On the Sex Life of the Incredible Shrinking Man 3: Agalmatophilia

You're looking swell, Dolly ... 

 

 

I. Hello, Dolly!

 

One of my favourite - because one of the most touching - scenes in Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man [a], is in chapter fourteen, when Scott Carey moves into the doll's house and briefly strikes up a relationship with a toy woman even smaller in size than Clarice, the sideshow dwarf with whom he has an equally brief, but arguably more intense and meaningful affair - if we consider the latter in amorously conventional and all too human terms - earlier in the novel.

Readers of this blog - or those familiar with my work beyond the confines of Torpedo the Ark - will know that I have written fairly extensively on the subject of agalmatophilia; i.e., the sexual attraction to statues, dolls, mannequins, or other similar figurative objects (what some aficianados refer to as the Pygmalion syndrome). 

 

As erotic fantasy practices go, this one - with its roots in Classical mythology - seems fairly harmless and rather charming. I can't think of any legitimate grounds upon which one might base a serious objection to the love of an artificial being. Those who protest that a doll, for example, isn't a living, breathing actual woman are not wrong - but they've missed the point. The idea that there is an authentic or more natural form of love - one rooted in truth and tied exclusively to personhood or human being - is something that we should always interrogate. 

 

Anyway, let's now take a look at Scott Carey's life in the dollhouse - we can return to this discussion afterwards ...

 

 

II. Chapter Fourteen

 

One day, when Scott has shrunk to under a foot in size, his wife Louise comes home with a large and luxurious doll's house, thinking that he might like to move in - for safety and convenience - away from the cat, who might decide to eat him, and away from Beth, his young daughter, who might accidently step on him. 

 

"He walked over to it  and went up on the porch. It gave him an odd feeling to stand there, his hand on the tiny wrought-iron railing; the feeling he'd had the night he'd stood on the steps of Clarice's trailer. 

      Pushing open the front door, he went into the house and closed the door behind him. He was standing in the large living room. Except for fluffy white curtains, it was unfurnished. There was a fireplace of false bricks, hardwood floors and a window seat, candle brackets. It was an attractive room, except for one thing: One of its walls was missing." [163-64]

 

Once it's fully furnished, it's a real palace; fit for a king! Well, sort of ... In truth, "doll furniture was not designed for comfort" [164] and life in the doll's house was basically a charade, without plumbing or electric fittings:

 

"He might have felt inclined to fiddle on the keyboard of the glossy grand piano, but the keys were painted on and the insides were hollow. He might wander into the kitchen and yank at the refrigerator door in search of a snack, but the refrigerator was all in one piece. The knobs on the stove moved, but that was all. It would take eternity to heat a pot of water on it. He could twist the tiny sink faucets until his hands fell off, but not the smallest drop of water would ever appear. He could put clothes in the little washer, but they would remain dirty and dry. He could put wood scraps in the fireplace, but if he lit them, he'd only smoke himself out of the house because there was no chimney." [164-65]

 

That doesn't sound great, but at least Lou had pushed the house up against the wall "so he could have the privacy as well as the protection of four walls" [164] and one day daughter Beth kindly left him a doll for company: 

 

"She'd put it on his porch and left it there. He'd ignored it all day; but now, on an impulse, he went downstairs and got the doll, which was sitting on the top step in a blue sun suit. 

      'Cold?' he asked her as he picked her up. She had nothing to say. 

      He carried her upstairs and put her down on the bed. Her eyes fell shut. 

      'No, don't go to sleep,' he said. He sat her up by bending her at the joining of her body and her long, hard, inflexible legs. 'There,' he said. She sat looking at him with stark, jewel-like eyes that never blinked. 

      'That's a nice sun suit,' he said. He reached out and brushed back her flaxen hair. 'Who does your hair?' he asked. She sat there stiffly, legs spread apart, arms half raised, as though she contemplated a possible embrace. 

      He poked her in her hard little chest. Her halter fell off. 'What do you wear a halter for? he asked, justifiably. She stared at him glassily, withdrawn. 'Your eyelashes are celluloid,' he said tactlessly. 'You have no ears,' he said. She stared. 'You're flat chested,' he told her. 

      Then he apologized to her for being so rude, and he followed that by telling her the story of his life. She sat patiently in the half-lit bedroom, staring at him with blue, crystalline eyes that did not blink and a little red cupid's bow mouth that stayed perpetually half-puckered, as if anticipating a kiss that never came. 

      Later on, he laid her down on the bed and stretched out beside her. She was asleep instantly. He turned her on her side and her blue eyes clicked open and stared at him. He turned her on her back again and they clicked shut. 

      'Go to sleep,' he said. He put his arm around her and snuggled close to her cool plaster leg. Her hip stuck into him. He turned her on her other side, so she was looking away from him. Then he pressed close to her and slipped his arm around her body. 

      In the middle of the night, he woke up with a start and stared dazedly at the smooth, naked back beside him, the yellow hair tied with a red ribbon. His heartbeats thundered. 

      'Who are you?' he whispered. 

      Then he touched her hard, cool flesh and remembered. A sob broke in his chest. 'Why aren't you real?' he asked her, but she wouldn't tell him. He pressed his face into her soft flaxen hair and held her tight, and after a while he went to sleep again." [165-66] 

 

 

III.  Analysis / Commentary

 

I have to say, the ending of this scene disappoints: Scott's desperate desire for a real woman with ears and large breasts, rather than an earless, flat-chested doll tells us that his major concern is reciprocation; i.e., more than wanting something to love, he wants someone to return his affection and whisper the words I love you into his shell-like.

 

Although he does eventually snuggle up to her in the bed and press her body close to his, one suspects that Scott, like D. H. Lawrence, finds a doll's nudity uninteresting and cut off from erotic allure [b]. One wonders if his (albeit mild) pediophobia is symptomatic of a much wider philosohical contempt for objects as things that are external to us and to human access. 

 

For me, it would have been interesting if Matheson had developed the relationship with the nameless doll towards a wonderfully perverse object-oriented materialism; allowing Scott to learn to love the doll as a doll and not merely as a substitute woman. Rae Langton and other Kantian-inspired humanists might dismiss such love as sexual solipsism [c] and think it morally problematic, but I don't.     

 

And even if loving a doll is solipsistic, mightn't that be a more fulfilling or, at the very least, happier experience than an authentic relationship with a human being? 

 

Langton would give a categorical No! in reply to this question and insist that human beings deserve to be treated in a manner that is essentially different to how we might treat objects, including life-like sex dolls and intelligent machines. Why? Because, she asserts, people can experience pain and this creates a unique obligation to treat them with a level of care.

 

This is, I suppose, true at a certain banal level. But as Nietzsche pointed out, pain is not an argument  [d] and recognising that others exist and experience pain doesn't necessarily make us love them; it might, indeed, serve as an enticement to sadism. Ultimately, Langton simply can't bring herself to admit that some men - extremely small in number - prefer to love dolls and that there's nothing reactive, immoral, or even solipsistic about this.

 

But, as we saw, Scott Carey is not one such man; he'd still rather hold a flesh and blood lover in his arms than a plastic doll. Which is fair enough - that's his preference. But I still maintain that an artificial lover (or an animal companion) can allow us to unlock the prison of the self (as Langton puts it) and nourish our virtues, etc. Either that, or perhaps Proust is right to scorn the idea that love - whatever form it takes - magically allows for communication and an escape from the self [e]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man, (Gold Medal Books, 1956). The edition I'm using here was first published by Gollancz, in 2014, in their SF Masterworks series and page numbers refer to this text. 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence's essay '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-346. According to Lawrence: "In or out of her chemise, however, doesn't make much of a difference to the modern woman. She's a finished-off ego, an assertive conscious entity, cut off like a doll from any mystery. And her nudity is about as interesting as a doll's." [346] 

[c] See Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, (Oxford University Press, 2009). 

[d] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, 318. 

 

[e] For Proust, we are always and forever isolate and courage exists not in pretending to care and share, but in daring to admit that those who choose to kiss people instead of dolls are no less alone. Reciprocity is an illusion and the objects of our affection, whatever their ontological status, simply allow for the projection of our own ideas, fantasies and feelings. In other words, love is an experience that, like all other experiences, comes from within. It might require some external object, but it hasn’t the slightest connection with it. Thus, we don't need someone to help us realise ourselves, merely something to provide us with sensation, whatever size we are and however we identify sexually.

 

 

To read part one of this post on The Shrinking Man and pictophilia, click here. 

To read part two of this post on The Shrinking Man and paedophilia, click here. 

On the Sex Life of the Incredible Shrinking Man 1: Pictophilia

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

 

 

I.

Pictophilia - i.e., a love of images regarded by the viewer as sexually arousing - is surely amongst the most universal and ancient of all paraphilias. Who doesn't enjoy responding to the erotic appeal of such pictures (be they openly pornographic in nature, or works that convey a sense of beauty with a greater degree of artistic sutblety); it stimulates us like sunshine on a grey day, as D. H. Lawrence would say [1]. 

 

Indeed, the only people who are genuinely repelled by such images and the natural stirring of sexual feeling are puritans and perverts who have fallen into hatred. And a certain type of feminist who deplores the fetishistic practice of pictophilia on the grounds that it's a form of what Rae Langton terms sexual solipsism and leads to treating real women as less interesting and less desirable than mere representations [2]. 

 

For Langton, and those who share her philosophical position, it is morally wrong to treat people as if they were objects; but it is also illicit to animate objects (including images) and treat them as sexual partners within the world of masturbatory fantasy. For when men begin to rely upon objects and images to gain sexual satisfaction, they invariably begin seeing and treating real women as objects and images.

 

Melinda Vadas takes this line of argument to its logical conclusion. She argues that if something can be used as a female sex object - even if it's just a photo in a magazine - then for all intents and purposes it is a female sex object and not merely a representation or substitute and that the way it is used (and abused) should therefore concern us. 

 

Probably best, then, that neither of the above read Richard Matheson's astonishing 1956 novel The Shrinking Man, which contains one of literature's finest scenes of pictophilia (with added elements of macrophilia) ...

 

 

II. 

 

Whilst fighting for his survival in the basement - threatened by starvation and a black widow spider - the now tiny figure of Scott Carey comes across an old magazine hidden behind some paint cans: 

 

"On the cover was the photograph of a woman. She was tall, passably beautiful, leaning over a rock, a look of pleasure on her young face. She was wearing a tight red long-sleeved sweater and a pair of clinging black shorts cut just below the hips. He stared at the enormous figure of the woman. She was looking at him, smiling. It was strange, he thought as he sat there, bare feet dangling in space. He hadn't been conscious of sex for a long time. His body had been something to keep alive, no more - something to feed and clothe and keep warm. His existence in the cellar [...] had been devoted to one thing, survival. All subtler gradations of desire had been lost to him. Now he had [...] seen the huge photograph of the woman. 

      His eyes ran lingeringly over the giant contours of her body, the high, swelling arches of her breasts, the gentle hill of her stomach, the long, curving taper of her legs. 

      He couldn't take his eyes off the woman. The sunlight was glinting on her dark auburn hair. He could almost sense the feeling of it, soft and silk like. He could almost feel the perfumed warmth of her flesh, almost feel the curved smoothness of her legs as mentally he ran his hands along them. He could almost feel the gelatinous give of her breasts, the sweet taste of her lips, her breath like warm wine trickling in his throat. 

      He shuddered helplessly [...] "Oh, God," he whispered. "Oh, God, God, God." There were so many hungers." [3] 

 

It seems, then, that not only intelligence but also desire exists on an infinite scale or continuum; that just because a man shrinks in size - even if it be to a molecular level where he becomes-imperceptible - he can still get a hard on.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 239. It should be noted, however, that Lawrence himself still objects to those images he regards as indecent and obscene; images that, in his view, do dirt on human sexuality and insult the body.

[2] Rae Langton. Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, (Oxford University Press, 2009). 

 

For Langton, the production and consumption of pornographic images is an activity almost exclusively associated with heterosexual males which enables the subordination and silencing of women. She says very little about female produced porn aimed at women, or gay male porn. For an interesting critique of her work, see Andrew M. Koppelman, 'Another Solipsism: Rae Langton on Sexual Fantasy', Washington University Jurisprudence Review, Volume 5 Issue 2 (2013): click here to access as a pdf.  

[3] Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man, (Gold Medal Books, 1956), Ch. 5. 

 

Matheson's novel was adapted for the screen in 1957 as The Incredible Shrinking Man, dir. Jack Arnold, starring Grant Williams as Scott and Randy Stuart as his wife, Louise (as seen in the publicity photo above). The film, whilst a classic work of cinematic sci-fi, ignored many of the pervy aspects of the book which interest me here in this series of posts. 

 

 

For part two of this series (on paedophilia), click here. 

 

And for part three (on agalmatophilia), click here.  

Self-Enjoyment and Concern Part 2: The Aesthetico-Ethical Case For Masturbation

No wanker wanks twice

  

In his final book, Modes of Thought (1938), Whitehead argues that life implies immediate and absolute self-enjoyment. What I'd like to do here, is perversely interpret this theory of auto-affection and show how it might relate to the question of masturbation in a manner that allows us to conceive of wanking as a vital pleasure, rather than an unnatural vice; a pleasure which enables solosexuals to experience life directly by taking it in hand.

Further, Whitehead's philosophy enables us to think of pleasure as immanent to the act of masturbating; non-dependent upon the achievement of any goal or static result, including orgasm. A wank, as it were, unfolds entirely in and for itself, without conditions and without reference to any other living moment.          

So far of course, this merely reinforces the case that D. H. Lawrence and Rae Langton have against masturbation. But Whitehead goes further and affords us the opportunity to construct a novel defence of self-enjoyment; to argue that each occasion one jerks off is an activity of concern. Concern, that is to say - in feeling and in aim - with things and bodies that lie beyond it. This, insists Whitehead, is concern understood in the Quaker sense of that term.

Steven Shaviro - upon whose excellent reading of Whitehead I'm reliant here - provides a convenient explanation of this latter point:

"For the Quakers, concern implies a weight on the spirit. When something concerns me, I cannot ignore it or walk away from it. It presses on my being and compels me to respond. Concern, therefore, is an involuntary experience of being affected by others. It opens me, in spite of myself, to the outside. It compromises my autonomy, leading me toward something beyond myself." [14-5]

In other words - and contrary to what Lawrence and Langton believe - we masturbate from out of a concern with (and a desire for) others; it's a relational activity, even if the enjoyment is purely private and personal. Ultimately, masturbation is a way of reaching out and coming into touch with others and not just touching ourselves in an inappropriate manner.

Unfortunately, Lawrence and Langton confuse the fundamental difference between these two closely bound but contrasting conditions of self-enjoyment and concern; or, rather, they see the first but are blind to the latter. But as Shaviro points out, you can't have one without the other; for concern is itself a kind of enjoyment and both are "movements, or pulsations, of emotion" [16].    

Thus, whilst masturbation may not directly involve others, it always keeps them in mind. It's also, crucially, not an atemporal phenomenon; we may wank in the present, but we do so with fond memories of past experience and projected towards the hope and the promise of sexual contacts still to come. In other words, masturbation is "deeply involved with the antecedent occasions from which it has inherited and with the succeeding occasions to which it makes itself available" [15].

It's because we come in a way that unites and affirms our life not just in the living moment, but across time, that wanking is transformed from simple self-enjoyment into concern: "Conversely, concern or other-directedness is itself a necessary precondition for even the most intransitive self-enjoyment ..." [15]. For no wank is ideal, or ever entirely without object.

And, what's more, no masturbating subject ever experiences the same wank twice; each and every wank is selected from a boundless wealth of alternatives, thus ensuring that masturbation, as a philosophical practice, "has to do with the multiplicity and mutability of our ways of enjoyment, as these are manifested even in the course of what an essentialist thinker would regard as the 'same' situation" [18].

In sum - and to reiterate - the joy and the excitement felt by a happy masturbator, is always derived from the past and aimed at the future. As Whitehead says: "'It issues from, and it issues towards ...'" [16] someone, something, or somewhere else. But it's important to note that it doesn't really matter who, what or where; what matters is the activity of wanking itself as an event that explores modes of thought, styles of being, and contingent interactions.  

I don't know whether masturbation can be said to be beautiful - though it certainly belongs to any ars erotica worthy of the name. But it can, I think, be said to be ethical (if in a somewhat illicit sense) and, as such, part and parcel of a good life conceived as something physically embodied. Indeed, what Whitehead offers us, says Shaviro, is an "aestheticized account of ethics" [24] in contrast to any categorical imperative.

And what I've attempted here is to illustrate how such an ethic might result from masturbation - i.e. concern is the consequence of wanking, rather than the basis of its value or its moral justification; something which "cannot be separated from self-enjoyment, much less elevated above it" [25].

See: Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things, (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). All lines quoted and all page numbers given above refer to the first chapter of this book: 'Self-Enjoyment and Concern'. 

To read part 1 of this post - The Moral Case Against Masturbation - click here. 

Self-Enjoyment and Concern Part 1: The Moral Case Against Masturbation

D. H. Lawrence and Rae Langton

According to D. H. Lawrence, the one thing that it seems impossible to escape from, once the habit is formed, is masturbation; a simple pleasure that he regards, for a number of reasons, as the most dangerous of all sexual vices. Chief among these reasons, for Lawrence, is the fact that masturbation is a form of fatal self-enclosure rather than just innocent self-enjoyment; a vicious circle of narcissism and nullity that causes the breaking of bonds between people formed via an exchange of mutual affection and results in a state of inertia, each man and woman trapped and isolated within the dirty little secret of themselves.      

Eighty years later and the feminist philosopher, Rae Langton, is still making much the same argument in her work on what she terms sexual solipsism; leading a liberal crusade not only against pornography and objectification, but against masturbation too, as a form of self-objectification, thereby betraying her Kantian roots. 

For Langton, committed masturbators, playing all alone with their sex toys, are not merely sad losers and reactive fantasists, they're unethical. And they're unethical because they show no genuine interest in - or concern for - others and their otherness. Happy to imaginatively explore their own bodies and their own desires, Langton regards their auto-erotic activity as so inauthentic, as to border on the inhuman. 

For we have, writes Langton, a duty as human beings to love others as others and to open ourselves up to that which we are not. In so doing, we unlock the prison of the self and nourish the virtues. Further, we impose an obligation upon others to love us in return. And so, in this way, we slowly erect a moral utopia established upon love, reciprocity, and transparency of the feelings.

Now, readers who are intimately familiar with this blog will doubtless recall that I've discussed this material previously: click here, for example, for a post on masturbation as a form of sex in the head; or here, for another critical summary of Rae Langton's musings in this area. I suppose we might deduce that something else which seems impossible to escape from, once the habit has been formed, is writing about masturbation ...

However, with apologies for any repetition and at the risk of boring readers for whom masturbation isn't such a pressing issue, I would like to offer in the second part of this post a new perspective on this subject; an aesthetico-ethical defence of masturbation as an activity of concern - not merely self-enjoyment - inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher whose thought has recently been subject to a (post-Deleuzean) revival of interest after a prolonged period of neglect.

To go to part two of this post, please click here.


See:

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, (Oxford University Press, 2009), particularly chapters 14 and 15. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Just Saying Something on Subjects and Objects

 

Cambridge Professor of Philosophy, Rae Langton, makes it very clear why she values people over objects. For whilst conceding that the former are a part of the phenomenal world of things, she insists that human beings (as subjects) have a uniquely rich inner life and a moral-rational capacity to make choices. To be an object, she writes, is to be something which isn't free; something that is stabilized and whose movements are all-too-predictable. She continues: 

"It is to be something incapable of the activities of knowledge, communication, love, respect. It is to be something that is merely a sensory appearance, something whose qualities are exhausted by how it can look, feel, sound, and taste to a perceiver. It is to be merely a body, something solid and extended in space. It is to be a tool, something whose value is merely instrumental, something which is a potential possession."

Obviously, as an object-oriented philosopher, I don't agree with this. For me, it's an anthropocentric conceit to believe that we belong to a superior ontological order to all other entities; be they organic or inorganic, natural or artificial, real or virtual objects. For me, our subjectivity is really just a peculiar way of being an object - much as life is simply a rare and unusual way of being dead (to paraphrase Nietzsche if I may). 

The question, I suppose, is why do so many thinkers like Rae Langton continue with this conceit? That is to ask, why do they continue to think of the object with such contempt and dogmatically privilege the position of the human subject?

Baudrillard, who has a far more interesting and philosophically provocative view of the object, provides us with a convincing explanation. Those who continue to support the fiction of an autonomous subject do so because it has "an economy and a history which is quite reassuring; it is the equilibrium between a will and a world ... the balancing principle of the universe". 

If we are more than mere objects, then we are not delivered up helplessly to a monstrous and chaotic universe of chance. Nor are we simply the unfortunate victims of surrounding forms or fascinating and fateful events that exist beyond our control.

In other words, to believe in ourselves as free-wheeling and free-willing subjects makes us feel safe and secure, as well as significant. That's comforting, but it's a lie. Perhaps a necessary lie that allows us to live and which it would be nihilistic to expose as such, but a lie nonetheless.

I'm just saying ...

Notes

Lines quoted from Rae Langton and Jean Baudrillard can be found in:

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 329. 

Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, (Pluto Press, 1999), p. 112.

Sexual Solipsism

Clive Barker, The Happy Masturbator, (1997)

Recently, I attended a very interesting research seminar at Senate House. The paper, presented by Professor Marco Wan of Hong Kong University, examined the obscenity trial that resulted from publication of Paul Bonnetain's novel Charlot s'amuse in 1883 - the story of a serial masturbator told in a naturalist style much influenced by Zola. 

Despite causing a huge scandal at the time, the work is little read today outside of French literary circles and the author, who died in 1899 aged just forty-one, is mostly a forgotten figure. Interestingly, however, 130 years after Charlot s'amuse, the subject of masturbation is one that still attracts moral condemnation from philosophers who place themselves in a feminist Kantian tradition in order to critique pornography; philosophers such as Rae Langton, for example.

Langton has two main concerns, which she relates to the question of pornography: the first is the sexual objectification of women (pre-given as a bad thing per se in her work); the second is the sexual solipsism that men, as the primary consumers of pornography, fall into via the solitary vice of masturbation. In brief, Langton argues that in a pornified world of objectified women, men too pay a heavy price; i.e. by mistaking women for things and substituting things for real women, they ultimately isolate and dehumanise themselves.

Now it could be that there is something in this argument. But Langton overlooks the fact that men are not quite alone in a world of objectified women. For not only do they still have one another to form relations with of a social, fraternal, and, indeed, sexual nature if they so desire, but they also have their animal companions and, as everybody knows, a man's best friend is his dog. 

Further, as Simone de Beauvoir was obliged to concede, not all men would regard an isolated and solipsistic existence as problematic. Indeed, for many it would be a more attractive option than a supposedly authentic relationship with another human being. The world of the masturbator may not be deeply fulfilling, but it's by no means unhappy and perhaps a little superficial physical pleasure means more today than vague promises of spiritual satisfaction and the soul's consummation via union with another.  

Langton, however, insists - and this is never a good sign in someone who claims to be a philosopher - that there has to be an escape from solipsism, as if it were the worst kind of trap to fall into. And she insists that in order to make this escape "some of the beings with whom one interacts must be people (not things); and one must treat them as people (not as things)" [Sexual Solipsism, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 312]. 

Ultimately, for Langton, this is a matter of moral duty: one must not fuck dolls, or jerk off over on-line images. Rather, one must seek out a real lover to hold in one's arms. For when sex is something you do with a thing, you reduce your own ontological status and become self-objectified. Kant has no sympathy for those 'worms' who violate themselves in this manner. And neither does Langton much care for those who remain shut up inside their own heads, alone with their own fantasies, when they could (and should) be sharing with others in a paradise of love and total transparency.

And here, we arrive at the crux of the matter: for Langton, there is a fundamental human need to unburden the heart and communicate the self. To articulate the body, she says, rather than masturbate it, "enables us better to learn what we think and feel and desire" [361].

This, in my view, is not only optimistic and naive, it is also highly sinister. For we know now how confession serves ultimately to better enable correction; that we have been encouraged to speak the self  historically in order that our thoughts and feelings may be judged and corrected by others. Humanists like Kant and Langton always promise to lead us out of our solipsistic and fallen condition into communal bliss, but they just as invariably end up marching us into drab social conformity and ugly moral convention.

And so there is, I think, something to be said for those who want to keep themselves to themselves and indulge private fantasies behind closed doors; better the solipsist and the solitary masturbator than the fascist who compels speech, or the moral exhibitionist exposing themselves in the name of Love.