“Never could abide feminists … ,” continued Christiane when they were halfway up the hill. “Stupid bitches always going on about the washing up and the division of labour; they could never shut up about the washing up. Oh, sometimes they’d talk about cooking or vacuuming, but their favourite topic was the washing up. In a few short years, they managed to turn every man they knew into an impotent, whinging neurotic. Once they’d done that, it was always the same story – they started going on about how there were no real men anymore. They usually ended up ditching their boyfriend for a quick fuck with some macho idiot […] Anyway, they fuck their way through a couple of bastards, maybe more if they’re really pretty, and wind up with a kid. Then they’re off making jam and collecting recipe cards from Marie Claire. It’s always the same story.” (A, 173–4)
This use of free indirect speech, what Douglas Morrey calls a ‘facile device to evade responsibility’ diverts the omniscience of the narrator into refocalized essayistic asides giving the impression that the ideas expressed are those of the characters and not of the author.47 A similar technique is employed to deliver anti-Islamic comments though the voices of Arab characters who rather implausibly, but conveniently for the novel, express their disdain for Islam: ‘Islam could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do […] than bugger their camels’ (P, 251). This technique of narrative displacement is secondary, however, to the wider ideological framing of a critique of Western capitalism which forms a central element of the ‘double-crossing’ to which Redonnet refers.
Houellebecq’s view of feminism is that it functions as an apolitical affective outcrop of neoliberal capitalism, and as such confirms his thesis of modern life as a process of ‘… setting into place of multiple relational exchanges that can be quickly renewed (between consumers and producers, between employers and businesses, between lovers), so as to promote a fluidity of consumption based on an ethic of responsibility, transparency and choice’ (P, 63). This critique could, on the face of it, seem like a genuine criticism of neoliberal capitalism whereas in fact it is an attack on feminism couched as admiration for ‘naturally’ sensual women. Feminism is set up as a case study of Houellebecq’s anti-’68 agenda, and in Platform a Manichean opposition is constructed between the ‘good-natural’ non-feminist woman versus the ‘bad-unnatural’ feminist woman, that is, the kind of woman who espouses even the most basic principles of feminism. An authentic, non-feminist femininity, represented by the Thai sex workers, ‘a gift from heaven’, and the main female character, Valérie, is represented as a sensual and sexual sanctuary from a ruinous capitalism and set in distinction to a ‘bad’ and inauthentic feminist femininity which is mercenary and emasculating, the very embodiment of capitalism (P, 316). Clearly, such a crudely drawn opposition is a profoundly regressive move against over 50 years of intellectual reflection on the complexities of sex, gender and sexuality and, in one sweeping gesture, the distinction between nature and culture is collapsed, reinstating a biological essentialism that audaciously ignores most, if not all, modern theories of gender as a social and cultural construction. At every turn then, Platform reverts to a regressive patriarchal discourse of a kind of sexual primitivism, a crude phallogocentrism that wipes out any trace of feminism from the face of the earth. In the novel, women exist as either harridans whose demands for sexual equality and help with the washing up drive men into the arms of non-feminist ‘natural’ women who are effortlessly affectionate, passive and, most important of all, sexually obedient, precisely the kind of self-sacrificing femininity that is the inspiration for Michel’s biogenetic ideal. Such women, Kristeva argues, must be kept ‘separate from and thus untainted by the social sphere’, their subjectivity ‘separated from reason, language and the symbolicity that […] alters, socializes, and sexualizes it’.48
Houellebecq’s female characters are there to seduce and seduction is their only real power. In this way they all enact Baudrillard’s faintly whimsical suggestion that ‘only by the power of seduction does woman master the symbolic universe’.49 This seductive power is never permitted to come close to the messy business of life (none of his women, for example, have any friends) or to be involved in any wider social or cultural socialization that might threaten to politicize their sexual and gender identity. Exquisite, blank ciphers, Valérie and the Thai women function as conduits to an imagined sexual Eden where femininity is ontologized as nature itself. It is crucial that non-feminist women are emphatically not consumers of sexuality themselves but skilled practitioners in the lost art of sensuality. They know how to ‘make’ love in the real sense of making, pointing up a persistent anxiety, discussed earlier, in Houellebecq’s work around the disappearance of physical skills and the spectre of a useless masculinity: ‘Meanwhile people were working making useful commodities. They were productive. What had I produced in the forty years of my existence? To tell the truth, not very much’ (P, 86). Once again, Platform portrays modern masculinity as more or less bewildered by its new role in the immaterial economy. Performing a kind of labour that is both intangible and indefinable, the narrator’s job in the novel is abstract, even mysterious, even to him: ‘I managed information, facilitated access to it and disseminated it; sometimes, too I carried out bank transfers … ’ (P, 8). As we have seen, in a neoliberal and post-Fordist immaterial economy, the worker’s role is no longer primarily the maker of things, but as an enabler and facilitator for the intensification of the possibilities of differentiated consumption which he must himself, as a consumer, learn to negotiate in all its variations. Young, beautiful and erotically generous, women function as the exact opposite of this; they are somehow real, authentic and above all, embodied in the present. A primitivized essential femininity functions as a compensation for the disappearance of traditional labour and gender roles as sexually abundant young female bodies and their ‘small, strange, cleft organs’ offer an abundant ‘realness’, even a quasi-spiritual deliverance, from a sense of masculine uselessness and unreality (P, 61). Tender, generous and sensually beguiling, the bodies of these ‘natural’ women, specifically their perfect genitals, are interpellated as a site of a lost immediacy and ‘realness’, functioning as what Fredric Jameson has called, albeit in a different context, utopian objects of compensation.50 Simple, yet transformative auratic spaces, these ‘strange cleft organs’ are sites where every social and cultural tension and contradiction is reconciled within the gently welcoming folds of accommodating flesh. In a postmodern economy of signs characterized by the disappearance of the real, the female body, in its fleetingly youthful prime, offers a return to the natural and the lost purity of the thing itself. Michel’s hobbyist enthusiasm for gazing mesmerized at young women’s vaginas is, he says, one of his ‘few remaining recognisable truly human qualities’; ‘Watching pussy in motion cleared my head. The contradictory trends of contemporary video art, balancing the conservation of national heritage with support for living creativity […] all of that quickly evaporated before the facile magic of a moving pussy’ (P, 17, 62). Such sexual magic is nowhere more keenly demonstrated than in the tender erotic expertise of the Thai sex workers. At the moment of an implausibly mutual orgasm with Thai bar girl no. 47, Michel hugs her to him and feels profoundly ‘reconciled’ by the purity of the sexual experience (P, 118). Moreover, this reconciliation extends beyond the purely genital. Perfect examples of non-feminist femininity, Thai women desire a highly traditional domestic life with a strictly gendered division of labour that Western women have largely rejected as limiting and oppressive. Writing in Phuket Weekly, the owner of the Heart to Heart marriage agency in Bangkok, Mr Sawasanee, (another good example of Houellebecq’s ideological ventriloquism) concludes his article by claiming to be helping ‘modern Western women to avoid what they despise’:
There seems to be […] a near perfect match between the Western men, who are unappreciated and get no respect in their own countries, and the Thai women, who would be happy to fi
nd someone who simply does his job and hopes to come home to a pleasant family life after work. Most Western women do not want such a boring husband […] [they] want someone who looks a certain way, and who has certain social ‘skills’, such as dancing and clever conversation, someone who is interesting and seductive. (P, 125)
In contrast, ‘bad’ femininity is one fatally corrupted by feminism’s encouragement of women to put their own interests before that of their husbands and children, and to demand the right to autonomy and pleasure. Destroyed rather than emancipated by their newly liberated sexuality, women influenced by feminism find it difficult to experience real desire or pleasure as one character in Platform opines nostalgically: ‘It’s very rare now to find a woman who feels pleasure and who wants to give pleasure […] you won’t find a white woman with a soft, submissive muscular pussy anymore, that’s all gone now’ (P, 112, 145). The possibility of the submissive female is gradually disappearing in the West, compelling men to travel to Thailand to be present at the ‘gentle and constant roll-call of Asian pussy’ that offers them a natural, real sexuality (P, 108). The ‘little Thai whores’ then, are ‘a godsend’, a ‘gift from heaven, nothing less’ to men worn out trying to please difficult and un-sensual Western women who immodestly flaunt a commodified sexuality, one unworthy even, we are told, of his two French travelling companions Babette and Léa, of being Thai prostitutes (P, 316). The satirical intent, such as it is, seems to have worn off completely at this stage of the novel as every woman who is not a sex worker or Valérie is unpleasantly denounced for her failure to possess a gentle and ‘natural’ willingness to give sexual pleasure to men.
This attack on feminism is equally explicit in the opening pages of Whatever where, at an office leaving party, a woman described as a ‘stupid bitch’ performs a striptease to the indifference of the assembled partygoers. More ironic than earnest, the woman’s performance underscores the ruination of a natural female eroticism and just before he passes out in a drunken stupor, the narrator mutters to himself, ‘The last dismaying dregs of the collapse of feminism’. (W, 3–4) In his drunken sleep he dreams of two women from his office singing the following ditty: ‘If I go around bare-assed/It isn’t to seduce you/If I show my hairy legs/It’s because I want to’ (W, 4). This ode to exhibitionist self-empowerment and the dismally received striptease crudely suggests feminism is responsible for rendering women virtually asexual in their refusal of the male gaze. Compare that scene, then, to the display of Thai women in a Bangkok bar whose acceptance of the male gaze is central to their appeal:
On the dance floor a dozen girls swayed gently to some sort of retro disco beat. Some of them wore white bikinis, others had taken their tops off and were wearing only G-strings. They were all about twenty, they all had golden brown skin, supple exciting bodies. An elderly German was sitting in front of a Carlsberg at the table on my left […] He stared at the bodies moving before his eyes, completely hypnotized … the girls left the stage, to be replaced by a dozen others wearing garlands of flowers around their hips and busts. Slowly, they turned around, the garlands occasionally revealing a breast or the top of the buttocks. The old German still stared at the stage […] He was in paradise. (P, 106)
In this bucolic scene of sexual intoxication, the male customer is overwhelmed with the possibility of the proffered female bodies, all of them smooth and unresisting with little sense of any agency beyond the simple financial transaction around sexual intercourse. It is important to note here that the economic dynamics of sexual exchange for which feminism is blamed, that is the opening up of sex to the forces of demand and supply, do not apply to the sexual economy of Thai prostitution, which is praised unconditionally for its cheerfully tender sale of sex. The heavily romanticized nudity of the bar display and the subsequent sexual intercourse with sex workers Ôon and Sin form part of a kind of sexual pastoral in which labouring brown (Third World) bodies are rendered as uncomplicated sites of pleasure. Easily readable non-Western bodies possessing neither subtext or context, the Thai women offer life-affirming sex to Western men with an expertise and tenderness that combines the maternal – some tenderly bathe and dry their customers after sex – and the sexually compliant ‘slut’ (P, 115).
Any ethical complications of the sex industry have erased by the women’s blissfully transformative sensuality which elevates the sex workers to a quasi-sublime realm of sensual and undemanding idealized femininity long since destroyed by Western feminism: ‘In Thailand […] everyone can have what they desire, and everyone can have something good’ (P, 74). It is left to the ‘plump, shrewd faced’ feminist, Josiane, to articulate any ethical concerns around prostitution. Described in surpassingly offensive terms as ‘exactly the kind of bitch who’d made me give up studying literature many years before’, Josiane embodies feminist censoriousness ‘trotting out tired political positions’ (P, 48, 78). Compared to the writers of the Guide du Routard as one of those ‘Protestant humanitarian cunts’ with ‘nasty little faces’, Josiane exists only to reproach and condemn in her exaggeratedly anti-sex utterances (P, 51). A cartoon version of a ‘sex-negative’ 1980s feminism, her disapproval of sex tourism represents a feminist sexual politics that is distinct from the ‘bare-assed’ sexual exhibitionism more characteristic of post-feminism. Disregarding any historical specificity or cultural or ideological complexity, feminism is reduced to two exceptionally simple caricatures of its second and third waves, both held in equal contempt. In their timely examination of the individualist and consumerist turn in 1990s post-feminism, Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra describe the ways in which criticisms of earlier feminist politics of the 1970s and 1980s make use of an ‘invented social memory of feminist language’ that characterizes feminist critique as ‘shrill, bellicose and parsimonious’ sex-negative ranting.51 This is precisely the purpose of the character Josiane whose only function in the novel is to articulate the ‘unsexy’ griping of an imagined feminist sexual politics. The character of Valérie, on the other hand, expresses the possibility of an essential and ‘natural’ femininity, untouched by any social or cultural change.
On their first meeting, Michel’s initial impression of Valérie is striking for its immediate appreciation of her passivity: ‘she wasn’t demanding, she really was a nice girl’ with a pleasing ‘canine docility’, who is ‘just submissive in general, and maybe ready to look for a new master’ (P, 43, 45). Valérie’s sexual charms are subtle, even demure; thus, it is only on closer inspection that Michel notices that she has a ‘pretty hot mouth’ that is ‘just ready to swallow the spunk of a true friend’, which of course she will do regularly just before serving Michel his morning coffee in bed before going off to work her ‘insane hours’ (P, 43, 45). Lecturing Valérie on how she possesses the real sensuality of a non-feminist woman, Michel commands her ‘Suck me’ … ‘You see’, he says, ‘I say “suck me” and you suck me. When actually, you didn’t feel the desire to do so […] Offering your body as an object of pleasure, giving pleasure unselfishly; that’s what Westerners don’t know how to do anymore’ (P, 244). She is praised, above all, for possessing the most clichéd attribute of femininity ‘… one of those creatures who are capable of devoting their lives to someone else’s happiness’ (P, 360). Sexually adventurous, Valérie is, however, crucially not visibly ‘sluttish’ like her travelling companions Babette and Léa, or the Russian teenage girls who, Michel scornfully notes, ‘had attained the pinnacle of sluttishness […] the sleazy little cocksuckers’ (P, 353). Like the Thai women, Valérie is outwardly modest in her sexuality; even when performing the most audacious of sexual acts she possesses a ‘simple joy, innocent and eternally blessed’ (P, 276). Thus, the Thai sex workers have their exact romantic counterpart in the sexually obliging and industrious Valérie who cheerfully works twelve hour days to promote sex tourism in South East Asia, Africa and South America in between episodes of uninhibited sex with Michel and an assortment of sexual partners. In fact, Valérie is given the dubious accolade of be
ing almost as sexually skilled as a prostitute: ‘… before Valérie I had never met a single girl who could come close to a Thai prostitute’ (P, 206). With her perky breasts and supple vagina, at 28 Valérie has the body of a 17-year-old (the optimum age of sexual attractiveness in Houellebecq’s fiction), with ‘breasts as firm as ever […] arse amazingly round too, without a trace of fat’ (P, 58). Passive but boldly bi-sexual, devoted to her ‘master’ and younger looking than her years, Valérie is the incarnation of the phallonarcissistic imagination; the ideal Houellebecquian woman. However, while she is endlessly sexually accommodating, she is crucially (and wholly implausibly) lacking in any previous significant sexual experience which prevents her from being classified as ‘an old slag’, like the Russian teenagers. It is imperative that ‘good’ women have not participated in long term sexual promiscuity as this, just like psychoanalysis, destroys a capacity for romantic love and sensual innocence. This idea of sexual innocence is subject to a typical Houellebecquian double-standard. Sexual promiscuity is inherently ruinous for European women for whom ‘Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two’; but this is not the case, however, for Thai sex workers or for the men who pay for their sexual services (W, 113).
Depicted as psychologically and intellectually blank, Valérie crucially does not recognize or realize her exchange value in the sexual marketplace and is completely disengaged from consumption, sexual and otherwise: ‘No doubt she could have made a bit more of herself … ’ (P, 58). Protected from the vicissitudes of the sexual open market by her long working hours, she is unlike most Lilith-like Western women who are focused on the highly commodified processes of seduction. This is the Sex and the City ‘high–maintenance’ version of liberal feminism that increasingly came to define feminism in popular culture in the 1990s.52 Michel describes Parisian women in precisely these terms, depicting sexual encounters with them as little more than sexual pantomimes consisting of an ‘élitist, trashy, bizarre seduction that was not the least bit erotic’ (P, 206). In this way, then, third-wave feminism is charged with producing sexually calculating women, the foot soldiers of neoliberal capitalism, who approach love and sex with the deadening spirit of consumption as if they were shopping for shoes. In complete contrast, Valérie is uninterested in material or sexual consumption, manifesting ‘… a complete indifference to Kenzo blouses and Prada handbags … ’ (P, 271). ‘By the time she sat her bac, she had more or less given up (on sex)’ and for ten years before she meets our narrator ‘what she was lacking, essentially, was the desire to seduce’ (P, 271). Concurring with the narrator’s characterization of modern women, Valérie happily agrees that Western men need the restorative and tenderly expert touch of sex workers who seem not only willing but cheerful in their work unlike, the ‘sexy, cool’ Parisian women who need to be dined and talked to before the serious job of sex can begin (P, 362):
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 19