Sex and the 21st Century (CAC Edition)
Created | Updated Mar 18, 2006
The new sexual revolution (of remotely-fathered designer babies) will undermine the welfare state and produce societies of greater freedom and realism.
BY BBCh2g2 author Richard IV ('Lanky')
Last revised in April, 2000.
SUMMARY
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY GAVE A LIBERATING RESPONSE TO SEX. INTELLECTUALS ADMITTED SEX MAY BE THE MOST POWERFUL HUMAN IMPERATIVE. TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES WERE UNDERMINING THE OLD MORALITY OF 'NO SEX OUTSIDE MARRIAGE.'
YET IMPORTANT BUSINESS WAS LEFT UNFINISHED. THE FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND FEMALE AFFECTIONS WAS ARGUABLY RESPONSIBLE.
TODAY, THAT OMISSION IS BEING RECTIFIED; AND POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES ARE BECOMING CLEAR. THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CAN BE EXPECTED TO EMANCIPATE PEOPLE FROM BOTH RELIGIOUS AND SOCIALIST EFFORTS AT REPRESSION OF WHAT THEY REALLY WANT.
NEW SEXUAL TECHNOLOGY ONCE SOUNDED THE DEATH KNELL OF CHRISTIANITY. TODAY IT SOUNDS THE END OF WELFARE STATISM. CHOICE BEGINS HERE -- THOUGH MANY WILL DOUBTLESS CONTINUE TO SEEK TRADITIONAL FORMS OF ROMANCE.
INTRODUCTORY QUOTATIONS
"….our civilisation will have to learn to come to terms with the claims of our sexuality."
Sigmund Freud, 1898.
"….in the female rat, the maternal 'drive' is the strongest of all those experimentally measured and compared -- including hunger, thirst and sex."
William McDougall, 1932, The Energies of Men: A Study of the Fundamentals of Dynamic Psychology. London : Methuen.
"The actor Jack Carson, a friend, was puzzled....by the number of handsome, muscular servicemen who seemed always to surround [the filmstar, Bette Davis], often to the exclusion of far more beautiful actresses. He asked one of them what the attraction was. The young man replied, "I hear she screws like a mink." ….[Bette Davis herself said: "Sex is] God's joke on humanity. It is the man's last stand at superintendency.... ....Remember, the most steadfast friend is your work. My work has been the big romance in my life." ….[But she added:] "The first months of a child are spectacularly exciting. [Although I never considered giving up my career,] my life seemed full without it.""
James Spada, 1993, More than a Woman: the Intimate Biography of Bette Davis. New York : Bantam. {Bette Davis was a prime box office attraction between 1937 and 1946 and won two Academy Awards.}
"I can't speak for women, but I know what men are about. I know about m*********n' men: They want to f**k. Men are dogs. They would like to sniff it and f**k it, now if not sooner. Men reading this right now are shaking their heads and saying to themselves, "Damn, Ice, shut the f**k up." As kids we were taught to make you believe we have other reasons to talk to you. At school, we'll walk up to you and ask, "What's your name? How are you doing?" But what we're really saying is, "Man, I want to f**k you." This is what drives the male. Women should give me a special service award for tipping them off."
'Ice-T' (as told to Heidi Siegmund), 1994, The Ice Opinion: Who Gives a F**k? New York : St Martin's Press.
"Having babies shifts and changes everything, not just your perspective but your energy -- and what you want to do with your life."
Imogen Stubbs (36, British actress, formerly pre-Raphaelite sex goddess, mother of two young children), 1997, talking to Mail on Sunday (Danaë Brooks), 7 xii.
INDEX
1. Sex and revolution
2. Forgotten sex
3. The new sex threat
4. Sex by tyranny -- or by contract?
--
1. Sex and revolution
What was on offer from Russia's 1917 Revolution? Selling out to Prussia and Austria? Nationalizing the public services? Not likely! Sex was what it was about. In the 1920's, nudist gatherings were a popular participator-sport for Russians. No town or hamlet was without its vodka-assisted frolics in the woods -- though better known for its frozen winters, Russia also gets hot in summer. In the Kremlin, Lenin kept his stunning French-born mistress, the chestnut-haired Ineva, as well as his wife, Krupskaya. In Kharkov of 1932, in the middle of the second great Ukraine famine, the young communist, Arthur Koestler, recorded the shops as being empty of everything but postage stamps, fly paper and the latest fashion accessories, contraceptives.
How so sex-obsessed? It is simple. Outside still-rural Russia, communism had little appeal for the sophisticated urban dwellers of Berlin, London, Paris and Vienna. Marx had thus been mistaken. It was not factory workers who wanted to be freed from the shackles of capitalism. Instead, revolution was a Wow in the West's largely mediaeval outback. So it would remain through the twentieth century. China, Cuba, Angola, Chile, Nicaragua: in such places, revolution was more fun than traditional society and its staple of organized religion. Of largely rural countries having literate capitals, only India proved immune to communism -- because of the emergence within its own traditional caste system of an English-speaking middle class, because the Hindu sexual code was already relaxed (especially for men), and because, by the 1950's, Russia was content with India as an ally against Red China so did little to foment unrest. After the Soviet Empire fell, it was its outlying regions (including Slavic brothers in Serbia) who clung most tenaciously to communism's liberation from the strict sexual codes of Orthodoxy and Islam. Under Soviet communism (especially after the carnage of 1914 to 1921), there was a young woman for every man; and pregnancy need no longer result in a child.
Until 1917, Russian Orthodoxy had remained, in Europe, the most repressive form of Christianity on offer. After the Revolution, divorce and abortion were a liberation for Russians -- a lusty lot at the most depressed of times. President Brezhnev's daughter, Galina, exemplified the pace in her involvements with circus strongmen, trapeze artists and lion tamers which led on (with the help of her bisexual lover, the Bolshoi dancer, Boris the Gipsy) to regular orgies in Moscow -- according to her 1998 obituary in London's Guardian newspaper. By the 1980's, the average Russian woman had undergone seven abortions -- a woman's 'right to choose' having been allowed even during most of Joseph Stalin's 30-year reign of terror. The Russian international reputation and self-image may be of people whose chief art form is massive inebriation; but a 1996 survey by the magazine Cosmopolitan of its readers in 29 countries found Moscow's women made love daily: they were twice as 'sexy' as world averages -- both in frequency of sexual congress and in the number of coital positions which they used. By 1999, Moscow was a notoriously delightful sex capital where high-powered graduettes in philosophy and medicine could be rented for extended periods -- or just for one decorously dirty night. Even after Secretary General Gorbachev's exposure to the world that communism had been a flop, a third of Russians continued to vote communist. Marxist-Leninism provided an affordable and, through those Russian winters, a well-heated room for the man between women. – By contrast, seduction of a new woman remained a problem for a man in the West. There, restrictions on abortions till the 1970's made women cautious about affairs with men having only a hotel room to offer, and couples often had to stay together for the sake of the mortgage.
Despite occasional hang-ups, the twentieth-century story outside Russia was similar. Sexual change occurred quickly while neoliberal economic change was glacial. Politicians and economists argued about the role of the state in the economy; but Western governments of all political colours steadily took around 35% of Gross National Product from 1914 onwards. Whether Britain's Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey, was 'squeezing the rich till the pips squeak' or Mrs Thatcher was denying the existence of 'society', the British Government spent 40% of its people's incomes for them. (Tax rates were lower in non-Western countries where men still provided 100% financial support for their wives.) Yet people had vastly increased freedom in sex and marriage. By 1928, the Church of England no longer required 'obedience' in a wife. After 1968 -- by which time the young had grown tired of standard-issue left-wing politics, as instantiated in the trade unions -- 'trial marriage' and 'living in sin' became commonplace in Europe. In the USA of 1998, despite the competing attractions of the Internet, strip shows grossed more than all other live entertainments together (including rock concerts and Broadway theatre) in what was by then the West's most religious country (rivalling Northern Ireland in the quantity and quality of new church buildings per caput); and in London of 1999 the West's liberation of Kosovo quickly produced hundreds of ethnic Albanian prostitutes for Soho. Around the world, sex tourism and migration broke all former taboos. Planeloads of Japanese businessmen would arrive in Manila to barter in packed theatres for girls for the night; Bangkok, Colombo and Havana each became as much a legend for 'paedophilia' as had San Francisco for sodomy; Asian girls streamed to the West to find the tall (and reasonably prosperous) men of their dreams. Victorian ladies would have swooned clean away had they contemplated the depictions of hunky musclemen and spread-eagled lovelies that would be purchasable from any station bookshop by the end of the twentieth century; and Victorian clubmen would have been [as is now said] gobsmacked to learn that a 1990's annual dinner at a Scottish mansion for 350 directors and top sales staff of a top UK company would involve comedians discussing 'whether size mattered' for the bedroom performance of the dinner-jacketed businessmen with their sometimes tattooed wives. For the millennial year 2000, BBC television was to begin showing South American 'dirty dancing' in which girls drape deliciously back over the lowered arm of the swain, leaving little of their crotchless panties and even pudenda to the imagination. Even the problems of sexual disease that prophets of doom predicted were largely overcome by Western state-funded medicine -- though vigorous, unlubricated, 'hot & dry' intercourse took a toll in undernourished Africa. The age of a typical British girl's first intercourse dropped from 22 to 15; thirteen-year-old mothers ceased to attract newspaper headlines and one eleven-year-old produced her baby on her parents' bathroom floor to the surprise of all parties. The twentieth century was about sex. By the 1990's, virtually all young adult Catholics in Spain, Italy and Ireland defied the special Roman doctrine, against contraception, on which successive Popes had insisted. The Christian Church had lost to Nietzsche and Darwin in the nineteenth century; and it lost to Marie Stopes and Alfred Kinsey in the twentieth. Yet worse was to follow for attempts to hold traditional moral lines about the sacramental relationship of marriage.
2. Forgotten sex
The traditional Western arrangement had been essentially that sex, marriage, family and well-being were virtually co-terminous for all but the landed gentry and victorious soldiers in time of war. Sex and its joys and prospects were only available to ordinary males in marriage -- except perhaps with girls who were likely to be pregnant by someone else already (usually the girl's boss or the boss's son). Was there a cost to breaking the links which Christianity had tried to maintain?
Remarkably, perhaps, the immediate costs to individuals were slight -- even if there were fears of how people living alone (without the loyal spouse of a lifetime) would cope with alcohol-fuelled old age. Men, at least, seemed to accept the deal whereby women earned more, the state spent more of people's earnings, and men themselves had more sexual freedom. With 'protected sex' or 'dry [extra-orifice] sex' a matter of course by 1985 (because of the risk of AIDS) women, too, embarked on hedonistic sex -- increasingly with well-equipped young male prostitutes who, in Vienna, advertised their services in magazines and visited ladies in discrete vans equipped inside with cocktail cabinets and boudoirs. The only serious discontents occurred when men found themselves paying, under divorce settlements, for ex-wives who had plainly set up with another man -- for both governments and women preferred to continue the arrangements of Christian marriage that required men to provide a meal ticket for life.
Otherwise, the only general problem was a curious one. Women reported their male partners to be 'uncommunicative' and even pre-occupied with soccer. Some women even developed an interest in soccer, hoping to discover the secret of that game's allure. Increasingly, however, women voiced suspicions that men might be 'insensitive' if not downright unfeeling as when -- largely banned from men-only evenings at a pub -- they drank himself into a stupor in front of the TV. Once upon a time, a man who escaped to his garden shed had been generously interpreted as working on his family's vegetables or on his children's toys. It was less easy to justify a late-20th-century male slumped on the couch surrounded by beer cans.
Accusations of that men were callous, barbaric and 'not in touch with their emotions' arose chiefly from a misunderstanding of male sexuality -- one that men themselves invariably declined to correct. Simply, men seldom communicate their sexual jealousy of their women. A man's propensity is to welcome all tokens that his woman's pregnancy will have been his own unaided work. Biologically, the assurance that he needs is given by the single-minded devotion of his female, her warmth in his company, her surrendering orgasmicity, and the simple absence of other males from her daily scene. For a male to voice jealousy once he has teamed up with a sexual playmate is to exhibit a lack of confidence; and women do not generally admire signs of weakness in men. Thus the man who expresses anxiety can easily find his last fate worse than his first. Not only will his wife be resentful -- as classically; but if she is genuinely loyal she may give up her job -- a disaster for the family. The man experiences old-as-evolution jealousy; but in modern conditions he reckons it dangerously uncool to be 'in touch' with such a feeling.
Faced with his working wife, just returned from a late-running office party, asking what was on his mind, the only correct response was therefore -- with his gaze never wavering from the TV's Match of the Day -- 'Just this **** referee, dear.' Inarticulate grumping about his wife's career-girl outings was only a new expression of the problem that is inherent in the male condition of not being the baby-bearer. No male company is welcome for a nubile wife apart from that of conspicuous eunuchs. In former times, the husband might even have silently resented his wife spending too long with the vicar.
Thanks to DNA testing, any man who doubted the paternity of his woman's children was actually able to set his mind at rest if he would just take a swab to the children's inside cheeks. By the 1990's, such testing was privately available -- even advertised on airport billboards in the USA. However, the state would not allow the male to slough off a faithless wife and her children at all cheaply. (Among the British, the law made no acknowledgment of the biology of parenting: legally, a mother was the person who provided a foetus with a womb, not the woman who gave a child 50% of its genes.) Thus the best solution for men was to make no effort to marry in the first place. Since few but the lowest-IQ girls now fell pregnant by accident, a historic male preference was thus realized. By the 1990's in the West, sex -- especially for the male -- began before age 16 and culminated in the shackles of marriage only at an average age of 28. Men were achieving an historic objective, even if marriage without their having patriarchal authority was a bruising and costly business as and when it did finally occur.
Nor did women themselves have to toil under any overall deterrrent costs of the new arrangements. Once, a jealous and uncommunicative husband might have seemed a strain. But life can have compensating pleasures -- including the modern state's willingness to command and attach male income to a mother. Moreover, sexual liberation had brought to light aspects of female motivation that had eluded Freud himself -- who, in the 1930's, had famously said he could not answer the question 'What does a woman really want?'
First, it had turned out that women did not in general want children -- at least, not in advance of actually being delivered of a baby. Confirming what feminists had long intuited, women were generally content with contraception and abortion. Just like the many who had lost their fiancés in the 1914-18 Great War, childless women could settle well to a life of good works. It is single men who turn to alcohol, fast cars, faster sex and suicide -- not single women. Thus, in late-twentieth-century 'relationships', it was the women who would take more contraceptive effort than men. It was men who declined to undergo the simple (and often reversible) vasectomies that could have freed both marital partners from the burdens of unwanted children.
So contented were women with their careers (often in state employment as doctors, teachers, nurses, social workers, secretaries and school dinner ladies) that European birth-rates dropped well below replacement rates even in largely Catholic countries which frowned on contraception. By the 1990's, completed family sizes even in Italy and Spain had dropped to 1.2 children. (Birth rates stayed a little higher in Britain and the USA because of generous welfare allowances for single-parent mothers which discouraged abortion and because of the failure of duller girls to master contraceptive technology. The English-speaking peoples had never talked much about sex, for their elite had historically solved its major problems by keeping wives in the countryside and by sending children off to single-sex boarding schools from an early age. Thus they had a problem providing explicit sex education for teenagers -- especially since teenagers weren't supposed to be having sex till 16 and the apparent victors of 1945 understandably retained their historic respect for law.)
This negative aspect of female motivation, the lack of drive to have children, had a positive counterpart. The second discovery about women was that, though most of them did not feel any lack of children in advance of having them, they were far more devoted to such children as they acquired than Freud or most other psychological theorists had ever realized. By 1930, the Harvard psychology professor, William McDougall -- a philosopher-scientist who kept the flag flying for 'instincts' while American behaviourists were coming to assert the paramountcy of 'conditioning' -- was announcing the answer. Laboratory experiments elsewhere in the USA had shown the remarkable degree of electric shock that female rats would endure to regain access to their young: such deprived mother rats would put up with more pain than any other experimental animals. Freud had thought eros and thanatos [the death wish] major drives; but maternos was plainly stronger -- once the female mammal was equipped with her progeny and associated hormonal changes.
Perhaps because most psychologists were men (or spinsters, like the leading female analysts -- Freud's daughter, Anna, and Karen Horney), the strength of maternal attachment remained unappreciated in psychology textbooks. Certainly behaviourists, with their faith in the importance of training, were ill-at-ease with deep and powerful drives of any kind -- including even sex and aggression. By the end of the century, however, the pattern was clear. Far from immature girls breeding promiscuously with the help of state welfare benefits -- a scenario which excited the tabloid newspapers and some conservatives -- a teenager who became pregnant and who had left abortion too late (often out of fear of parental or priestly wrath) would take her baby off to the flat provided by her local council, and that would often -- despite fears of her louche personality -- be the end of the matter. Just as filmstars and career women were content with the one 'designer baby' which they allowed themselves in their thirties, so 17-year-old mothers of out-of-wedlock children, or 25-year-old victims of early divorce, would settle down for life with their one child. It is only when a woman has been hormonally triggered into maternal attachment that she may steal a child; and adoptive homes are typically perfectly loving and satisfactory -- though the adoptive mother has often gone in for adoption after the experience of a lost pregnancy that has awakened her interest in cuddly infants. The fabled 'maternal instinct' that Christianity wisely placed at the centre of its religious system, is not for a woman to have children. Rather, it is for her to love the children she has. It is a supremely powerful drive that can be experienced and indeed enjoyed without a husband and without any more than a single child.
Evolutionarily, this makes sense. The woman who has a child can have few more babies without risk to her health and ability to provide resources for the first child. She is well advised to concentrate principally on nurturing the child she already has. By contrast, a man can be cavalier about the loss of children claimed as his. He has invested little in them by the time of birth, and he has just shown that he can easily have more.
Infants, for their part, reciprocate and encourage maternal attachment in a way that goes far beyond their need for food and immediate shelter. This discovery, too, belongs to the late twentieth century -- though Freud anticipated it when holding that an infant's desire for its mother and her breast was essentially sexual, and the married female analyst, Melanie Klein, captured in her theorizing the full intensity of the mother-child relationship (especially of the infant's voracity at the breast). What became clear was that, via hormonal mechanisms, an infant's non-nutritive sucking has a suppressant effect on maternal fertility. The breast-loving infant will typically manage to delay the arrival of a new sibling by some eighteen months -- and further delay could be achieved in conditions of one-room living by the child becoming distressed at its parents preparing to make love (what Freudians called the child's horror at 'the primal scene').
Fertility-suppressant suckling may not seem of great importance -- except perhaps to aristocrats eager to have sons. However, in third world conditions, such as prevailed for much of humanity until the twentieth century, the strongest predictor of an infant's dying before age five is that its mother has produced a subsequent sibling. Closely spaced births would have mattered little to an infant born into a high class home of eighteenth-century England. There, a wet-nurse would have been hired to provide the child with its birthright -- allowing the mother to become pregnant again while she was still young. In more normal human conditions, however, the arrival of siblings is a disaster for a child; so children are evolutionarily selected for the high level of sucking and allied 'loving' (clinging) that will prevent this outcome. It is small wonder the mother-infant bond is so strong and so rewarding to both parties. The gentry and aristocrats of previous eras realized this bond had to be weakened so as to achieve reasonable numbers of children from a selected wife. Today, however, our secure scientific knowledge of the phenomenon has a wider and politically devastating corollary.
3. The new sex threat
The cost of twentieth-century sexual liberation was not in fact to be paid by the adults who had taken their freedom from Christian marriage; or even by their children who were understandably content with the new arrangements of smaller families -- except when a divorce made them shorter in parental resources. Both men and women proved happy enough with the West's version of the quintessentially West African arrangement whereby reasonably prosperous men are as promiscuous as possible (typically maintaining several 'secretaries' in their firm whom they will trade with other businessmen in afternoon sessions at beer halls) and women look after their babies with more help from their own parents and siblings than from their child's father. The emerging Western pattern differed from its African ancestor only in involving wine bars rather than beer halls, evenings rather than whole afternoons, and support from a welfare state using about a quarter of national income. It is now becoming clear that it is the welfare state which is going to crack under the strain.
It is not just that the welfare state is producing too few young workers to support the many elderly and divorced people living alone without spouses or children to help them. That strain is beginning -- as social-democratic politicians like British Labour's Mr Frank Field have tried to recognize. Following Field's analysis, the realities were too painful to be faced by his UK Cabinet colleagues and so, a year after Mr Blair's government had taken office, Field had to resign. Most politicians stay silent and hope that the affluent young, even if they have suffered from their parents' divorces, will be too embarrassed to see relatives end their days in squalor. Nor is there overt anxiety about the cost to the Caucasian peoples or humanity -- despite White males having provided virtually the entire stock of the world's science, technology, music, painting, historical research and ideas of justice, liberty and democracy. On the issue of the future colour of the human race, the hope is apparently that what biologists call 'hybrid vigour' will result from the blending of the Caucasian, Asian and African races -- a result of which there is some chance so long as the crucial genes for Western creativity are not delicate 'recessives' that will simply be smothered by out-breeding. However, there is one very definite and serious challenge that arises from the West's sexual progress. This challenge is to the very idealism that has characterized Anglo-American world-wide empire since the victories over Germany in 1945 and the USSR in 1989.
For all their own unprecedented sexual freedoms and aspirations to socialism, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did not become welfare states. Whatever their limitations, they had a purpose and did not nanny their own people. Vigorous young men had been given more opportunity for sex than ever before. (Not least with each other -- for homosexuality and pederasty were encouraged among the Nazis, particularly because they gave a handle with which to discipline wayward party members.) And intelligent young women could easily become doctors -- even if Soviet wages for doctors were beneath those for factory workers. But there was little welfare: Hitler threw wave on wave of young Germans into suicidal combat; and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev finally revealed in the 1980's that a third of Russian 'hospitals' had no running water.
In contrast, post-1945 Britain and post-1965 USA targeted means-tested welfare on their society's poorest members. By 1998, Britain spent £333 billion annually on 'social security' -- more than on health, education and defence combined. (In Continental Europe, 'socialism' treated citizens more even-handedly and never abandoned social-disciplinary functions -- like identity cards, the registration of all citizens' addresses and, in Scandinavia, the maintenance of records of alcohol consumption.) Implicit in the Anglo-American liberal-left's effort was the assumption that it was proper to meet sheer 'need', i.e. to pay Danegeld to the bottom ten per cent of the population. -- And where could 'need' be found more conspicuously than in a fatherless baby? While Western Continental Europe discouraged the growth of any underclass, the USA and the UK handed over many inner-city areas to low-cost or subsidized housing -- helped in this by the ancient Anglo-Saxon preference for semi-rural family life involving, if not a farm, then a house with a sizeable garden in the suburbs, enabling families to be kept away from urban unpleasantness (and wives from the attention of other men).
Over the past generation, despite greatly increased all-round affluence, welfare states have expanded to provide not only treatment for sickness but cheap housing, education (or at least 'edutainment') till 21, long-term nursing care, cosmetic surgery, replacement surgery and artificial insemination. For children, state provision now includes, bouncy castles, safari holidays for delinquents and subsidized 'college' places for any child who can answer multiple-choice questions. (The only conspicuously unsolved problem is that of people who fall out with others in the council accommodation which they have been assigned -- for the free market in rented accommodation declined as so much housing provision was made by local authorities and universities. Currently, such stubborn victims of their own or others' mental illnesses and drinking become street beggars until officialdom relents and allows them access to the many deserted flats on vandalized council estates.) Yet, through all this provision, the assumptions have been that marriage is the normal condition from which single-parenting was a deviation; and that children are at least the product of citizens who had been sufficiently attractive to each other for sexual congress to have occurred. -- If the father was a foreigner, there had at least been available the substantial funds for his immigration that tourism once required. Moreover, when targeting resources on needy single mothers, Britain and America have at least reckoned that they were helping the children of men who had served their countries well in 1914-18 and 1939-45.
Today, all those assumptions are standardly violated. As happened in the first big sexual liberation of the 1920's, Hollywood filmstars and similarly well-remunerated people are showing the way. The top actress, Jodie Foster, has a baby with the help of a sperm bank; two of the Spice Girls have become pregnant without troubling to marry; and no female TV newscaster, despite her £UK80,000 annual salary, is complete without her list of demands for crèche facilities at her workplace so she can be ever-present for her out-of-wedlock child.
At a humbler level, in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, two young British women have similarly pointed the way to the future. They used sperm brought to them in a pickle jar to conceive a child that would adorn their lesbian relationship -- though their union, which had been blessed by a Church of England minister, ended in tears and drunkenness in 1998, just six months after the child's birth. At the time of the conception, in 1997, the women, neither of whom worked, enjoyed council housing benefit which paid for their cosy-enough, £270-a-month terrace house; the mother-to-be drew £56.85 a week in disability allowance for a slipped disc and income support; and her lesbian partner received a weekly £69.01 income support and £11.05 single-parent support for her own child. By 1998, in the hospitals of Dundee (Scotland's third largest city), the majority of births were to unmarried women -- not far behind the 70% rate of out-of-wedlock births to Black women that had come about in the USA by 1975.
What is happening here? Is a positive maternal drive to have children actually emerging at last?
Hardly! There can be no good biological vibrations associated with pumping sperm with a kitchen syringe. Anyway, such a drive, if it existed, would not stop at producing just the one child. No, what is shown here is that unmarried mothers manage well. They even enjoy the 'challenge' of single-parenting -- and indeed love their babies to bits. In this matter, the standard doctrine of 'women's liberation' has turned out to be seriously mistaken. Babies-in-the-hand are wonderful -- to women. Orgasmic breast-feeding will convince any doubters. Mothers do not like to tell men just how satisfactory a baby is. This is their secret, that they love their baby more than their husband -- just as the man's sexual jealousy is his. The new single-parenting is assertive. It is not an accidental deviation from any path of virtue. The woman has not been a victim of male domination for which sympathy could be appropriate. What has arrived is positive choice to dispense with manageable contraceptive restraint and the search for a satisfactory husband. Instead, the woman thinks she can succeed by state-environmental means in the classical game of getting ahead of the woman down the road. Among human beings, as in prairie dogs, the standard female prefers a female-exclusive life with her own offspring, and perhaps other relatives; but she is visited occasionally by a sleek and well-groomed male bearing gifts. No wonder homo sapiens comes top of biologists' rankings of species for lack of co-operation between females! What is happening is that pregnancy, which once involved unfakeable male enthusiasm for a female, is now becoming a matter of female calculation and fashion indulgence. Males merely top up occasionally the income that the female has from the state or from her (typically) state-funded career. What women really want has been discovered. The Christian role of the male is at an end. The real world is now that of women and welfarism -- yet for how long? Can welfarism survive the growing appreciation that babies are as much the loci of female choices as they are the loci of needs? In particular, can it survive what is the now visible next step -- the elimination of the male altogether from procreation?
4. Sex by tyranny -- or by contract?
The ending of patriarchal control of sex by means of Christian marriage might be no unmitigated disaster. As far as modern science teaches, women have always had around a third of their children by someone other than their husband of any one time. Even among the children a husband calls his own, about one in seven is not his by the blood group criteria used in household medical surveys both in modern Liverpool and in the well-stockbrokered 'Garden of England', Kent. What happens is that women are readily attracted by high-status males who make females feel good about their immediate security and longer-term prospects. Can ordinary wives really find the opportunity for so much adultery? No: the impressive male lover simply triggers female orgasm much more easily than the nondescript husband, thus yielding a high rate of pregnancy even though husbands perform 99 out of 100 copulations. Such spontaneous response to the alpha-male lover may seem a far cry from taking sperm from the freezer and bringing it to the right temperature; but the principle is the same. The important difference consists in today's lack of illusion -- for the male, for the female, and for public discussants.
Many women will doubtless make as sensible a choice of sperm as they did in the past. Moreover, given Europe's contribution to civilization, virtually anything that results in Western girls having larger families is to be welcomed. Yet one European creation will meet its end. As girls make their pregnancies a matter of rational calculation and public announcement, they will increasingly have their babies by the sperm of their favourite pop stars or composers. Moreover, as cloning becomes available -- already the Texas A & M University has undertaken to try to clone a dog for a pet loving millionaire -- it is inevitable that successful career women will be tempted to clone themselves. The trade-off is simple: cloning will give them a procreate having 100% of their genes instead of the mere 50% carried by an old-fashioned child. Nor will they have needed to down tools for nine months to bear the infant. Further, it is especially easy to love someone who has the same genes as oneself. -- Identical twins commonly discover such a bond.
As all this begins to happen, the cases for traditional Christian monogamy and for the social support of occasional deviations from it must simply collapse. Ordinary men will have no interest in traditional marriage or the payment of taxes in a scheme where women have abandoned even the pretence of wanting their children. Women themselves will not want to pay taxes to support other women who are conspicuously forging ahead in the quality or quantity of the children (or clones) which they produce. For both sexes, the new technological possibilities will reveal the future as plainly dependent on very practical choices of the present. People's interest in supporting by taxes the progeny of women who have chosen to clone themselves will be zero. The humanitarian imperatives that once fuelled socialized medicine will go into reverse If anything, it will be argued that there should be state disincentives to such 'unnatural' breeding, especially since the progeny will have only one parent figure instead of the two of the past and thus especially likely to become dependent upon the state.
In response to successful women visibly seeking 'superman' sperm or 'superwomen' clones of themselves, it would be open to men to equalize the score by cloning themselves. At present, it would only be a matter of guesswork whether men could feel the same love for a 'son'-clone-infant as could a woman for her 'daughter'-clone. Yet one thing is certain. The accidents of infatuation, impulse and opportunity will have gone out of the process of breeding. Nowhere in such scenarios can the state be called upon by even the most besotted welfare-ideologue to help 'a woman in her hour of need when her man has deserted her.' Plainly breeding will be something for which people themselves will have to take responsibility. Just as the drug companies will be working to improve erections, orgasms and the sexual attractiveness of people who prefer sex and breeding in the old-fashioned way, sperm banks and cloning will mean that people will have to be required to pay (or insure themselves for paying) the educational, medical and corrective costs of their own children (or 'child'-clones). No-one else is going to want to pay -- even though modern states will doubtless try to perpetuate (and promise to control) the more familiar human proclivities.
Barring tyranny, states will surely fail to orchestrate or reverse the arrival of babies who will now literally lack fathers -- just as politicians cannot manage to stop people relying for their old age on the presumed 'national insurance' contributions of a declining number of young people. So long as wombs can effectively be rented, as at present, people could, without any physical exhaustion, have as many clones as the 888 children credited to the Moroccan emperor, Moulay Ismal the Bloodthirsty. Only a tyranny run by elitists could provide state support for such breeding -- which itself would have to be done only by select men and women. Only a helot class of sterilized devotees of such an elite could provide the wombs and the labour that their tyrants would require.
The welfare state, which always had a problem in circumscribing elite activities, has now met its match. There can be so serious role for a state that makes up for people's unhappy 'accidents' when matters of health and fertility have become demonstrably non-accidental. Such states will either have to become true organizing tyrannies that seek the perpetuation of themselves and their elites; or they will have to hand choice back to people themselves -- insisting, as they do so, on future contracted provision for the young by real-time insurance.
Today, the emergence of maternal attachment as what a normal woman really enjoys is completing a Freudian century in which male eros and the sexuality of infants ceased to be under-the-counter matters. Just as the last turn-of-the-century found Freud's articulation of the importance of sex accompanied by technological advances in contraception (the rubber contraceptives), so today's emergence of maternos is accompanied by the arrival of the means to its large-scale realization. Last time round, the state stepped into the sexual arena where the church had failed. (It was the post-1870 urbanization of Europe, as North American wheat undercut farm prices, that had driven people from the land and their churches.) Twentieth-century Western states eventually liberated sexual behaviour of almost all kinds (except paedophilia -- for this reminded people of how much, and of how sexually they loved their own children) and required payment for sex by mass taxation.
This time, though there will doubtless be enormous controversy, and some states will hold out longer than others for 'Nature's way', the Western state will find no alternative to letting women have the children and clones of their choice. Already, this argument has been rehearsed and resolved in debates on abortion, with the upshot that Western states have ultimately backed a woman's 'right to choose' the contents of her womb.
Further, since subsidies from taxpayers for father-free (and sometimes mother-free) procreation will be unacceptable under the new understanding, governments will find themselves obliged to locate the costs of breeding securely with the choosers. Necessarily, in view of the many new forms of procreation, this will involve a multiplicity of types of family contract -- some between a man and a woman, but others between two women and a sperm donor, four women and a man who can support them, an adolescent girl and a rich married lover, or just one woman and her bank manager. Christian monogamy -- latterly a feeble restraint on sex and a disincentive to the making of serious family contracts that take individual wishes into account -- will be swept away as state authorities realize they will have to ensure due payment over decades ahead for twenty-first-century children. Along with state-backed monogamy (often very debased) will disappear people's current liberty to multiply 'needs' that have to be met from the public purse. Both the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of the individual will have to go.
Today, Russia is once more in the melting pot -- with a likely outcome that the Mafia will become the prime enforcer of contracts in much of Europe. Thanks to the politicians' lack of imagination as to what the state should be doing, such elemental free market forces will move in. Apparently, all that Russia has left after nearly a century of communism is a legal system that has been little used as politicians have preferred to beg and borrow the country's way to economic development. As Harvard's Emeritus Professor Richard Pipes has explained, Russia's history of needing to defend against Mongol invaders has left her with a hankering for authoritarian rule and with little respect for property rights (Property & Freedom, 1999). The route of selling land and of making proper, binding contracts has hardly been tried. It may be that this country -- so renowned for the vigour and patriotism of its people -- will develop ways of funding its family units for the future by a variety of tailor-made contracts, perhaps involving Western firms and cutting out the defunct political class of Moscow. Russia is better placed to break the statist mould than are many Western countries where so many jobs are now within the state-welfare sector of the economy and depend on the present recognition of 'needs.' The Russia that once produced nudist colonies in celebration of socialism now has the opportunity to let a thousand forms of sexual and acquisitive contract bloom -- some even involving polyandry, since Russian men will for a while be so poor and Russian women are so lusty. So long as basic justice -- the honouring of contracts -- prevails and allows long-term choices by individuals, the failed uniformitarianism of communism could yield to exciting experiments in true (self-chosen) community.
If so, it will be Russia that shows how people can live by loyalty to contracts that are made in elemental human trust -- or at least the hope of sex -- and realism. No matter which country provides most initiative, however, a century of European welfare will at last be over and a century of choice will begin. Sex and love and justice will assert their paramountcy in ways anticipated by few of society's current experts in economics, psychology or politics -- most of whom continue to think in terms of formulaic solutions to human problems that make no more allowance for individuals than that made by international capitalism. Notoriously, sex is a highly individual matter where twentieth century experts have totally failed to account even for why some people are hetero- and others homo-sexual in their orientations -- forget about what the beloved has to wear, in whatever precise bondage gear, and with whatever commitments to household garbage disposal and nappy changing. It may be hard for people to ditch the idea that there is some simple utopia for everyone (Renaissance Florence; Calvinist Scotland; Austria-Hungary; Tahiti; 1930's Berlin; Thatcher's London; Blair's Chester); but, freed once again to respond to their own true, passionate imperatives within binding unions of their own choice, people of the twenty-first-century will probably enjoy the best sex yet.
FINIS
An earlier version of this essay was submitted in September, 1998, to Stephen Brown, [email protected].
A draft was published as a supplement to McDougall NewsLetter, 22 xii '98 (http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch6.htm
BY BBCh2g2 author Richard IV ('Lanky')
Last revised in April, 2000.
SUMMARY
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY GAVE A LIBERATING RESPONSE TO SEX. INTELLECTUALS ADMITTED SEX MAY BE THE MOST POWERFUL HUMAN IMPERATIVE. TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES WERE UNDERMINING THE OLD MORALITY OF 'NO SEX OUTSIDE MARRIAGE.'
YET IMPORTANT BUSINESS WAS LEFT UNFINISHED. THE FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND FEMALE AFFECTIONS WAS ARGUABLY RESPONSIBLE.
TODAY, THAT OMISSION IS BEING RECTIFIED; AND POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES ARE BECOMING CLEAR. THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CAN BE EXPECTED TO EMANCIPATE PEOPLE FROM BOTH RELIGIOUS AND SOCIALIST EFFORTS AT REPRESSION OF WHAT THEY REALLY WANT.
NEW SEXUAL TECHNOLOGY ONCE SOUNDED THE DEATH KNELL OF CHRISTIANITY. TODAY IT SOUNDS THE END OF WELFARE STATISM. CHOICE BEGINS HERE -- THOUGH MANY WILL DOUBTLESS CONTINUE TO SEEK TRADITIONAL FORMS OF ROMANCE.
INTRODUCTORY QUOTATIONS
"….our civilisation will have to learn to come to terms with the claims of our sexuality."
Sigmund Freud, 1898.
"….in the female rat, the maternal 'drive' is the strongest of all those experimentally measured and compared -- including hunger, thirst and sex."
William McDougall, 1932, The Energies of Men: A Study of the Fundamentals of Dynamic Psychology. London : Methuen.
"The actor Jack Carson, a friend, was puzzled....by the number of handsome, muscular servicemen who seemed always to surround [the filmstar, Bette Davis], often to the exclusion of far more beautiful actresses. He asked one of them what the attraction was. The young man replied, "I hear she screws like a mink." ….[Bette Davis herself said: "Sex is] God's joke on humanity. It is the man's last stand at superintendency.... ....Remember, the most steadfast friend is your work. My work has been the big romance in my life." ….[But she added:] "The first months of a child are spectacularly exciting. [Although I never considered giving up my career,] my life seemed full without it.""
James Spada, 1993, More than a Woman: the Intimate Biography of Bette Davis. New York : Bantam. {Bette Davis was a prime box office attraction between 1937 and 1946 and won two Academy Awards.}
"I can't speak for women, but I know what men are about. I know about m*********n' men: They want to f**k. Men are dogs. They would like to sniff it and f**k it, now if not sooner. Men reading this right now are shaking their heads and saying to themselves, "Damn, Ice, shut the f**k up." As kids we were taught to make you believe we have other reasons to talk to you. At school, we'll walk up to you and ask, "What's your name? How are you doing?" But what we're really saying is, "Man, I want to f**k you." This is what drives the male. Women should give me a special service award for tipping them off."
'Ice-T' (as told to Heidi Siegmund), 1994, The Ice Opinion: Who Gives a F**k? New York : St Martin's Press.
"Having babies shifts and changes everything, not just your perspective but your energy -- and what you want to do with your life."
Imogen Stubbs (36, British actress, formerly pre-Raphaelite sex goddess, mother of two young children), 1997, talking to Mail on Sunday (Danaë Brooks), 7 xii.
INDEX
1. Sex and revolution
2. Forgotten sex
3. The new sex threat
4. Sex by tyranny -- or by contract?
--
1. Sex and revolution
What was on offer from Russia's 1917 Revolution? Selling out to Prussia and Austria? Nationalizing the public services? Not likely! Sex was what it was about. In the 1920's, nudist gatherings were a popular participator-sport for Russians. No town or hamlet was without its vodka-assisted frolics in the woods -- though better known for its frozen winters, Russia also gets hot in summer. In the Kremlin, Lenin kept his stunning French-born mistress, the chestnut-haired Ineva, as well as his wife, Krupskaya. In Kharkov of 1932, in the middle of the second great Ukraine famine, the young communist, Arthur Koestler, recorded the shops as being empty of everything but postage stamps, fly paper and the latest fashion accessories, contraceptives.
How so sex-obsessed? It is simple. Outside still-rural Russia, communism had little appeal for the sophisticated urban dwellers of Berlin, London, Paris and Vienna. Marx had thus been mistaken. It was not factory workers who wanted to be freed from the shackles of capitalism. Instead, revolution was a Wow in the West's largely mediaeval outback. So it would remain through the twentieth century. China, Cuba, Angola, Chile, Nicaragua: in such places, revolution was more fun than traditional society and its staple of organized religion. Of largely rural countries having literate capitals, only India proved immune to communism -- because of the emergence within its own traditional caste system of an English-speaking middle class, because the Hindu sexual code was already relaxed (especially for men), and because, by the 1950's, Russia was content with India as an ally against Red China so did little to foment unrest. After the Soviet Empire fell, it was its outlying regions (including Slavic brothers in Serbia) who clung most tenaciously to communism's liberation from the strict sexual codes of Orthodoxy and Islam. Under Soviet communism (especially after the carnage of 1914 to 1921), there was a young woman for every man; and pregnancy need no longer result in a child.
Until 1917, Russian Orthodoxy had remained, in Europe, the most repressive form of Christianity on offer. After the Revolution, divorce and abortion were a liberation for Russians -- a lusty lot at the most depressed of times. President Brezhnev's daughter, Galina, exemplified the pace in her involvements with circus strongmen, trapeze artists and lion tamers which led on (with the help of her bisexual lover, the Bolshoi dancer, Boris the Gipsy) to regular orgies in Moscow -- according to her 1998 obituary in London's Guardian newspaper. By the 1980's, the average Russian woman had undergone seven abortions -- a woman's 'right to choose' having been allowed even during most of Joseph Stalin's 30-year reign of terror. The Russian international reputation and self-image may be of people whose chief art form is massive inebriation; but a 1996 survey by the magazine Cosmopolitan of its readers in 29 countries found Moscow's women made love daily: they were twice as 'sexy' as world averages -- both in frequency of sexual congress and in the number of coital positions which they used. By 1999, Moscow was a notoriously delightful sex capital where high-powered graduettes in philosophy and medicine could be rented for extended periods -- or just for one decorously dirty night. Even after Secretary General Gorbachev's exposure to the world that communism had been a flop, a third of Russians continued to vote communist. Marxist-Leninism provided an affordable and, through those Russian winters, a well-heated room for the man between women. – By contrast, seduction of a new woman remained a problem for a man in the West. There, restrictions on abortions till the 1970's made women cautious about affairs with men having only a hotel room to offer, and couples often had to stay together for the sake of the mortgage.
Despite occasional hang-ups, the twentieth-century story outside Russia was similar. Sexual change occurred quickly while neoliberal economic change was glacial. Politicians and economists argued about the role of the state in the economy; but Western governments of all political colours steadily took around 35% of Gross National Product from 1914 onwards. Whether Britain's Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey, was 'squeezing the rich till the pips squeak' or Mrs Thatcher was denying the existence of 'society', the British Government spent 40% of its people's incomes for them. (Tax rates were lower in non-Western countries where men still provided 100% financial support for their wives.) Yet people had vastly increased freedom in sex and marriage. By 1928, the Church of England no longer required 'obedience' in a wife. After 1968 -- by which time the young had grown tired of standard-issue left-wing politics, as instantiated in the trade unions -- 'trial marriage' and 'living in sin' became commonplace in Europe. In the USA of 1998, despite the competing attractions of the Internet, strip shows grossed more than all other live entertainments together (including rock concerts and Broadway theatre) in what was by then the West's most religious country (rivalling Northern Ireland in the quantity and quality of new church buildings per caput); and in London of 1999 the West's liberation of Kosovo quickly produced hundreds of ethnic Albanian prostitutes for Soho. Around the world, sex tourism and migration broke all former taboos. Planeloads of Japanese businessmen would arrive in Manila to barter in packed theatres for girls for the night; Bangkok, Colombo and Havana each became as much a legend for 'paedophilia' as had San Francisco for sodomy; Asian girls streamed to the West to find the tall (and reasonably prosperous) men of their dreams. Victorian ladies would have swooned clean away had they contemplated the depictions of hunky musclemen and spread-eagled lovelies that would be purchasable from any station bookshop by the end of the twentieth century; and Victorian clubmen would have been [as is now said] gobsmacked to learn that a 1990's annual dinner at a Scottish mansion for 350 directors and top sales staff of a top UK company would involve comedians discussing 'whether size mattered' for the bedroom performance of the dinner-jacketed businessmen with their sometimes tattooed wives. For the millennial year 2000, BBC television was to begin showing South American 'dirty dancing' in which girls drape deliciously back over the lowered arm of the swain, leaving little of their crotchless panties and even pudenda to the imagination. Even the problems of sexual disease that prophets of doom predicted were largely overcome by Western state-funded medicine -- though vigorous, unlubricated, 'hot & dry' intercourse took a toll in undernourished Africa. The age of a typical British girl's first intercourse dropped from 22 to 15; thirteen-year-old mothers ceased to attract newspaper headlines and one eleven-year-old produced her baby on her parents' bathroom floor to the surprise of all parties. The twentieth century was about sex. By the 1990's, virtually all young adult Catholics in Spain, Italy and Ireland defied the special Roman doctrine, against contraception, on which successive Popes had insisted. The Christian Church had lost to Nietzsche and Darwin in the nineteenth century; and it lost to Marie Stopes and Alfred Kinsey in the twentieth. Yet worse was to follow for attempts to hold traditional moral lines about the sacramental relationship of marriage.
2. Forgotten sex
The traditional Western arrangement had been essentially that sex, marriage, family and well-being were virtually co-terminous for all but the landed gentry and victorious soldiers in time of war. Sex and its joys and prospects were only available to ordinary males in marriage -- except perhaps with girls who were likely to be pregnant by someone else already (usually the girl's boss or the boss's son). Was there a cost to breaking the links which Christianity had tried to maintain?
Remarkably, perhaps, the immediate costs to individuals were slight -- even if there were fears of how people living alone (without the loyal spouse of a lifetime) would cope with alcohol-fuelled old age. Men, at least, seemed to accept the deal whereby women earned more, the state spent more of people's earnings, and men themselves had more sexual freedom. With 'protected sex' or 'dry [extra-orifice] sex' a matter of course by 1985 (because of the risk of AIDS) women, too, embarked on hedonistic sex -- increasingly with well-equipped young male prostitutes who, in Vienna, advertised their services in magazines and visited ladies in discrete vans equipped inside with cocktail cabinets and boudoirs. The only serious discontents occurred when men found themselves paying, under divorce settlements, for ex-wives who had plainly set up with another man -- for both governments and women preferred to continue the arrangements of Christian marriage that required men to provide a meal ticket for life.
Otherwise, the only general problem was a curious one. Women reported their male partners to be 'uncommunicative' and even pre-occupied with soccer. Some women even developed an interest in soccer, hoping to discover the secret of that game's allure. Increasingly, however, women voiced suspicions that men might be 'insensitive' if not downright unfeeling as when -- largely banned from men-only evenings at a pub -- they drank himself into a stupor in front of the TV. Once upon a time, a man who escaped to his garden shed had been generously interpreted as working on his family's vegetables or on his children's toys. It was less easy to justify a late-20th-century male slumped on the couch surrounded by beer cans.
Accusations of that men were callous, barbaric and 'not in touch with their emotions' arose chiefly from a misunderstanding of male sexuality -- one that men themselves invariably declined to correct. Simply, men seldom communicate their sexual jealousy of their women. A man's propensity is to welcome all tokens that his woman's pregnancy will have been his own unaided work. Biologically, the assurance that he needs is given by the single-minded devotion of his female, her warmth in his company, her surrendering orgasmicity, and the simple absence of other males from her daily scene. For a male to voice jealousy once he has teamed up with a sexual playmate is to exhibit a lack of confidence; and women do not generally admire signs of weakness in men. Thus the man who expresses anxiety can easily find his last fate worse than his first. Not only will his wife be resentful -- as classically; but if she is genuinely loyal she may give up her job -- a disaster for the family. The man experiences old-as-evolution jealousy; but in modern conditions he reckons it dangerously uncool to be 'in touch' with such a feeling.
Faced with his working wife, just returned from a late-running office party, asking what was on his mind, the only correct response was therefore -- with his gaze never wavering from the TV's Match of the Day -- 'Just this **** referee, dear.' Inarticulate grumping about his wife's career-girl outings was only a new expression of the problem that is inherent in the male condition of not being the baby-bearer. No male company is welcome for a nubile wife apart from that of conspicuous eunuchs. In former times, the husband might even have silently resented his wife spending too long with the vicar.
Thanks to DNA testing, any man who doubted the paternity of his woman's children was actually able to set his mind at rest if he would just take a swab to the children's inside cheeks. By the 1990's, such testing was privately available -- even advertised on airport billboards in the USA. However, the state would not allow the male to slough off a faithless wife and her children at all cheaply. (Among the British, the law made no acknowledgment of the biology of parenting: legally, a mother was the person who provided a foetus with a womb, not the woman who gave a child 50% of its genes.) Thus the best solution for men was to make no effort to marry in the first place. Since few but the lowest-IQ girls now fell pregnant by accident, a historic male preference was thus realized. By the 1990's in the West, sex -- especially for the male -- began before age 16 and culminated in the shackles of marriage only at an average age of 28. Men were achieving an historic objective, even if marriage without their having patriarchal authority was a bruising and costly business as and when it did finally occur.
Nor did women themselves have to toil under any overall deterrrent costs of the new arrangements. Once, a jealous and uncommunicative husband might have seemed a strain. But life can have compensating pleasures -- including the modern state's willingness to command and attach male income to a mother. Moreover, sexual liberation had brought to light aspects of female motivation that had eluded Freud himself -- who, in the 1930's, had famously said he could not answer the question 'What does a woman really want?'
First, it had turned out that women did not in general want children -- at least, not in advance of actually being delivered of a baby. Confirming what feminists had long intuited, women were generally content with contraception and abortion. Just like the many who had lost their fiancés in the 1914-18 Great War, childless women could settle well to a life of good works. It is single men who turn to alcohol, fast cars, faster sex and suicide -- not single women. Thus, in late-twentieth-century 'relationships', it was the women who would take more contraceptive effort than men. It was men who declined to undergo the simple (and often reversible) vasectomies that could have freed both marital partners from the burdens of unwanted children.
So contented were women with their careers (often in state employment as doctors, teachers, nurses, social workers, secretaries and school dinner ladies) that European birth-rates dropped well below replacement rates even in largely Catholic countries which frowned on contraception. By the 1990's, completed family sizes even in Italy and Spain had dropped to 1.2 children. (Birth rates stayed a little higher in Britain and the USA because of generous welfare allowances for single-parent mothers which discouraged abortion and because of the failure of duller girls to master contraceptive technology. The English-speaking peoples had never talked much about sex, for their elite had historically solved its major problems by keeping wives in the countryside and by sending children off to single-sex boarding schools from an early age. Thus they had a problem providing explicit sex education for teenagers -- especially since teenagers weren't supposed to be having sex till 16 and the apparent victors of 1945 understandably retained their historic respect for law.)
This negative aspect of female motivation, the lack of drive to have children, had a positive counterpart. The second discovery about women was that, though most of them did not feel any lack of children in advance of having them, they were far more devoted to such children as they acquired than Freud or most other psychological theorists had ever realized. By 1930, the Harvard psychology professor, William McDougall -- a philosopher-scientist who kept the flag flying for 'instincts' while American behaviourists were coming to assert the paramountcy of 'conditioning' -- was announcing the answer. Laboratory experiments elsewhere in the USA had shown the remarkable degree of electric shock that female rats would endure to regain access to their young: such deprived mother rats would put up with more pain than any other experimental animals. Freud had thought eros and thanatos [the death wish] major drives; but maternos was plainly stronger -- once the female mammal was equipped with her progeny and associated hormonal changes.
Perhaps because most psychologists were men (or spinsters, like the leading female analysts -- Freud's daughter, Anna, and Karen Horney), the strength of maternal attachment remained unappreciated in psychology textbooks. Certainly behaviourists, with their faith in the importance of training, were ill-at-ease with deep and powerful drives of any kind -- including even sex and aggression. By the end of the century, however, the pattern was clear. Far from immature girls breeding promiscuously with the help of state welfare benefits -- a scenario which excited the tabloid newspapers and some conservatives -- a teenager who became pregnant and who had left abortion too late (often out of fear of parental or priestly wrath) would take her baby off to the flat provided by her local council, and that would often -- despite fears of her louche personality -- be the end of the matter. Just as filmstars and career women were content with the one 'designer baby' which they allowed themselves in their thirties, so 17-year-old mothers of out-of-wedlock children, or 25-year-old victims of early divorce, would settle down for life with their one child. It is only when a woman has been hormonally triggered into maternal attachment that she may steal a child; and adoptive homes are typically perfectly loving and satisfactory -- though the adoptive mother has often gone in for adoption after the experience of a lost pregnancy that has awakened her interest in cuddly infants. The fabled 'maternal instinct' that Christianity wisely placed at the centre of its religious system, is not for a woman to have children. Rather, it is for her to love the children she has. It is a supremely powerful drive that can be experienced and indeed enjoyed without a husband and without any more than a single child.
Evolutionarily, this makes sense. The woman who has a child can have few more babies without risk to her health and ability to provide resources for the first child. She is well advised to concentrate principally on nurturing the child she already has. By contrast, a man can be cavalier about the loss of children claimed as his. He has invested little in them by the time of birth, and he has just shown that he can easily have more.
Infants, for their part, reciprocate and encourage maternal attachment in a way that goes far beyond their need for food and immediate shelter. This discovery, too, belongs to the late twentieth century -- though Freud anticipated it when holding that an infant's desire for its mother and her breast was essentially sexual, and the married female analyst, Melanie Klein, captured in her theorizing the full intensity of the mother-child relationship (especially of the infant's voracity at the breast). What became clear was that, via hormonal mechanisms, an infant's non-nutritive sucking has a suppressant effect on maternal fertility. The breast-loving infant will typically manage to delay the arrival of a new sibling by some eighteen months -- and further delay could be achieved in conditions of one-room living by the child becoming distressed at its parents preparing to make love (what Freudians called the child's horror at 'the primal scene').
Fertility-suppressant suckling may not seem of great importance -- except perhaps to aristocrats eager to have sons. However, in third world conditions, such as prevailed for much of humanity until the twentieth century, the strongest predictor of an infant's dying before age five is that its mother has produced a subsequent sibling. Closely spaced births would have mattered little to an infant born into a high class home of eighteenth-century England. There, a wet-nurse would have been hired to provide the child with its birthright -- allowing the mother to become pregnant again while she was still young. In more normal human conditions, however, the arrival of siblings is a disaster for a child; so children are evolutionarily selected for the high level of sucking and allied 'loving' (clinging) that will prevent this outcome. It is small wonder the mother-infant bond is so strong and so rewarding to both parties. The gentry and aristocrats of previous eras realized this bond had to be weakened so as to achieve reasonable numbers of children from a selected wife. Today, however, our secure scientific knowledge of the phenomenon has a wider and politically devastating corollary.
3. The new sex threat
The cost of twentieth-century sexual liberation was not in fact to be paid by the adults who had taken their freedom from Christian marriage; or even by their children who were understandably content with the new arrangements of smaller families -- except when a divorce made them shorter in parental resources. Both men and women proved happy enough with the West's version of the quintessentially West African arrangement whereby reasonably prosperous men are as promiscuous as possible (typically maintaining several 'secretaries' in their firm whom they will trade with other businessmen in afternoon sessions at beer halls) and women look after their babies with more help from their own parents and siblings than from their child's father. The emerging Western pattern differed from its African ancestor only in involving wine bars rather than beer halls, evenings rather than whole afternoons, and support from a welfare state using about a quarter of national income. It is now becoming clear that it is the welfare state which is going to crack under the strain.
It is not just that the welfare state is producing too few young workers to support the many elderly and divorced people living alone without spouses or children to help them. That strain is beginning -- as social-democratic politicians like British Labour's Mr Frank Field have tried to recognize. Following Field's analysis, the realities were too painful to be faced by his UK Cabinet colleagues and so, a year after Mr Blair's government had taken office, Field had to resign. Most politicians stay silent and hope that the affluent young, even if they have suffered from their parents' divorces, will be too embarrassed to see relatives end their days in squalor. Nor is there overt anxiety about the cost to the Caucasian peoples or humanity -- despite White males having provided virtually the entire stock of the world's science, technology, music, painting, historical research and ideas of justice, liberty and democracy. On the issue of the future colour of the human race, the hope is apparently that what biologists call 'hybrid vigour' will result from the blending of the Caucasian, Asian and African races -- a result of which there is some chance so long as the crucial genes for Western creativity are not delicate 'recessives' that will simply be smothered by out-breeding. However, there is one very definite and serious challenge that arises from the West's sexual progress. This challenge is to the very idealism that has characterized Anglo-American world-wide empire since the victories over Germany in 1945 and the USSR in 1989.
For all their own unprecedented sexual freedoms and aspirations to socialism, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did not become welfare states. Whatever their limitations, they had a purpose and did not nanny their own people. Vigorous young men had been given more opportunity for sex than ever before. (Not least with each other -- for homosexuality and pederasty were encouraged among the Nazis, particularly because they gave a handle with which to discipline wayward party members.) And intelligent young women could easily become doctors -- even if Soviet wages for doctors were beneath those for factory workers. But there was little welfare: Hitler threw wave on wave of young Germans into suicidal combat; and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev finally revealed in the 1980's that a third of Russian 'hospitals' had no running water.
In contrast, post-1945 Britain and post-1965 USA targeted means-tested welfare on their society's poorest members. By 1998, Britain spent £333 billion annually on 'social security' -- more than on health, education and defence combined. (In Continental Europe, 'socialism' treated citizens more even-handedly and never abandoned social-disciplinary functions -- like identity cards, the registration of all citizens' addresses and, in Scandinavia, the maintenance of records of alcohol consumption.) Implicit in the Anglo-American liberal-left's effort was the assumption that it was proper to meet sheer 'need', i.e. to pay Danegeld to the bottom ten per cent of the population. -- And where could 'need' be found more conspicuously than in a fatherless baby? While Western Continental Europe discouraged the growth of any underclass, the USA and the UK handed over many inner-city areas to low-cost or subsidized housing -- helped in this by the ancient Anglo-Saxon preference for semi-rural family life involving, if not a farm, then a house with a sizeable garden in the suburbs, enabling families to be kept away from urban unpleasantness (and wives from the attention of other men).
Over the past generation, despite greatly increased all-round affluence, welfare states have expanded to provide not only treatment for sickness but cheap housing, education (or at least 'edutainment') till 21, long-term nursing care, cosmetic surgery, replacement surgery and artificial insemination. For children, state provision now includes, bouncy castles, safari holidays for delinquents and subsidized 'college' places for any child who can answer multiple-choice questions. (The only conspicuously unsolved problem is that of people who fall out with others in the council accommodation which they have been assigned -- for the free market in rented accommodation declined as so much housing provision was made by local authorities and universities. Currently, such stubborn victims of their own or others' mental illnesses and drinking become street beggars until officialdom relents and allows them access to the many deserted flats on vandalized council estates.) Yet, through all this provision, the assumptions have been that marriage is the normal condition from which single-parenting was a deviation; and that children are at least the product of citizens who had been sufficiently attractive to each other for sexual congress to have occurred. -- If the father was a foreigner, there had at least been available the substantial funds for his immigration that tourism once required. Moreover, when targeting resources on needy single mothers, Britain and America have at least reckoned that they were helping the children of men who had served their countries well in 1914-18 and 1939-45.
Today, all those assumptions are standardly violated. As happened in the first big sexual liberation of the 1920's, Hollywood filmstars and similarly well-remunerated people are showing the way. The top actress, Jodie Foster, has a baby with the help of a sperm bank; two of the Spice Girls have become pregnant without troubling to marry; and no female TV newscaster, despite her £UK80,000 annual salary, is complete without her list of demands for crèche facilities at her workplace so she can be ever-present for her out-of-wedlock child.
At a humbler level, in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, two young British women have similarly pointed the way to the future. They used sperm brought to them in a pickle jar to conceive a child that would adorn their lesbian relationship -- though their union, which had been blessed by a Church of England minister, ended in tears and drunkenness in 1998, just six months after the child's birth. At the time of the conception, in 1997, the women, neither of whom worked, enjoyed council housing benefit which paid for their cosy-enough, £270-a-month terrace house; the mother-to-be drew £56.85 a week in disability allowance for a slipped disc and income support; and her lesbian partner received a weekly £69.01 income support and £11.05 single-parent support for her own child. By 1998, in the hospitals of Dundee (Scotland's third largest city), the majority of births were to unmarried women -- not far behind the 70% rate of out-of-wedlock births to Black women that had come about in the USA by 1975.
What is happening here? Is a positive maternal drive to have children actually emerging at last?
Hardly! There can be no good biological vibrations associated with pumping sperm with a kitchen syringe. Anyway, such a drive, if it existed, would not stop at producing just the one child. No, what is shown here is that unmarried mothers manage well. They even enjoy the 'challenge' of single-parenting -- and indeed love their babies to bits. In this matter, the standard doctrine of 'women's liberation' has turned out to be seriously mistaken. Babies-in-the-hand are wonderful -- to women. Orgasmic breast-feeding will convince any doubters. Mothers do not like to tell men just how satisfactory a baby is. This is their secret, that they love their baby more than their husband -- just as the man's sexual jealousy is his. The new single-parenting is assertive. It is not an accidental deviation from any path of virtue. The woman has not been a victim of male domination for which sympathy could be appropriate. What has arrived is positive choice to dispense with manageable contraceptive restraint and the search for a satisfactory husband. Instead, the woman thinks she can succeed by state-environmental means in the classical game of getting ahead of the woman down the road. Among human beings, as in prairie dogs, the standard female prefers a female-exclusive life with her own offspring, and perhaps other relatives; but she is visited occasionally by a sleek and well-groomed male bearing gifts. No wonder homo sapiens comes top of biologists' rankings of species for lack of co-operation between females! What is happening is that pregnancy, which once involved unfakeable male enthusiasm for a female, is now becoming a matter of female calculation and fashion indulgence. Males merely top up occasionally the income that the female has from the state or from her (typically) state-funded career. What women really want has been discovered. The Christian role of the male is at an end. The real world is now that of women and welfarism -- yet for how long? Can welfarism survive the growing appreciation that babies are as much the loci of female choices as they are the loci of needs? In particular, can it survive what is the now visible next step -- the elimination of the male altogether from procreation?
4. Sex by tyranny -- or by contract?
The ending of patriarchal control of sex by means of Christian marriage might be no unmitigated disaster. As far as modern science teaches, women have always had around a third of their children by someone other than their husband of any one time. Even among the children a husband calls his own, about one in seven is not his by the blood group criteria used in household medical surveys both in modern Liverpool and in the well-stockbrokered 'Garden of England', Kent. What happens is that women are readily attracted by high-status males who make females feel good about their immediate security and longer-term prospects. Can ordinary wives really find the opportunity for so much adultery? No: the impressive male lover simply triggers female orgasm much more easily than the nondescript husband, thus yielding a high rate of pregnancy even though husbands perform 99 out of 100 copulations. Such spontaneous response to the alpha-male lover may seem a far cry from taking sperm from the freezer and bringing it to the right temperature; but the principle is the same. The important difference consists in today's lack of illusion -- for the male, for the female, and for public discussants.
Many women will doubtless make as sensible a choice of sperm as they did in the past. Moreover, given Europe's contribution to civilization, virtually anything that results in Western girls having larger families is to be welcomed. Yet one European creation will meet its end. As girls make their pregnancies a matter of rational calculation and public announcement, they will increasingly have their babies by the sperm of their favourite pop stars or composers. Moreover, as cloning becomes available -- already the Texas A & M University has undertaken to try to clone a dog for a pet loving millionaire -- it is inevitable that successful career women will be tempted to clone themselves. The trade-off is simple: cloning will give them a procreate having 100% of their genes instead of the mere 50% carried by an old-fashioned child. Nor will they have needed to down tools for nine months to bear the infant. Further, it is especially easy to love someone who has the same genes as oneself. -- Identical twins commonly discover such a bond.
As all this begins to happen, the cases for traditional Christian monogamy and for the social support of occasional deviations from it must simply collapse. Ordinary men will have no interest in traditional marriage or the payment of taxes in a scheme where women have abandoned even the pretence of wanting their children. Women themselves will not want to pay taxes to support other women who are conspicuously forging ahead in the quality or quantity of the children (or clones) which they produce. For both sexes, the new technological possibilities will reveal the future as plainly dependent on very practical choices of the present. People's interest in supporting by taxes the progeny of women who have chosen to clone themselves will be zero. The humanitarian imperatives that once fuelled socialized medicine will go into reverse If anything, it will be argued that there should be state disincentives to such 'unnatural' breeding, especially since the progeny will have only one parent figure instead of the two of the past and thus especially likely to become dependent upon the state.
In response to successful women visibly seeking 'superman' sperm or 'superwomen' clones of themselves, it would be open to men to equalize the score by cloning themselves. At present, it would only be a matter of guesswork whether men could feel the same love for a 'son'-clone-infant as could a woman for her 'daughter'-clone. Yet one thing is certain. The accidents of infatuation, impulse and opportunity will have gone out of the process of breeding. Nowhere in such scenarios can the state be called upon by even the most besotted welfare-ideologue to help 'a woman in her hour of need when her man has deserted her.' Plainly breeding will be something for which people themselves will have to take responsibility. Just as the drug companies will be working to improve erections, orgasms and the sexual attractiveness of people who prefer sex and breeding in the old-fashioned way, sperm banks and cloning will mean that people will have to be required to pay (or insure themselves for paying) the educational, medical and corrective costs of their own children (or 'child'-clones). No-one else is going to want to pay -- even though modern states will doubtless try to perpetuate (and promise to control) the more familiar human proclivities.
Barring tyranny, states will surely fail to orchestrate or reverse the arrival of babies who will now literally lack fathers -- just as politicians cannot manage to stop people relying for their old age on the presumed 'national insurance' contributions of a declining number of young people. So long as wombs can effectively be rented, as at present, people could, without any physical exhaustion, have as many clones as the 888 children credited to the Moroccan emperor, Moulay Ismal the Bloodthirsty. Only a tyranny run by elitists could provide state support for such breeding -- which itself would have to be done only by select men and women. Only a helot class of sterilized devotees of such an elite could provide the wombs and the labour that their tyrants would require.
The welfare state, which always had a problem in circumscribing elite activities, has now met its match. There can be so serious role for a state that makes up for people's unhappy 'accidents' when matters of health and fertility have become demonstrably non-accidental. Such states will either have to become true organizing tyrannies that seek the perpetuation of themselves and their elites; or they will have to hand choice back to people themselves -- insisting, as they do so, on future contracted provision for the young by real-time insurance.
Today, the emergence of maternal attachment as what a normal woman really enjoys is completing a Freudian century in which male eros and the sexuality of infants ceased to be under-the-counter matters. Just as the last turn-of-the-century found Freud's articulation of the importance of sex accompanied by technological advances in contraception (the rubber contraceptives), so today's emergence of maternos is accompanied by the arrival of the means to its large-scale realization. Last time round, the state stepped into the sexual arena where the church had failed. (It was the post-1870 urbanization of Europe, as North American wheat undercut farm prices, that had driven people from the land and their churches.) Twentieth-century Western states eventually liberated sexual behaviour of almost all kinds (except paedophilia -- for this reminded people of how much, and of how sexually they loved their own children) and required payment for sex by mass taxation.
This time, though there will doubtless be enormous controversy, and some states will hold out longer than others for 'Nature's way', the Western state will find no alternative to letting women have the children and clones of their choice. Already, this argument has been rehearsed and resolved in debates on abortion, with the upshot that Western states have ultimately backed a woman's 'right to choose' the contents of her womb.
Further, since subsidies from taxpayers for father-free (and sometimes mother-free) procreation will be unacceptable under the new understanding, governments will find themselves obliged to locate the costs of breeding securely with the choosers. Necessarily, in view of the many new forms of procreation, this will involve a multiplicity of types of family contract -- some between a man and a woman, but others between two women and a sperm donor, four women and a man who can support them, an adolescent girl and a rich married lover, or just one woman and her bank manager. Christian monogamy -- latterly a feeble restraint on sex and a disincentive to the making of serious family contracts that take individual wishes into account -- will be swept away as state authorities realize they will have to ensure due payment over decades ahead for twenty-first-century children. Along with state-backed monogamy (often very debased) will disappear people's current liberty to multiply 'needs' that have to be met from the public purse. Both the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of the individual will have to go.
Today, Russia is once more in the melting pot -- with a likely outcome that the Mafia will become the prime enforcer of contracts in much of Europe. Thanks to the politicians' lack of imagination as to what the state should be doing, such elemental free market forces will move in. Apparently, all that Russia has left after nearly a century of communism is a legal system that has been little used as politicians have preferred to beg and borrow the country's way to economic development. As Harvard's Emeritus Professor Richard Pipes has explained, Russia's history of needing to defend against Mongol invaders has left her with a hankering for authoritarian rule and with little respect for property rights (Property & Freedom, 1999). The route of selling land and of making proper, binding contracts has hardly been tried. It may be that this country -- so renowned for the vigour and patriotism of its people -- will develop ways of funding its family units for the future by a variety of tailor-made contracts, perhaps involving Western firms and cutting out the defunct political class of Moscow. Russia is better placed to break the statist mould than are many Western countries where so many jobs are now within the state-welfare sector of the economy and depend on the present recognition of 'needs.' The Russia that once produced nudist colonies in celebration of socialism now has the opportunity to let a thousand forms of sexual and acquisitive contract bloom -- some even involving polyandry, since Russian men will for a while be so poor and Russian women are so lusty. So long as basic justice -- the honouring of contracts -- prevails and allows long-term choices by individuals, the failed uniformitarianism of communism could yield to exciting experiments in true (self-chosen) community.
If so, it will be Russia that shows how people can live by loyalty to contracts that are made in elemental human trust -- or at least the hope of sex -- and realism. No matter which country provides most initiative, however, a century of European welfare will at last be over and a century of choice will begin. Sex and love and justice will assert their paramountcy in ways anticipated by few of society's current experts in economics, psychology or politics -- most of whom continue to think in terms of formulaic solutions to human problems that make no more allowance for individuals than that made by international capitalism. Notoriously, sex is a highly individual matter where twentieth century experts have totally failed to account even for why some people are hetero- and others homo-sexual in their orientations -- forget about what the beloved has to wear, in whatever precise bondage gear, and with whatever commitments to household garbage disposal and nappy changing. It may be hard for people to ditch the idea that there is some simple utopia for everyone (Renaissance Florence; Calvinist Scotland; Austria-Hungary; Tahiti; 1930's Berlin; Thatcher's London; Blair's Chester); but, freed once again to respond to their own true, passionate imperatives within binding unions of their own choice, people of the twenty-first-century will probably enjoy the best sex yet.
FINIS
An earlier version of this essay was submitted in September, 1998, to Stephen Brown, [email protected].
A draft was published as a supplement to McDougall NewsLetter, 22 xii '98 (http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch6.htm
