The Case of Jessica Ahlquist: Evil Little Thing

Christianity, we are told by its adherents, is a religion of love. And forgiveness. And understanding. A religion that prefers to turn the other cheek and to judge not. But the case of Jessica Ahlquist once more provides shocking evidence to the contrary.

A teenage student at Cranston High School West in Rhode Island, Ms Ahlquist inadvertently made herself the pin-up girl of secularists everywhere in 2012 following a successful lawsuit to remove a religious prayer banner from her school auditorium, thereby defending the United States Constitution which expressly separates church and state (those who are interested in this should take a look at the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment).

During the two years of the law suit, Ahlquist was subject to vile abuse in the media and online; received further hate mail in the post - including a number of rape and death threats - and required a police escort to and from her classes. To top it all off, on the day after Ahlquist won her ruling a Rhode Island State Representative, Peter G. Palumbo, described her on local radio as an "evil little thing".

Thankfully, she has continued to speak up as an atheist and a champion of civil liberties and has received a number of awards for her activism. Further, sales of a t-shirt produced by supporters with the words evil little thing printed on the front raised over $62,000 and this money was presented to Jessica in order to provide her with a college education fund. 

In a sense, she's our Malala, standing up to religious fanatics and insisting on her right to an education that values freedom of thought over superstition and dogma. One can only hope that she needn't take a bullet to the head before her bravery is officially recognized not only in the Playboy Mansion, but in the White House too.   

Negritude

Image from madamenoire.com

I love everything about you -

not least the impossible blackness of your skin

and the way you walk bare-foot 

at the cocktail party

arousing

a mixture of desire and disapproval

in your white host who fantasises

about your 'exotic otherness'

but fears

you might laugh 

at his nakedness.

Breast Relief for a Dying God

Madonna for Dolce and Gabbana (AW 2010)

Look! there's Jesus hanging on a little golden cross,
snuggled obscenely between a warm pair of tits.

What would his mother Mary have made of this;
or she whose embrace he so cruelly refused?

Would it have secretly satisfied them to know
how son and saviour is finally reconciled with
the softness of female flesh?

Gender Patterns

One of the things that is often overlooked in debates about the sexual objectification of women in the arts, media and society, is the fact that it does not just attempt to impose a restrictive model of femininity and a norm of female behaviour. It also - just as insidiously - constructs male identity, determining how men should view women, as well as understand their own selves and their relationships to others.    

Thus the so-called lads' mags - to take an example that has been much discussed of late, thanks to a campaign co-organized by UK Feminista - do not merely objectify the girls stripped naked on their covers and within their pages; they also subjectify their adolescent male readers and provide a masturbatory and misogynistic channeling of what is wrongly assumed to be an instinctive and innocent flow of desire.

Lawrence was only half-right when he said that women need to follow ever-changing patterns of femininity and to constantly adapt themselves to male fantasies and theories of womanhood. Young men also seek codes of conduct to which they might subscribe and conform; they learn how to sit, how to stand, how to walk, how to talk, how to love, how to hate ...

The truth is there are no real men any more than there are real women. Gender is entirely a matter of cultural artifice and whilst the patterns we construct of manhood and womanhood may sometimes be very beautiful and sometimes truly grotesque, they're never "perverted from any real natural fulness of human being". This is simply a piece of idealistic naivety: for no such underlying metaphysical essence exists.

And so the real question is: what models of manhood and womanhood are we going to create as a society (if such models there must be); who will determine them; how will they be circulated and encoded; and what variations and infringements will we allow?

I would hope that we might do better than what we are presently stuck with; tired and lame patterns of men and women within a very regrettable system of dualism that shame us all in their emotional and imaginative poverty.     

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, 'Give Her a Pattern', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), pp. 160-65.

Two Blue Birds

"There was a woman who loved her husband, but she could not live with him. The husband, on his side, was sincerely attached to his wife, yet he could not live with her. ... They had the most sincere regard for one another, and felt, in some odd way, eternally married to one another. They knew each other more intimately than they knew anybody else, they felt more known to one another than to any other person.

      Yet they could not live together. Usually, they kept a thousand miles apart, geographically. But when he sat in the greyness of England, at the back of his mind, with a certain grim fidelity, he was aware of his wife ... away in the sun, in the south. ...

      So they remained friends, in the awful unspoken intimacy of the once married." 

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Two Blue Birds', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, (CUP, 1995), p. 5. 

As a matter of fact, this is probably quite common - or at least more common than many might imagine. And I have a good deal of sympathy for Compton Mackenzie and his wife, Faith, whom Lawrence is sardonically taking a pop at here, having personally experienced (and survived) a relationship very similar to this one. 

It's not easy, but, if you can avoid the fall into private bitterness and secret resentment, you can, I'm very happy to say, eventually find a resolution to what sometimes seems an impossible situation: one that leaves you both free to move on and build new lives, but in which you continue to regard your ex with affection.

Doubtless, it's sometimes necessary to make a clean break with the past and discard those who have at one time or another been nearest and dearest. But as Christopher Hitchens points out, one of the melancholy lessons of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends.  

Wuthering Heights

No coward soul is mine / No trembler in the world's storm-startled sphere

"We're a long way from Wuthering Heights," as Michel Houellebecq rightly points out. Nevertheless, it remains one of the few truly great works of fiction and continues to implicate its readers in what Bataille calls the crime of literature and by which he refers to the fact that writing has a complicity with evil. For what literature reveals is the possibility of a form of sovereignty that does not negate or exclude morality, but which demands a hyper-morality existing beyond biblical injunction. 

What Charlotte regrets as the immature and immoderate faults in her sister Emily's novel are in fact what lend it such savage beauty and potency. And what is so admirable about the younger sister is that she has the courage to allow the demon to speak directly in her poetry and prose; Charlotte prefers to gently but firmly place her hand over the demon's mouth so that she may at all times speak for him. 

Thus Charlotte, when editing the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, not only changes the paragraphing and punctuation in an attempt to regularize Emily's idiosyncratic style, she also seeks to impose an element of contrived and conventional humanity into the work at the expense of that which is uniquely and diabolically inspired.  

Thankfully, the perversity, the cruelty, the madness, and the morbidity that characterize the novel continue to shine through and Wuthering Heights remains one of those books that readers weary of the narrow limitations imposed by moral or literary convention (not to mention interfering siblings) will continue to find of much value. Emily's understanding of love - based not on worldly personal experience, but impersonal inner intensity - not only linked sex to death, but suggested that each of these contained the essential truth of the other. Her novel thus illustrates the basic premise underlying authors such as Sade and Bataille: eroticism is the affirmation of life all the way to its fatal conclusion.

It is this disconcerting truth that lies at the heart of Wuthering Heights and which gives it an affinity with the great works of Greek tragedy; all of which ultimately concern the violation of the Law (be it divine, human, or natural in origin). Emily dreams of a sacred and transgressive form of violence via which lovers might regain paradise (or childhood innocence). If this was promised by Romantic literature in general, it is Wuthering Heights which most powerfully shows us the full horror of atonement and the tragic character of life (it bleeds, it suffers, it dies, it returns). This may not make it a holy book in a religious sense, but it certainly makes it a great work of art.

Should We Lose the Lads' Mags?

When the defenders of so-called lads' mags argue that there is nothing wrong or shameful about the naked female form, you know they are either willfully misunderstanding the arguments made against pornography, or that they are morons. 

Personally, I tend to think that they are cynical and slimy rather than stupid. Thus they know perfectly well that the objection of feminists like Kat Banyard is not to female flesh per se, but to the sexual objectification and exploitation of female flesh.  

And they understand - as we all understand - how the young girls who model in such magazines are obliged to adopt a familiar series of poses and display their nakedness within a recognizable erotic environment. Reclining bodies on a bed, or bodies crawling around on all fours sticking out parts for penetration are not simply unclothed. They are, rather, naked for a purpose within a context of meaning and they don't so much expose the flesh as promote its desirability and advertise its availability as a commodity.

This doesn't mean I automatically lend support to the UK Feminista and Object campaign to "lose the lads' mags" from the shelves of supermarkets, but it does mean that there remains an important debate to be had on the intimate relationship between pornography, sexism and capital. 

Arguably, porn has always been the secretly privileged discourse of bourgeois society ...

 

Necrophilia

www.hotdog.hu

The eroticised encounter with death is not something that many persons actively seek out. And those who do enjoy romancing corpses mostly do so in silence. And secrecy. And shame. Necrophilia remains one of the very few forms of love that still daren't speak its name and which hasn't been co-opted by mainstream society or made chic within the media.

The relationship between sex and death is, however, extremely intimate and long established and eroticism would be a fairly insipid state of affairs if this were not the case. For as Bataille points out, it is the latter that ensures the power of the former and only in conjunction do they constitute the tragedy of human existence. 

What do those who love long hair and sharp nails imagine excites them after all?

Orientalism

Even after Edward Said, I still can't help dreaming of the Orient: that radiant and mysterious utopia uncompromised by real geographical and historical determinants, which promises a degree of innocence and forgetfulness impossible in a Western world which one knows and is fatefully known by.

It is precisely the possibility of becoming-imperceptible via the donning of a kimono and submission to an alien sensibility which so seduces. The dream, says Barthes, is to undo our reality until everything Occidental in us totters and we can see the world with narrowed eyes. 

Prince Philip seemed to understand this when visiting China and speaking to some English students, but thought it was something to warn against. 

Phallic Tenderness

In the Classical world, the preferred size of the penis was small and delicate. The god Priapus, with his grotesquely large and ever-erect member, was regarded with mirth, not envy, and, arguably, the modern obsession with size and the desire to attain a longer, thicker, harder penis in line with the pornographic ideal is simply another sign of barbarism.

Of course, we all like to feel a penis rise against us with "silent amazing force and assertion" and to quiver as it enters into our softly-opened bodies with strange and terrible potency; penetrating with "the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world". But, like Connie, so too do we cherish the post-coital penis as it withdraws and returns to its flaccid and rather frail condition, with bud-like beauty and reticence.
 
See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (CUP, 1993), pp. 173, 174.