penetration and its aftermath colours future acts. It may in many cases not include penetration at all, which is why President Clinton’s assertion that his doings with Monica Lewinsky were not ‘sex’ raised such consternation. Why, too, technical sex education classes raise sniggers from the young and rarely hit the mark. Even in adolescence, when, particularly for boys, the body’s urges feel paramount, the physical act brings much else in train–guilt, hatred, status, a sense of power, accomplishment or disappointment, perhaps even love.
A mere kiss, let alone penetration, transports you inside another’s body: the liberation of breaking your own boundedness can be exalting. Someone else is sharing you. Acknowledging the bits you hated or may have been ashamed of. You’ve emptied yourself of problems.
It can also be terrifying. You might be swallowed up, sucked into an abyss, disappear. Or you might feel invaded, poisoned, no longer an intact self.
Indeed, sex calls up the most intense, the most difficult feelings we have. The act is intrinsically bound up with who we are or may want to be. And even when there is no animal act in question, even when we’re abstinent, we carry on having a relationship to desire or its lack.
When I was an undergraduate in the sixties, before the pill had come in and the women’s movement had taken hold, virginity was still a freighted fact, far more substantial than the hymen which distinguished it. Losing one’s virginity carried all the significance of a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. There was a distinct before and a mysterious after. An aura of danger attended the act. The risk of pregnancy, the tales of torrents of blood, were real enough. But there was less tangible matter, too. If something was to be lost–what did that loss entail? Purity and chastity were symbolically loaded words. Yet what meaning could they hold after all those excited fumblings on sofas and back seats of cars? God had little place in my family, and my Dad, his only representative, much as he might scowl at some of the boys who entered the family house, had little time for such decidedly female matters. Mothers, and not only my own, were clear enough: what potential husband would want used, let alone soiled, goods?
None of my circle of female friends paid much heed. We were rebellious. We were certainly not going to become suburban wives and mothers. Though we were still some years away from Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex (1972), we all knew that in sex lay a treasure trove of experience. We read D.H. Lawrence, after all, and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet was making the rounds. Though his sly character Pursewarden may have written a postcard upbraiding Lawrence for his ‘habit of building a Taj Mahal around anything as simple as a good f––k’, we somehow wanted both the sacred Taj Mahal and the excited seriality of Durrell’s ‘simple’ sex. All that stood in the way of both was virginity. But that tiny membrane was resistant and sometimes felt as big as Sisyphus’s boulder. You’d get to a certain point and something would stop you. Boys, too, were a little in awe, even when they had managed to lose their own less burdensome virginity with one or t’other of the more ‘forward’ girls at school.
Much has changed since my youth, when sex and pregnancy came in one dangerously glittering package. Now first sex, if not necessarily first love, comes for most young people at the age of about sixteen and a half in the US, Canada and Britain, far younger for some. The rest of Europe has followed suit. First sex often long predates marriage or cohabitation, which comes for the majority as they move towards thirty. Most women, like most men, will have sex in their teens and may well have a series of partners before engaging in a long-term relationship. Young women who grow up in immigrant families from more traditional cultures are caught in painful contradictory tugs between what their families ordain and what their peers enact. The increasing number of young Muslim women in Britain who have donned the hijab or the burkha, in the process perhaps rebelling against the more moderate customs of their parents, are engaging in a rebellion against both their parents and the culture’s permissiveness.
For women first sex may still invoke or provoke first love. But the experience that once united them is now widely separated. In clubs or on campuses in Britain and America, the young hook up for a night or three or more, with no strings or even names attached. Intimacy, not to mention social or emotional continuity, is not an issue. Alternatively, in another standard arrangement, ‘friends with benefits’ provide sex for each other without any acknowledgement that the act has taken place, until one or other of them may grow attached, and then it’s time to ‘move on’. The package of love and sex has been dismantled–or so the blithe, socially accepted, hypothesis would have it.
Though disciplinary voices decry our sexually permissive times and idealize earlier supposedly more moral epochs, these, for certain sections of the male population, had equally casual sexual arrangements. More stringent codes brought their own burden of ills, and not only for those sectors of Western society who sought to conform to the rules of ‘respectability’ that the nineteenth century enshrined and which were reinvigorated for some fifteen years after the Second World War. In his novella On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan minutely describes the excruciating wedding night of a ‘young, educated’ couple whose lives are blighted because their union took place at a time just before the sexual revolution, ‘when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible’. His hero Edward’s sudden and premature ejaculation, which sends his heroine Florence into a panic of revulsion, precipitates the end of their marriage before it has quite begun. This despite their genuine love for one another: Edward never meets anyone, he reflects in his sixties, ‘he had loved as much’.
Freud was only one of many reformers to analyse the human damage repressive sexual mores can precipitate. Before the Great War when middle-class men married late and women were kept shrouded in sexual ignorance, the toll in middle-class neuroses was high. It was more than equalled by the social cost of rampant prostitution and the often destructive, cavalier relations between the bourgeois male and any number of shop or servant girls, sexual stand-ins for ‘respectable’ women imprisoned as objects of idealized love, even when their own desires might eventually dictate otherwise.
It’s useful to remember here that people have always coupled once their bodies permitted it and often enough before, whatever the prevailing moral regime and attendant public discourse. Agrarian workers, servants, the industrial working class, the hordes of child prostitutes who populated Victorian cities engaged in what we now call teenage and unmarried sex, even when the Church railed against it and the moral climate was one that sought to keep the middle classes pure and sexual activity repressed. Though illegitimacy rates through history are hard to come by with any accuracy, they do indicate that in country and city alike ‘illicit’ sex was engaged in and babies born at rates that bear comparison with our own, though whether our high rates of contraception equal previous epochs’ unreported rates of illegitimacy is something that can only be guesse
d at. Suffice it to say that as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, in Munich, one-third of all children were born out of wedlock. The growth of foundling hospitals suggests a similar story for an earlier period; while the ravages of syphilis throughout the nineteenth century until a cure was found in 1910 indicate that human beings engaged in the ‘animal act’ outside marriage whatever the dictates of Church and state.
Indeed, as that greatest of Renaissance sages, Michel de Montaigne, wrote towards the end of his life and centuries before Freud or Lawrence or our permissive West had launched its sexual revolution: ‘The whole movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation. It is a substance infused through everything, it is the centre towards which all things turn.’ Nor did Montaigne, who lived in times when chastity for women was prized and enforced, here differentiate between the sexes: both women and men are subject to Venus’s ‘frenzy’, he tells us, citing a host of classical texts from Plato to Virgil to bolster his case–and, good modern that he is, propping it up further with ethnographic examples.
Our own sexual revolution has come in tandem with a social revolution. We no longer quite so emphatically have differing ‘rules’ for the rich and for the poor, for men and for women. The double standards of past centuries no longer prevail. Gone are the epochs that saw one law for the male, permitted sexual congress from a young age, albeit sometimes under the cloak of hypocrisy, and another for the young woman exhorted to keep her virginity intact until what might well be a late marriage. Yet the traces of such attitudes linger within us and without, even when they no longer carry the weight of general consensus. In our globalized and multicultural world, we are ever and always aware of places elsewhere and in our own midst where they are also intact. The vying forces of puritan religions–for instance, the Catholic stance against contraception, Evangelical edicts against premarital sex, Muslim injunctions on female modesty and against homosexuality–and commercialized sexual permissiveness are internalized as contradictions and rumble uncomfortably through individual lives.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 8