Every Woman Adores a Futurist: On the Manifestos of Valentine de Saint-Point

Valentine de Saint-Point by Rossana Borzelli (2016)

Acrylic and oil on metal (250 x 125 cm)

singulart.com

 

 

When one thinks of Futurism, one automatically thinks of machines and machismo. For Futurism is the technophallic art movement par excellence; an Italian boy's club obsessed with speed, dynamism, virility, and violence; one which prides itself on its anti-feminism and proto-fascism. 

 

Indeed, Marinetti even made contempt for women - along with worship of war - one of Futurism's founding principles in his Manifesto of 1909, describing them as a form of inert matter (i.e., passive lumps of flesh).  

 

Despite this, there were women attracted to and associated with Futurism; one of whom - Valentine de Saint-Point - even wrote two manifestos of her own ...

 

 

Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [1]

Responding directly to Marinetti's misogyny, Saint-Point published her Manifesto della Donna futurista in which she amusingly insists, amongst other things, that men and women are equal - but equally mediocre and thus equally deserving of contempt:

 

"Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn." 

 

Later in the text, she challenges the binary idea of two separate sexes; there are, rather, just exceptional individuals, born from within strong cultures, who possess both masculine and feminine traits:

 

"It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being." 

  

Unfortunately, Saint-Point doesn't show fidelity with her own argument; she repeatedly falls back into the language of men and women and it's pretty clear that what she values most are traits and values traditionally associated with the fomer, such as virility, for example, perhaps the key term of her manifesto: 

 

"What is most lacking in women as in men is virility. That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right. To restore some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them in virility even to the point of brute animality."

 

Every woman, she insists, "ought to possess not only feminine virtues but virile ones, without which she is just a female". Once they've been made to man-up as it were - and perhaps even grow a pair - then woman are capable of waging war even more ferociously than men - remember the Amazons! 

 

Saint-Point wants warrior women; not wise or virtuous women, or women who value peace and dream of healing the world. She also wants women who surrender to lust - the second great term of her Futuristic vocabulary - and rediscover their instinctive cruelty. We should stop preaching spiritual justice to women in the name of a mistaken feminism; the latter is an error that undermines their instincts and fertility, falsifying their primordial fatality.

 

The new woman - the Futurist woman - the woman who recognises sentiment as a weakness, will be a sensual woman who understands that lust is the basis of her strength; a bit like the prostitute who incites her illicit lovers to express their darkest desires. 

 

Saint-Point ends her manifesto with the following rallying cry:

 

"Woman [...] go back to your sublime instinct, to violence, to cruelty [...] incite your sons and your men to surpass themselves. You are the ones who make them. You have all power over them. You owe humanity its heroes. Make them!" 

 

Saint-Point would develop her (cod-Nietzschean) philosophy in a second manifesto - the Futurist Manifesto of Lust - published a year later ...

 

 

Manifesto futurista della Lussuria (1913) [2]

 

Conceived as a reply to those critics who had laughed at her earlier manifesto, Saint-Point here expands upon her erotic theory of lust as an "essential part of life's dynamism" and, indeed, as a virtue that drives individuals towards self-overcoming. 

 

For lust is not just a desire for pleasure or to know the body of another. Lust, says Saint-Point, is also the "expression of a being projected beyond itself [...] the joyous pain of a flowering". And fucking - or the union of flesh, as she calls it - is the "sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit". 

 

This being the case, if a strong man is to realise his full spiritual potential, then he must realise also his full carnal potential and deny himself nothing when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh: the warrior is fully justified in enjoying the spoils of war and to show moral restraint is a sign of weakness. In other words, rape is both a normal and natural part of warfare; the recreation of life after the slaughter of the battlefield.     

 

And what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Or, in this case, the (male) artist, who has the same desires and same need for pleasure as the warrior; artists should feel no shame in raping their models once the latter have finished sitting for them. As Saint-Point writes - in capitals, just so we hear loud and clear what she's saying:

 

"ART AND WAR ARE THE GREAT MANIFESTATIONS OF SENSUALITY; LUST IS THEIR FLOWER [and] LUST EXCITES ENERGY AND RELEASES STRENGTH."

Lust, also, it seems, makes the world go round; including the world of business, finance, and media; "it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press, and international trade to increase their wealth". 

 

Essentially, lust is Saint-Point's term for what Nietzsche calls the will to power and desires of all kinds - "whether they are considered normal or abnormal" - are always the supreme spur to action and the most magnificent expressions of our wellbeing.   

Again echoing Nietzsche, Saint-Point calls for the destruction of Christian morality, which considers lust a sin or vice; something shameful to be denied: "We must stop despising desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality" and we must, she says, reject everything associated with romantic love: "counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty". 

 

Whenever beings - of whatever sex - are drawn together by physical attraction, we should let them "dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies" and transform lust into an erotic (albeit sometimes brutal) art form that allows us to bring sex to full conscious realisation. 

 

In other words, lust must be guided by will, not just instinct and intuition, so that in this way the joys of fucking will result in guaranteed orgasm for both parties. 

 

One can't help wondering if Saint-Point isn't directing her remarks here to a lover who has sadly failed to excite her in the way she hoped ...? And one also can't help wondering quite how seriously she expects us to take what she writes, either here or in her earlier manifesto; for just twelve months later she would declare: 

 

'I am not a Futurist and never have been. I do not belong to any school.'       

 

Notes

 

[1] Valentine de Saint Point, The Manifesto of [the] Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti), trans. Bruce Sterling (2008): click here. 

      All quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.org (an excellent website established by Jessica Palmieri, in 2007, in order to encourage the exchange of ideas and disseinate information about Italian Futurism).

 

[2] Valentine de Saint-Point, Futurist Manifesto of Lust, trans. J. H. Higgit (1973): click here.

      Again, all quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.com

 

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see a short essay by Adrien Sina and Sarah Wilson, 'Action féminine: Valentine de Saint-Point', in Tate Etc., issue 16 (Summer 2009): click here to read online.   

Cum Play With Mellors: On the Sexual Politics of Ejaculation

Faith Holland: Ookie Canvas (detail) [1] 

faithholland.com 

 

 

I. 

 

Readers familiar with D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) will doubtless remember the long and explicit tirade that Mellors delivers when Connie asks him why he married Bertha Coutts. 

 

Detailing his frustrating sexual experience not only with the latter, but also with several other women - some of whom he describes as unresponsive and some of whom he labels lesbian - Mellors also informs Connie of the fact that, in his view, the vagina is the only place in which it is right and proper for a man to ejaculate.

Mellors hates those women who find coitus distasteful and simply lie there waiting for him to finish. And he also hates those women who prefer to actively bring themselves to orgasm after he has already come [2]. But so too does Mellors despise women who love "'every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off [...] except the natural one'" [3]. 

 

That is to say, women who, for example, prefer oral to vaginal sex and "'always make you go off when you're not in the only place you should be, when you go off'" [4].  

 

 

II.            

 

Ultimately, despite his penchant for anal sex, Mellors subscribes to a very conservative model of what constitutes legitimate and fulfilling sexual activity for adults: a heterosexual model which privileges genital penetration and terminates as soon as the man has deposited his semen inside the cunt. Freud would approve. But many men (not to mention many women), might find this model - one which is firmly tied to reproductive function rather than to erotic pleasure divorced from such - rather limited and restrictive [5].

 

Nice as it is to spend oneself inside the female genital tract, some men prefer to splash out in other ways, though it's interesting to ask to what extent this preference has been shaped by contemporary pornographic convention. For as Linda Williams reminds us, whereas earlier porn films occasionally included spectacles of external ejaculation, it wasn't until the 1970s and the rise of hardcore movies that the so-called money shot (i.e. cum shot) assumed "the narrative function of signaling the climax of a genital event" [6] and vouched for the scene's veracity. It has since become a standard feature - arguably to the point of cliché - loved by some, loathed by others [7].    

 

Thus, there's a whole politics involved around the question of when and where to come. Not only have options expanded (both on and off screen) to the point whereby men are encouraged to ejaculate on just about every part of a woman's body, but those who are jizzed-upon are expected to enjoy the experience and find novel ways to erotically play with semen; swallowing it, rubbing it in, forcing their partners to lick it off them, etc.    

 

Just don't tell Oliver (Quick! Let me come inside you) Mellors ... [8]

 

Notes

 

[1] Faith Holland's Ookie Canvases are pictures composed of cum shots sampled from pornography or submission, isolated from their background, colourised, and then collaged together to form an all-over composition.

 

[2] In this post I am using come as the verb and cum to refer to the resulting substance, but there is no established rule governing these spellings.   

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 203.  

 

[4] Ibid.

 

[5] What Mellor's doesn't seem to appreciate is that for a sexually active woman without access to reliable methods of birth control, coitus interruptus is perhaps her best hope of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy when her lover insists on vaginal penetration but refuses to wear a condom. 

      Interestingly, it has been suggested that the cum shot first became popular in hardcore circles only after the actresses decided that ejaculation inside their bodies was risky, inconsiderate, and unnecessary. In other words, it does not signify a secret male desire to visualise ejaculation, nor is it a dark desire to humiliate or degrade women in some manner. See: Joseph W. Slade, Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, Vol. 2., (Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 654-56.

[6] Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", (University of California Press, 1989), p. 93.

 

[7] As one commentator on this tricky (not to mention sticky) subject reminds us, since the '70s anti-porn feminists have often singled out the money shot for particular criticism, though their views have since been challenged by feminists writing from a more sex-positive perspective:

 

"'It is a convention of pornography that the sperm is on her, not in her,' Andrea Dworkin argued in 1993. 'It marks the spot, what he owns and how he owns it. The ejaculation on her is a way of saying (through showing) that she is contaminated with his dirt; that she is dirty.' But, as Lisa Jean Moore points out in Sperm Counts (2007), Dworkin ignores 'that these actresses exhibit pleasure and that it is their pleasure that many of their male partners enjoy. It is perhaps more accurate to theorize that men, both as spectators and actors, want women to want their semen.' In Moore's view, it's not the woman's humiliation, but her enthusiasm, that is so hot." 

      See Maureen O'Connor, 'The Complicated Politics of Where to Come', New York Magazine (13 July, 2015). It can be read online in The Cut by clicking here.   

 

[8] Connie, however, is a different kettle of fish. She has a fetishistic fascination with the male body, particularly the sexual organs, and at one point when admiring the erect penis of her lover, she goes "crawling on her knees on the bed towards him" and puts her arms around his white slender loins, "drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallos, and caught the drop of moisture". 

      One imagines from this that Connie would be more than happy for Mellors to ejaculate on her tits, thrilling as she does to the feel of precum on her body and, later, the heavy rain in which she frolics naked and holds up her breasts.   

      - D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, op. cit. The line quoted is on p. 210 and the scene referred to in the rain is on p. 221. 

 

Sinister Writings 2: On the Sexual Politics of Adam and Eve

Theodor Harmsen: Hermaphrodites (2017) 

The Book of Adam and Eve 

theodorharmsen.com

 

 

What do you call the layer of excess fat surrounding the vagina? 

Woman.  

 

If ever there was a joke written to offend feminists concerned with the sexual objectification of women - particularly their reduction to a body part - it's this one. 

 

And yet, if certain midrashic interpretations of God's creation of man in terms of what we would now call intersexuality are to be believed, then we might well ask what is woman if not merely a monstrous personification of cunt given an autonomous life of her own once separated off from the body of Adam.

This is not a question that escapes the attention of Abel Tiffauges:

"Reading the beginning of the Book of Genesis, one is pulled up short by a flagrant inconsistency that sticks out like a sore thumb in the venerable text. 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them ...' This sudden transition from the singular to the plural is downright unintelligible, especially as the creation of the woman out of Adam's rib does not occur till much later, in the second chapter of Genesis. But all is clear if one retains the singular throughout ... 'So God created man in his own image, that is, at once male and female ... And God said to him, be fruitful, multiply ...' etc. Later he sees that the solitude implied by hermaphroditism is undesirable, so he puts Adam to sleep and takes from him not a rib but his ... womb, i.e. his feminine sexual parts, and makes these into an independent being." [14-15]

 

That's interesting: for not only does it mean that Adam was originally created as an intersexed being, but - made as he was in God's own image - that God too is therefore both male and female (or, if you prefer, neither male nor female). 

 

Exactly how Adam was physically constituted is something that rabbis and Christian theologians who have bought into this idea have long debated; was he a true hermaphrodite or simply one half of a conjoined male-female twin assemblage (i.e., a single bi-sexed body)?   

 

Fascinating as it is to think of the Old Adam "armed with all his reproductive apparatus, [...] a constant prey to amorous transports of unimaginable perfection, in which he is both possessor and possessed, except - who knows? - during the periods when he was pregnant by himself" [15], this is not my main point of interest. Nor am I concerned here with the (potentially liberating) implication of this myth for those who identify as trans, queer, intersex, or non-binary. 

 

Rather, my concern is for the daughters of Eve and how this myth enables the kind of sexism contained in the joke with which I opened this post, by encouraging men to think of woman as not only a walking, talking sex organ, but a sex organ which originally belonged to Adam before God decided that the hermaphroditic model was not quite working and tore the sexes asunder.

 

If, technically speaking, woman has no sexual parts of her own - but is herself merely a sexual part of the original man "deposited outside himself [...] and taken up when needed" [15] - then why, for example, should a man worry about the ethical issue of female objectification, or wish to ensure female pleasure and fulfilment; particularly when he is "naturally out of step with woman's slow, vegetative ripenings" [8] ...?   

 

See: Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014). All page references in the text refer to this edition. 

 

For sinister writings on angelic oppression, click here. 

 

For sinister writings on cadent euphoria, click here. 

Taking a Trip Through The Beauty Jungle

Press ad for The Beauty Jungle (1964)

The most colourful and exciting film of the year

The good people at Talking Pictures TV have found another absolute gem of a movie: The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964), starring (60s and 70s stalwart) Ian Hendry as local journalist Don MacKenzie and (lovely Lancashire lass) Janette Scott as the typist-turned-beauty contestant Shirley Freeman.

Also putting in appearances are Tommy Trinder, Sid James, and a 21-year-old Maggie Nolan as just one of the mulitude of leggy-lovelies gracing the screen, so obviously a film with instant appeal for viewers like me (although it's interesting to note that promotion for the film was aimed primarily at a female audience in the belief that it was the sort of film women will want to see; the sort of picture women will want to talk about).   

Essentially a moral tale - or, rather, a sexploitation movie masquerading as a moral tale - it purports to expose the sordid and corrupt world of beauty pageants. MacKenzie, acting as a manager and image consultant to Shirley, is desperate to also become her lover. Unfortunately for him, having left her home, her job, and her boyfriend and transformed from a happy young brunette into a glamorous and ambitious blonde, greedy for ever-greater fame and success, she isn't interested and spurns his advances.         

Of far more interest to Shirley are playboy filmstar Rex Carrick (played by Edmund Purdom) and sauve international beauty pageant promoter Armand (played by the French actor Jean Claudio). She tries to seduce the former, only to discover he's either gay or asexual; and she (mistakenly) agrees to sleep with the latter in the (vain) hope of becoming Miss Globe (a title that goes to Miss Peru, played by a former Miss Israel, Aliza Gur). 

Having failed to make it to the top, Shirley is reduced to working as a celebrity judge back on the local beauty contest circuit - until, that is, she sees her younger sister paraded before her (and under the management of MacKenzie). This forces her to walk away from the industry for good and presumably back into a life of obscurity and nine-to-five normality; just another victim of the beauty jungle and its brutal, primitive law (though one who was happy to be complicit so long as she was winning). 

What feminist critics or members of the #MeToo generation would make of such a film heaven only knows; one imagines they'd be triggered (perhaps rightly) by the unabashed sexual objectification and abuse of young women by powerful and unscrupulous older men.

But the film has such quirky British charm - not only, as I said earlier, do Tommy Trinder and Sid James appear, but Lionel (Give Us a Clue) Blair and cheeky chappie Joe Brown also pop up on screen - that such sleazy behaviour is normalised, humanised, and made entertaining. Maybe that's the thing with vice and immorality - we find it so damn seductive (and excusable) if it's carried out by people with a twinkle in their eye!

And, what's more, I fully appreciate why girls like Shirley Freeman set out on the path to fame and riches, prepared to do whatever it takes in order to escape being little Miss No One from nowhere - for who wants to peel potatoes and scrub floors when you can drink champagne and travel the world in style?


Notes

To watch a trailer for The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964): click here.

To see the astonishing press kit released to help promote the film visit the William K. Everson Archive (NYU): click here.

Lady Chatterley's Lover: What Kind of Man Was Oliver Mellors?

Oliver Mellors as imagined on 

Comic Vine

Oliver Mellors was an ex-soldier turned gamekeeper; so it's not so strange that he carries a gun. One suspects, however, that the sense of menace he conveys is unrelated to the fact that he's armed. At any rate, Connie Chatterley's first reaction is one of fear, not desire. Upon seeing him, she felt threatened as he emerged from the woods in his "dark green velveteens and gaiters [...] with a red face and red moustache" [46].

The narrator tells us Mellors was "going quickly downhill" [46] and it's uncertain whether this refers to his direction of travel, or to a state of spiritual and physical decline due to his isolation and ill health (Connie soon notices his frailty and the fact he has a troublesome chest; a recent bout of pneumonia having left him with a cough and breathing difficulties).

Mellors has a thick head of fair hair and blue all-seeing eyes that sparkle with mockery, yet have also a certain warmth. In terms of build, he was "moderately tall, and lean" [46] and Lawrence writes admiringly of his slender loins and slender white arms. When Connie first spies him semi-naked, she finds it a visionary experience. It's not that he's conventionally good-looking or sturdy of physique - in fact he's rather weedy and looks older than his 38 years - but he has something strangely attractive about him: "the warm white flame of a single life revealing itself" [66] in his body.

Later, when she gazes with wonder as he stands before her fully-naked, Connie decides that her lover is piercingly beautiful:

"Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. [...] The back was white and fine, the small buttocks beautiful with exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of the neck ruddy and delicate and yet strong. There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body." [209]

Mostly, however, Connie is fascinated with his erect penis, one of the most famous members in literature; "rising darkish and hot-looking from the cloud of vivid gold-red hair" [209]. We also discover that Mellors likes to refer to his big, thick, hard and overweening dick by the popular slang term John Thomas.

Of course, Mellors is more than a walking penis: he has a mind and likes to read books of all kind, including works about contemporary political history and modern science. He even has a few novels on his book shelf (though, unfortunately, Lawrence doesn't reveal what they are).

Mellors also has the ability - increasingly rare amongst modern people - to act in silence with soft, swift movements, as if slightly withdrawn or invisible; like an object. In other words, he has presence, but he wasn't quite all there in a fully human sense; he lacked what might be termed personality.

At the same time, he stares with a fearless impersonal look into Connie's eyes, as if trying to know her as an animal might know its prey. This naturally intensifies her sense of unease and she decides he's a "curious, quick, separate fellow, alone but sure of himself" [47].

In other words, Mellors is a cocky little so-and-so, aloof with his own sense of superiority, despite his lowly social status and the fact he walks with a stoop. Little wonder that Clifford finds him impertinent and something of an upstart: '"He thinks too much of himself, that man.'" [92] Similarly, Connie's sister, Hilda, isn't keen on Mr Mellors, finding his use of dialect affected (which it is - though he mostly deploys it as a defence mechanism in times of social anxiety, so it's really a sign of his own insecurity).

Perhaps his defining characteristic, however, is rage: Mellors is angry with everyone pretty much all of the time. He's angry with the bosses; he's angry with the workers; he's angry with men; he's angry with women - he's even angry with his own small daughter for crying when he shoots a cat in front of her: '"Ah, shut it up, tha, false little bitch!'" [58] No wonder the poor child is frightened of him and that even his own mother admits he has funny ways. When Connie asks him why he has such a bad temper, he replies: "'I don't quite digest my bile.'" [168]

Perhaps this helps to explain why he just wants to keep himself to himself: "He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be alone." [88] He even resents the company of his dog, Flossie (too tame and clinging). For Mellors, solitude equates with freedom. And contact with others - particularly women - only results in heartache. Mellors is not so much a social discontent as a man on the recoil from the outer world (and from love).    

Unfortunately, all it takes is a single tear falling from Connie's eye for "the old flame" [115] to leap up again in his loins ... Before he knows where he is or what he's doing, he's fucking her Ladyship on an old army blanket spread carefully on the floor of his hut. For Mellors is a man of desire - and also a man prepared to submit to his fate (no matter how grim).

He's not a man, however, greatly concerned with pleasuring his partner: "The activity, the orgasm was his, all his ..." [116] Afterwards, having caught his breath and lain for a while in mysterious stillness, he buttons up his breeches and exits the hut to ponder what it means for his soul to be broken open again. He rather regrets that her ladyship has cost him his privacy and brought down upon him a "new cycle of pain and doom" [119].

Having escorted Connie home - and inwardly raged against the industrial world with its evil electric lights - Mellors returns home "with his gun and his dog [...] and ate his supper of bread and cheese, young onions and beer" [119]. If it's true that you are what you eat, then this makes Mellor's an extremely simple soul; simple, and rather innocent in the Nietzschean sense of not being troubled by guilt or a sense of sin: "He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society: or fear of oneself." [120]

(Later, however, Mellors admits to Connie that he is afraid: "'I am. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid o' things'" [124] - things being people and consequences.)     

Having finished his supper, he returns to the darkness of the woods, gun in hand, and with his penis stirring restlessly as he thought of Connie. The turgidity of his desire is something he greatly enjoys, as it makes him feel rich. What he doesn't much care for, however, is French kissing - as Connie finds out to her chagrin when she mistakenly offers him her mouth with parted lips one time and asks for a post-coital kiss goodbye.

He speaks of tenderness, but Mellors is much more a wam, bam, thank you ma'am, kinda guy. Thus one day, he bumps into Connie in the woods and forces himself upon her, despite her words of protest and gestures of resistance:

"He stepped up to her, and put his arm round her. She felt the front of his body terribly near to her, and alive.
      'Oh, not now! Not now!' she cried, trying to push him away." [132]

Ignoring this, Mellors forces her to lie down - like an animal - and is in such a hurry to fuck her that he literally snaps her knicker elastic: "for she did not help him, only lay inert" [133].

I wouldn't go so far as to characterise this as a rape scene, but some readers might and, at the very least, it demonstrates that Mellors has scant concern for notions of consent.

Indeed, rather than worry about the finer points of sexual politics and etiquette, he prefers to reminisce about his childhood (he was a clever boy); his estranged wife Bertha (she was brutal); his life in the army (he loved his commanding officer); his own poor health (weak heart and lungs); or the lack of any real difference between the classes (all are now slaves to money and machinery - or tin people, as he calls them).

These things certainly troubled him and kept him awake at night. But when engaged in conversation with Connie one evening, he reveals that the real source of his resentment and bitterness is his failure to form a satisfactory sexual relationship. His first girlfriend, he says, was sexless - and his second also "'loved everything about love, except the sex'" [201].

Then came Bertha Coutts - whom he marries - and she loves to fuck. So, for a while, he's happy: "'I was as pleased as punch. That was what I'd wanted: a woman who wanted me to fuck her. So I fucked her like a good un.'" [201] But then the arguments start - and the domestic violence: "'She flung a cup at me and I took her by the scruff of the neck and squeezed the life out of her. That sort of thing!'" [201]       

Even worse, according to Mellors' account, is the fact that Bertha preferred to grind her own coffee:

"'She'd never come off when I did. Never! She'd just wait. If I kept back for half an hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting.'" [201-02]  

Mellors hates women like this; just as he hates those women who encourage non-vaginal ejaculation - '"the only place you should be, when you go off'" [203] - or women who insist he withdraw prior to ejaculation and then '"go on writhing their loins till they bring themselves off'" against his thighs [203].

Women like this, he tells Connie, are mostly all lesbian - consciously or unconsciously - and this triggers his violent homophobia: '"When I'm with a woman who's really lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'" [203]

Now, I don't know what Connie thinks of all this - although she nervously protests some of what he says - but such overt misogyny and reactionary sexual stupidity is pretty shocking and shameful to many readers today and does make it hard to find Oliver Mellors a likeable figure. And the casual racism only makes things worse: '"I thought there was no real sex left: never a woman who'd really 'come' naturally with a man: except black women - and somehow - well, we're white men: and they're a bit like mud.'" [204]

As I said earlier, Mellors talks a lot about tenderness and the need for warm-heartedness, but there's a nastiness in him - and more than a touch of madness, as he fantasises, for example, about the end of mankind: '"Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species [...] it calms you more than anything else.'" [218]

Again, to her credit, Connie isn't quite convinced by this. And she knows that Mellors still hopes that the human race might find a way into a new revealing - if only the men might learn to wear bright red trousers and short white jackets:

'"Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket, then the women 'ud begin to be women.'" [219]

This longed for revolt into style - and desire for gender authenticity where men are men and women are women - is at the heart of Mellors's völkisch utopian vision, along with neo-paganism and certain eugenic proposals, such as severely restricting the number of births; '"because the world is overcrowded'" [220]. That might be true, but it's probably not the kindest thing to tell the woman carrying your unborn child.

In sum: whilst Mellors might have natural distinction, he lacks discretion and seems to go out of his way to upset people - even those who, like Duncan Forbes, are trying to help him and Connie. He tells Duncan, an artist, that he finds his work sentimental and stupid and that it "murders all the bowels of compassion in a man'" [286], and so succeeds in gaining himself one more enemy in the world. 

Ever alert to the slightest hint of insult, Mellors is thus outrageously rude to other people - many of whom, including Clifford and Bertha, he wants to have shot. When Connie points out that's not being very tender towards them, he says:

"'Yea, even the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.'" [280]         
 
Connie tries to convince herself that he isn't being serious when he says such things. But Mellors is quick to put her right: he'd shoot them soon enough, '"and with less qualms than I shoot a weasal" [280].

Does this make him a bumptious lout and a miserabe cad, as Clifford says? Or "more monstrous and shocking than a murderer like Crippen" [267] as the local people think?

Maybe, maybe not ...

But Oliver Mellors is certainly no angel and shouldn't be thought an heroic figure. He might write a fine letter and he might have a good cod on him (as Connie's father likes to assume), but this Lawrentian bad boy is a bad son, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad employee, a bad citizen, and - unless one likes it rough and Greek style - a bad lover ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of the novel.

Birkin's Cat (Notes on Sexual Politics and Feline Philosophy in Women in Love)

Portrait Gray Tabby Cat

Photograph by Maika 777

fineartamerica.com

I.

I wasn't surprised to discover that Rupert Birkin owned a grey tabby cat. Is there anything more noble, after all, than a young male cat with long legs and a slim back?

What was surprising, however, was to discover that Birkin based his sexual politics and philosophical thinking on star equilibrium as much upon observations of Mino the cat as upon his (mis)reading of Nietzsche.

Thus, when watching Mino amorously interact with a stray she-cat that has wandered into the garden from the woods, Birkin can't help metaphysically musing on gender relations and the need for superfine stability, even if this requires cruelty and, ultimately, the submission of the female to the male ... 


II.  

"The young cat trotted lordly down the path, waving his tail. He was an ordinary tabby with white paws, a slender young gentleman. A crouching, fluffy, brownish-grey cat was stealing up the side of the fence. The Mino walked statelily up to her, with manly nonchalance. She crouched before him and pressed herself on the ground in humility, a fluffy soft outcast, looking up at him with wild eyes that were green and lovely as great jewels. He looked casually down on her. So she crept a few inches further, proceeding on her way to the back door, crouching in a wonderful soft, self-obliterating manner, and moving like a shadow.
      He, going statlily on his slim legs, walked after her, then suddenly, for pure excess, he gave her a light cuff with his paw on the side of the face. She ran off a few steps, like a blown leaf along the ground, then crouched unobtrusively, in submissive, wild patience. The Mino pretended to take no notice of her. He blinked his eyes superbly at the landscape. In a minute she drew herself together and moved softly, a fleecy brown-grey shadow, a few paces forward. She began to quicken her pace, in a moment she would be gone like a dream, when the young grey lord sprang before her, and gave her a light handsome cuff. She subsided at once, submissively."    

"The eyes of the stray cat flared round for a moment, like great green fires staring at Birkin. Then she had rushed in a soft swift rush, half way down the garden. There she paused to look round. The Mino turned his face in pure superiority to his master, and slowly closed his eyes, standing in statuesque young perfection. The wild cat's round, green, wondering eyes were staring all the while like uncanny fires. Then again, like a shadow, she slid towards the kitchen.
      In a lovely springing leap, like a wind, the Mino was upon her, and had boxed her twice, very definitely, with a white, delicate fist. She sank and slid back, unquestioning. He walked after her, and cuffed her once or twice, leisurely, with sudden little blows of his magic white paws."

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

III.

Ursula, who happens to be watching this alongside Birkin, is angry and upset at the male cat's use of violence to bully the female, as she perceives it. Birkin, amused by her indignation, tries to explain that this is a normal part of feline intimacy and, it's true of course, that feline sexual behaviour does involve a certain amount of unpleasantness (spraying, fighting, biting, etc.).*

Ursula, however, is unconvinced and continues to insist that Mino is a bully - like all males. This clearly irritates Birkin, who replies:

"'He is not a bully. He is only insisting to the poor stray that she shall acknowledge him as a sort of fate, her own fate: because you can see she is fluffy and promiscuous as the wind. I am with him entirely. He wants superfine stability."  

Which, I suppose, is one way of putting it and one possible explanation. Though it could just be that Mino wants to penetrate the she-cat and that his male dignity and higher understanding are but fanciful notions belonging to Birkin. That's certainly what Ursula thinks: "'Oh it makes me so cross, this assumption of male superiority! And it is such a lie! One wouldn't mind if there were any justification for it.'"

Clearly, Birkin thinks there is some justification for it - and that it is neither a sadistic lust for cruelty nor a naked will to power, describing the latter as base and petty, even though, clearly, his reading of Nietzsche - like Lawrence's own - is a poor and selective one at best.

For Birkin, Mino's behaviour - and, presumably, male sexual behaviour in general - can best be thought of as a desire to impose upon female chaos masculine order and thus bring about a state of "transcendent and abiding rapport" between the sexes that benefits them both. Paradise is a state of pure equilibrium in which each party is a star balanced in conjunction.

And that, for Birkin, is what love is all about - fulfilment, not individual or personal freedom: "'Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It's a freedom together, if you like." Ideal love and ideal freedom, he says, ultimately result in chaos and nihilism.

But, again, Ursula isn't having any of it: "'I don't trust you when you drag the stars in,' she said."

Notes

* Things probably aren't helped - speaking from the female cat's point of view - by the fact that the male has a barbed penis and that penetration therefore causes a certain amount of discomfort (although I'm not sure it's fair to describe the male cat's penis as a horrifying engine of pain, as one feminist commentator described it). Upon withdrawl, these keratinised penile spines rake the walls of the she-cats vagina, removing the semen of love rivals and helping to trigger ovulation. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Ch. XIII, pp. 148-152.

Clothes Maketh the Woman (With Reference to the Queer Case of Nellie March)

Anne Heywood as Ellen (Nellie) March in The Fox (dir. Mark Rydell, 1967)

Image from Twenty Four Frames: Notes on Film by John Greco: click here

I.

Nellie March is an interesting character: I'm not sure it's accurate to describe her as a dyke, but she's definitely a bit more robust and mannish than her intimate friend Miss Banford, who was a "small, thin, delicate thing with spectacles" [7] and tiny iron breasts.  

Unsuprisingly, therefore, it's March who does most of the physical work on the small farm where she and Banford live. And when she hammered away at her carpenter's bench or was "out and about, in her puttees and breeches, her belted coat and her loose cap, she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man" [8].

It's interesting to consider this: that outward appearance plays such an important role in the construction of gender; that clothes maketh the man, even when that man happens to be a woman.


II.

For all his essentialism, Lawrence is acutely aware of this. Which helps explain why he frequently gives detailed descriptions of what his characters are wearing and seems to have an almost fetishistic fascination with both male and female fashion. In the Lawrentian universe, looks matter and the question of style is crucial.

It also explains why later in the story, when March has decided to affirm a heterosexual identity and give her hand in marriage to a foxy young Cornishman named Henry, she undergoes a radical change of image. All of a sudden the heavy work boots and trousers are off and she's slipping into something a little more comfortable, a little more feminine, and she literally lets down her thick, black hair.

Henry, who has been dreaming of her soft woman's breasts beneath her tunic and big-belted coat, is astonished by her transformation:

"To his amazement March was dressed in a dress of dull, green silk crape [...] He sat down [...] unable to take his eyes off her. Her dress was a perfectly simple slip of bluey-green crape, with a line of gold stitching round the top and round the sleeves, which came to the elbow. It was cut just plain, and round at the top, and showed her white soft throat. [...] But he looked her up and down, up and down." [48]       

By his own admission, he's never known anything make such a difference, and as March takes the teapot to the fire his erotic delight is taken to another level:

"As she crouched on the hearth with her green slip about her, the boy stared more wide-eyed than ever. Through the crape her woman's form seemed soft and womanly. And when she stood up and walked he saw her legs move soft within her moderately short skirt. She had on black silk stockings and small, patent shoes with little gold buckles.
      She was another being. She was something quite different. Seeing her always in the hard-cloth breeches, wide on the hips, buttoned on the knee, srong as armour, and in the brown puttees and thick boots, it had never occurred to him that she had a woman's legs and feet." [49]

Not only is March born as a woman thanks to putting on a pair of black silk stockings and a (moderately) short skirt, but Henry too feels himself reinforced in his phallic masculinity:

"Now it came upon him. She had a woman's soft, skirted legs, and she was accessible. He blushed to the roots of his hair [...] and strangely, suddenly felt a man, no longer a youth. He felt a man, with all a man's grave weight of responsibility. A curious quietness and gravity came over his soul. He felt a man, quiet, with a little heaviness of male destiny upon him." [49]

It's writing like this that sets Lawrence apart, I think; writing that will seem pervy and sexist to some, but full of queer insight to others. Writing that, in a sense, undermines his own essentialism by showing the importance of costume and perfomativity when it comes to gender roles, sexual identity, and sexual attraction.     

III.

And does it end well once they are married, Henry and Nellie? A 20-year old youth and a 30-year old woman used to living an independent life (and sharing a bed with another woman)? Not really: something was missing. 

The problem is, he wants her submission: "Then he would have all his own life as a young man and a male, and she would have all her own life as a woman and a female. [...] She would not be a man any more, an independent woman [...]" [70]

But March, of course, doesn't want to submit; she wants to stay awake, and to know, and decide, and remain an independent woman to the last.

So it's hard to believe they're going to find happiness. But then, as Lawrence writes:

"The more you reach after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles so blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you become aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit [...]
      That is the whole history of the search for happiness, whether it be your own or somebody else's [...] It ends, and it always ends, in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall [...]" [69]

And on that note, Happy New Year to all torpedophiles ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Fox', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

Dionysos Versus the Amazons

I.

One of two final (prose) poems written by D. H. Lawrence was a work inspired by a reading of Plutarch, concerning the bloody battle fought between the god Dionysos and his followers and the tribe of warrior women known by many names amongst the ancient Greeks, but most commonly remembered today as the Amazons [Ἀμαζόνες].

According to Plutarch, after an initial skirmish at the coastal city of Ephesus, the Amazons fled to the island of Samos, where they were pursued by Dionysos and slaughtered en masse. Lawrence seems to be in little doubt as to who instigated the violence. He writes:

"Oh small-breasted, brilliant Amazons, will you never leave off attacking the Bull-foot, for whom the Charities weave ivy-garlands?"

And, a little later, he notes: "the Amazons swept out of cover with bare limbs flashing and bronze spears lifted."

What Lawrence doesn't do in his reimagining of the myth, is explain why the Amazons should be so fiercely determined to resist the triumph of Dionysos. To understand that, we need to turn to the work of the 19thC theorist of ancient matriarchy, Johann Jakob Bachofen ...


II.

Bachofen is probably best remembered today (if at all) as the author of Das Mutterrecht (1861); a seminal work in which he argues that Woman in her role of sacred (earth) mother is the origin of all human religion, culture and society.

According to Bachofen's post-Hegelian perspective, human cultural evolution consists of several stages, culminating in the Apollonian age in which all traces of the Mutterecht and the matriarchal past were eradicated, and from which modern (solar-phallic) civilisation emerged.

Whilst convinced that, ultimately, there's a progressive movement from base matter to the luminous unfolding of spirit, Bachofen doesn't argue for a smooth, developmental process. He insists, rather, that each shift from one phase to the next is marked by violence and there are often long periods during which regressive forces gain the upper hand and force humanity backwards. 

As the Dionysian phase of cultural evolution was one in which earlier female traditions were either masculinised or destroyed as the phallocratic order of patriarchy slowly began to emerge and assert itself, there was, therefore, good reason for the Amazons to be pissed (as Americans like to say).

It should be noted, however, that Bachofen doesn't approve of their feminist uprising, dismissing it as both reactionary and perverse and decrying the Amazons as a bunch of hate-filled, homocidal, war-loving maidens [männerfeindlichen, männertötenden, kreigerischen Jungfrauen].

He celebrates their defeat by Dionysos as the restoration of the natural order; finally, says Bachofen, women can find their fulfilment (and destiny) via glad submission to the male in all his glory. 
  

III.

I suppose the question is: did Lawrence know of Bachofen and was the latter an influence of any sort?

Well, whilst I don't recall him ever mentioning Bachofen, one suspects Lawrence would have known the name, being as he was well read in German literature and philosophy and married to a woman who would have almost certainly been familiar with Bachofen's ideas.   

What's interesting is that even whilst Lawrence would have detested Bachofen's idealism, he himself frequently wrote within the terms and confines of metaphysical dualism; darkness and light, passive and active, and - most crucially - male and female.

Indeed, like Bachofen, Lawrence sometimes seems to read all human history in terms of a battle of the sexes. And, like Bachofen, whilst he declares his sympathies are with the women, Lawrence often seems deeply troubled by the thought of women who have liberated themselves from men and phallocentric culture entirely, such as Amazons and lesbians.

Thus, it's noticeable that in his poem Lawrence seems more concerned about the fate of the beasts that accompanied Dionysus into battle, than the fate of the women who were put to the sword:

"The rocks are torn with the piercing death-cries of elephants, the great and piercing cry of elephants dying at the hands of the last of the Amazons, rips the island rocks."  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Elephants of Dionysos', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1615-16. This work, along with another (untitled) prose poem, was found on a short manuscript torn from a notebook. They are believed to be the last poems Lawrence wrote, composed at the beginning of December, 1929.

W. R. Halliday, The Greek Questions of Plutarch, (Oxford, 1928); see Question 56. This is the edition that Lawrence consulted when writing his poem on Dionysos and the Amazons. 

Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans. Ralph Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1992).

Cynthia Eller; Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861-1900, (University of California Press, 2011). See Chapter 3: On the Launching Pad: J. J. Bachofen and Das Mutterrecht, which I found particularly helpful when writing this post.  

This post is for Maria.

Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt

"All is dust and lies. So much the worse for the men who get in my way. 

Men are mere stepping-stones to me. As soon as they begin to fail 
or are played out, I put them scornfully aside."

I.

Love is blind. But when a woman gets into her 30s and sees her looks are starting to fade and hair beginning to whiten, it's only natural that she begins to doubt the veracity of this expression ...


II.

Eugénie Brécourt was born in Paris, in the spring of 1837. She was fated to become one of France's most notorious women; a true femme fatale who broke many hearts and ruined the lives of numerous men, before finaly ending up behind prison bars ...  

Neglected as a child, she was adopted by a nobelwoman who took pity on her. Her parents, however, reclaimed their daughter when she was eleven and immediately put her to work selling gingerbread on the streets. At seventeen, the kindly Baroness found her a job at a silk factory and agreed to once more care for the young woman. She even stumped up a dowry of 12,000 francs when Jeanne decided to marry the local grocer.

Unfortunately, married life didn't suit Jeanne and after a rumoured affair with an army officer, her husband left her and she went missing ... When she reappeared, having apparently tried her hand (and failed) at acting, literature and journalism, it was as a prostitute calling herself Jeanne de la Cour.     

I don't know the secret of her deadly charm, but she obviously had something; one of her lovers committed suicide; another died by taking an overdose of Spanish fly; a third was taken to hospital in suspicious circumstances, where he, too, eventually died.

Brécourt was completely indifferent to their suffering and something of her attitude towards men can be gleaned from the quotation above with which I open this post; it's a libertine philosophy that has a distinctly Sadean feel to it.

To be fair, working as a prostitute had also taken a toll on Jeanne's health too and in 1865 she was obliged to enter an asylum, suffering from hysterical seizures and a loss of speech. Hospital records describe her as being of dark complexion, with very expressive eyes. Although clearly of a nervous disposition and prone to fantasy, she was also said to be agreeable.

After several months, she was discharged though advised by her doctors to spend time resting in the spa town of Vittel, in northeastern France. Here, Jeanne claimed the title of Baroness for herself and nursed a wounded pigeon back to health. She also determined to find a permanent benefactor who would secure her future, having no intention of ending her days destitute, which, alas, was the fate of many a woman in her position.

Enter Rene de la Roche ... 

III.

Roche was a wealthy young man who had the misfortune to meet Jeanne at a ball in Paris, in 1873. He quickly became infatuated by the woman 16 years his senior and by the end of the year they had entered into a fateful relationship ...

Whilst Roche was away on a six month trip to Egypt in 1876, Jeanne went to visit a fellow prostitute with a lover who was blind not only to her moral shortcomings, but who, being visually impaired, incapable also of witnessing the very obvious signs of her physical decline. This got Jeanne thinking and on Roche's return to France she hatched a plan to deprive him of his sight.

Jeanne managed to persuade an old friend from her childhood days to help her, having told him (falsely) that Roche was the son of a man who had done her wrong. As arranged, Nathalis Gaudry carried out the diabolical assault in January 1877, throwing sulphuric acid in the face of the innocent victim.

Roche completely lost the sight of one eye and that of the other was significantly damaged; he was also, of course, terribly disfigured. Just like the injured pigeon, Roche was now made dependent upon Jeanne's loving care and, initially, neither he nor anyone else suspected her role in the matter.

Jeanne undertook the duty of care with every appearance of genuine devotion. Roche was consumed with gratitude for her untiring kindness; thirty nights she spent by his bedside and it was his wish that she alone should nurse him.

Gradually, however, his friends and family became suspicious and increasingly concerned by Brécourt's behaviour; frustrating, for example, their attempts to see or communicate with him. Eventually, the police were alerted and opened an investigation. Despite brazenly informing them that they would never find any evidence against her, they did just that and six months after the attack, both she and Gaudry found themselves standing in the dock.

Brécourt was defended by one of France's top criminal lawyers and her case aroused great public interest. Several famous faces and well-known writers sat in the public gallery to observe and record the proceedings. She was, if you like, the Roxie Hart of her day - although, unlike Roxie, Jeanne wasn't acquitted.

Having been found guilty, she was, rather, sentenced to fifteen years penal service; her accomplice got off with just five years jail time, having pleaded guilty but with mitigating circumstances - namely, being under the spell of a woman who was part-witch, part-seductress. He told his interrogators that he was madly in love with Brécourt and would have done anything she asked: Ses désirs sont des ordres!

What, if anything does this case teach us? I'm not sure. Some might cite it as evidence that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, but that's just a piece of sadomasochistic fantasy, isn't it?

Note: readers interested in this case might also find the following two posts to their tastes: the first in memory of Cora Pearl and the second in memory of Laura Bell: click here and here respectively.

 

Douglas Murray: The Madness of Crowds

Bloomsbury (2019)

Douglas Murray's new book is conveniently divided into four main sections headed by a single term (dramatically printed in bold even on the contents page): Gay - Women - Race - Trans

Each of these terms plays a foundational role within contemporary culture; they are the four pillars of postmodernity; the terms to which all paths lead and all other signifiers refer. Whilst they provide meaning and allow individuals to forge identities, they are also the true causes of the collective insanity that lies at the root of what is happening today.

That - in brief - is Murray's central argument; one with cultural and socio-political aspects, but which essentially remains a philosophical argument to do with the collapse of old values in an age after God, when even the secular narratives that initially promised to fill the void no longer retain our belief.     

The problem is, Murray is not a philosopher; he's a journalist and public intellectual. And so his analysis tends to be common sensical rather than conceptually challenging and when he does mention philosophers by name, it's only ever in passing and nearly always in a dismissive manner - never once does he engage with their ideas or even think it might be worthwhile to do so.

And that's a real problem for me - even if, broadly speaking, I agree with Murray on many points and share some of his concerns. Perhaps if he did read the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze with serious critical attention he might understand a little better why we are where we are and avoid the anglophonic arrogance that he and others of his ilk (Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro) are prone to.          


Gay

According to Murray, Foucault's views on homosexuality are deeply confused. I don't think that's true: I think, rather, that Murray dislikes any degree of ambiguity and, in the end, Foucault is a little too radical and a little too queer for his liking. For whereas gays, such as himself, want social acceptance and pride themselves on their respectability, "queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into" [37]. 

For Murray, irresponsible queers - along with radical feminists, black militants and trans activists - take things too far; instead of seeking liberal consensus and some form of historical resolution, they just keep banging on about power and politics, identity and intersectionality:

"Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing  how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren't very good at living with each other." [4]

Murray's fear is that this risks a backlash that would threaten some of the advances made in civil rights and sexual freedoms that he supports: "After all it is not clear that majority populations will continue to accept the claims they are being told to accept and continue to be cowed by the names that are thrown at them if they do not." [232]

That's a very reasonable concern, but, ironically, some critics would argue that his moral conservatism is part of that reaction.    


Women

Murray's wish that we might all just get along is developed in his chapter on women and the relations between the sexes. But he seems to think that we'll never get along until everyone acknowledges the innate biological differences between men and women (including aptitude differences) and accepts these as a basis for ordering society, rather than the "political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences" [65]. 

The problem is, of course, that even biological facts are subject to cultural and socio-political interpretation. And even if we could identify biological facts concerning sexual difference in and of themselves, Murray doesn't provide any reason why they should be inscribed within society and its institutions as natural law; why biology should become not only a determining factor but a destiny.  

Murray also worries far too much about silly slogans, hashtags, and memes on social media that betray an apparent war on men being fought by man-hating fourth-wave feminists: things such as 'men are trash', 'kill all men', and references to 'toxic masculinity', etc.

I'm surprised Mr. Murray has the the time or patience to read the latest tweets from Laurie Penny et al and would suggest he spend less time on social media (which, in an interlude following this chapter, he describes as a massively disruptive force that dissolves the public/private distinction and ultimately leads to group think and mass hysteria).*     

Race

It's not only queers, feminists, and the tech giants of Silicon Valley who are foisting us off with "things [we] didn't ask for, in line with a project [we] didn't sign up for, in pursuit of a goal [we] may not want" [120], it's also those anti-racists who "turn race from one of many important issues into something which is more important than anything else" [122], writes Murray.  

Just when black and white people were learning to live together in the same perfect harmony as the keys on Paul and Stevie's piano, along came critical race theory and black studies to fuck things up with "a newly fervent rhetoric and set of ideas" [122] that don't simply celebrate blackness, but problematise (and even demonise) whiteness.

Why, it's almost as if race were a political issue to do with power and privilege ... things which, as we have noted, Murray wishes to turn a blind eye to; just as he wants us all to be colour-blind: "the idea of which Martin Luther King was dreaming in 1963" [126]. To get beyond race is such a beautiful thought, says Murray. But, obviously, it's not going to happen: not least of all because race isn't simply a question of skin colour, as Murray acknowledges; it's a time bomb.  
 

Trans

Murray writes:

"Among all the subjects in this book and all the complex issues of our age, none is so radical in the confusion and assumptions it elicits, and so virulent in the demands it makes, as the subject of trans [...] trans has become something close to a dogma in record time." [186]

That, unfortunately, seems to be the case: and whilst I have no problem with trans individuals, dogma and/or doxa, should always be challenged - even genderqueer dogma.

Anyway, moving on ... I was fascinated to discover that:

"One of the most striking trends as the trans debate has picked up in recent years is that autogynephilia has come to be severely out of favour. Or to put it another way, the suggestion that people who identify as trans are in actual fact merely going through the ultimate extreme of sexual kink has become so hateful to many trans individuals that it is one of a number of things now decried as hate speech." [196]

This surprised (and disappointed) me as someone who has written positively about autogynephilia and eonism in the past on Torpedo the Ark: click here, for example. Why must everything - even changing sex - be presented as a spiritual journey and an issue to do with human rights?**

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather think in terms of desire and seduction, perversion and pathology. And if I were a transwoman, the last thing I'd want to be is some kind of sexless figure like a nun whose newly constructed vagina is a sign of sacrifice and suffering rather than a site of potential pleasure.    

To conclude: The Madness of Crowds is an informative and interesting book, rather than an important and inspired one; a piece of intelligent journalism, rather than a work of philosophy. A book that ends with a call to love, as if it weren't precisely such idealism that got us into the mess we're in today.

Notes

* Murray will later go on to say: "The arrival of the age of social media has done things we still have barely begun to understand and presented problems with which we have hardly started to grapple. The collapse of the barrier between private and public language is one. But bigger even than that [...] is the deepest problem of all: that we have allowed ourselves no mechanisms for getting out of the situation technology has landed us in. It appears able to cause catastrophes but not to heal them, to wound but not to remedy." [174]

One suggests Murray read (or re-read) Heidegger's classic 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology, which might deepen his thinking on this point and also provide him with a wider perspective. I suspect, however, that Heidegger would be another of those philosophers that he'd dismiss for lacking clarity (though he could hardly accuse the latter of being a crypto-Marxist).  

** Murray provides the answer to this question:

"If people have a particular sexual kink then [...] it is hard to persuade society that it should change nearly all of its social and linguistic norms in order to accommodate those sexual kinks.  [...]
      If trans were largely, mainly or solely about erotc stimulation then it should no more be a cause to change any societal fundamentals than it would be to change them for people who get a sexual thrill from wearing rubber. Autogynephilia risks presenting trans as a softwear [i.e. non-biological] issue. And that is the cause of the turn against it. For - as with homosexuals - there is a drive to prove that trans people are 'born this way'." [198-99] 

Readers might be interested in a post on Douglas Murray's previous book, The Strange Death of Europe (2017): click here.        

Michel Houellebecq: Serotonin

Front cover of the English hardback edition

William Heinemann (2019)

In the end, even your favourite writers let you down. And so Michel Houellebecq and his new novel Serotonin ...

Maybe he's tired of producing fiction; maybe success makes lazy. Or maybe his porno-nihilistic schtick is prone to some kind of law of diminishing returns. I don't know. But I do know this is a pretty feeble addition to what remains an impressive body of work and whilst the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, needed his small, white anti-depressant pills to prevent him from dying of sadness, I felt in need of something to stop me from drifting off with boredom at times as a reader.

Ultimately, the problem with creating unsympathetic characters is that they're, well, unsympathetic - so they had better have something interesting to tell us and I'm really not sure that Labrouste does; unless, that is, one is interested in the commercial availability of hummus in French supermarkets (pretty good); the fate of French dairy farming in a globalised economy (pretty dire); the condition of his cock (mostly flaccid, which is unfortunate as this seems to be the core of his being).     

Having said that, there are plenty of things to enjoy in the novel. For example, I like the casual references to Heidegger, Bataille, and Blanchot, as if everyone will be familiar with these names dropped as easily as the names of high-end fashion brands and types of French cheese. 

I also like the fact that the Japanese photograper and video artist Daikichi Amano is given a mention and can imagine many readers quickly googling the name to see if he's real or just a fictional character made up by Houellebecq (in the context of the novel, of course, he's both). Considering Yuzu's fascination with Amano's work, it's surprising that her zoosexual adventures were confined to canines.

Fascinating too the central conceit of one day just walking away from one's old life; of severing all connections with family and friends and voluntarily going missing. A transgressive act - but not a criminal one (in either France or the UK) and Houellebecq / Labrouste is right to register his surprise:

"It was startling that, in a country where individual liberties had tended to shrink, legislation was preserving this one, which was fundamental - in my eyes even more fundamental, and philosopically more troubling, than suicide." [47]

If only for sentences like this, Serotonin is worth reading and it's always nice to be reminded that in less than a day one can erase or reconfigure one's entire life. Nice, too, to discover that two people can be buried in the same coffin.  
 

As for Labrouste's observations on love and sexual politics as played out between men and women, these didn't much interest - despite being placed within a Platonic-Kantian context to do with human perfection via the loving fusion of two into one and the attainment of mutual respect. That said, this passage is one that caught my attention as a xenophile:

"I had carnal knowledge of girls from different countries, and had come to the conclusion that love can only develop on the basis of a certain difference, that like never falls in love with like, and in practice many  differences may come into play: an extreme difference in age, as we know, can give rise to unimaginably violent passions; racial difference remains effective; and even mere national and linguistic difference should not be scorned." [81-2] 

This is true, I think, and is a truth long recognised and exploited within the pornographic imagination. I'm not sure that the lines that follow are also true, but they are certainly worthy of consideration:

"It is bad for those who love each other to speak the same language, it is bad for them to truly understand one another, to be able to communicate through words, because the vocation of the word is not to create love but to engender division and hatred, the word separates as it produces, while a semi-formless, semi-linguistic babble [...] creates the basis for unconditional and enduring love." [82]

When not reminiscing about lost loves and slowly coming to the realisation that it's the past and not the future that engulfs and eventually kills us, Labrouste likes to express his affection for cows and spy with binoculars on a German paedophile; "basically I think I would have liked to be a cop, insinuating myself into people's lives, penetrating their secrets" [184] ... A cop, or a novelist.  

He also tries (unsuccessfully) to counsel an old college friend, Aymeric, a farmer who, like many others, has fallen on hard times and is angry about it to the point of taking up arms. It's at this point in the novel that Houellebecq once again shows his uncanny ability to tap into the spirit of the times; anticipating the gilets jaunes movement and its rage against free trade, liberal elitism, and their own feelings of impotence and loss.

Suddenly, as James Lasdun notes in his review, "the book's seemingly haphazard elements begin working together" and Houellebecq no longer disappoints ...

He could (perhaps should) have ended the novel with Aymeric's violent suicide and the fatal confrontation between farmers and the security police (CRS). But Houellebecq writes on for another 75 pages or so, as Labrouste stalks an old girlfriend (Camille) in the hope that he and she might get back together and find the happiness they deserve.

First, however, he plans to murder her four-year-old son: "the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype" [265]. Of course, not being a stag or a Brazillian macaque - or even an early human - Labrouste can't go through with it; instead, he collapses into terminal sorrow and self-pity (though, to be fair, his cortisol levels are as high as his testosterone levels are low).           

In the end, there's nothing for him to do but get fat and watch TV: "I was now at the stage where the ageing animal, wounded and aware of being fatally injured, seeks a den in which to end its life." [291]

What worries me - after 1,285 days in Essex exile and already being ten years older than Labrouste - is the thought that I'm also at this stage; will I too suddenly have a desire to read The Magic Mountain and reach the Proustian conclusion that what matters most in this life is not social or cultural activity, nor intellectual stimulation, but young wet pussies?
 

Notes

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (William Heinemann, 2019).

James Lasdun, 'Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq review - a vision of degraded masculinity', The Guardian (20 Sept 2019): click here to read online.