Freud’s
classic argument is that sex is a strong human drive, active from earliest
childhood, but it becomes repressed by an internal mechanism. You repress
yourself, eliminating consciousness of desire, driving it from your thoughts as
well as your behavior. But it comes out anyway, in dreams, in symptoms, in
displacements. For Freud, the world is pervasively sexualized, but in symbolic
form, via transformations of sexual drive onto targets seemingly far removed
from its original erotic objects.
Freud
wrote at a turning point now 100 years behind us. He psychoanalyzed his
patients at the end of the Victorian era, making his discoveries between the
1890s (“the gay 90s” in the original sense of the time, which meant heterosexual)
and World War I. Sex was coming out of the closet-- better said, out of the
corset-- and Vienna was the leading center of the action. It was the first
period of the modern sexual revolution. Official prudery was being challenged;
the heavy layers of clothing were starting to come off, and people were not
only starting to talk about sex (and to paint it) but to act on it more
overtly.
 |
| Egon Schiele, 1917 |
It is
ironic that Freud should formulate a theory of sexual repression at just this
time. In fact his patients were caught in the gap, repressed persons in a world
where heightened sense of sexuality was rising around them.
 |
| Freud’s first patient cured, Anna O. |
Since
then have been a series of sexual revolutions. The “roaring twenties”-- the
“Jazz age” which in its original slang meant the verb to have sex (“he tried to
jazz me” a young woman says in a Faulkner novel). The sixties counterculture,
famous for sexual communes-- in fact not very many and all of them short-lived;
the counterculture had more long-lasting effects in the shift to cohabiting
without getting married, a shock wave around 1968-71 about what used to be
called “shacking up” or “living in sin,” and then quickly becoming accepted
almost everywhere. Cohabitation was soon followed by acceptance of what used to
be called “illegitimacy," which soon changed to "out-of-wedlock
childbirth,” and now is completely normalized. The outburst of pornographic magazines and films in the
1970s, going mainstream and eventually becoming the early cutting edge of video
and the Internet. The homosexual liberation movement that achieved public
legitimacy in the scandal of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and transformed
proper terminology into the elaborations of LGBT. Battles still take place,
most recently over gay marriage. The configuration has repeatedly replayed
since Freud’s time-- a struggle between one form or another of sexual
repression and victorious movements of sexual liberation.
Can we
say sexual repression still exists?
That is, exists in the large part of society which is liberated, outside
of a few backward enclaves who have lost every battle and appear likely to lose
the rest of them?
What Would Totally Liberated Sex
Look Like?
Let us
define complete sexual liberation as a condition where anyone can say or do
anything sexual that they want.
Would
there be any limitations? Consider
our own sexually liberated times. Can you go up to any person at all and say,
I’d like to have sex with you?
Circumstances
where one cannot say this are limitations on sexual speech. As for sexual
action, consider its least intrusive form, touching. Can you touch any person
you feel attracted to?
The
quick answer to both questions is: no. There are very definite limitations and
circumstances in which sexual speech and action is allowed.
The
phrase is widely used, “between consenting adults.” But this implies a lot more
sexual liberty than actually exists, even among the most liberated. “Consenting
adults” applies more to action than to words; and many forms of sexual speech
are strongly sanctioned-- so that even approaching the topic is socially
prohibited in most situations. This doesn’t mean talking philosophically about
consent. What is prohibited is
requesting personal, particular consent.
The
title, “Why Does Sexual Repression Exist?” is not a rhetorical question. It is
not a way of saying “Isn’t it absurd for us not to express our sexual desires
any time we want to?” It is a real
question, a sociological question that asks what causes people to limit
expression of sexual desire and sexual behavior.
It is a
very answerable question. Sexual behavior and talk have varied a great deal
historically, across societies and within any particular one. There is ample
evidence for showing what determines what sex is and is not allowed.
There
may be a tendency to think that the answers are obvious, at least for our own
enlightened times. Obviously, certain categories of persons have to be
protected; certain situations are just not appropriate. Why do we think this? It is more
revealing to distance ourselves from our contemporary point of view. Not very
far in the past, people assumed different standards. It is safe to predict that
in the future, people will look back at us-- including the most liberated--
with scorn and moral condemnation, just as we look backwards at our own
predecessors. The power of comparative sociology is to rise above our
historical self-centeredness, and to show what makes people feel this is right and that is wrong about sex.
Does “Consenting Adults” explain
the contemporary sexual standard?
Social
rules are embedded in tacit understandings as to when a rule is to be invoked.
Freud would have called this unconscious; Durkheim called it pre-contractual
solidarity. There are many persons and many situations where one cannot ask for
consent, or even bring up the topic.
By way
of generating some sense of the social conditions, ask yourself: how many
people can you ask to have sex with you? Think of the variations of how to say
it to particular persons: politely, indirectly, blatantly, using slang, using
obscenity: “Excuse me ma’am (or sir), would you like to fuck?” What would
happen if you said this? In some situations today one would be accused of using
inappropriate language, in others, of sexual harassment. In the era before
WWII, you could get your face slapped.
I have
appealed to your imagination of real-life occasions because in the vast number
of situations where someone has a sexual interest in someone else, it does not
get expressed at all. David Grazian’s book, On
the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, shows what happens when young adults are out in the scenes
where they are most explicitly looking for sex. Although both the boys and the
girls* talk about what they are aiming for and what happened, they do this
among themselves before they go out and after they come back. When they are on
the front lines in the night club, virtually no one ever says anything like,
let’s hook up. They are playing a game of pickup, but at a very distant level.
Most of the excitement is in the tease and innuendo, and sexual scores are so
rare that the boys end up bragging about getting a girl’s phone number, and the
girls laugh about giving out fake numbers. Like most ethnographies, Grazian
cuts through the ideal and shows the social realities of how the atmosphere of
sexual excitement is constructed, like putting on a performance in a theatre.
* “girls” is how they refer to
themselves. [See also Armstrong and Hamilton.]
Why
doesn’t this scene, about as blatantly sexual as they come, have more real sex
or at least more sexual talk? This means asking about the sociological
processes that repress sex. We will come to the list of causes shortly; here
they have little to do with the kind of sexual repression which concerned
Freud.
Compare
the few places where expressing one’s sexual desire face-to-face with its
target is actually done. One is in front of fraternity houses, on heightened
occasions like party-night afternoons, or at the beginning of term when new
student cohorts arrive. There can be a lot of raucous hooting at passing women,
commenting both positively and negatively on their sexual desirability. Notice
two things: This is sexual expression, but without a serious aim to get consent
from any particular woman; in fact, the impersonal and collective nature of the
hooting makes this impossible. Secondly, even the frat boys’ tactic of
strength-in-numbers-and-anonymity does not necessarily shield them from the negative
reaction they would likely get if one of them said the same things to an
individual woman. As social
movements and administrative organization have mobilized, fraternities hooting
at women are sometimes sanctioned or even closed down (as happened for instance
at San Diego State University in 2014). The sociological pattern holds: expressing sexual desire is limited even
in the most liberated society; it can be gotten away with more if it is
ostensibly not really serious, or is carried out at a safe distance. Today, the
most blatant sexual talk is telephone sex [Flowers 1998]. Sexual expression
also gives rise to counter-movements. The sociological pattern is not sexual
expression alone, but sexual conflict.
Inside
the fraternity house, the situation is not too dissimilar from Grazian’s
description of downtown nightclubs. [Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape; Armstrong and Hamilton, Paying for the Party] There is a lot of bragging talk about sex
within the male-bonded group; but only a small sexual elite actually gets very
much action. At parties, disguised by loud music, semi-darkness, and plentiful
alcohol, the reality is that most of the frat boys are on the sidelines
watching their sexual heroes. So, are they the ones who boldly ask for sex?
Even here, the conversations are more tacit and oblique than blatant; the most
successful approach is by sheer body language, dancing in high sync, laughing
together. The less formal and coherent the talk, the more likely it is to build
the mutual mood that may lead to sex. Uninhibited extroversion is favored by
the scene, not the rational-legal language of discussion and consent.
The
prevailing social pattern when talking person-to-person about possible sex is
that explicit sexual desire is never directly expressed, until the situation
has evolved non-verbally to the proper point; any violation of this tacit rule
gets a negative reaction. The main
exception is in commercial sex work, talk between prostitutes and prospective
clients (Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily
Yours). But even here, the initial steps of negotiation are surprisingly
round-about. Sex work illustrates a pattern found more generally in social
stratification: low-class street prostitutes are most blatant in verbally
offering sex; high-class prostitutes or “escorts” play out the girlfriend
experience (GFE in advertisements) minimizing explicit negotiations in order to
set a non-commercial atmosphere.
The most
explicit sexual talk is in scenes dominated by males, not only because they
control violence but because they are at the center of the carousing, “where
the action is.” This is the
pattern in unpoliced lower-class
black inner city ghettos, where groups of dominant males-- both teenage gang members,
and some adult men-- fling sexual banter at girls and attractive women, and
humiliate those who object. [Jody Miller, Getting
Played] This fits the
sociological pattern of more blatant sexual talk lower in the class hierarchy.
But it isn't the whole explanation, since upper-middle class fraternities resemble
lower-class gangs, except that they have the money for their own club house,
and do not need to engage in street crime for income. Whether in tribal
societies or enclaves in modern ones, a hyper-sexualized pattern of blatantly
exploiting women occurs where the power center is a "men's house"
that is also the ceremonial center of the community.
In the
gender-integrated middle and upper classes, much sexual talk is tabooed even
when it has nothing to do with consent.
Circumstances are rare in which persons can say directly to another:
“How big is your penis?” or “You’ve got really great tits.” In the talk regime
of liberal late 20th/ early 21st century, such talk would be considered over
the top, if not called “politically incorrect,” “sexist,” or actually resulting
in formal charges.
Socially constructed age limits
The
other part of “consenting adults” is the age limitation. We take this for
granted, as all customs generally are. But it is palpably constructed by social
regimes, as we can easily see by comparing laws and customs in different
historical periods. In this area, instead of a post-Freudian trend of
increasing sexual liberation, sexual repressiveness has historically increased.
The
strongest contrast is sex in tribal societies. One of the most detailed is
Malinowski’s ethnography of the Trobriand Islands north of Australia. The
Trobrianders have almost the opposite of the official American position (that
adults are sexual and children are sexless, unless adults impose sex upon
them). In this tribe, childhood is the time for unrestrained sex; whereas
adults are expected to settle down and devote themselves to work. Both girls and boys flaunt their sexual
activity; both sexes go off on group sex-seeking expeditions; both show off
marks of love-bites and scratches on the skin as proud tokens of sexual
passion. This happens almost exclusively among what modern Americans legally
define as children.
Among
the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea, there is a homosexual version (Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes). The normal
life-course pattern is for an adolescent boy to become the sexual partner of a
young man, the older initiating the younger into sex simultaneously with the
mysteries of the warrior men’s house. It is not lifetime homosexuality but a
stage of age-graded promotion. The boy is shown the sacred flutes and also
taught to suck the man’s penis and swallow the sperm, religiously interpreted
as giving manhood. As William Graham Sumner said, the social mores can make
anything legitimate.
A
similar pattern existed in ancient Greece. Young men of the upper classes, in
the long wait for marriage to upper class women (who were snapped up very young
by older men), had love affairs with boys of their same social class--
preferably adolescents before the beard and pubic hair had grown. These were
genuinely passionate love-affairs that would be recognizable today, except that
young males rather than females set the ideal of bodily beauty. The ideal
eventually became transferred to the female body, once Greek and Roman women
became more emancipated. [Dover, Greek Homosexuality;
Keuls, Reign of the Phallus]
This is
a striking reversal of modern homosexuality, which is legitimate among adults
but harshly penalized across age lines. For the ancient Greeks, homosexual
relations among adult men was considered ludicrous; and anal sex-- the
predominant form of modern male homosexual practice [Laumann et al. 1994]-- was
regarded only as a humiliating punishment.
What can
we get out of these comparisons other than that societies change and can decree
anything is right and wrong?
Sex
between adults and “children”-- generally defined by the cutting point of age
18-- is now labeled child sexual abuse. It is the most stigmatized of
contemporary crimes. The rationalized argument is that the child has no power
of consent, and that any adult must automatically be considered as taking
advantage of them. This is a legal judgment, not a sociological one.
Where
sociological evidence does exist is for the pattern that children who have had
sex with adults-- victims of child abuse-- have many more life problems.
[Finkelhor 1986] They have more drug use and alcohol excess; more unstable
marriages and sexual partnerships; they are more likely to become victims of
spousal abuse and violence; to have more trouble with education and jobs. The
data analyses do not always control very well for confounding factors, such as
lower social class and broken family structure; but on the whole, one can make
out a sociological case why child sexual abuse is a very bad thing in its
consequences.
Social shame causes the damage
There is
one major problem: what is the causal mechanism? One might assume that a child
who has sex with an adult feels traumatized; but this is not always the case.
Sometimes the adult uses force, but in many cases the adult is a parent or
close relative, often when the opposite-sex spouse is absent, and the child
gets an early sense of intimacy and initiation into adult sexual
privileges. The mechanism that
causes the trauma, most typically, is shame. Shame produced by the reaction of the
larger society, shame transmitted to the child by having to keep the sexual
relationship secret. Shame and humiliation when the case comes to official
notice; even bureaucratic policies to keep such cases secret (as far as the
child’s identity is concerned) have the effect of segregating the child in an
atmosphere where the secrecy is itself a mark of shame. This is shown in
studies of juvenile facilities where children in such cases are segregated; and
where a culture of precocious sexuality is further enhanced, since the one
thing these kids have over others is more sexual experience, and they share it
among their peers.
Social
labeling theory has been applied to explaining mental illness, retardation, and
numerous other things. The theory has not always held up when controls are
applied to the data. But in the case of the life-long effects of being labeled
a victim of child abuse, the labeling process is by far the strongest explanation
of the debilitating consequences.
As
social psychologist/family therapists Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger have shown,
shame is the master motive of social control. Even tiny episodes of shame from
broken attunement in a conversation bring hurt reactions; and if the shame is
not overtly expressed and resolved, but hidden away (by embarrassment, by shame
about being ashamed) it comes out in long-term destructive rage, against self
and others. In my own theory of successful and unsuccessful Interaction Rituals
[Collins 2004], disattunement and its concomitant shame lead to difficult
social relationships; to loss of emotional energy, and instead to a cycle of
depression, passiveness, and interactional failure. Via the shame mechanism, it is possible to explain why many
sexual relationships between adults and children result in very negative life
consequences for the children as they grow up.
Many
sexual relationships, not all of them. We know that because of societies like
tribal New Guinea and ancient Greece, where adult-child sex was honorable and
celebrated, not regarded as shameful at all. In those societies, it had no
negative consequences.
The
purpose of this discussion is not to make sexual policy; but here is a point
where sociological theory suggests what is being done wrong, and what could be
done to solve it. The negative consequences of adult/child sex could be
eliminated if society stopped treating it as shameful.
Who Can Touch Who When?
The
formula “between consenting adults” has similar limitations in explaining the
tacit social norms about touching another person.
Consider
the range of touches that exist in our society, whether commonplace,
restricted, or forbidden:
--
shaking hands
--
patting on the shoulder (usually clothed)
--
kisses of all varieties: air kisses, cheek kisses,
gentleman-kissing-lady’s-hand, kissing the Pope’s ring, lip kisses, tongue
kisses, tongue-to-genital kisses
Notice,
apropos of consenting adults, hardly anyone ever asks, “Can I kiss you?” (although social consent is explicit in
the traditional wedding ceremony, with its climax “You may now kiss.”) When
persons kiss, and what kind of kiss it is, is a tacit, unspoken part of a
particular kind of social relationship. If it is the wrong social relationship,
or the wrong kiss, there are repercussions. This is a sociological rule for all
forms of touching.
Similarly
with hugs. The style has palpably changed in American society, with a big shift
in the 1970s towards much more hugging-- not necessarily spontaneous, because
it has become so strongly expected in particular situations. Take a look at the
polite hugs which are now de rigueur in social gatherings of the higher
classes-- hugs around the shoulders, leaning forward, avoiding full body
contact. In the 1940s, an enthusiastic hug consisted in grasping the other
person’s arms with both hands, above the elbows-- more enthusiasm shown by more
body contact, within the limitations of the time. The ritual of sports
celebrations (victories; home-runs crossing the plate) has shifted from merely
verbal, to hand-shaking, to the now-required full-body pile-on. It is notable that body contact among
American men is more extensive the more violent it is; swinging high-fives, forearm
smashes, chest bumps, pile-ons are more favored than gentle contact, probably
because the violence sends the message that it isn’t sexual.
Historical
comparison helps explain the meanings of body contact vary. In traditional
societies such as Arabs, it was common for groups of men in public to walk
along holding hands or linking arms. Similarly, women in traditional societies
linked arms in public. It was an
explicit show of group tie-signs. It had nothing sexual about it; it expressed
the politics of the situation when kin-groups and other close solidarities were
all-important. As modern societies have become more individualized, tie-signs
such as hand-holding or linking arms have narrowed in meaning, explicitly
confined to sexual ties. It is the same with the decay of old kissing rituals like
the French official who kisses the recipient on both cheeks after pinning on a
medal.
In our
sexually liberated age, many bodily gestures are restricted, because the
default setting is to take them as sexual.
Four causal mechanisms that
control sex
[1]
Sexual property regimes
[2]
Sexual markets
[3]
Sexual domination and counter-mobilization
[4]
Sexual distraction and sexual ugliness
These
mechanisms, in one degree or another, have existed in every society. What varies is the strength of the
ingredients that go into each mechanism.
[1] Sexual property regimes
Sexual
property is present wherever there is jealousy. It is analogous to property
over a thing, or more exactly, property over behavior-- like a professional
athlete signing a contract that requires certain kinds of performance on the
field and prohibits other behavior in the off season. Sexual property is the right to touch someone else’s body
sexually. Like other forms of legal property, it takes many forms: sometimes
the rules are elaborate and restrictive, sometimes not; sometimes it is a
permanent, life-time contract, sometimes breakable (e.g. by divorce), sometimes
very short-term indeed (e.g. a half hour deal with a prostitute or an overnight
with an escort).
The
forms of sexual property have changed historically. But despite movements of
sexual liberation, it has not gone away.
The gay liberation movement has coincided with a great deal of private
fighting over sexual jealousies-- more commonly among male homosexuals than
females [Blumstein and Schwartz 1983].
Legitimating a particular form of sex does not mean turning it into open
access.
What
determines the forms sexual property has taken? Most important are changes in
the political power of the family.
The most blatant and restrictive forms of sexual property existed in
patrimonial households-- roughly speaking, the medieval pattern where big
households with their own warriors were the backbone of the state. Important households were tied together
by marriage politics. Women were treated as tokens to exchange with other
important families, so they had no choice in their own sexuality. Any incursion
into the sexual property of the household was regarded as a combination of rape
and treason, with both parties punishable, sometimes by spectacularly violent
death. This is the background for Romeo-and-Juliet romances, and for real-life
versions in places like Saudi Arabia, Kurdistan, and Pakistan. A royal princess
can be assassinated, and brothers can stone a sister to death for sex or mere
flirtation with an outsider to the clan. [Cooney 2014]
The era
of the patrimonial household upheld a double standard, technically unilateral
sexual property: males controlled females as sexual property to be used for
political alliance-making, but not vice versa. The big historical changes in
sexual property go in either direction from this medieval pattern-- backwards
towards tribal societies, and forward to the modern state.
Tribal
societies like those described by Malinowski and Margaret Mead, and that
greeted sailors in Polynesia during the 19th century, seemed like sexual
paradises to people from the modern West. The reason was that their politics
were extremely rudimentary. Where there were no strong military coalitions, and
nothing like a warrior class living in castles or big households, marriage
alliances were not very important. In very simple societies without class
differences in wealth, divorces were extremely easy. Sex was not politicized
and therefore left up to individual discretion. Jealousies were personal and
not backed up by group forces. Sexual property was ephemeral.
Coming
forward historically from the Romeo-and-Juliet world toward our own is the rise
of the bureaucratic state. Governments acquired their own armies and tax-collecting
machinery. Households became more private and their sexual affairs
depoliticized. This set the stage for the shift to the private marriage market.
[2] Sexual markets
A market
exists whenever there are numbers of actors who want something and have to find
someone else to trade with to get it. Markets can range from many competitors
to virtually none; the more competition, the more each individual must be
concerned about the “price” for what they are buying or offering. This
structure exists whether its participants recognize it consciously or not. The
price can be in money, but it can be in other things too-- sexual
attractiveness, subservience, social status, even love. In fact a bundle of all
these things has become the preferred way that people find sexual partners in
the modern era of the private sexual marketplace.
The
ideal of marrying for love came into existence in European societies around the
turn of the 1800s. It was called the “Romantic” era because so many writers
made a theme out of love affairs defying social convention and expressing the
individual’s wild, uncontrolled passions. The literary ideal reflected a real
change. Parents gradually stopped controlling their children’s choice of
partners. In one respect this felt like an era of freedom, but it also meant
that young people were thrown into a marriage market they had to negotiate for
themselves.
A market
is freedom but it is also constraint. The freedom is to make choices. The
constraint of a market is that you do not necessarily get what you want, at the
price you would like to offer. The
romantic image is that love happens like magic, a meeting of two persons with
perfectly matched desires; it scorns social differences and mere material
things like inheritance and money. In reality, the love ideal came along with
the market of who can offer what. Many persons may desire a very beautiful,
sexually arousing partner, but s/he may not find you sufficiently attractive in
return. Other things get thrown into the mix: today not so much inheritance,
but a good job and earning capacity.
Material
things become part of romancing,
in the form of treating, paying for dinners and entertainment, gifts, not to
mention the degree of attractiveness one can muster by one’s clothing and
grooming. Viviana Zelizer has
shown there is no clear gulf between purely sentimental considerations and
material offerings; even if the latter are ignored in the ideology of love and
sexual passion, they exist in a semi-conscious underground of bargaining, an
almost Freudian repression of the sexual market itself from polite
consciousness.
We don’t
care about somebody’s social background, and assert that all that matters is
whether we really like each other. We can take this attitude with a fair degree
of success because in fact what we like about another person is their cultural
tastes and their social personality, and liking consists of fitting together
people who find their manners match. It is not surprising to sociologists that
the prevailing pattern is homophily-- personal ties with someone similar to
oneself on as many dimensions as possible. And this applies to ties of all
degrees of permanence: from long-term marriage down to passing affairs. In
fact, the closer the homophily, the longer the relationship is likely to
last. Affairs across big social
gaps do happen, but they are also more likely to break up. The shift during the
last century from divorce-proof lifetime marriage, to serial monogamy, to
cohabitation without getting married, to hookups, has not affected the dynamics
of sexual markets. In none of these long-term or short-term relationships is it
irrelevant who are the competitors, and competition always affects what one
needs to offer in order to find a partner.
Sexual repression inside a sexual
market
The idea
of a sexual market makes it sound like everything is very blatant, but on the
whole modern sexual markets repress the overt expression of sexual desires. The
more people who are actively out there on the market looking for partners,
whether for the evening or for a lifetime, the more likely it is that any
particular person will encounter rejections. Experienced individuals in such
markets-- those who often go to nightclubs, or to parties, mixers, conferences,
dances, dating services, you name it-- generally get to know their own value
from the way they are treated by others. Very attractive individuals become
very picky-- in part because they can afford to be, in part because they are
overwhelmed by advances, most of which they scorn. A very beautiful young woman of my acquaintance complains
that she is constantly being stared at by strangers, who she regards as
completely boring. Of course: by
her standards, she can do much better. Interview data show the same thing [Gardner,
Passing By]. This is a main reason
why persons at the top of the sexual market tend to pair off with each other.
Homophily
is everywhere. Systematic observations of persons who are together on streets
and public places (my own research), shows that pairs and small groups tend to
be similar on every dimension, including clothing style, physical size, and
attractiveness-- i.e. they have sorted themselves by cultural capital and
social class, but also by their positions in sexual markets. Women tend to be friends with women of
similar attractiveness, because they have similar backstage issues.
An open
sexual market represses overt expression of sexual desire for several reasons.
One reason why people very rarely say something like “I’d like to have sex with
you,” is that most of the time they will be rejected. The target of the advance
may not at all be a prude, but simply someone higher in the sexual market. And
rejection is not only a downer in its own right, but it also tends to publicize
one’s own level of sexual un-attractiveness. Paradoxically, the more open the
sexual market, the more individual-level psychological pressure exists to avoid
exposing one’s own sexual desires. The expression of desire risks a negative
judgment about one’s market position.
Thus the
persons who are most open in expressing their sexuality tend to be among those
who are most sexually attractive.
The expression of sexual desire itself becomes stratified in a time of
sexual openness.
 |
| sexual ranking at IMF meeting |
[3] Sexual domination and counter-mobilization
Sex is a
potential site for conflict and domination. Some feminist theorists have
asserted that sex is always a form of domination, or at least heterosexuality
always is. In social science, “always” is a dangerous term, since variations
spread across the spectrum, and it is more useful to look for the causal
conditions rather than an alleged constant. In some arenas (such as prisons),
homosexual sex is more frequently the target of coercive practices. [O'Donnell
2004]
Since the
aim of this article is causal explanation rather than protest and policy, let
us ask the question: what settings produce the most sexual domination, both
coercive and indirect? And what conditions mobilize social action against
sexual domination?
Indirect
sexual domination is implicit in some kinds of sexual property, especially in
the patrimonial household politics already discussed. In those settings, sexual
violence mostly comes out when the informal controls are challenged.* Modern
sexual markets have probably increased the historical incidence of some kinds
of sexual coercion, since date rape could hardly exist in societies where there
was no dating, and fraternity party rapes could not exist before the era of
co-ed schooling.
* This
doesn’t inevitably happen. Cooney
[2014] shows that the weaker the clan’s political control and the more the
family lives in modern urban conditions, the more likely they are to let off
the culprits from their tribal code. When they can keep the sexual defection of
a daughter or son secret, it is often indulged; but when it comes out in the
ethnic community, the family may be goaded to act violently to protect their
reputation.
There
are at least five distinct causal pathways of rape (date rape; serial stranger
rape; carousing zone rape; political rape; rape in the course of another
crime.) I will put aside the topic
of the causes of rape for fuller treatment in another post.
Here I
will concentrate on two arenas where opportunities for sexual domination have
changed, and where counter-movements have mobilized against them. My analysis
focuses on the theme we have been pursuing, what causes sexual repression.
The two
arenas are age restrictions on sexual contact, and restrictions at work.
We have
already seen that age limits on sexuality have grown historically. They were
virtually non-existent in most tribal societies. In patrimonial household
politics, child sexuality was promoted when political marriages were arranged
at a young age. The category of childhood is a modern construction, at least in
the sense of a social category backed up by law. Of course medieval people
recognized that children were sometimes too small for adult activities, but
there were no rigid dividing lines; what children did was determined by their
particular capacities and the political maneuvers that took place around them.
For centuries in Japan, children were put on the throne so that they could be
manipulated by regents, often from the family of the child-Emperor’s wife; and
child sexuality was encouraged precisely because political influentials wanted
an heir from their line.
What
created the sharp dividing lines that separate childhood from adulthood,
legally as well as moralistically, was the rise of modern bureaucracy. The
power of the household was reduced by the bureaucratic state. The state began
to impose requirements for children to be educated in a bureaucratic school
system; labor laws were created, under a variety of influences including both
labor and humanitarian movements, which restricted or prohibited employment
under particular ages. States have increasingly penetrated households; at first
(starting in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s) this was done to enroll the
population for military conscription, and for taxation; approaching our own
times, for the purposes of social welfare, public health, equal opportunity,
prevention of child abuse, and a growing list of causes.
Bureaucratization
means setting out formal rules and keeping records. The rules are designed to
disregard individual circumstances and lump everyone into abstract and easily
measurable categories. The growth of mass education has placed increasing
emphasis on age-appropriate activities, as laws have mandated education for lengthening stretches of
everyone’s lifetime. Schools in
medieval times, and up through the 19th century (as in rural schools in
America), generally lumped together children of very different ages; they all
learned in the same classroom, with the abler ones moving through faster at
their own pace. (For instance, Sir Francis Bacon went to Cambridge University
from age 12 to 14, tagging along
with his older brother; he entered law school at age 15, but soon went off on
an informal apprenticeship as secretary to an ambassador. This cursory formal
education did not prevent Bacon from becoming the most learned man in early
17th century England.) By the early 20th century, schools were moving students
through rigidly according to age-graded classes; skipping grades was allowed as
an exceptional policy, but both formal and informal pressures were against it.
It was
in this context that laws controlling the sexual behavior of children-- now a
strictly age-graded category, with no concern for individual variation-- became
formalized in law. Children are now defined by their age, not by their capabilities.
Social movements have been mobilized, since the mid-19th century, to protect
children, as seen through eyes and social values of the reformers. Some of
these movements were notorious for imposing the values of puritanical
Protestants upon immigrant families in American cities; others have dropped the
religious themes, and put themselves forward in the name of humanitarian,
scientific, or medical ideals. Because resources for mobilizing social
movements have continuously expanded in the 20th and 21st centuries, movements
to control the lives of age-defined persons (“children”) have become
increasingly influential.
There is
no natural, culture-free reason why persons above the age of 18 should be
regarded as sexual predators against those below 18. Since boyfriend-girlfriend
relationships are typically between males a year or two older than females,
there comes a life-passage when what was acceptable at least informally in
these age-segregated enclaves becomes illegal. Increasing pressures on courts
to impose uniform penalties, has combined with the successful efforts of social
movements to punish all sexual offenders not only with prison but by labeling
and segregating them for the rest of their lives. The results include instances
where the sexual activities of boyfriends with girlfriends end up in the public
roster of sex offenders as indistinguishable from the most violent rapist.
Young female teachers in their 20s who have affairs with teenage boys (probably
the most sexually mature ones) are treated as if they were raping little
children. The spread of surveillance cameras, where videos are routinely
monitored by bureaucratic authorities and handed over to prosecutors bent on
increasing their conviction rate, is one more feature of today’s impersonal
organization intruding on private lives to enforce laws that are oblivious to
individual differences.
Genuinely
humane persons might recognize that the category of statutory rape should be
replaced by more flexible consideration of circumstances. But it is characteristic of a
bureaucratic society that once rules are written into laws and standard
organizational practices, unintended consequences merely become normal. Peeling
back such laws and procedures is more difficult than the flurries of scandal
and melodrama that first enacted them.
From the
high ground of sociological analysis, we can summarize: the combination of
modern age-graded bureaucracy and the ease of mobilizing social movements is a
new source of sexual repression, rolling back waves of post-Freudian
liberalization.
The
other arena of new sexual controls is work. Gender integration of women into formerly male occupations
increased opportunities for sexual contact. The result has been two kinds of
controversies. One is that men can take advantage of women working with them,
either by superior force or by rank. Counter-movements have mobilized, and
rules to prevent such victimization have grown, both within organizations and
under government legal pressure. Since sexual advances are also made in an
indirect manner, rules to control sexual domination have expanded to a wide
variety of activities under the category of “sexual harassment.” One result has
been that the loosening of sexual talk that happened from the 1930s through the
1980s, has been reversed. Whether this is good or bad from the point of view of
men and women in the world of work, is no doubt mixed. One conclusion is clear:
post-Freudian sexual liberation-- although still strong in popular culture and
in the high arts-- has been turned back to a Neo-Victorian standard of official
prudishness.
[4] Sexual distraction and sexual ugliness
This is
a topic rarely discussed. It is more universal than our current movements for
and against particular kinds of sexuality. Even if sexual domination were
eliminated, this issue would remain.
Sexual
arousal can be overwhelming, obsessive, shutting everything else out. This
leads to practical norms to limit sexual arousal.
Why is
there a taboo against sex in public? Even in the most liberated arenas and
sexual scenes of modern society, it is rare for people to actually engage in
sexual intercourse in public, as well as other sexual acts. Anthropologists and
sociologists [Ford and Beach 1951; Reiss 1986] have noted that with all the
variety of sexual regimes around the world, there is one constant: sexual intercourse almost always takes
place in privacy.
The
exceptions help pin down the sociological rule. Even in the most liberated
circles, there are restrictions. Swingers groups (AKA wife-swapping), popular
in the 60s and 70s, developed a rule: couples only, no unaccompanied singles
[Gilmartin 1978]. The exchange had
to be complete; everyone had to take part. Swinging was breaking the rule of
monogamous sexual property; but it had to be equal-- both man and woman got the
same license as their partner. Another rule: no meeting illicitly on the
outside. What happens in swinging, stays in swinging! If they were all going to have sex together, it was going to
be in one place: group privacy, no public allowed, no side-involvements.
Studies
of communes in the 1960s and 70s (Zablocki 1980; Martin and Fuller 2004) found that the longevity of the commune
was inversely related to its sexual openness. Communes that strictly banned sex (especially religious
communes) or communes composed of married or monogamous cohabiting partners
lasted longest. Communes that had a policy of free love-- anyone can have sex
with anyone, no questions asked-- were the most volatile. Why? In part, because
their idealistic rule overlooked the sexual market and sexual
attractiveness. On one side, the
men vied to have sex with the best-looking women, hence squeezed each other
out. * On the other side, women sex stars were overwhelmed, and played their
favorites. And there was the snake
in the garden, social rank: a
charismatic commune leader hogged most of the sex; and swingers groups among
businessmen tended to fall into the pattern of the younger men with
good-looking wives swapping with older men and fading wives, a trade-off of
rank for sex, or sex for promotion.
*The
same was observed in the bathhouse scene of gay sex in the 1980s and 90s, when
the overt rule was anything goes, but in fact bathhouse participants queued up
in order of personal attractiveness to get the most attractive men.
Although
there is a fantasy ideal of orgiastic sex, it is structurally difficult, if not
impossible. Orgies are depicted on ancient Greek drinking-bowls; but what we
know about these scenes is that the group of upper-class men hired professional
prostitutes for the orgy. [Keuls 1985] Even with this commercial dominance, the border seemed to be
enforced: everyone present took part in the orgy, closed to the world outside.
To
repeat the question: why the taboo against public sex? The answer is that
sexual arousal is distracting, it is contagious. There are rapes on record
where men wandering around come upon a couple making love on a deserted beach,
and intrude themselves into the
sex. Gang rapes often get started in the same way, without plan, sheer
arousal-driven piling on.
The
answer is a sociological transmutation of Freud. Sex is too strong a drive for
people to let it go untrammeled-- which is to say, to let it go outside of
privacy that limits it to just two people, or in rare circumstances, a larger
but equally circumscribed group. This continues to be the pattern of
Vegas-style all-girl junkets for sexual adventure. Pictures posted on Internet
sites typically show a group of women of which one is having sex with a
well-built man while the others watch; the partying atmosphere is displayed in
their fancy clothes and their drinking. It remains a private group enclave,
where everyone present is a potential sexual participant.
Sexual distraction
helps explain the proliferation of sexually-inhibiting rules in the
contemporary work place. In addition to the threats of sexual dominance, there
is also the possibility that sexual arousals may take over and pull people from
their work. It is hard to estimate realistically the strength of this threat,
given that most organizations are not working at full capacity, and ideal
efficiency is always hard to estimate.
A hint
is that sexual relationships at work are tolerated when they do not upset the
organizational hierarchy or blur its chain of command. On the Eastern front of World War II,
it was common for Soviet commanders to take “combat wives”-- secretaries or
telephone operators pressed into service in the manpower shortage, who became
the sexual property of the highest-ranking officer for the duration. There was
little push-back about the system. There are indications similar things
happened on the Western front, at least among the Americans (such as the C-in-C
Eisenhower having an affair with his chauffeur). * But organizational sex only functioned when women did not
upset the hierarchy. As women started making careers of their own, even vying
for CEO in their own right, the stories that circulated in the 1970s of fast-track
young women having affairs with CEOs gave way to the current standard of sexual
restraint.
* It is striking that the three most famous
Presidents of mid-20th century-- FDR, Ike, and JFK-- all had illicit affairs,
well-known to insiders and journalists, but no scandals were launched against
them. Ari Adut (On Scandal)
notes that in a more puritanical culture of polite discussion ("all
the news that is fit to print," in the New York Times' now-outdated
slogan) scandals don't happen because it is improper to talk about them in
public. Bill Clinton's blow-job affair with a White House intern happened in
the late 1990s when the public culture of sex was at its most blatant. Sex
scandals have become part of the normal political repertoire for bringing down
politicians and government officials.
A
notorious example of what happens when sexual partying gets into organizational
duties is the Abu Ghraib scandal. [Mestrovic 2006] The American guards carried
out their torturing of prisoners with forced nudity and sexual humiliation, and
in an emotional tone of joking and laughter. The presence of young women guards
in the gender-integrated US Army-- one of whom got pregnant by a leader of the
revels-- was a major ingredient in the partying atmosphere. Politicians
supporting the guards argued it was nothing more than the fun of a fraternity
initiation. It was so much fun
that they couldn't help sending out the photos that implicated them.
Bottom
line: sexual arousal upsets
organizational hierarchies. The solution has been to keep it rigidly under
control.
The
hypothesis this gives rise to is the opposite of post-Freudian liberation: the more gender equality in the future,
the more Neo-Victorian repression in the realm of work and politics.
Sexual ugliness
There is
another dimension of how sex disrupts everyday life. Since almost all
depictions of sex are tittilating, this one runs against the ideological
grain: Sex is often ugly.
Freud
himself said, the sight of the genitals is not beautiful, although it is
exciting. This is confirmed by photographic evidence. There are exceptions, but
these help tell the sociological story.
The
history of pornographic magazines in the 20th century provides evidence on how
sexuality is depicted in styles varying from idealized to ugly. The first successful
magazines (Playboy, founded 1953; Penthouse, founded 1965) projected an
upper-class image, a fantasy of sexual luxury. Playboy reached a peak monthly circulation in 1972, at 7 million
copies-- for a time it had the second biggest circulation of any magazine of
any kind except TV Guide. Penthouse
peaked in 1984 at 5 million.
Put this
in context of the so-called Pubic Wars: Playboy
had pioneered in showing beautiful nudes and semi-nudes, including stars like
Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, featuring bare breasts and pin-up leg
shots. Under competition from Penthouse,
by the early 1970s Playboy was
showing similar women, in luxurious lingerie and decorator interiors, with a
hint of pubic hair. Peak circulation in 1972 was early on in this process of
genital strip-tease. By 1973-75, Penthouse
was showing the same kind of luxurious bedroom scenes with women’s legs
starting to come apart, revealing the interior of the crotch-- through a
drawn-out sequence of disguising through shadows, fingers, and semi-revealing
panties. Penthouse soft porn
photography was famous for the heavy use of flowers, sometimes to set the
atmosphere, sometimes to lend cover or suggest shape to the genitals. Playboy
followed suit for a while at a discrete distance. But as Penthouse
in the late 1970s and early 80s printed increasingly clear pictures of genitals
with outer labia parted and then inner labia aroused, Playboy began to pull back
to its older pubic-tease standard of its greatest success. [Wikipedia articles; Venusobservations.blogspot.co.uk/pubic-wars]
Although
Penthouse followed the pathway of
increasingly edgy photos, this was not the formula for greatest market success.
By the 1990s, Penthouse had lost much
of its circulation, as well as virtually all of its mainstream advertisers.
Like most sex magazines of the time, its advertising revenue shrank to
telephone sex services. It continued to push the edge as a glossier version of
hard-core smaller-circulation magazines, now showing vaginal penetration as well as oral sex on both male and
female genitals. Penthouse with its money could still
present explicit porn with better looking models, high-quality photographers,
and luxury settings. In contrast, Playboy in the 90s held to its stronger
market niche of extremely beautiful, clean-cut models in slightly provocative
nude poses. This was the luxury-sex market, on the conventional edge of
respectability, where Playboy could
get the most beautiful models by offering fees as high as $10,000 in the late
1970s (equivalent to $45,000 today)
for the monthly centerfold. Competing magazines like Gallery
in the 1990s offered $2,500 for the monthly winner of amateur nude photo
contests featured in the magazine, $25,000 for the yearly winner. But it all
went down hill. By 2003, Penthouse
went bankrupt, then re-emerged with a modest circulation of 300,000. Playboy too was down, but held on at a
respectable 3 million circulation as of 2006. The 40-year sequence is an
experiment showing the greater attractiveness of idealized sex over blatant
sex.
Another
rendition of this history just says the porn magazine business was destroyed by
sex on the Internet. This is a factor, but it doesn’t alter the point that
blatant sex doesn’t sell so well. Playboy,
the most conservative sex magazine, survived in reasonable shape, and was
joined by new magazines like Maxim,
playing for the niche of idealizing a respectably sexy life-style of successful
men. Hugh Hefner’s celebrity-laden Hollywood partying style was the biggest
attraction, not the amount of explicit sexual display. The most blatant sex
magazines were already declining before the Internet became dominant. A further peculiarity of Internet porn is
that most of it is posted for free, by amateurs showing themselves off to each
other. This resembles a private enclave of sex cultists, like swingers in a
previous generation.
Compare
now the sex mags that deliberately aimed at a non-elite, real-life,
working-class view of sex. Hustler,
founded in 1974, rocketed to a circulation of 3 million by the end of the 70s.
It never rose above third place, but it did open a market for more blatant
sexual display: what publisher Larry Flynt bragged about as “showing
pink,” i.e. fully lighted photos
of open labia and vaginas. It should be noted, though, that Hustler during its early
high-circulation years stayed closer to the Playboy/Penthouse
style of luxurious settings, often with quite beautiful models. It parted
company most blatantly in its cartoon features, rather juvenile satire of the
scatological kind, toilet-bowl humor in pictures, with scuzzy-looking derelict
characters. This was in sharp contrast to Playboy’s
cartoons, which tended to feature stereotypical old roué millionaires with
willing bimbos and trophy brides. The social class ambience is explainable in
the trajectories of the publishers: Hefner started in the sophisticated
literary men’s magazine Esquire,
Flynt as promoter of a string of roadside strip clubs.
As Hustler got more blatant, more
working-class in appearance, and lost its idealized settings for pornographic displays, it lost ground in the
market faster than its rivals. By the early 2000s, it was hanging on below
500,000 circulation, and offered $1500 for the monthly amateur photo
winner. Even cheaper-style
presentations of sex were on the market by the late 1980s and 90s, pioneering
photos of actual sexual intercourse (rather than the genital-hiding couples
features in classic soft-porn Penthouse
that resembled body-double sex scenes in Hollywood movies). A useful comparison
is Lips, which imitated a popular
feature in Hustler and Gallery: amateur nude photo contests,
with cash prizes for the winners. Lips
appeared to print more or less all comers, pushing the edge by concentrating on
close-up photos of female genitals in their opened and aroused state. There are
no luxurious backgrounds, in fact usually no backgrounds at all (although Hustler and Gallery amateur photos show that most of them are taken in cheaply
furnished working-class homes or rural outdoors). Such magazines are relatively
limited circulation, sold primarily in non-corporate, independent liquor stores
and mom-and-pop markets-- lower class all the way around. This is sheer un-idealized
genital sex, and one effect is to show how often genitals are rather ugly.
By what
standard can one make such a judgment? Beautiful depictions of human bodies are
very symmetrical, with clear simple geometry; long graceful curves, proportions
that have been calculated as a “golden mean,” inflections of curves that
gracefully change direction and convey a geometry of three dimensional solids.
Art instruction books tell how to draw a beautiful woman by staying very
closely in form; especially drawing the face with as few lines as possible,
highlighting the curves of jaw, cheekbones, lips, eyes. Superfluous and
complicated lines (not only wrinkles, but contorted body lines) are avoided.
Obviously this is not the standards of abstract and expressionist art, but it
is the standard of success in erotic art from the pin-up era through the peak
of Playboy/ Penthouse/ Gallery market
sales.
As one
can see in close-up depictions of genitals, and especially labia in an aroused
state, they do not often fit the criteria of graceful curves. Aroused genitals
are often asymmetrical, full of bulges and pockets; colors when engorged with
blood range through purple, brown and grey. This is not universally true, but
classically beautiful genitals are probably rare, judging from the array of
commercial porn. The 1970s era of the Pubic Wars, when photos at most showed
inner labia peeking through the dark hair of outer labia, were piquant, but
close-ups of hairy crotches themselves generally are more of an jumble than as
aesthetic pattern. This is so even in photos of women chosen for their overall
beauty. In collections of amateur
photos of ordinary working-class women, frequently what can be seen of the rest
of the woman’s body is flabby, wrinkled, boney, or sometimes with skin
eruptions. (This last is completely excluded in magazine porn with professional
models, who are selected for their good skin, indeed as the sine qua non of
every kind of modeling.) Surprisingly often the fingers and nails shown in
crotch shots are unmanicured, even cracked, bandaged, or dirty. One conclusion
is that the people submitting these photos (usually the husband or sexual
partner of the model) find this an object of desire that outweighs any
aesthetic considerations. True enough; these photos come from the lower end of
the sexual marketplace, but individuals match up by desire as best they can at
that level too. This underscores the point that successful porn depicts a
fantasy of the upper end of the
sexual marketplace, where a fantasy of wealth matches a fantasy of perfectly
sexy bodies. And even under those
conditions, female genitals are not on the whole highly aesthetic.
The same
is true of male genitals. Not to say that male genitals are incapable of being
idealized, like Michelangelo’s statue of David; and porn photos sometime show
classically beautiful male bodies and even penises with classic proportions.
The bigger circulation sex magazines started showing male genitals relatively
late, in the 1990s when female genitals had been shown for about 20 years. Why
this is the case has not been sociologically explained. Even the most blatant
of the sex mags, Hustler, instructed
amateur photographers that it would not accept photos of erections, although
occasionally it printed frontal photos of “well-hung studs” in the amateur section. When photos of
erections and intercourse started appearing in the 1990s, it became apparent
that an erect penis is often bulging with veins, trails off into loose skin,
sometimes distended testicles; altogether quite far from the aesthetic criteria
of a few smoothly inflected curves. (Depictions of erect penises in ancient
pottery and statuary, included ritual door-marking herms, clearly idealized penises to an aesthetic standard, since
modern porn photos rarely look so pure.)
Bottom
line: comparison of un-idealized, naturalistic photos of both male and female
genitals indicates that genitals per se are not the most beautiful part of the
body; they rarely fit the criteria of symmetry and graceful geometry that many
people display in their legs, hips, breasts, arms and faces. To underline the
point: genitals are not usually attractive aesthetically, but of course they
can be a powerful center of attraction as the target for sexual action.
Comparing
the techniques of idealized and un-idealized pornography shows that erotic
attractiveness is constructed through the total effect of the body in its
setting. Professional photographers at the high point of soft porn popularity
in the 1970s showed genitals in the midst of photos posed and manipulated for
maximal aesthetic effect and social prestige in the non-genital features of the
photo. Luxurious upper-class and fantasy settings. Women with curvy legs,
firmly rounded breasts; long beautiful hair, stylishly coiffed; beautiful faces
with high cheekbones and full cupid’s bow lips. Body postures carefully posed to get at the best angles to
display the curve of a thigh or a calf, the hang of a breast; awkward poses
eliminated in the pile of rushes. In the midst of the picture, increasingly the
peep-hole widening on the crotch. But since close-ups of pubic hair and crotch
hair are not in themselves aesthetic, photographers position them as accent
marks in the total picture; something like beauty-marks, actually skin
blemishes that set off the rest of the face. Of course the genitals are the
object of erotic interest, in the fantasy of consummating with oral touch or
real penetration, but the photo is frozen in the visual moment. Dark pubic hair
was especially dramatic for the total aesthetic project; that nuance
disappeared with the shaved style that came in the late 90s.
An
analogy is depictions of breast nipples and areolas. During the pin-up era of
the 1930s through the 50s, both in drawing and photos, artists worried over the
question, to nipple or not to nipple, and if so, how distinctly. Large, dark
areolas can have a strong effect as an accent mark, making breasts look
spectacular when they echo larger curves with concentric ones. But close-ups of
breasts tend to zoom in beyond optimal aesthetic distance. Close-up, nipples
and areolas are often lumpy and unsymmetrical; this appears to be especially
common for women with very large breasts. Since big-breasted women display the
strongest distant marker of female form, they tend to be the favorite for
lower-class pornography. Here again we see a contradiction between the object
of erotic action and optimum aesthetic presentation.
Finally,
we should note that erotic photographs are often manipulated post-production. I
am not referring here to censoring features like pubic hair by old-fashioned
airbrushing, but the opposite-- making bare bodies look sexier. Photos in sex
magazines are often printed in enhanced colors, especially a golden light that
makes the skin look honey-blonde or coppery. (One sees this in non-erotic
photography as well, especially in tourist magazine photos of hotel lobbies.)
Comparison with amateur photos shows what needs to be touched up: natural skin
color (even of Caucasians) is often a dull white, yellowish or brownish; the
vivid hues are added by professionals. Some magazines print pictures both of
the amateur photo submission and the results of the professional photo shoot;
the same woman generally looks transformed, not only better coiffed and made
up, but her whole body comes across as more vivid.
For all
these reasons, the more blatant or hard-core the pornography, the less likely
it is to be attractive aesthetically. Sexual ugliness is a fact that is widely
covered up for most people in everyday life.
Social repression of sexual
ugliness
Thus we
have another facet of why totally out-front sex is controlled-- by most people
themselves. Concern about sexual ugliness is not unconscious Freudian
repression, but Goffmanian strategy of self-presentation.
Not to
overlook all the changes that have happened historically in how much of their
bodies people have displayed publicly. The bedrock limitation I am pointing to
here is about people displaying their genitals. This is very rare throughout
all societies, except in privacy with a person one is about to have sex with.
It has often been noted that what someone looks like does not match very well
with how their body feels up close, and that the quality of intercourse
diverges widely from how beautiful or not the partner is. The point remains,
that the visual repression of genital
display has been widespread, and will likely continue to be so.
What has
varied is displaying the rest of the body. Bodily ugliness has changed a great
deal in recent centuries. In the Middle Ages, most of the population were
ill-nourished, largely unwashed, often afflicted by skin diseases and other
illnesses. Medieval aristocrats regarded the peasants who worked their land as
dirty animals, hardly sexual objects. The sexual status of non-elite classes
improved as indoor servants became better treated. In the early 20th century,
working-class people started becoming much better fed, healthier, and better
looking. Upper class persons, especially women, started getting more exercise
and developed fitter bodies. This is one reason why shorter clothing became
popular, especially in the series of economic booms since WWII. More people can
wear things like bikinis (invented in 1946), because more people look better in
them. The sexual revolutions of the 20th century have a lot to do with these
kinds of improvements in general physical health and bodily attractiveness. If
the trend continues, some forms of bodily display will further increase in the
future-- but we can expect it will be confined to showing the more attractive
parts of the body.
Future Limits of Sexual
Repression
Further
sexual revolutions in the future are certainly possible. In fact, we have been
running at the rate of one sexual revolution every 15 or 20 years, since at
least the beginning of the 20th century. Gay marriage is only the latest of the
series. What else can happen? Sociological predictions take more than
imaginative speculation, and are best made when we have a theory of what causes
what.
Sexual
property regimes have shifted historically depending upon the political uses of
sex for family alliances; male and female incomes and wealth-holding; and the
bundling of shared household property with sex and love. All these generate possessiveness, in
the form of jealousy and anger when the existing form of sexual property is
violated. Whatever else is bundled with sex may well change in the future, but
it seems likely bundling of sex with some kind of property will continue.
Sexual
markets exist whenever people have choices of partners; this means competition,
rejection, and psychological defenses against rejection. In a sexually
liberated era, this is a major reason why most people are not very blatant
about offering and asking for sex.
Sexual
domination, in an era when it is easy to mobilize social protest movements,
typically gives rise to counter-movements that restrict sexuality in arenas
like work and government. Ironically, sex becomes more scandalous in an era of
gender integration. A similar
process in the future may create new arenas for scandals as discrimination
against homosexuality declines. Another possible future is that as social class
inequality widens-- and we are rushing down that slope-- the advantages of the
wealthier occupations will give more sexual leverage to the upper classes. A
version of this exists already in the black lower classes of urban ghettos,
where men who have jobs or even just substantial illegal incomes have many
women seeking them, and can play the sex market in a cavalier fashion. (See the
forthcoming ethnography by Waverly Duck, No
Way Out.)
Sexual
arousal is disruptive of normal routines, and will continue to be confined to
enclaves where everyone takes part and outsiders are excluded (the prototype
“what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” junket).
The
contemporary world is thus a patchwork of different arenas, some of them
rigidly policed by political correctness, others blatantly displaying idealized
images of sex. But sexual display is safest when it happens at a distance, not
in personal relationships but for a mass audience; and when it is wrapped in
aesthetic and class markers of eliteness and luxury. In the early years of the
21st century, advertisements in women’s fashion magazines-- especially those
depicting the fantasy of a non-existent world of total sophistication-- show
models in poses that mimic the soft porn of men’s magazines around the early 1970s.
 |
| jewelry ad, 2006 |
 |
| luggage ad, 2006 |
And the
future of sexual ugliness? Further advances in electronic technology might
produce virtual reality sex-- not just today’s pictures for masturbation but
stimulating brain centers so as to convey the actual feelings of sexual
intercourse, combined with idealized images of a beautiful body. Ordinary
sexual ugliness would be side-stepped, the sexual market of person-to-person
barter turned into a completely commercial market for non-human surrogate
experiences. And then what? Social processes don’t go away just because of
technology. Counter-movements would probably mobilize, treating virtual-reality
brain-stimulation sex as dangerous as heroin. Since people generally enjoy sex
most with someone they like, love and family will probably not disappear,
although they would have to compete in the market with virtual sex.
In
short, there will likely always be some social controls on sex. The Oedipus
complex may be far behind us, along with the jealous father internalized as the
Superego of the child who has to give up sexual desires for the mother. For
reasons Freud could not have foreseen, there will always be some mechanisms of
sexual repression.
---------
Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy
Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs
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