Holy Trichophilia! It's Hairy Mary Magdalene!

 Detail from an illustration in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493),

depicting the assumption of a hirsute Mary Magdalene

 

 

I. 

 

Hair fetishism - or trichophilia as it is known by aficianados - is an erotic partialism in which an individual finds hair sexually arousing to look at, touch, smell, or lick. Whilst usually head hair is the object of fascination, some trichophiles express a preference for underarm hair, pubic hair, or hair on other areas of the body. 

 

Similarly, whilst some trichophiles have a penchant for dry hair, others insist it's only sexy when wet; some like long, straight blonde hair, carefully styled and groomed, others are excited by short, curly dark hair left to grow in a wild, natural state.  

 

Ultimately, like other members of the kinky community, hair lovers subscribe to a libertine philosophy of live and let live. Or as one trichophile joked: 'When it comes to hair fetishism, the only rule is hirsute yourself.'             

 

 

II. 

 

One of the defining characteristics of mammals, hair - a biomaterial primarily composed of the protein alpha-keratin - doesn't have any inherent value or sexual significance; these things are ascribed to it culturally.

 

Those brought up within the three main Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - seem to find hair - particularly female hair - problematic and associate various moral, magical, and erotic properties with it. 

 

Thus, Muslim women, for example, are expected to wear a hijab whilst in the presence of any male outside of their immediate family and Christian women in the West were also, until fairly recently, expected to cover their heads in church, thereby retaining modesty whilst at prayer.         

 

And speaking of Christian women ...

 

 

III.

 

Apart from the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene is arguably the most important woman in the Bible [1] and the subject of great controversy (and confusion) amongst the Church Fathers. For according to some sources, she was not only a woman of independent means, but also a former prostitute who had been possessed by seven demons [2]. 

 

In addition, she was also abnormally hairy, as depicted in numerous works of European art from the 15th-century onwards.

 

Just to be clear on this latter point: Mary didn't just have long luscious locks like Rapunzel; this gal was covered in thick hair - some might even call it fur - like some kind of wild woman of the woods or sideshow freak. Only her hands, breasts, face, knees and feet were free of hair.  

 

Whilst this might just be an artistic metaphor of some kind [3], it's also possible that Mary suffered from some form of hypertrichosis. And, if so, what does this tell us about Jesus; was his obvious affection for Mary - something that used to aggrieve his male disciples - a sign of his trichophilia? 

 

Maybe: that would certainly help explain, for example, the time he allowed his feet to be dried by a sinful woman using her long hair [4].   

 

Of course, it could be that Mary's condition only manifested itself after her time with Jesus. Some believe, for example, that in her later life she became a religious recluse and cared nothing for possessions - not even clothes which gradually fell away, and that her hair grew in order to protect her modesty [5].

 

Ultimately, who knows what the truth is in Mary's case? She is thought to be an actual historical figure, but very little is known about her life and she seems to have left behind no writings of her own. So let's just close this post with another fantastic image showing Mary in all her hairy glory ...

 

 

Mary Magdalene carried by Angels

(c. 1490-1500)

Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen

Notes

 

[1] Mary Magdalene is mentioned by name twelve times in the canonical gospels, which is more than any other woman apart from the Virgin Mary. She was an important follower of Jesus and was not only present at the crucifixion, but at the resurrection also. Indeed, according to some accounts, she it was who discovered the empty tomb and she it was whom the newly risen Jesus instructed not to touch him (on the grounds that he had not yet ascended unto his Father). She is also a favourite amongst the Gnostic authors, some of whom imagine that she and Jesus eventually married. See for example the non-canonical 3rd-century text known as the Gospel of Philip: click here.   

 

[2] The portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a repentent prostitute began after a series of Easter sermons delivered in 591, when Pope Gregory I conflated her with Mary of Bethany (sister to Martha and the zombie-like Lazarus) and the unnamed hussy who anoints Jesus's feet in Luke 7:36-50. This resulted in a widespread belief that she was a former bad girl; a belief which has persisted within the popular imagination to this day, despite the attempt by Pope Paul VI in 1969 to quash it once and for all.

      As for the demon possession, see Luke 8:1-3 and/or Mark 16:9. Luckily, Jesus was an excellent exorcist and soon put the girl right in mind and body. Consequently, she was completely devoted to him.

 

[3] That is to say, Mary Magdalene's hair suit is an iconographic feature - not the result of any medical condition - whose depiction borrows from religious drama and legend. 

 

[4] See Luke 7:36-50 in the New Testament. Lines 36-38 in the New International Version read:  

 

"When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. 

      A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume.       

      As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them."

 

So touched is Jesus by this (rather kinky) act of love, that he immediately forgives the woman her sins. 

 

[5] Unfortunately, this is another mistaken belief which is again due to the conflating of Mary Magdalene's life with that of another Mary, namely, Saint Mary of Egypt, a 4th-century prostitute who did indeed become a Christian ascetic and is venerated within the Orthodox and Coptic tradition as a Desert Mother.    

 

 

On Erotico-Religious Lactation (Or Get Your Tits Out for the Saints)

St. Bernard of Clairvaux being treated to a squirt 

of fresh breastmilk by the Blessed Virgin Mary 

 

 

I. 

 

As I'm not a great lover of dairy products or female breasts, lactophilia has limited erotic appeal for me. 

 

However, for some individuals - and we're talking adults here, not babies - there's nothing more arousing (whilst, paradoxically, at the same time strangely comforting) than to suckle on a mammary gland swollen with rich, creamy milk.   

 

I suspect that had D. H. Lawrence chosen to develop the kinky relationship established between Sir Clifford Chatterley and Mrs Bolton, this is the direction it would have taken. For the former had already adopted an infantalised role in relation to the latter and liked nothing better than to feel her arms around his shoulders as he put his face on her bosom and allowed himself to be gently rocked and kissed like a baby:

 

"He would hold her hand, and rest his head on her breast [...] And he would gaze on her with wide, childish eyes, in a relaxation of Madonna-worship [...] letting go all his manhood, and sinking back to a childish position that was really perverse. And then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exaltation, the exaltation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man.

      Mrs Bolton was both thrilled and ashamed, she both loved it and hated it. Yet she never rebuffed or rebuked him. And they drew into a closer physical intimacy, an intimacy of perversity, when he was a child stricken with [...] an apparent wonderment, that looked almost like a religious exaltation: the perverse and literal rendering of 'except ye become again as a little child.'" [1]   

 

As I say, breastfeeding would seem to be the natural next step in this illicit love affair. But what really interests is how Lawrence stresses not just the erotic but also the religious aspect of the relationship - something that is crucial but often overlooked and which I'll pick up on below in section III ...

 

II. 

 

Breasts, particularly the nipples, are almost universally recognised as erogenous zones; certainly in Western culture. So it's no surprise that their stimulation is a common aspect of human sexual behaviour. But what some might find surprising is that milk production can be induced by regular suckling on the breast of a woman even when she's not pregnant or nursing an infant (note: this may require both patience and practice).  

 

Thus it isn't all that odd - and perhaps not even all that uncommon - that many couples proceed from oral stimulation of the nipples to actual breastfeeding. Indeed, lesbians regard this as a perfectly normal expression of affection and tenderness (much as they do golden showering, or so I'm told). 

 

That said, many people would still regard erotic lactation as a queer practice that goes against accepted norms and values, though that isn't something that troubles me; as I said at the opening of this post, I'm more lactose intolerant than intolerant of that which gives pleasure to others (be that producing milk, consuming milk, or just playing with breastmilk in a wet and messy sexual context).           

 

 

III.     

 

Those who know anything about the history of European art in the Middle Ages will be able to vouch for the fact that there are a number of erotico-religious works depicting the Virgin Mary breastfeeding not just the infant Jesus, but also adult males [2]. 

 

Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Lactation Bernadi (or, as it is known in English, the Lactation of Saint Bernard). An example of one work illustrating this visionary experience is shown above.

 

Now, you might think that it would be regarded as sinful or blasphemous to consume something intended to provide sustenance for Our Lord. But apparently not; apparently it's okay to drink Our Lady's sacred milk squirted straight from source (albeit from some distance). In fact, it's seen as a sign that the recipient is blessed and on the road to sainthood. 

 

Another interpretation of the story is that Mary allowed Bernard to sample her milk in order to demonstrate that she is Mother of the Church and, via the Church, the mother of all mankind. Or that she was attempting in her own manner to directly offer spiritual nourishment (her milk thus paralleling the role played by the blood of Christ). 

 

Either way, as someone once joked, it proves that Mary was the original MILF: Mother Imparting Liquid Faith ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 291.   

[2] After the Council of Trent (1545-1563), clerics discouraged nudity in religious art and the use of the Madonna Lactans iconography began to fade away. However, pictures involving St. Bernard being gifted milk by the Virgin survived even into the late Baroque period.

 

 

On the Risen Christ

Jesus with Erection - a satrirical image from 

the student newspaper The Insurgent (2006) [1]

 
 

I.

 

For me, the most daring, most beautiful, and most philosophically important of all D. H. Lawrence's tales is The Escaped Cock (1929). In this short novel, he makes a major contribution to the Nietzschean project of a revaluation of all values as advocated in The Anti-Christ (1895).

 

And he does this by insisting upon what Leo Steinberg describes as a long-suppressed matter of fact: that as well as being a Man of Sorrows keen to show us his wounds, the resurrected figure of Christ was also a bringer of joy, proud to sport an erection. 

 

In other words, just like the Renaissance artists who produced a large body of devotional imagery centred on the penis of both the baby Jesus and the 33-year-old crucified Christ, Lawrence obliges us to "recognise an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostantatio vulnerum" [2]. 

 

Whilst many Christians still prefer to look away, Lawrence emphasises in the phallic second part of his tale that if Christ rose, he did so in the flesh in order to experience the pleasures of the latter, including the pleasure of feeling "the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins" [3]. 

 

This is his glory and triumph over death, not some mad fantasy of ascension that defeats the whole point and purpose of his Passion. All that suffering - including the terrible effort of leaving the tomb - doesn't make sense if he is simply obliged to "lurk obscurely for six weeks on earth" [4] before then being whooshed up to heaven on a cloud and never put down again.      

 

Flesh and blood, as Lawrence says, belong to the earth - and only to the earth. And Jesus was risen flesh and blood: both mortal and sexed. Christ's erect penis signifies his humanation and whilst St. Augustine might find the male member shameful (not least of all in its disobedient nature), the man who died does not.  

 

And those who, like Lawrence or Michelangelo, do what they can to stress this fact are not being sacrilegious; on the contrary, the "rendering of the incarnate Christ ever more unmistakably flesh and blood is a religious enterprise because it testifies to God's greatest achievement" [5].         

 

 

II.         

 

So, where are we now? Are we finally prepared to acknowledge Jesus as a man of flesh and blood, if not, indeed, accord the Son of Man a place alongside Osiris and Dionysus within a pantheon of ithyphallic deities? 

 

Probably not. Jesus with Erection, the satrirical image seen at the top of this post, still caused controversy when it was published in the student newspaper The Insurgent in 2006, with all the usual suspects rising to the bait. 

 

The picture, one of twelve iconoclastic images depicting events in the life of Jesus, was intended to demonstrate that Christians could be just as easily (and deeply) offended as those Muslims who were offended by the Danish cartoons of Muhammad [6]. 

 

However, one suspects that those responsible for the images of Christ published in The Insurgent knew very well that whilst some Christian groups and individuals might vociferously protest, there weren't going to be riots in the streets and no one was likely to be killed [7]. 

 

Their provocation was not, therefore, quite as daring, nor as radical, as it might first appear and the image lacks all the potency, profundity, and piety of those works of Renaissance art discussed by Steinberg, or, indeed, of Lawrence's beautiful novella.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Student Insurgent is a radical political journal published by a collective of students and community members. The paper's coverage shifts periodically, but has covered anti-capitalist, environmentalist, and anti-war topics and expressed solidarity with such groups as the Animal Liberation Front and Earth First! 'The Jesus Issue', featuring images of Jesus - including Jesus with Erection - was produced in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy (see note 6 below). 

 

[2] Leo Steinberg, 'The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion', essay in October, Vol. 25, (Summer, 1983), p. 1. Published by the MIT Press. Available to access on JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/778637   

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Escaped Cock', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 159.  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Risen Lord', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 270. 

[5] Leo Steinberg, op. cit., p. 10.

      When I mention Michelangelo, I'm thinking of his marble sculpture Cristo della Minerva (1519-21), usually known in English as the Risen Christ. Admittedly, this figure does not have a hard-on, but, nevertheless, the sexual organs are exposed in order to show that Christ's sexuality is uncorrupted by sin and free of shame. It might also be noted that during the Baroque period a bronze loincloth was added and that this has remained in place ever since - an act of sheer barbarism carried out in the name of propriety.     

[6] The Muhammad cartoons controversy began after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve editorial cartoons on 30 September 2005, most of which depicted the founder and prophet of Islam.  This led to violent demonstrations around the world which resulted in a more than 250 reported deaths. 

[7] It's not that Christian fundamentalists are any less fanatic than Islamists, but Christianity doesn't hold to the strong tradition of aniconism that Islam subscribes to and the idea of blasphemy has no legal basis any longer in the West, with most laws relating to it having now been repealed. In the US, of course, the First Amendment protects all forms of free speech and any attempt to draft or enforce blasphemy laws would violate the Constitution. 

Colaphology: On the Politics and Pleasure of Turning the Other Cheek

Iconic image of Tyler Durden 

by digital artist Gedo: gedogfx

 

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. 

This does not always happen, but it's to be expected. And you ought not to bitch about it if it does happen. 

 - The gospel according to St. Tyler

 

 

It's commonly believed that when Jesus instructs his followers to turn the other cheek he is offering a moral rejection of revenge and retaliation and promoting a politics of pacifism and non-violence [1]. 

 

But couldn't it be that, actually, this is a form of ironic defiance; one that not only confuses one's enemy but renders them (momentarily at least) impotent; a strategy that Baudrillard calls seduction and cheerfully describes in terms of the revenge of the object [2].   

 

We see a perfect illustration of this in the scene from David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) in which Tyler Durden allows himself to be savagely beaten by the owner of Lou's Tavern when the latter discovers that his basement is being used as an illicit venue. 

 

Having repeatedly struck Tyler full in the face, Lou is at a loss what to do next; he has been robbed of his power to act by Tyler's mocking passivity and so can only concede to Tyler's request to be allowed continued use of the basement as a fight club [3].   

 

Of course, there's something perverse (if not psychotic) about Tyler's behaviour in this scene; his mad laughter betrays the fact that - to paraphrase Adam Ant - there's so much happiness behind his tears [4]. 

 

Similarly, the passion of Christ also involved a masochistic acceptance of extreme pain, humiliation, and martydom, so that the Son of God could achieve his moral victory with tongue pressed firmly in turned cheek as he hangs naked and erect upon the Cross [5].

 

 

Notes 

[1] See Matthew 5: 39 in the New Testament. The King James Version reads: "But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." 

      This moral teaching forms a key component of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, but its interpretation is far from agreed. New Testament scholar R. T. France, for example, rejects the translation of the word anthistemi, as 'resist' in the general sense of the term. In the original Greek, he says, ἀνθὶστημι translates more accurately as 'do not resist by legal means'. For France, therefore, the view that Jesus is advocating a politics of non-violence - to the point of facilitating further aggression agaist oneself - is a misunderstanding

      As for the curious fact that Jesus explicitly speaks of the right cheek being hit, this is probably best explained not in terms of the left-hand being associated with evil (though there are numerous instances of this association to be found in the Bible), but as evidence of a back-handed slap; still a powerful gesture of contempt today. To slap with the palm of the hand is an act of violence, but it is not a grave insult nor intended to remind the person being struck of their social inferiority. 

      See: R. T. France, The Gospel According to Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary (Varsity Press, 1985). 

 

[2] See Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, (St. Martin's Press, 1990). 

      Arguably, there is a parallel (of sorts) between Baudrillard's thinking on seduction and the revenge of the object and Christian anarchism à la Tolstoy. Whilst I wouldn't want to make too much of this, it might also be noted how the American biblical scholar and theologian Walter Wink - a key figure in the movement to reform Christian belief in line with postmodern philosophy - clearly picks up on the subversive elements of Jesus's teaching which challenge traditional power structures by turning the tables. See his book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, (Fortress Press, 1992).       

 

[3] To watch this scene from Fight Club (dir. David Finch, 1999), starring Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden and featuring Peter Iacangelo as Lou, click here. 

[4] Adam and the Ants, 'Beat Me', B-side of the single 'Stand and Deliver' (CBS Records, 1981). The track - an old song from Adam's punk days - later featured on the compilation album B-Side Babies (Epic Records, 1994): click here. 

      Those readers interested in the kinky aspects of face slapping as a form of rough play practiced within the world of BDSM might find this short introduction on bound-together.net of interest. 

 

[5] The phenomenon of the death erection amongst executed prisoners is well-documented. Although usually associated with hanging, or other forms of swift, violent death, who knows what unintended side-effects crucifixion might produce. As the art historian and critic Leo Steinberg reminds us, a number of Renaissance artists depicted Jesus with a post-mortem hard-on. Perhaps not surprisingly, these works were suppressed by the Church for several centuries. 

      See: The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (University of Chicago Press, 1996).  

This post - a contribution to the new science which was born on 22 August, 1975, in a church in Berlin, and named colaphology by Michel Tournier - is dedicated to Catherine Brown. 

Additional Thoughts on Síomón Solomon's 'The Atonement of Lesley Ann'

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego 

by Simeon Solomon (1863)

 

 

I.

 

Síomón Solomon's The Atonement of Lesley Ann (2020) - a theatrical ghost-cum-love story (based on actual events) - continues to haunt my imagination ... [1]

 

After reading and re-reading the script (kindly given to me by the author) over the Christmas and New Year period, it has suddenly triggered thoughts of Stockhausen's seminal work Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56) [2], which, like Solomon's play, features the voice of a child which it seamlessly integrates with electronic sounds, creating a new (and rather terrifying) listening experience.  

It's possible that Solomon was hoping to create something similar with his use of music and audio effects including police sirens, radio static, and the howling wind of Saddleworth Moor. However, without attending a performance of the work one cannot say how successful he is in this. 

 

 

II.      

 

Gesang der Jünglinge is based on mytho-biblical events described in the Book of Daniel [3], wherein the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar throws three young Jews - Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego [4] - into a super-heated furnace after they refuse to bow down to a giant golden statue made in his image. 

 

Miraculously, they are unharmed and are heard singing praises to God who has sent an angel to protect them from the flames, transforming their intense heat into a cool dawn breeze [5]. Naturally astounded by what he has witnessed, Nebuchadnezzar commands his people to henceforth worship Yahweh, God of the Jews, and he appoints the three holy youths to high office. 

 

 

III.

 

According to Michel Tournier, it was Gesang der Jünglinge that he repeatedly listened to whilst writing Le Roi des aulnes (1970) [6] - not Schubert's Erlkönig (1815) as many might imagine - and he explains that his novel and Stockhausen's composition share a similar terrible logic that requires the sacrifice (or murder) of small children and the presence of an ogre ...

 

If you listen to Gesang der Jünglinge, says Tournier, what is most striking is that only pre-pubescent voices can be heard and that the joyful and triumphant end of the Bible story is of no interest whatsoever to Stockhausen:  

 

"He keeps only the sound of crystalline voices rising out of the torture of the flames. Bodies tortured in the fire are represented by voices tortured in a thousand ways by sophisticated electronic devices. Voices? In fact there is only one voice, electronically multiplied by repeated recording overdubbed upon itself; the child sings in chorus with himself. Children, torture from which there is no escape, a single voice overdubbed upon itself - in all these ways Stockhausen's piece resembles The Erl-King." [7]   

 

And in these ways also both the above works feel strangely present in The Atonement of Lesley Ann ...

 

Notes

 

[1] For an earlier post written on this work by Síomón Solomon, please click here. And for further thoughts, click here.

 

[2] Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge ('Song of the Youths') brought together the two (previously opposing) worlds of German elektronische Musik and the French musique concrète. Those who wish to listen to the astonishing result, can click here.  

 

[3] See the Book of Daniel, 3: click here for the King James Version of the story or here for the New International Version. 

 

It is generally accepted amongst modern scholars that the Book of Daniel originated as a collection of stories among the Jewish community in Babylon and Mesopotamia in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods (5th to 3rd centuries BCE), expanded by the visions of chapters 7-12 in the Maccabean era (mid-2nd century). It is also agreed that Daniel is a legendary rather than a purely historical figure.   

 

[4] These are the Babylonian (or Chaldean) names that the three Jewish children were given; their original Hebrew names were Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. 

 

[5] In Christian interpretations of this story, the angel is in fact Jesus and he is depicted in icongraphy with a cross upon his halo. The story thus has great significance for members of the Christian faith.

 

[6] Michel Tournier, Le Roi des aulnes (Éditions Gallimard, 1970). Translated into English as The Erl-King, by Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014).   

 

[7] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), pp. 104-05. Note, I have slightly modified the translation from the original French text, Le vent Paraclet, (Éditions Gallimard, 1977). 

Suffer the Little Children: D. H. Lawrence on Child Sexuality, Puberty, and Savage Initiation Rites

Portrait of Lawrence as a young boy

 

 

D. H. Lawrence despised false notions of childhood purity and innocence, as if children were entirely ignorant of their own bodies and pleasures; "even in a child of three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall".*

 

Having said that, he insists that the sexuality of pre-pubescent children is distinct from that of adults and that if the latter should intervene at all in the sexual behaviour of the former it is only as guarantors of this specificity. 

 

Thus, in an interesting passage in Fantasia whilst he writes in favour of allowing children to witness the passions of adult life (and animals fucking), he strongly opposes formal sex education: 

 

"It is ten times criminal to tell young children facts about sex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strong evanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible words on back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is a kind of dream act - quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And does nobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if a child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well and good. It should see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in the mental consciousness of these shadowy dynamic realities." [125-26] 

 

For Lawrence, puberty - which he explains in pollyanalytic terms of dynamic consciousness and the biological psyche - is an absolute and crucial dividing line: before it, sex is "submerged, nascent, incipient only" [134]; after it, sex is not quite the be-all and end-all, but a hugely important factor nevertheless and "an element of sex enters into all human activity" [66]. 

 

So vital is puberty for Lawrence, that he strongly advocates that it is marked by some form of initiation, for both sexes, although his primary interest seems to be the process of turning boys into men: 

 

"Boys should be taken away from their mother and sisters [...] at adolescence. They should be given into some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy [...] suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation, from which the lad emerges [...] cut off forever from childhood [...] [139] 

 

I don't quite know what Lawrence has in mind here, or to whom he is referring when he speaks of savages. I do know, however, that he read various anthropological accounts of initiation ceremonies, so perhaps he was thinking of those tribal peoples who practice circumcision on adolescent boys, or engage in acts of ritualised homosexuality, including semen ingestion via the fellating of elders.  

 

For the cruel truth is that in societies which do practice such rites, the transtion from the biological state of childhood into the socio-sexual status of adulthood is never completed without tears and bloodshed ...

 

 

Notes

 

* D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.

 

Pédophilie (with Reference to the Cases of Michel Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff)

 Suffer the little children to come unto us ...

 

Whatever some people choose to believe, children are not angels and even pre-pubescent youngsters possess an immature form of sexuality that they will often seek to playfully explore as a natural part of their development. That, we might say, is simply an established (biological and psychological) fact.  

 

The problem, however, is that this fact of child sexuality is subject to an ever-shifting socio-cultural interpretation by adults, some of whom wish to safeguard the innocence of those deemed to be incapable of giving consent and some of whom wish to share in or exploit the affections of children whom they argue are perfectly capable of expressing their feelings and know very well what they do and do not want to do.         

 

This latter position was pretty much that of everyone who located themselves on the radical wing of French politics in the 1960s and '70s, including, for example, Michel Foucault ... 

 

In 1977, having previously added his name to an open letter published by Le Monde [1] defending three individuals who had been charged over sexual activity with minors (or what is known outside of France as statutory rape), Foucault signed a petition addressed to the French parliament calling for the decriminalisation of all consensual relations between adults and minors under the age of fifteen [2]. He also later took part in a radio discussion of this topic with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet [3].

 

Amongst other things, they expressed their shared concern that the penal system was not merely punishing acts deemed criminal, but in the process of constructing a new type of bogeyman - the paedophile - who was being held up as a danger to society in much the same way that the figure of the homosexual had previously been used.         

 

For Foucault, the suggestion that children - particularly over the age of twelve - were unable to consent to sexual relations (either with one another or with adults) was itself an unacceptable form of abuse, restricting their right to freedom and decision making via the use of contractual law introduced into the amorous realm. Children, he said, should be fully empowered to find pleasure in any way they liked.

 

What this argument ultimately hinges upon is whether one considers child sexuality as fundamentally different from adult sexual behavior and, as such, something that should be preserved as a form of virgin territory "with its own geography that the adult must not enter" [4] under any circumstances or for any reason. 

 

Clearly, Foucault isn't prepared to buy into this idea of children's sexuality as a specific sexuality "with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific drives, and its own latency periods" [5]. Nor does he think that children are a particularly vulnerable population who need protecting from adults or, indeed, from their own desires.

 

It's precisely this kind of thinking that, over forty years later, has finally landed Gabriel Matzneff in hot water ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] Foucault was not the only well-known French intellectual to sign this; his name was just one of over sixty attached to the letter - written by Gabriel Matzneff (see footnote 6 below) - that appeared in Le Monde on 26 January, 1977. For an English translation of the letter and a list of the signatories, click here.

 

[2] Again, it should be noted that the petition was also signed by many other prominent intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and even dear old Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As I say in the post, pretty much everyone on the radical left at this time was pro-sexual freedom, the extension of civil rights, and the breaking of all taboos (if only to outrage the bourgeoisie). For an interesting article by John Henley writing in The Guardian (24 Feb 2001) on how the call to legalise sex with children rebounded on some of the luminaries of May '68, click here.    

 

[3] The radio discussion was produced by Roger Pillaudin and broadcast by France Culture on 4 April, 1978. A transcript was later published as La Loi de la pudeur in Recherches 37, April 1979. The first full translation in English, by Alan Sheridan, appeared under the title 'Sexual Morality and the Law' in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, (Routledge, 1988). This was republished as 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e), 1996).   

 

[4] and [5] Michel Foucault, 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, (Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 267.

 

[6] Gabriel Matzneff is a French writer who had long boasted of his penchant for sex with children and openly detailed his activities in his books. Despite this, he escaped criminal prosecution for many decades and enjoyed the support of the French literary establishment. However, at the end of 2019 Vanessa Springora published Le Consentement, describing her illicit relationship with Matzneff in the mid-1980s when she was fourteen and he was fifty. The book ignited a controversy in France and led to prosecutors opening a rape inquiry. Matzneff is also due to appear in court in September of this year charged with being an apologiste for paedophilia in a case brought by the Blue Angel Association.    

On Initiating Youth into the Democracy of Touch

Some youths playing football as imagined by D. H. Lawrence 

in a water colour entitled Spring (1929)

 

 

When D. H. Lawrence writes of the inspiration of touch, he is clearly thinking of how desire invests the lives of adult men and women, involving as it does, amongst other things, "the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love" [1].

 

Nevertheless, this former school teacher was vitally interested in the education of the young and would doubtless have wanted to see children and adolescents initiated (or groomed) into his phallic-utopian new order, so that from an early age they too might learn to substantiate the mystery of touch and form a direct relationship with all things. 

 

The fact that children and adolescents are often denied intimacy with one another is something that also concerned the French author Michel Tournier. Like Lawrence, he argued that youngsters should be allowed (and, indeed, encouraged to experience) physical contact with the bodies of others and that our primary human need is for touch. 

 

Before eyebrows could be raised, however, and accusations begin to fly, Tournier quickly added:

 

"When I speak of physical contact, I mean of course something far more vast and more primitive than erotic games and sexual relations, which are merely a special case." [2]

 

Tournier was also keen to counter those who think that by giving children toys or pet animals to play with we can conveniently sublimate their desire for the forming of close physical and emotional bonds:

 

"Everyone likes to say that young children like to play with dolls and teddy bears, and sometimes they are permitted to play with small animals. It is also commonly said, however, that dogs like bones. The truth is that dogs gnaw on bones when they have nothing else, but you can take my word for it, they would prefer a good cut of steak or a nice veal cutlet. As for children, it is quite simply a dreadful thing that we toss them dolls and animals in order to assuage their need for a warm, living body. Of course sailors on long voyages sometimes avail themselves of inflatable rubber females, and lonely shepherds in the mountains have been known to mount a lamb or goat. But children are neither sailors nor shepherds and do not lack for human company. Their distress is the invention of a fiercely anti-physical society, of a mutilating, castrating culture, and there is no question that many character disorders, violent outbursts, and cases of juvenile drug addiction are consequences of the physical desert into which the child and adolescent are customarily banished in our society." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Version 2 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. 

 

[2] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Albert Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 15.

[3] Ibid., pp. 16-17. 

 

 

Michel Tournier on Education 2: Erotic Religiosity

It is not enough to love the young; 

they must know that they are loved - St. Don Bosco

 

 

I. 

 

I closed part one of this post [click here] mourning the fact that only rarely in an age of remote learning do teachers and their students form those close bonds that were common when education was about initiation in the old aristocratic sense of the term (i.e. becoming a good human being and member of society), rather than instruction in the modern bourgeois sense (i.e., becoming someone with the skills and knowledge valued by employers).

 

Perhaps, I tentatively suggested, we need to radically rethink the question of education and reintroduce an element of erotic religiosity back into the classroom; whether this be modelled on classical Greek lines, Loyola's order of Jesuits, or even upon Lawrentian lines in terms of the democracy of touch, is something that would obviously have to be discussed carefully and at length [a].

 

 

II.

 

The French writer Michel Tournier seems to favour the Catholic model, if only because this is the one with which he is most familiar. 

 

In his autobiography [b], he tells us that the two schools that occupy a special place in his memory among the dozen or so he attended in the course of a "chaotic scholastic career" [47], were both religious institutions; Saint Erembert's in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Saint Francis's School in Alençon. Each were far more successful than their secular counterparts "in preserving the initiatory aspects of education" [47].

 

Tournier explains what it was about Catholicism that particularly appealed to his youthful self and how this inclined him in later years towards the study of philosophy:

 

"The Catholic religion, with its rituals, holy days, theology, and mythology, served as a marvelous emotional counterweight to mathematics and the natural sciences, a counterweight without which the child or adolescent is afflicted by a sense of dryness and aridity. In any case, I cannot separate my memory of the theology [...] from the sumptuousness of ritual. Dunce that I was, I found in religious history and catechism an anticipation of what I later discovered in metaphysics: concrete speculation inextricably intertwined with powerful and brilliant imagery. For metaphysics is nothing other than the rigour of mathematics wedded to the richness of poetry." [47]   

Not that Tournier was smitten with other aspects of Catholicism: "I had little use for the bludgeon of dogma or for the zombie-like obedience and faith of the humble." [47] This is probably why he became a novelist and not a priest. He appreciated the fact that the Church initiated the child into a world that was both spiritual and sensual; a world that granted access to all - not just members of the nobility - to poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Alas, the institutionalised clergy also has another face, hideous, hypocritical, and hateful ...

"Having lost its temporal power, the Church signed on as handmaiden to the most constricted, conservative element of the bourgeoisie, whose interests and ideas it ardently adopted as its own. It continued to draw its teachings from the Gospel, but from the words of the Pharisees rather than those of Jesus. In other words, it began to preach respect for social hierarchies, money, and power as well as hatred of sexuality." [48-49] 

For Tournier, it's simple: in teaching a false morality (conservative and anti-erotic), the Church cannot possibly initiate the young into the good life. In a manner similar to D. H. Lawrence, he dreams of a Jesus fully resurrected in the flesh:

 

"Fear of the flesh has made the crucifix - a corpse nailed to two pieces of wood - the centre of Catholic worship in preference to all other Christian symbols [...] The Church has resolutely set its face against the dogma of resurrection in the flesh and attempts to ignore the fact that whenever Jesus encountered sexuality - even in the antisocial forms of prostitution and adultery - he defended it against the wrath of the Pharisees. [...] Prudes are ugly and impute their own ugliness to love, but when they spit on it, they spit on themselves. Loved and celebrated in those we love, the flesh is as radiant as that of Jesus on Mount Tabor." [49-50] [c]

 

Tournier continues:

 

"Sumptuous, subtle, and erotic - such is the initiatory Church of which I dream when I think back on how my childhood might have been. I thank my stars that the Church that actually raised me only partially betrayed that ideal." [50]

 

Sadly, those days are now remote - Tournier was born almost a hundred years ago (in 1924) - and secular education has pretty much triumphed:

 

"The revolution begun by the men of the Enlightenment is now complete. Emotional bonds, personal and possibly erotic relationships, pose no further danger of polluting the aseptic atmosphere of the classroom. Education, cleansed of every last vestige of initiation, has been reduced to nothing more than a dispenser of useful and saleable knowledge. Already computers are taking the place of teachers [...]" [50]     

But still the heart beats and the flesh quivers ... And tomorrow is another day ...

 

Notes

 

[a] I am aware of the danger that initiation can collapse into indoctrination and that models of pedagogy that flirt with ideals of pederasty can often serve as an apologetics for the sexual abuse of minors. In replacing modern teachers with tutors and mentors who care about more than exam results, we don't want to end up appointing orgres to the classroom (or even dangerous women like Miss Brodie). 

      On the other hand, if you banish the warm and magical aspect of education entirely from the official curriculum and prohibit all forms of amorous relations in the classroom, then you can be certain they will develop elsewhere and often in guises you wouldn't anticipate.    

         

[b] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989). All page references given in the post refer to this work. 

 

[c] As Deleuze notes: "A certain number of 'visionaries' have opposed Christ as an amorous person to Christianity as a mortuary enterprise." See 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998), p. 37.  

Michel Tournier on Education 1: Initiation contra Instruction

Ivor Fox: The Initiation (c. 1950) 

Oil on board 

 

 

I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: What is education all about? 

 

I don't think government ministers or even those working in the teaching profession can answer this question with any real confidence. Thus it is that we have to turn to our philosophers and writers to find an answer ...

 

D. H. Lawrence, for example, made a bold attempt to address this question in a long essay entitled 'Education of the People' (1920); an important text that I have discussed elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark [a]. 

 

More recently, the French author Michel Tournier had a crack in his intellectual autobiography, Le Vent Paraclet (1977), arguing that education can be thought either in terms of initiation or instruction:

"Education in the broad sense of the word prepares a child to enter society and to occupy his place in it. In all times and places it appears to come in two forms, one moral, emotional, indeed magical, the other purely intellectual and rational. The first is called initiation, the second instruction. [...]

      Of course these two components of education assume many guises, and their importance varies. My view is quite simply that, historically, the relative importance of initiation has been diminishing compared with that of instruction and that for some time now this has passed the point of being harmful." [b]

 

Beginning in the eighteenth century, says Tournier, there was a bourgeois-Romantic attack launched upon the classical, aristocratic model of education "dispensed primarily by the Jesuit schools" [44]. Such a model was said to lack relevance in the age of commerce, industry, science and technology. What's the point of a man knowing about Ancient Athens and Rome, if he is incapable of earning his living in the modern world?    

"Behind these indictments (echoes of which can still be heard today in strictures against the teaching of Latin and Greek) lies a lack of understanding that comes close to bad faith. The critics pretend that the Jesuits' instruction was intended to equip the child with the knowledge needed to become a merchant, manufacturer, sailor, or government official. Had that been its purpose, it would have indeed fallen far short of its goal! But to begin with, the Jesuits were educating young aristocrats, who did not need to become scholars in order to succeed. High birth was enough. But they were also supposed to be human beings, and the education they were offered was supposed to help them toward that end. Here we touch on the crux of the misunderstanding that arose in this period between the 'ancients' and the 'moderns'. For the aristocrat, the child was not a full-fledged human being. He was a little animal, dirty, vicious, and stupid, on the whole rather contemptible. Education was supposed to make him presentable. The Jesuits were concerned not with enriching the child's mind and preparing him for a career but with shaping his moral being. Toward that end they caused him to live in a wholly unreal world in which people spoke only Latin [...] In other words, initiation was much more important than instruction in this version of education. But the moderns had no notion what this initiation was all about, and they actively opposed it. For them, the child was not wicked but simply uninformed. His mind was a blank page upon which knowledge had to be inscribed. Whereas the only ambition of earlier educators was to conduct the child from an animal state to a human one, the moderns wished to enrich his mind with science and technology, tools with which to make his fortune ..." [45-46]  

I don't know if this is true or not, but I find this passage fascinating. As I do the one which follows: 

"This crisis, which began in the eighteenth century, appears to have been a turning point in the history of education, as moral initiation gradually lost out to practical instruction. Since that time, the initiatory function of education has steadily diminished, and we are now witnessing the elimination of the few vestiges that remain. First to go was corporal punishment, which established a sadomasochistic bond between teachers and pupils, followed by religious instruction and confession, which established a similar bond at a spiritual level. More recently, Greek, Latin, philosophy, and literature have been stricken from the curriculum as obviously superfluous nonsense. All traces of humanity must be eliminated from the classroom so that the 'heartless teacher' [...] can inoculate his students exclusively with knowledge deemed to be of practical use." [46-47]

This final line is particularly resonant in an age in which schools are repeatedly (and now almost routinely) closed on the pretext of a virus presently doing the rounds, and more and more teaching is done remotely via a screen - or online, as we like to say. 

 

"Only rarely and with a feeling of illicitness" [47], says Tournier, do students and teachers now form close relations and, in some cases, life-long bonds of friendship. 

 

Perhaps, therefore, we need to radically rethink the question of education and - dare one say it - introduce an erotico-religious (or initiatory) element back into the classroom ... An idea I will develop in part two of this post: click here.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambrdge University Press, 1988), pp.85-166. 

      

Recent posts on Torpedo the Ark that discuss this essay include 'Back to School in the Age of Coronavirus' and 'Education, Education, Education à la D. H. Lawrence'.

 

[2] Michel Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet, (Éditions Gallimard, 1977). I am quoting here, obviously, from the English edition, translated as The Wind Spirit by Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 43. Following page references to this text will be given directly in the post.