stargeek
the "guerillas" that the same treasonous Left so love and adorethe "guerillas" that the same treasonous
|
 The
Idea: Author
Laura Kipnis argues that monogamy is unnatural and unhealthy, and
possibly complicit in our emotional detachment from political life and
our ecosystem as well.Laura Kipnis, despite the title of of her 200-page "polemic", is not Against Love. Rather, she's against the trappings, the rules, the rituals that our culture imposes on love relationships. She goes even further -- she sees marriage, the institution, as every bit as repressive, suffocating and unnatural as our mind-numbing employment in modern hierarchical organizations, and draws strong parallels between the slavery of the workplace and the slavery of the matrimonial home. These two canons of civilization: our need and responsibility to devote our daytime hours to meaningless subordinate labour, and our need and responsibility to devote the rest of our hours to boring, stifling and unsatisfying monogamy, work together diabolically to keep us suppressed, and in our 'place' in society. Small wonder, she says, that one of our most enduring conventional wisdoms is that "a good marriage takes work". If this protestation against the rigours of monogamy, fidelity and marriage-slavery as the complement to wage-slavery sounds familiar, it's because it's very similar to the argument that Glenn Parton made in his essay posted first on these pages last year entitled "Love Politics". Glenn's argument is that we have become so emotionally numbed by our twin bondage to job and marriage that it has made our hearts cold and hard, uncaring of the plight of our planet and of others, and that this is a direct cause of the destruction of our world. "If I'm miserable, why should I care about anyone else?" Dare to love more than one person, he suggests, and the shackles of this self-imposed imprisonment are broken, and the inrush of emotion will shock us into awareness of, and eagerness to heal, the massive emotional and physical illness of our entire planet. Why should we, why do we subject ourselves to this one-love-partner-slavery as easily and as passively as we do to wage-slavery? This is the subject of much of Ms. Kipnis' book. Her prose is so adept and so powerful I won't attempt to paraphrase her arguments. Here are a few teasers: Is it the persistence of the
work
ethic that ties us to the compassionate couple and its workaday
regimes, or is it the ethos of compassionate coupledom that ties us to
sould-deadening work regimes...Resenting the boss? Feeling bored or
overworked or dissatisfied? Getting complaints about your attitude?
Whether it's "on the relationship" or "on the job" get yourself right
to the therapist's office, pronto. There are only two possible
diagnoses for all such modern ailments: it's going to be either
"intimacy issues" or "authority issues". You'll soon discover that the
disease doubles as the prescription at this clinic: You're just going
to have to "work harder on yourself"...
Take the modern consumer. Clearly, routing desire into consumption would be necessary to sustain a consumer society -- a citizenry who fucked in lieu of shopping would soon bring the entire economy grinding to a standstill. Or better still, take the modern depressive. What a boon to both the modern pharmaceutical and the social-harmony industries that such a social type would be. These are merely hypotheticals of course, since it's not as if we live in a society of consumers and depressives, or as if the best strategy for the latter weren't widely held to be strategically indulging in the former -- "retail therapy"...Love's proper denouement, matrimony, is also of course the social form regulated by the state, which refashions itself as a benevolent pharmacist, doling out the addictive substance in licensed doses...What about re-envisioning [marriage] or... insisting that social resources and privileges not be allocated on the basis of marital status? No. let's demand regulation! Not that it's easy to re-envision anything when these intersections of love and acquiescence are the very backbone of the modern self, when every iota of self-worth and identity hinge on them...Domestic coupledom is the boot camp for compliant citizenship, a training ground for gluey resignation and immobility... Ms. Kipnis suggests the same lack of innovation that permeates the workplace in the 21st century also permeates domestic institutions: Different social norms could
entail something entirely different: yearly renewable contracts for
example. And if we weren't so emotionally yoked to the social forms
we've inherited that trying to envision different ways of having a
love
life seems intellectually impossible and even absurd, who knows what
other options might present themselves?...It behooves [our] society to
convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure,
starting over is shameful, and wanting more satisfaction than you have
is illegitimate...As love has increasingly become the center of all
emotional expression in the modern imagination -- the quantity without
which life seems forlorn -- anxiety about obtaining it in sufficient
quantities and for sufficient duration has increased to the point that
that anxiety suffuses the population, and most of our cultural
forms...Uncoupling [then] can only be experienced as ego-crushing
crisis and inadequacy...[and] the grief of failed love is exacerbated
by inevitable feelings of personal failure...
Much of the latter part of the book is focused on the psychological
gymnastics of all three (or more) parties in the polygon of adultery,
from the rationalization that hiding the affair is to protect the
feelings of the cuckold, to the feelings of self-hatred and
self-flagellation of the 'sinner(s)'. She also discusses the awkward
mechanics of the ultimate break-up of either the marriage or the
affair
(or both), and the degree to which children of the relationship become
hostages, or excuses for deception, or excuses for the boredom that
gave rise to the deception. Of course the book also talks about famous
infidelities in high political circles, and the twisted hypocrisy of
conservatives' opposition to same-sex marriage, as well as the
equal-opportunity-for-misery desire of lesbians and gays to gain
access
to the sad and repressive regulation of 'official' marriage rather
than
'settling for' merely the legal and resource rights that come with
equivalent-to-married status. And there's also a discussion of the
pragmatic phenomenon of "serial monogamy" -- the fall-back that
there's
nothing wrong with marriage per
se, it's just that we were all married to the wrong person. All of this is complicated (even more) by the emergence of the Two-Income Trap, which imposes a financial prison on top of the emotional one in marriage. We have to stay together because we can't afford to live apart. I am convinced that this one factor is overwhelmingly responsible for keeping the rate of divorce from reaching astronomical levels. It is also probably helpful in keeping birth rates in the West below replacement levels -- Not only can we not afford children, we certainly don't want any (or any more) with the spouse we're economically shackled to. And having one with the secret love is just too messy. In my recent article predicting a baby boom, perhaps I underestimated the sheer perverseness of a socioeconomic system that not only makes parenthood financially reckless, it also suppresses fertility rates by its expressed moral repugnance for having a child by someone other than your boring spouse. A lot of people, some of their own free will, and many more who have been pushed, have recently broken free of wage slavery and are now working, mostly for much less income, for themselves. That's probably a good thing in many ways -- it reduces the supply of the remaining wage slaves, which might actually, in time, allow them to bargain from a position of at least a bit of power. It increases self-sufficiency. It reduces excessive consumption. What if there were a similar revolution against marriage slavery? What if a whole generation just refused to define themselves (in more ways than one) as married, or to live with the constraints of monogamy, and instead opted for a polyamory life-style? Paternity 'rights' and responsibilities would both probably suffer, as the new family unit would be a woman (or possibly, and more logically, a group of women, in self-selected community) and their children. They would have the power, and could strike whatever contract they chose with males who wanted the responsibilities and privileges of fatherhood. The nuclear family and the 'single-family dwelling' would disappear. Conjugal relations would not attach to parental responsibility, and could be negotiated between any two people as individuals on a one-shot basis, with no responsibility other than the responsibility to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease. This would probably be bad for the oldest profession, as the supply/demand ratio for quick couplings would soar. Jealousy and the consequent domestic violence that is the scourge of our nuclear spouse-as-property society would, slowly (old habits die hard), disappear. I think the vast majority of men, driven by million-year-old biological imperatives, once they reached a certain age, would choose to attach themselves to one of the matriarchal communities (if so invited), and would do their share to provide for its well-being, in return for the company and sense of purpose that would bring. We are told it takes a village, a community, to raise a child. Perhaps the community is necessary, and sufficient, for far more: To break us all free from both the emotionally numbing subjugation of wage-slavery and the misery and boredom of marriage-slavery. The community would then become truly self-sufficient in every respect, and we would be happier and freer than we can, or dare, imagine. Cartoon: By Peter Steiner from The New Yorker, in the Cartoon Bank |
Rover's stunning image of lander. Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit has delivered its first data on the minerals present in the soil of the Red Planet. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]
The Gillmor Gang. Thanks to the fine production efforts of IT Conversations'
Doug Kaye, the first Gillmor
Gang is now available via Windows Media, MP3, and RSS
enclosures, with a transcript soon to follow. This week's Gang
includes Jon Udell, Doc Searls, Dana Gardner, and Michael Vizard. I
hope you'll enjoy this and future episodes as much as we enjoyed doing
it. [Steve Gillmor's
Blogosphere]
Dam! I not only didn't make it into the most listened to, most cared about or even - care about at all list. I'm not even on any list - 'cept for this little mention:
| ITC Check
In, February 23, 2004 Searls,Cone,Canter |
| [runtime: 00:20:33, 4.7 mb, recorded 2004-02-23] |
I guess I just don't rate.
:-)
Alex and I are working out way up the East Coast now with a new companion: a 9-month-old Samoyed puppy named "Sammy". He wore out his welcome with a family in Norfolk, Virginia and is coming to Boston under my "No Samoyed Left Behind" initiative. Samoyeds are unpopular for fairly good reasons. Most people who want a big dog want one that will be aggressive and attack other humans. Hence the Top 10 American Kennel Club breed registristrations include German Shepherds, Rottweilers, etc. (Pit Bulls are not an AKC breed.) A second category of popular big dog is the obedience champ, e.g., Labs and Goldens. These breeds are smart and make an owner feel good by hanging on his every word. The Arctic breeds are big and smart (as measured by their ability to solve puzzles that reward them with things that they like, e.g., food) but they don't see any particular reason to listen to most humans and they aren't interested in attacking humans. Samoyeds are easily bored. Especially when young they seem to need constant companionship and entertainment, either from a person or another dog. If they get bored they find ways to entertain themselves. Unfortunately what is entertaining to a Samoyed usually is not entertaining to his or her owner. Digging and chewing are popular pastimes as is destroying the rugs and furniture.
Sammy was living with a family in Norfolk. It sounded like an ideal environment with a stay-at-home wife and kids aged 6 and 3 plus a backyard with pool. Sammy, however, wanted to wrestle with the kids non-stop and they were really too young and small to deliver the required pounding to 45 lbs. of solid puppy muscle. The wife had her hands full with the kids. So Sammy was left alone in the backyard and would dig ("they did in the winter to keep warm; they dig in the summer to keep cool; they dig in the fall and spring to keep in practice" George's breeder used to say). He was sent to sleep-away obedience camp for two weeks and came back with a good report and knowledge of some commands, though not necessarily a lot of interest in obeying them.
So... now he is coming up to New England where I am going to let Alex wear him out for a month or two and then find him a home either in the suburbs where there is a big fenced yard and some other dogs or in the city with someone who works at home and can keep the dog with him or her at all times for mutual companionship. No Samoyed should live in the South and no Samoyed should be left behind...
[The question of naming arises. I like "Ralph" better than "Sammy". And there is a terrier in Manhattan named "Sizzler" whose name could be well applied to this little bundle of energy. Any other ideas?]
Charlie Stross and I just finished "Appeals Court," the sequel to Jury Service, which Argosy magazine will publish bound together in January, in a fix-up novel called "Rapture of the Nerds." "Appeals Court" is, in part, a response to "Left Behind": a story about a world where the only hominids who haven't ascended to the post-human cloudmind are reactionaries, missionaries, and religious fundamentalists.
Here's a little chunk of "Appeals Court," so you can see what I mean:
The ant-colony has taken the entire Atlantic coast of the US, has marched on Georgia and west to the Mississippi. It is an anarchist colony, whose females lay eggs without regard for any notional Queen, and it has entered its eighth year of life, which is middle-aged for a normal colony, but may be just the beginning for the Hypercolony.and here's Slacktivist on "Left Behind":The God-botherers have no treaty with the ants, but have come to view them as another proof of the impending end of the world. Anything that is not contained in chink-free, seamless plastic and rock is riddled in ant-tunnels within hours. They've learned to establish airtight seals around their homes and workplaces, to subject themselves to stinging insecticide showers before clearing a vestibule, to listen for the tupperware burp whenever they seal their children in their space-suits and send them off to Bible classes.
The ants have eaten their way through most of the nematode species beneath the soil, compromised all but the most plasticized root-systems of the sickening flora (the gasoline refining forests are curiously symbiotic with the colony -- anarchist supercolonies like living cheek-by-mouth-part with a lot of hydocarbons). They've eaten the bee-hives and wasp-nests, and they've laid waste to any comestible not tinned and sealed, leaving the limping Americans with naught but a few billion tons of processed food to eat before their supply bottoms out.
The American continent is a fairy tale that the cloudmind tells itself whenever it doubts its collective decision to abandon humanity. The left-behinds there spent their lives waiting for an opportunity to pick up a megaphone and organize crews with long poles to go digging through the ruins of civilization for tinned goods. Presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy as evangelical pigs in shit -- plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms.
What more could they possibly need?
The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them.
Note that Tim LaHaye's wife is something of a professional misogynist. She runs the 500,000-member "Concerned Women for America" -- jokingly referred to by its critics as "Ladies Against Women." For years, while Beverly LaHaye's husband pastored a church in San Diego, Mrs. L. spent most of her time 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., running a large organization committed to, among other things, telling women they should stay at home and sacrifice their careers for their husbands. She is not an ironic woman and doesn't seem to find any of this inconsistent. (Nor, as I found out firsthand, does she appreciate jokes about the Freudian implications of the view from her L'Enfante Plaza office window. Sometimes the Washington Monument is just a cigar.)
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