The Enlightenment
&
The Disenchantment
of Sex
By Robin Phillips
I concluded the last essay by considering the role
that nature played in 18th century thinking. We saw that different
philosophers had different ideas of what it meant to be ‘natural.’ For some, we
saw that it was a paradoxical corollary of determinism to assume that anything
one did was, by definition, natural.
It was in the area of sexual morals that issues such as
these became acutely practical. It should not be surprising that a worldview
which reduced man to chemistry and replaced his responsibility before God with
his responsibility before the variable of ‘nature’, began to have implications
in the area of morals. However, since determinism had implied that anything was
natural as long as you were doing it, one might say that the sexual taboos of
Christian society had been natural, or one might assert, with equal
justification, that it was natural to adopt a more licentious approach. It
should hardly come as much surprise if the naturalness of the later and not the
former began to dominate popular thinking as the 18th century
progressed.
In one of the encyclopédie entries, Diderot
personifies Nature, not merely to speak in defence of sexual enjoyment, but to
elevate it almost to the status of a moral imperative. Anticipating the
objections, Diderot wrote,
If
there is a perverse man who could take offence at the praise that I give to the
most noble and universal of passions, I would evoke Nature before him, I would
make it speak, and Nature would say…[1]
Nature then speaks and, of
course, she cannot help but be on Diderot’s side. “Nature is satisfied” only
when the sexual impulse is allowed to reach its climax.
The Real Sexual Revolution
The, so called, “sexual revolution” is usually associated
with the 1960’s. But the real sexual revolution occurred during the 18th
century Enlightenment. While it may have not been as widespread as the sexual
revolution of the 60’s (though I have yet to do more sociological research
here), it nevertheless contained all the seeds that would eventually produce
the 60’s.
In all fairness to the Enlightenment’s philosophers, most
of them were unprepared for, and even disturbed by, the ramifications their
ideas began to have in the area of sexuality. It did not take long for such
ramifications to begin manifesting themselves. Jonathan
Israel observes that while the political consequences of Enligthenment
philosophy did not fully kick in until the 1790s, the sexual consequences of
this new philosophy began to be felt as early as the mid 1700’s.
Of
course, the seeds for this sexual revolution had been planted back in the 17th
century through such unsuspecting vessels as Locke and Spinoza. Referring to the new ideal of sensual pleasure that emerged in the mid 18th
century, Lawrence Stone suggests that this came as “an unanticipated by-product
of Lockean philosophy.”[2]
Similarly, Israel tells us that though Spinoza took little interest in sexual
issues, yet the materialistic system he espoused gave an intellectual basis for
the movement of sexual liberation.[3]
We will do well, therefore, to consider more closely the aproach to sexuality
implicated by a materialist worldview.
Materialist Sexuality
Remember that materialism asserts that all conditions and forces
in the universe are reducible to matter. It thus denies the existence (or at
least the relevance, in its more agnostic form) of non-material properties in
the universe. Naturally, this leaves the human being without any such thing as
a soul and spirit, both of which must be discarded along with God, angels, a
belief in miracles, and all other such remnants of a pre-enlightened humanity.
Man is simply a machine – a complex machine, to be sure, but a machine none the
less.
Now if this account of the human being is the correct one,
then just as it is impossible to ascribe to man any transcendental
significance, so it is equally difficult for the materialist to ascribe to
sexuality any significance beyond the purely biological. Once you introduce
into sexuality such things as wonder and enchantment, let alone God-given
parameters for the moment, it is difficult to avoid the implication that there
must be some non-material explanation behind sexuality - that is, an
explanation external to the ‘closed system' of Nature's predetermined cause and
effects.
Thus, if Diderot had been more consistent with his
materialism, he could not have praised sexual pleasure the way he did in the encyclopédie article already quoted. This
passion which Diderot terms “the most noble and universal of passions” can be
no more noble than our urge to go to the toilet. It is a biological fact,
perhaps even a biological accident, and that is all. There can be no more
special meaning behind it than there can be a special meaning behind any aspect
of the materialist’s universe.
The situation that thus arises is expressed in
Fig. A.
Fig. A
Reduction of Mankind
(materialism) Reduction of Sexuality
The Enlightenment’s philosophers
were unready for the radical consequences of their ideas had on this area of
life. Many of them still felt, like Diderot, that this area of life was somehow
set apart from the ordinary, that there was more to it than predetermined
mechanical forces. Furthermore, the old taboos of Christian doctrine still
exercised an unconscious primacy over their newly ‘enlightened’ minds. All this
compelled the Enlightenment philosophers to find alternative grounds for
affirming some moral codes, in an attempt to stem the tide of a complete sexual
reductionism. In the next section we will consider some of their proposed
solutions.
Utilitarian Morality
While
a consistent application of the new philosophy did reduce us and our sexuality
to the status of an animal, various philosophers characteristically tried to
temper the severity of this conclusion. (The physician La Mattrie
was untypical in advocating an outright hedonism as the corolary of his belief
that man was a purely material entity, “an organic machine whose illusion of
possessing an independent soul or mind was produced simply by the interplay of
its physical components.”[4])
The
attempts to provide an alternative code of morality that would be consistent
with materialism, usually relied heavily on pragmatic, utilitarian and
sociological considerations. All such considerations boiled down to either
asserting that the individual will be happier by following rules in this area,
or society will work better. Moral codes and sexual modesty may not be natural,
but they are profitable; modesty and sexual restraint are not intrinsic to the
human condition, but they are good sense in our society.
Under this scheme of things, there may be good
utilitarian reasons for keeping one’s libido under control, or almost under
control. This was a position adopted by many who were disturbed by the growing
licentiousness of society. Though traditional codes of morality could not be
rationally defended, nevertheless society would run smoother if people would
adhere to them.
Along
this line, we find Benjamin Franklin (an all-round child of the Enlightenment)
giving advice to young men to leave the woman alone, because the appearance of
virtue is an important business asset and, furthermore, because the institution
of marriage was the most likely source of happiness. However, Franklin adds, if
you must engage in extra-marital sex, it is better to go for elderly woman.
After all, he points out, all women look the same in the dark anyway.[5]
Spinoza had argued similarly that in one’s own
interest one ought to avoid scandalizing the community, “but equally, in his
naturalistic philosophy, sexual pleasure, the libido, in so far as it is
life-enhancing is a good thing and, in principle, in no way different outside
marriage than within it.”[6]
Hume and the Economics of Modesty
While
various philosophers were seeking a pragmatic basis for morality, it is a
credit to his genuis that David Hume managed to find an economic argument for
sexual modesty. His argument starts with the observation that men go through
enormous expense, fatigue and restraint for the sake of their offspring. “But,”
he pointed out,
in order to induce men to impose on
themselves this restraint, and undergo cheerfully all the fatigues and expenses
to which it subjects them, they must believe, that the children are their own,
and that their natural instinct is not directed to a wrong object, when they
give a loose to love and tenderness.”[7]
How then can men be assured that their
children are really their own? Hume pointed out that, given the maner in which
copulation occurs, the female will always know. But how is the man to be
assured of the paternity of his children? Only by restraining the behaviour of
woman through cultural taboos.
Man have undoubtedly an implicit notion,
that all those ideas of modesty and decency have a regard to generation; since
they impose not the same laws, with the same force, on the male sex,
where that reason takes not place.[8]
By this line of
argument we may well ask if there is any point at all to codes of proprietry
among the males of our species. Hume deals with this question, and it is
interesting that in the end all he can appeal to are “the general notions of
the world…” These general notions suggest that though standards may be a bit looser
for the man, nevertheless men ought to usually abstain from complete sexual
indulgence most of the time!
…according to the general notions
of the world, {men} bear nearly the same proportion of the obligations of
women, as the obligations of the law of nations do to those of the law of
nature. It is contrary to the interest of civil society, that men should have
an entire liberty of indulging their appetites in venereal enjoyment;
but as this interest is weaker than in the case of the female sex, the moral
obligation, arising from it, must be proportionably weaker. And to prove this
we need only appeal to the practice and sentiments of all nations and ages.[9]
Notice the recurring theme
that society works better if people adhere to standards which, in themselves,
have no real ontological justification. It is a purely pragmatic aproach to
morality. According to this aproach, sexual ethics are rather like good
political policy, but you cannot claim that they represent right behaviour in
any objective sense.
When the happiness of public society becomes the only justification for
sexual ethics, there is no reason in principle why this incentive should
dictate what I do in private to promote my own happiness. The loophole that
Hume gives to men (i.e., that men bear ‘nearly’ the same obligations of
women, that men should not have entire liberty, that the moral
obligation in men is ‘proportionably weaker’ to the female) was more
than a large enough for the libido of any man to slip through.
Form
with Content
This apraoch to sexuality is similar to the
aproach to religion that began to arise at this time. Though all the
matterialist philosophers in the Enlightenment agreed that the doctrines,
practices and claims of institutionalized religion were absurd, a good many of
these philosophers also felt that society needed these institutions to give the
common people an incentive for morality. In other words, though religion might
be based entirely on fables, it was still a necessary componant to a cohesive society.
That was no doubt why Voltaire, though an outspoken opponant of Biblical
Christianity, still built a church for the workmen on his land.
Clinging
thus to the forms of religious morality without the content, the result was not
dissimilar to the way our own era has developed a pseudo-morality around the
need for ‘safe sex’, with the Chastity Movement affirming the thou-shalt-nots
of Christian doctrine on entirely utilitarian grounds.[10]
Similarly, though the Christian taboos about
extra-marital sex were thought to have no rational basis, still it was better
for society if those taboos were generally adhered to - which, of course, they
weren’t. Mankind has never needed much encouragement to endulge in this area,
and the new philosophy provided the perfect justification. Israel tells us that
in general, the more radical the philosophical
standpoint, the more emphatic the levelling and egalitarian tendencies implicit
in ideas which, in turn, generated a growing impulse not just towards the
emancipation of woman but of the human libido itself.[11]
As we see from this quotation, the issues to do with
sexuality were inexplicably linked with questions about the emancipation of
woman. The traditional codes of modesty could not be challenged without also
raising questions about our sexual identity in general. What does it mean to be
a man or a woman? Do these categories also require a re-thinking in light of
matterialist/determinist values? These are some of the questions we will take
with us into the next section.
The Reduction of Gender
Just as the materialist account of the human being made it
impossible to ascribe to sexuality any transcendental significance, so it made
it equally difficult to ascribe to gender differences any significance beyond
the purely biological.
Thus, as the metaphysical drappery was removed from the unvierse and from
mankind, it became necessary to think through traditional assumptions about
gender. If the human person is nothing more than a collection of physical particulars,
then are the differences between men and woman merely physical? Questions such
as these had profound social and political implications since they related to
how men and womenrelated as well as their respective roles in society.
The very idea that
the different sexes would have different roles, responsibilities, strengths and
weaknesses had assumed that there was more to the differences between men and
woman than merely the physical differences. On the other hand, a philosophy that
reduced men and woman equally to nothing more than billions of particles –
leaving them with no soul, no extra-physical component, no metaphysical
drappery – could not at the same time maintain that the differences between
them was anything other than physical. Hence, all the ancient customs and
notions the 18th century inherited concerning the relations between
men and women were flawed not simply in actuality, but in very principle.[12] Israel tells us how
Several writers took up the point that if woman’s subjection to man within
marriage, the family, and law, is not after all ordained by a providential God
and has no basis in Revelation, then the entire system of relations between the
sexes prevailing in Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other societies lacks
justification or basis…[13]
One could argue that the subjection of females that existed at the time
(being, in many instances, more like repression than subjection) was actually
not in keeping with a true understanding of the Christian revelation. While this
is certainly true, the new impetus came not as a result of realigning one’s
thinking with a correct understanding of Christian doctrine, but getting rid of
any basis by which the roles between the sexes could have any ontological
justification at all. Nor should we expect anything less from a worldview that
removed from men and women any reality outside their material construction.
Thus, the situation before us can be expressed as follows:
Fig. B
Reduction of Mankind (materialism)
Reduction of Gender (androgyny)
In a sense, the progression in Figure B describes nothing beyond what
has to be true by definition, seeing as it is axiomatically necessary that the reduction
of mankind will lead to the reduction of anything relating to mankind (i.e.,
gender). As self-evident as this progression appears, however, the process of complete reductionism of gender has taken all the time
from the Enlightenment till now to reach fruition (a topic to be dealt with
later in this essay). The full realization of this process comes when the very
idea that there are different roles for men and woman is considered to be
severe heterodoxy. This process was slowly set in motion during the 18th
century and acquired a momentum almost proportionate to the growth of the
materialistic worldview.
Burke and the Wardrobe of Descent Drapery
A parallel problem to the reductionism of gender
differences and roles occurred with questions relating to royalty: if all people
are merely the product of material particulars, then is it rational to assume
that the King and Queen are anything special? This is a question that Edmund
Burke faced when he wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Reflecting on the discurtious way the queen of France had been treated by the
revolutionaries, Edmund
Burke put the entire philosophy of the Enlightenment in a nut shell:
All the descent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.
All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination,
which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the
defects of our naked shivering nature, are to raise it to dignity in our own
estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is
but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order.
All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is
to be regarded as romance and folly.[14]
A woman (to say nothing of a man) is but an animal. Burke is
not caricaturing current notions, he is extending them to their logical
consequence. Because materialism sees human beings as mere physical systems,
the division between man and the animals is simply one of complexity. Though
materialists usually slip into unconsciously predicating transcendental
categories to man, thereby giving him the kind of dignity to which Burke
refers, we must always return to the fact that, according to their worldview,
the ontology of human beings includes nothing that has not arisen from natural
causation – in other words, nothing that is non-physical.
Rousseau and the Return to Modesty
Rousseau, like
Burke, seemed to realize some of the problems inherent in a materialistic
aproach. “Stop,
stop stop!” we hear the pitiful voice of Rousseau ringing out. “These ideas are
making society worse, not better.” But though Rousseau may have laid his finger
on the pulse of the problem, he did not really have any better solution to
offer, as we shall see.
One of the main areas that concerned Rousseau
was the effect the new philosophy had in respect to modesty, particularly
female modesty. In book five of Emile, where Rousseau sets forward his
ideal for female education, modesty plays an important role. Before looking at
his ideas, however, a few introductory words about modesty will be helpful.
One has to
always remember that when we speak of sexuality we are talking about more than
simply what occurs under the sheets. We are talking about how we percieve
ourselves as human beings and how we percieve our sexuality. This general
perception of sexuality will often be evidenced in a culture’s aproach to
modesty. There is not space for extensive sociological verification of this
fact (fascinating as the study would be), but suffice to say that how females
dress - or do not dress as the case may often be - usually reveals more than
merely flesh, but is symptomatic of prevailing, albiet usually unconscious,
aproaches to sexuality. Reciprically, how one chooses to dress can
psycologically orient a person, again often unconsciously, in the direction of
a particular aproach to sexuality. These points will become clearer as we
procede with this study, I only mention them now to show how crucial the
question of modesty was in the 18th century.
Rousseau seems to have realized some
of this. He argued hotly that if modesty is not an imperative given by nature,
but only an invention of social laws to protect the rights of fathers and husbands
(recall Hume), then “modesty is nothing.”[15] Though Rousseau did
affirm that modesty served a pragmatic function, he argued that fundamentally
its basis was the God-given instincts of our nature.
Central to Rousseau's thesis was the
notion that man and women are made differently. In reaction to the growing view
that all gender differences were the result of custom rather than creation,
Rousseau argued that men and woman are born with different natures. As he
writes,
... in everything immediately respecting sex
{gender}, the women differs entirely from the man; each is the compliment of
the other...[16]
Rousseau’s representation of gender
falls down the line of the typical polarities, with man being active while woman
is passive, man being strong while woman is weak, man being bold while woman is
bashful and modest, and son on. These sexual differences necessitate the each
will have a different function in society, which in turn necessitates that the
education of one sex will differ significantly from the education required for
the other sex. (Emile was actually a tretise on education.) That is why
Rousseau had to devote an entire book of Emile to the education of
women.
History has ascribed to Rousseau a
derogetory attitude towards females. Even where this may have been partly true,
the basis of the contemporary critique has rested on philosophically untennable
ground, as it would have us believe that merely to predicate gender differences
necessarily entails a perjorative aproach to women. But Rousseau’s aproach was not
derogetory; indeed, by the standards of his day, his views on female education were
comparitively advanced, as was his view on physical exercise and religious
education for women. Furthermore, he himself was keen for us not to think he is saying
that one sex is inferior to the other, “as if, in answering the different ends
for which nature designed them, both were not more perfect then they would be
in more nearly resembling each other."[17]
While Rousseau’s
position would seem to present a solution to the Enlightenment’s reductionism,
it actually raises more questions than it solves. Since Rousseau’s ‘natural
religion’ gave no criteria for determining in practice whether one set of
sexual ethics is preferable to any other, the difference between his aproach
and the materialistic aproach was purely abstract. Though Rousseau did try to
show the practical outworkings of his philosophy, we have no reason, on the
basis of Rousseau’s system, to accept his suggestions about modesty any more
than any other set of suggestions. This is because Rousseau’s system, like so
much 18th century thinking, simply referred everything to a
vacuitous “nature” for substantiation.
It is true
that Rousseau went further than most in trying to show why nature could
be appealed to as an authority. Rousseau makes it clear that the authority of
nature rests in the higher authority of God, whom he calls “the Author of
Nature.” But in Book IV of Emile, Rousseau argues that God is unknowable.[18]
Yet although God was unknowable, Rousseau effectively bypassed such
epistemological limitations in his own claim that God had certain designs and
intentions with the created order - an assumption on which his whole ethical
theory hinged, to say nothing of his argument for modesty. Having dispensed
with the Christian scriptures, Rousseau offered no alternative criteria to show
that God intended modesty and not immodesty to be the natural condition of
mankind.
Wollstonecraft and the De-Sexualizing of Modesty
Rousseau ideas were attacked by one of his
female contemporaries, a woman named Mary Wollstonecraft.
(Wollstonecraft has subsequently been considered one of the forerunners of the
feminist movement.) Reading between the lines of Wollstonecraft Vindication
of the Rights of Women, it is clear that she had an androgynous agenda
(“androgyny” is a term that refers to the homogenizing of the gender
distinction). She disapproves, for example, of women who “remind [men]
that they were women” through what she terms "mock modestly"[19],
arguing that women should be allowed to acquire more understanding in order
that they might not "always remember that they are women." [20]
Naturally, if
women were to strive to be the same as man, as Wollstonecraft
desired, then sexual modestly would have to be one of the first
things to go since this kind of modesty was testimony of a woman’s difference
from man. Hence, the revealing heading for chapter 7 of her book: Modesty. - Comprehensively considered, and not as a
sexual[21]
virtue. Wollstonecraft considered modesty from many different angels, from
delicacy of mind to moderate estimation of one’s talents, carefully avoiding
any acknowledgement of it as a sexual (gender-related) virtue for women. The
only kind of modesty Wollstonecraft allows are those forms which are the same
between men and women, mainly a kind of polite reserve. She is clear that “the
reserve I mean, has nothing sexual in it, and that I think it equally necessary
in both sexes..."[22]
Why was Wollstonecraft keen to elliminate the sexual kind of
modesty that Rousseau had advocated? Wendy Shalit has suggested that the reason
lies in the fact that a gender/sexual related modesty gives men and women an
abiding awareness that women are women, the very thing Wollstonecraft was keen
to avoid. This reduction of modesty to a sexually neutral virtue was an
unavoidable consequence of Wollstonecraft’s pursuit of androgyny.
Since that
time, men and women have continued to quest after an ideal of gender
neutrality, with some very unexpected results being reaped upon our sexuality.
Keep in mind the dispute between Rousseau and Wollstonecraft as we move on to
see how our own culture has tried to come to terms with these problems.
The Time Bomb
When the Enlightenment
severed sexuality from the restraining influences of an apparently outdated
ethic (an ethic which had originally derived itself from religious conviction),
it attempted to temper the implications of this move with the considerations of
a utilitarian pragmatism as ambiguous as it was ungrounded. However, once it
was conceded that mankind was merely matter, that men and women were as much a
product of determinism as the motion of the stars, this necessarily set in
motion a sexual time bomb. It is in our own age that this time bomb has gone
off.
This is not to
deny that there were immediate practical consequences of the new thinking;
however, the practical consequences felt in the 18th century were
mainly seen in a straight-forward increase of sexual licentiousness. Our age,
however, has seen more than merely a quantitative increase in sexual
promiscuity; rather, we have undergone a complete upheaval of what it even
means to be sexual. Ironically, this upheaval and the consequences of it were
simultaneously necessitated by, as well as opposed to, the ideology of the
Enlightenment. For, as I shall argue, we are the recipients of a form of sexual
repression far more pervasive than anything to which the likes of Hume or
Voltaire were opposed. Furthermore, the supreme paradox of “letting nature have
it’s way” has been to produce a climate directly opposed to being naturally
sexual – a climate in which we are constantly made to feel ashamed of our
sexuality. However, I am anticipating the conclusion of my argument. We need to
start by reflecting how our era is the recipient of a reductionist approach to
gender.
Questions about
gender are logically prior to questions about sexuality. The follows from the
fact that how a society views men and women is at the centre of how that
society will see sexuality. The most straight-forward example of this is that
in cultures where women are treated no better than objects of property, we find
an impersonal approach to sexuality. Or again, we have seen that the approach taken
to sexuality in certain segments of 18th century Europe and America
was directly reflective of a materialistic view of mankind. Similarly, in order
to understand our own era’s approach to sexuality, we must first come to terms
with the way we think of men and women. That will be the focus of this chapter,
before going on, in the following chapter, to consider our era’s approach to
sex.
Gender Reductionism
In our own era
there is, of course, a general extension of the Enlightenment tendency towards materialistic
determinism, together with the added credence that the theory of evolution is
assumed to lend such a structure of thinking. But we also have something else
that was only beginning to be explored during the 18th century, and
that is a reductionism of gender. In chapter 5 I briefly touched upon the way the
Enlightenment began rethinking some of the conventions traditionally associated
with gender differences. During the 18th century, however, the move
towards androgyny remained comparatively theoretical, and even in the
theoretical sphere they never carried such ideas to the logical consequence. It
has been left to our age to do that.
Starting from the true premise that many of the roles and
differences assigned to the sexes have been culturally conditioned, it is
becoming increasingly accepted that all gender differences are culturally
limited. Reflecting on this reductive approach to gender, David Wells points
out that
It
is true, of course, that manhood and womanhood are partly cultural creations.
They are matters of cultural nurture. What much of our current belief assumes,
however, is that they are only matters of nurture, not of nature at all,
and that our most fundamental identities as men and women are matters of choice
and of construction.[23]
Even the idea of gender is
being increasingly seen as a social construction, as reflected in Andrea
Dworkin’s statement that, “The discovery is, of course, that ‘man’ and ‘woman’
are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs...Demeaning to the female,
dead-ended for male and female both.”[24]
Although it would hardly be fair to cite as representative
the comments from extremist feminists who deny any differences at all between male and
females (such as McElavaine who speaks of the heresy that "there are
biological differences between males and females''[25])
it is certainly true that the synthesizing of the gender polarity is one of the
hallmarks of our age.
One of the best ways to see the stark effects of androgyny
is to compare our own age to even fifty years ago. It would be risky to start
elucidating specific examples of the unisex tendency since it isn’t possible to
prove philosophically that any specific gender convention has an a priori precedent.
However, when we consider all the particulars of the unisex trend as a whole,
such a trend can clearly be seen as symptomatic of the androgynous ideology
implicated by the Enlightenment’s reductionism of mankind.[26]
At the time, it may have seemed as if the philosophy of the
Enlightenment would liberate gender. In retrospect, we see that all it
succeeded in doing was to make us ashamed of gender. To see this shame, one
doesn’t have to resort to the views of extremist feminists in Sweden who have
argued that men should sit down to urinate, or scholars who advocate
gender-neutral snow-men – oops, I mean, snow-persons. Indeed, the pervasive attempts to achieve a
gender-neutral vocabulary are probably the most concrete examples of a
paranoia, if not outright shame and repression, that now attaches itself to the
issue of gender. Hence, the publication of such books as The Elements of
Nonsexist Usage, or the thousands of dollars governments now spend
educating their staff how to avoid ‘gendered’ terms such as seamstress.[27]
Is gender really as scary as all that?
Apparently it is. “Gender issues” are apparently just as
much a threat as land mines, heroin smuggling and extreme poverty, for when the
British Foreign Office had to make schemes to help the war-torn state of
Afghanistan, the Labour government instructed diplomats to give a higher
priority to “gender issues” than to the more pressing dangers imposed by drugs,
mines and general deprivation. The Foreign Office responded by producing a
report entitled Inclusive Government: Mainstreaming Gender into Foreign
Policy. (The report included advice on how to help Afghan tribesmen to get
in touch with their feminine side.)[28]
How has this reduction of gender effected our era’s
approach to sexuality? That is the question we must carry with us into the next
chapter.
The Reductionism of Sexuality
Though it may be a logical necessity that the reduction of
gender will involve a corollary reduction of sexuality, human society usually
takes its time following the dictates of logic. Thus it was that during the
Enlightenment the reduction of sexuality was fuelled more by materialism than
gender reductionism (androgyny). However, today the reduction of sexuality is
fuelled by a much fuller application of androgyny – an androgyny that, at the
time of the Enlightenment, remained comparatively theoretical. Thus, we have a
confluence of two streams of thought which have already been expressed as fig.
A and B. The total result is to produce a reductionism of sexuality that is
unprecedented. Look now at figure C.
Fig. C
Reduction of Mankind
(materialism)
Reduction
of Sexuality
Reduction of Gender (androgyny)
It will be instructive to consider how the
reduction of gender leads to the neautralizing of sexuality, not just in
theory, but in actual practice. One doesn’t have to look far to see this
dynamic at work, a dynamic I will try to illustrate anecdotally.
Rabbi
Manis Friedman tells about some campers who came to ask his advice about a
camping trip. Friedman was horrified to learn that while they were camping,
members of the opposite sex would share sleeping bags. When the rabbi
challenged the young people about this they assured him “there’s nothing sexual
about it.” Now, is it true that there can be “nothing sexual” in just sharing a
sleeping bag with someone of the opposite sex, or in other activities that
might be mentioned, such as co-ed bathrooms, co-ed wrestling, etc? For many
young people today, the answer is yes, there is nothing sexual in such
activities. We have the supreme realization of Wollstonecraft’s ideal that
women might sometimes forget they are women in the presence of men: in the
presence of women, the men of today forget they are with women. The strangeness
inherent in such things as co-ed campuses, co-ed bathrooms co-ed wrestling and
even co-ed sleeping bags, is not that such things exist, but that
they can exist without sexual conotation.
Even the most overtly sexual things –
such as the sex act itself - are gradually becoming de-sexualized. One sees
this in the way sex is discussed in education ciriculi. When sex curriculum was first
introduced into kindergarten schools, the teachers experienced discomfort and
shyness about the subjects they were forced to talk about. In time, however,
these same teachers started to say that it was no different than talking about
an elbow. And what about orgasm? Well, apparently that's no different than
talking about sneezing, according to certain worksheets. Other worksheets show
pictures of different pennises and ask the children to circle which is errect.
Do the people who write these school
books think the children won’t know how to reproduce if they haven’t worked
through all the pages, or is a far more subtle agenda at work? Indeed, as the
agendas of androgyny and materialism continue to assert their reductive
influences, sexuality becomes completely disenchanted. Earlier, when this area
of life was considered ‘holy ground’, the vale of shyness that properly
attended discussion of sexual matters preserved the sense in which this
activity, on one level purely functional, is in fact an occasion for
significance, reverence, respect and privacy. To remove this veil and reduce
sex to just another ‘subject’, no different to elbows and sneezing, is
inevitably antecedent to a change in sex ethic. This will affect every area of
how one views sex-related issues, from dress to the appropriate civil response
to crimes of sexual violence. As concerns the latter, it is interesting that
Camille Paglia has argued that if rape “is a totally devastating psychological
experience for a woman, then she doesn't have a proper attitude about sex.”
Rape is just “like getting beaten up. Men get beat up all the time.”[29]
As absurd as
such statements may appear, there is a frightening consistency at work here.
When sexuality is stripped of it’s “decent drapery”; when all aspects of our
humanity are reduced to gender-neautral categories, then what is left to call a
woman has hardly any right to complain that rape is qualitatively different to
being beat up.
The Supreme Irony
One might note
a whole string of social and moral consequences entailed by the reduction of
sexuality. This is a favorite stragedy of popular moralists. However, the most
ironic consequences of this reductionism are seldom noted. I say ironic, since
the consequences I am refering to are, in many respects, antithetic to the very
ideals that set this reductionism in motion back at the Enlightenment.
In trying to
follow the dictates of ‘nature’ rather than an externally imposed system of
morality, the Enlightenment apparently liberated our sexuality, freeing us to
be naturally sexual rather than unnaturally repressed. However, it would be
some time later before we would begin to witness the consequences of a society
that takes this agenda seriously in it’s widest application. Since the
Enlightenment there has been a gradual lessening of all sexual restrictions,
with high points such as the ‘free love’ movement of the mid 19th
century and, finally, the so-called, ‘sexual revolution’ of the sixties. The
total result is perhaps the last thing we would expect: we find that,
comparitively speaking, the people of today are de-sexualized
and inhibited in being naturally sexual.
At first this
seems a bizare thing to say. Indeed, it may seem that the opposite is, in fact,
a truer description of our age. However, when I say that the people of
today are de-sexualized, I do not mean that they are less sexually
active than at other times, but that the scope of their sexuality is much
smaller. The material, actions or stimuli that, at one time, would have been
implicit with erotic suggestion, are today treated as something non-sexual.
Once there was sexual conotation in a man and woman being alone together in the
same room; now, in the universities and cities you will find mixed sexes living
together without sexual conotation (and with it as well!). Once a woman’s bare
knee was provocative; now days there are many men who would not even
bat an eye to see a woman in a bikini. What is this de-sexualizing other than a
form of repression?
Of course,
like all generalizations, life has it’s exceptions. There will always be those
for whom our society reserves the term ‘over-sexed.’ Among males, such an
appelation may apply to a man who cannot concentrate on beach volleyball
because the woman playing opposite is dressed in the equivalent of her
underwear, or the man who refuses to hire a female secretary because he knows
it would be too tempting being alone with her day after day. This is the kind
of person who is typically seen to have a problem with his sexuality, not the
person who can detach himself in these things. However, such a judgement only
serves as an indictment on the condition of sexuality today, for it reflects
the pervasive assumption – unconscious as it may be – that healthy sexuality
means a detached sexuality; a sexuality we can keep safely installed in our
back pocket. Lurking behind this mentality is surely the very monster that all
libertine movements have sought to eradicate: a shame of sexuality.
Although we're supposed to have been ‘liberated’ sexually, we are everywhere
encouraged to feel ashamed of our sexuality - not having sex, mind you, but being
sexual.[30] Let’s face
it, it’s embarresing to admit to the kind of active, ever present sexuality
that cannot watch your average commercial without being roused, let alone walk
down a European beach in the middle of summer.
It is as if everywhere there is an unconscious pressure to become
desensitised to sex, just as there is a pressure to become gender-neutral.
Consider, for example, the justification
so often proffered for watching sex scenes in movies, namely, “it doesn't
affect me.” The contrast is implicit between “sensitive,” “over-sexed” people
who are affected or offended by such content. However, we see again that the
shoe is actually on the other. If someone can truthfully say that sex in films
do not affect them, that is the surest proof that it has already had a very
marked effect upon them, for it shows that they have been affected to the point
of being able to view such content non-sexually. However, when we reach the point where
nothing fazes us, where we can share sleeping bags with members of the opposite
sex or play beach volleyball with virtually unclad men and women, or even just
watch sex scenes in films and not experience sexual feelings, then it is we who
are the losers. What have we lost? We have lost an ability to be naturally
sexual. It is similar to when a person constantly represses his/her emotions
and eventually finds it difficult to be naturally emotional.
Thus we find that with both gender and
sexuality (the later being a corollary of the former), the attempts at
liberation have resulted in shame and repression.
Having gone this far in trying to show
how the Enlightenment failed on its own terms, let me take the risk of pressing
my argument one stage further. We have looked at the reduction of gender and
the reduction of sexuality. How about the reduction of sexual enjoyment? In the
next chapter I will argue that the Enlightenment has robbed our society of the
ability to enjoy sexual experience to the fullest potential.
Love and Modesty
We
must momentarily return to the dispute between and Wollstonecraft.
Recall
that Rousseau had argued that the attraction between the sexes, the happiness
of marriage, and by extension the smooth running of society, hinged on
women-being-women in the sense of being different from man. (How Rousseau
applied this in practice is more problematic, and we might want to join
Wollstonecraft in disputing some of his arbitrary definitions of feminine
qualities.) However, it is instructive to note that, for all her feminism,
Wollstonecraft couldn’t help agreeing that the happiness of marriage is an
implication of the gender polarity she was so anxious to homogenize. For
example, she concedes that her educational agenda - and no doubt the androgynous
impetus behind it - will lead to unhappy marriages. However, this did not worry
Wollstonecraft since
an unhappy marriage is often
very advantageous to a family, and that the neglected wife is, in general, the
best mother. And this would almost always be the consequence if the female mind
being more enlarged...”[31]
It
would be tempting to try to show that Wollstonecraft’s admirable agenda for
female education might be easily retained within a framework that still
preserved the gender polarization, but that would be to miss the point. In
Wollstonecraft’s mind, at least, the two points were inseparable: her
educational program was bound up with an ideology of androgyny. The fact that
she recognizes these pursuits to be antithetic to the happiness of marriage is
very revealing in light of Rousseau’s similar assertions. Later Wollstonecraft
let the cat out of the bag further when she wrote that
Nature, in these respects,
may safely be left to herself; let women acquire knowledge and humanity, and
love will teach them modesty.[32]
We are hard pressed to understand what Wollstonecraft means
by modesty here apart from the kind of sexual/gender related modesty which,
earlier, she painstakingly avoided. It should come as no surprise that, in the
context of love at least, Wollstonecraft couldn’t help but lapse into a
gender-specific kind of modesty. This is because the gender distinction, together
with a right understanding of modesty, is crucial to a proper outworking and
enjoyment of love.
How To Enjoy Sex
Love between a man and woman tends to increase in meaning and
pleasure in proportion to what the lovers have to offer and receive. The
ultimate expression of love is, therefore, when lovers give all of
themselves to the other, as expressed in lifelong commitment and total physical
donation. On the other hand, those who have attempted to expunge the full force
of their gender polarity have, consequently, less of themselves to offer since
they are less than themselves. Thus, there is a logical consistency at work in
those feminists who are arguing that romantic love, like gender distinctions,
is one of the remnants of an unenlightened society. As the feminist Amy
Erickson puts it, “romantic ideals were simply a means of maintaining male
dominance at a time when overt demands of submission were no longer acceptable.”[33]
Back
in 1934, Naomi Mitchison complained that the feminist movement was creating a
generation of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere
sensation of the male embrace roused an undercurrent of resentment. Commenting
on Mitchison’s words, C. S. Lewis wrote that “at some level consent to
inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity.”[34]
He then speaks of the tragic-comedy of the modern woman who “taught by Freud to
consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited
by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete
emotional success.”[35]
But
it takes more than merely a rejection of androgyny to enable one to truly enjoy
sex. One needs to return to the codes of morality overthrown by the
Enlightenment’s materialism. It may seem stupid at first to suggest that the
way to truly enjoy a thing is to restrict it, even though our world furnishes
numerous examples of this principle. However, even confining our discussion
purely to sexuality, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that those
who are so sexually active that they give no second thought to a
one-night-stand, and treat sex as no big deal (often being actively encouraged
to do so[36]), should find
the activity less pleasurable than those so-called 'prudes' for whom sex is
still a Very Big Deal. And well, believe it or not, sex should be a Big
Deal, and not merely because this makes the act more enjoyable, though of
course, it does.[37]
Not only does the reduction of sexuality leave sex less of
a Big Deal, but it removing it’s enchanting quality, stripping it of that
magical ‘something’ which gave it dignity, it actually removes an important
aspects of its very appeal. We don’t have to travel to a nudist colony to see this principle
outworked. It was recently observed in The Times that advertisers are finding
that sex just doesn’t sell products like it once did. The reason, as Cristina
Odone reported, is that the advertisers have made sex so banal it’s hardly
surprising that it no longer entices us. Treated as it has been, the naked body loses that
spark of magic, essentially becoming no big deal any more - not secret,
therefore not sacred, therefore not exciting. No wonder young people are now reported as
making comments like “I’m so used to it, it makes me sick.”[38]
The same point can be made
in a different way. Central to the delight of sexual union is the pleasure of
being admitted into a place that is not merely common, but a private recess
open only to one unique individual – the person you love. It is a recess set
apart for this rite. Thus, the rite is “occult” in the sense of being hidden
knowledge and “holy” in the sense that it is set apart. Immodest behaviour and
dress necessarily diminishe the size of this recess by drawing in the
boundaries that set it apart, inviting others to enter that recess even if only
visually and to restricted degrees. Immodesty thus limits the depth of hidden
knowledge one can know and offer in the sexual rite. Thus, it should hardly
seem surprising if the euphoria of delight that attends the penetration of
privacy is inevitably lessened when there is less privacy to begin with. Nor
should we wonder if the offering and receiving of the private affords less
excitement when that very privacy has been scorned or eroded through an
unconscious reductionism and the consequent lack of modesty.
Seen in this way, an
over-conscientious modesty need not be indicative of an under-sexed
temperament, as is often thought, but a preservation and acknowledgement of
one’s sexuality. Thus, modesty is not a matter of negation, as it is often
thought, but of affirmation – affirming the sacredness of sexuality and
comiting to preserve the sense in which it is set apart, important and cherrished. [39]
C. S. Lewis wrote that “when a thing
is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common.”[40]
Thanks to the Enlightenment, sexuality has come to be common, not only
quantitatively, but also qualitatively.
Sexual Paranoia
It would be ironic enough to stop
there, having seen how the Enlightenment’s attempts to free sexuality have
merely truncated our sexual orientation and diminished it’s pleasure. However,
the supreme irony emerges when we consider the full extent to which our age,
apparently so “liberated” sexually, is actually as ashamed and paranoid of
sexuality as we are of gender. We have already touched on the shame aspect in
the discussion of de-sexualizing. As concerns paranoia, it seems that a
corolary of not seeing sex where it should be is that we are forever doomed to
see sex everywhere it is not. The papers are always full of examples. We
read that it is now against the law for school officials to give children high
fives, since the physical contact is somehow seen as having sexual overtones.
We read about a nine-year-old schoolboy in Virginia being accused and arrested
for aggravated sexual battery because he rubbed up against a girl in the
cafeteria. I am even told that some
women feel sexually asaulted if a man gives up his seat or opens a door for
them.
As situation and actions which ought to be latent with
erotic suggestion are treated commonly, without due respect and honour, we find
that situations and actions which really are merely common are treated
as being full of sexual overtones. If we really are, as I have suggested, a
society of sexually repressed people, then this paradox should come as no
shock. Sexuality will not be repressed, and to attempt to do so only causes it
to emerge in other areas. We thought that by removing
the restraints placed on our sexuality we would become liberated, but all it
has achieved is to put us into real bondage.
But this is exactly the legacy that the Enlightenment has
left us with. Filtered through a metaphysic of materialism and an anthropology
of androgyny, what is left to call our sexuality is so distorted that we hardly
no how to handle it. Stripped of what Burk called the decent drapery of life,
we have nothing to raise to dignity our naked shivering nature.
The Enlightenment told us that man and woman were but
animals, the product of impersonal material forces. The problem is not merely
that we believed them, but that now it is acceptable to behave like animals.
Recovering from the
Enlightenment
That we need to reject and recover from the legacy
bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, together with the consequences this
legacy has wrought in the sexual upheaval of the last century, is hardly a very
original thesis. It is no longer just in religious circles that you hear moralists
preaching the virtues of chastity; since the 80’s, the threat of AIDS has given
abstinence a utilitarian underpinning in much of the secular world. “The
chastity movement,” as it has come to be known, is now supported with millions
of dollars of the government’s money, with emblems such as the chastity ring,
or slogans like, “Do the right thing, wait for the ring.” On top of that, we
begin to find the wider issue of modesty also taking on a popular appeal in
many circles.
The prominence that chastity and modesty are now receiving
is certainly to be applauded. However, I am concerned that this new emphasis
has arises without first understanding the nature of the problem it is reacting
against. The nature of the problem emerges only when we fully realize what was
the philosophical pedigree to the sexual revolution, and, what was the
worldview that legitimised it in the first place. It will only be through
addressing these issues that any lasting headway will be able to be made
towards reversing the sexual revolution. To attack any problem without first
analysing how the problem arose, leads only to the kind of ineffectual
solutions that come through fighting symptoms rather than causes. It is akin to
taking a tangled knot of string and trying to unravel it without first studying
to find where and how the string became entangled. If one knows that the string
goes up here, around here, is looped across here, then one immediately begins
to perceive the solution to unravelling it. Similarly, I have attempted to show
how and why our sexuality has, like the lump of tangled string, become
completely twisted out of true, in order that this knowledge may point the way
towards recovery.
Return to Robin Phillips HOMEPAGE
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