Posts Tagged ‘Stendhal’
Tenderness seeking an outlet – touching on sex, shame and bonobos
Confidences about passionate love are only well received between schoolboys in love with love, and between girls devoured by curiosity, by tenderness seeking an outlet – perhaps already drawn by the instinct which tells them this is the important business of their lives, and the sooner begun the better.
Stendhal, Love (De L’Amour)
There’s no doubt that we humans have cultural difficulties, depending on culture, and/or subculture, about the kind of sex bonobos engage in. In the WEIRD world we’re gradually becoming okay with female/female and male/male sex, but bonobos also openly (they don’t have bedrooms) engage in child/child, adult/child and old/old sex combos. I should add that this is mostly, and for the kids, exclusively, mutual masturbation. Some of these combos are so unacceptable to the WEIRD that I feel like a criminal in even raising the matter. We’re still generally critical of non-monogamous sexual behaviour, especially for women, though in my recent reading of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World: a family history (and in viewing many Korean historical dramas), I’ve learned of countless potentates keeping hordes of concubines, and even of powerful women maintaining a stream of male and female lovers. However, for most of us in the WEIRD world, monogamy, whether serial or ‘till death us do part’, has become so culturally normative that any sexual feelings outside of that norm elicit a sense of guilt and betrayal. Simone de Beauvoir describes the problem in The prime of life:
I had surrendered my virginity with glad abandon: when heart, head, and body are all in unison, there is high delight to be had from the physical expression of that oneness. At first I had experienced nothing but pleasure, which matched my natural optimism and was balm to my pride. But very soon circumstances forced me into awareness of something which I had uneasily foreseen when I was twenty: simple physical desire. I knew nothing of such an appetite: I had never in my life suffered from hunger, or thirst, or lack of sleep. Now, suddenly, I fell a victim to it. I was separated from Sartre for days or even weeks at a time…
S de Beauvoir, The prime of life, pp 54-5
Beauvoir is no doubt typical, in sexual terms, of women of her time – and perhaps still today, almost a century later – in the WEIRD world. Losing her virginity (a thought-provoking term in itself) in her early twenties as a ‘function’ of her first serious relationship with a man (Jean-Paul Sartre), opens up something of a mine-field for her. Beauvoir says nothing about her sexual feelings or urges before this time, though she must surely have had them. Then again, my perspective on such things comes from the late 20th century, hers from the early 20th century. I’m also male, which may or may not make a difference. My own experience, which I doubt is particularly exceptional, is that sexual arousal came early, too early to put a reliable number on it. Three years before Beauvoir’s birth, Sigmund Freud published Three Essays on the theory of Sexuality, in which he described infantile sexuality in broad terms, including thumb-sucking. All of which suggests that sexuality may be an ill-defined and elusive concept. Returning to Beauvoir, she describes a period of separation from Sartre:
I had emancipated myself just far enough from my puritanical upbringing to be able to take unconstrained pleasure in my own body, but not so far that I could allow it to cause me any inconvenience. Starved of its sustenance, it begged and pleaded with me: I found it repulsive. I was forced to admit a truth that I had been doing my best to conceal ever since adolescence: my physical appetites were greater than I wanted them to be. In the feverish caresses and love-making that bound me to the man of my choice I could discern the movements of my heart, my freedom as an individual. But that mood of solitary, languorous excitement cried out for anyone, regardless. In the night train from Tours to Paris the touch of an anonymous hand along my leg could arouse feelings — against my conscious will — of quite shattering intensity. I said nothing about these shameful incidents. Now that I had embarked on our policy of absolute frankness, this reticence was, I felt, a kind of touchstone. If I dared not confess such things, it was because they were by definition unavowable. By driving me to such secrecy my body became a stumbling block rather than a bond of union between us, and I felt a burning resentment against it.
Ibid, pp 55-6
These are complex emotions and sensations which surely lie at the heart of any relationship that purports or intends to be monogamous. One might claim that Beauvoir is over-thinking the relationship – you can have these thoughts and sensations and still remain faithful to the One. Another might claim that there’s no shame in these sensations, and if you act on them with others, why should that compromise your Main Squeeze relationship?
But there’s another factor at issue, and that’s the idea that we humans should have risen above these sordid sexual urges, and have at our best:
I learned with my body that humanity does not subsist in the calm light of the Good; men suffer the dumb, futile, cruel agonies of defenseless beasts. The face of the earth must have been hellish indeed to judge by the dark and lurid desires that, from time to time, struck me with the force of a thunderbolt.
Ibid, pp 56
There’s much to unpack and critique here, especially in the light of bonobo sexual and relational practices, which, it needs to be said, are neither dumb nor futile. Beauvoir is clearly referring to humans, rather than simply men, and she also apparently refers to ‘cruel agonies’ in reference to the actors as well as those acted upon. But of course, she’s describing an overheated emotional state within the context of a well-buttoned civil society. It’s ye olde standard contrast between cultured humans and brute beasts, which the anthropology, palaeontology and primatology of the 20th and 21st centuries have done so much to fuzzify. It’s perhaps worth noting that just as Beauvoir was struggling with her sexual demons in the Paris of the late 1920s and early 1930s, a new species of primate, very closely related to H sapiens, was being identified and investigated, a species whose sexual behaviours have gradually caused the cognoscenti, a very tiny proportion of the population even of the WEIRD world, to reflect upon the role of sexuality in both bonobo and human culture.
Again, it’s worth reflecting on how human culture, especially in the long period when religion held sway in the proto-WEIRD world, outlaws and debases ‘brute beast’ sexuality. Take this passage from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, describing the ‘saintly’Alyosha:
Boys pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak. More than that, much that soldiers have no knowledge or conception of is familiar to quite young children of our intellectual and higher classes. There is no moral depravity, no real corrupt inner cynicism in it, but there is the appearance of it, and it is often looked upon among them as something refined, subtle, daring, and worthy of imitation. Seeing that Alyosha Karamazov put his fingers in his ears when they talked of “that,” they used sometimes to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout nastiness into both ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried to hide himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their insults in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting him with being a “regular girl,” and what’s more they looked upon it with compassion as a weakness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p 18
This captures well, though par inadvertence, the hypocrisy of Christian civilisation – or, not just Christian, but every civilisation that seeks to repress the most natural urges, generally via religion. Alyosha’s saintly aversion to ‘that’ makes him a ‘regular girl’ among these rough-house schoolboys, but to apparently enlightened readers it characterises him as something akin to the Sacred Virgin, the ideal woman of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. We need to work harder at leaving all that silliness well behind us. We need more outlets for our tenderness and our kindness, whether sexual or otherwise, and so, Vive les bonobos.
References
Stendhal, Love, 1822
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 1961
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880
more frayed and fractured thoughts on the long and winding road that leads to your bonoboism
I have attempted to show, in my book The Second Sex [1949], why a woman’s situation still, even today, prevents her from exploring the world’s basic problems.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 1960
L’admission des femmes à l’égalité parfaite serait la marque la plus sûre de la civilisation et elle doublerait les forces intellectuelles du genre humain.
Stendhal, De l’amour, 1821
Little Women
The move towards female dominance in the WEIRD world has begun. Or has it? If so, it has a bloody long way to go. Here in Australia, our Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are male, but at least our Foreign Minister is female. As a relatively new country, federated in 1901, we’ve had 31 Prime Ministers, 30 of whom have been male. That’s slightly (or much?) better than the USA, with 45 Presidents, all male, from 1789. Of course, Australia’s only female PM, Julia Gillard, came to power in the 21st century (unelected ‘by the people’, due to internal ructions in the sitting government, though her party, the Australian Labor Party, went on to retain government in 2010 – but then the party dumped her before the next election). Our neighbour New Zealand has had three female PMs, one of whom, Helen Clark, managed to hold the post for nine years. And New Zealand was the first country in the WEIRD world to allow women to vote, in 1893.
We don’t have a presidential system, we have a far better party-based system, in which we vote for policies and party platforms rather than a one-on-0ne between two ‘I alone can fix it’ noise-makers. Having said that, I’m being a bit disingenuous – it’s very likely that a lot of Aussies vote based on the ‘personality’ of Mr Labour or Mr LNP (the federal LNP has never had a female leader, while federal labour has had only Gillard). But at least the party can dump their leaders at the behest of the elected members, and there’s nothing in the way of immunity or ‘pardoning powers’. And that goes for virtually every democracy in the WEIRD world, apart from the USA. Getting rid of all that bullshit would, I think, be a move in the bonobo direction for that teetering nation. Don’t hold your breath.
The bonobo world, as I see it, is not just a predominantly female world, it’s a collaborative world. And with a greater spirit of collaboration in the structure or design or evolved culture of a company or a discipline – think education, the law, but above all the sciences, which don’t suffer from the negativities of in-built adversarial systems (politics, courts, industrial relations) – more women will be attracted, and will succeed. The horrorshow regions of the world – China, Russia, the Middle East (including Israel) and much of Africa, Asia and South America, are mucho macho. Which, frankly, doesn’t leave much territory for women to display their wares. Those that succeed, politically, often do so by aping the confrontational male approach, to the delight of their male ‘advisors’. Pew research from a few months ago tells us that fewer than a third of UN member states have ever had a female leader, and that of the mere thirteen current female leaders, nine are the first female leaders of their nation. Of course, if we go back 100 years, when the League of Nations was struggling to survive, the situation was far worse. So unless change occurs exponentially, we’ll be waiting a few centuries before bonoboism takes its rightful place in our world.
And yet, we must take the long view. It has amused and annoyed me that so many scholars, who should know better, take issue with Steven Pinker’s ‘better angels of our nature’ and Peter Singer’s ‘expanding circle’. The evidence of extreme, mass human violence and cruelty going back centuries into millennia has been gathered and presented by countless historians, and the fact that so many millions were killed in just the past century or so of warfare is not due to our growing thuggishness and indifference to suffering, but the greater efficiency of our killing machinery, culminating in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki horror. Some may say this is wishful thinking, but I consider that double event as a watershed in our history. What followed was a period of unprecedented peace in the WEIRD world, and the establishment of a concept of universal human rights, developed and promoted by the indefatigable Eleanor Roosevelt, among many others.
Over the years I’ve known many individuals to sneer at and dismiss the UN as a toothless tiger, and it would be easy enough to enumerate its failings, but the very existence of ‘peacekeeping forces’ is, historically, a completely novel, and quite bonoboesque, phenomenon. After all, bonobos aren’t entirely non-violent, but they tend to employ violence only to prevent further violence.
Bonobos are less territorial than chimps. They both live in distinct troupes (think ‘nations’) but while bonobos are observed to share food (and cuddles) with bonobo foreigners, chimps are just as likely to engage in death-fights. In recent centuries, humans have created nations, whose integrity obsesses us, so that we patrol borders, we obsess over the ‘legality’ of those who cross those borders, we pride ourselves on being ‘us’ and not ‘them’. Before we developed those obsessions, an intrepid voyager, or ‘immigrant’, might have travelled from Albion, where I was born, to the European mainland, and on east for thousands of kilometres, to arrive at the northern Pacific, perhaps around where Vladivostok is now, without ever having crossed a border, or been asked to produce her ‘papers’. Of course she may well have been robbed or raped a few times along the way, all part of the adventure, and would’ve learned about safety in numbers, and the art of ingratiation… Intrepid travellers generally have many skills to rely on, for surviving and even thriving in new arenas, enlivening and enriching those arenas to the benefit of all, a process that has occurred time and time again – but when males have dominated, there has aways been a conflictual downside. If female dominance manages to become the norm, as one day, long after the eight billion humans currently doing their diverse things around the biosphere have passed away, I believe it will, this downside will be greatly reduced, and a true golden age for humanity, and for the biosphere within which it is enmeshed, will begin.
Or maybe not. I always like to have an each-way bet, even when I’ll never know in my lifetime what the outcome will be. Got to protect my future rep after all. But I really don’t think a future without greater female empowerment can be contemplated with equanimity. China, Russia, the Middle East and most of Africa are currently shithole regions for women, but arguably this isn’t because women’s situation has deteriorated in these regions. It has never been good for them, since their history has been recorded. Or perhaps not never. There have been brief periods – before the Ayatollahs turned Persia into Iran, for example, or when Catherine the Great introduced the idea of (limited) education for women in Russia – but it so often seems like one step forward then two steps back.
Anyway, Vive les bonobos. We need to keep learning from them.
References
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eleanor-Roosevelt
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Universal-Declaration-of-Human-Rights
Beauvoir, Stendhal, bonobos and the past
Canto: So, having read The Second Sex recently, I’m pondering over her essay on Stendhal, a writer I was a little obsessed with in the 1980s, in the years of my fading youth…
Jacinta: Right, so near the middle of that book Beauvoir wrote five little essays on five writers, treating of their treatment of women, from the most misogynist to – Stendhal. So the first four, in order, were Henry de Montherlant, D H Lawrence, Paul Claudel and Andre Breton.
Canto: Yes and she mentions Stendhal with affection in Memoirs of a dutiful daughter too, so it transports me back to my discovery of Stendhal’s work in the early eighties, and then, in the late eighties, my decision to write my French Honours thesis on Stendhal’s work, which led me to read and reread more or less all of his oeuvre, as well as much literary criticism, including, if I’m not much mistaken, Beauvoir’s essay.
Jacinta: And in that essay, she points out that Stendhal is more invested in the female characters than the males. His writing career is bookended by Lamiel, his unfinished last novel, and Armance, his first written work of fiction, which uses physical impotence effectively to disguise the emotional difficulties faced by the male lover, Octave…
Canto: Well I’ve been reading critiques, by women, of Beauvoir’s treatment of Stendhal’s treatment of women, and it all becomes a bit abstruse, but surely nobody wold doubt that Stendhal has a view of women that is very much out of synch with his time. But what most interests me, is the personal nature of his interest. Because I identify with it. I very much recall his account, in Vie de Henri Brulard, of his writing the names in sand, or was it dirt, of the women he loved (whatever that may mean), and who never returned his feelings. And watching the waves, or was it the wind, wash those names away. Stendhal was always a ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ writer, whose writing became most taut when emotionally charged. Few writers have had greater emotional impact on me than Stendhal, no doubt because I too have been a terrible failure in love, or lust, or whatever it is that brings bodily closeness, of the kind that bonobos manage so effortlessly.
Jacinta: Culture, and religion, and its aftermath, have left us with a legacy that makes physicality, so basic to other mammals, an arena replete with problems. The very process of writing illustrates this. Bonobos don’t write, or talk, they don’t put off spontaneity. If they’re spurned, as Stendhal was spurned by those he obsessed over, they find someone else, without giving up on their first choice. And if they’ve proved themselves, they might succeed in their first choice next time, without giving up on their second choice…
Canto: But maybe there’re bonobo versions of Stendhal, and myself, who don’t succeed in their first second or third choices…
Jacinta: Bonobo society is clearly inclusive. It’s not just about sex, but about closeness. That’s what makes for less violence and more collaboration. In the primate world, our world, greater female empowerment makes all the difference.
Canto: No bonobo left behind. But we have become ‘literate’, spectacularly, which has led to our science and complexity, Shakespeare and Newton and music and quantum mechanics and longevity and so many understandings of the universe and neutrinos and the butterfly effect and complex feedback loops…
Jacinta: And still there is warfare – involving the rape and murder of women – a feature of every example of warfare over the last 5000 years and more – and invariably perpetrated by men. Men men men men men men men.
Canto: What about Thatcher and the Falklands?
Jacinta: Complex, but initiated by the aggression of Argentinian males, and of course there are aggressive women…
Canto: Well getting back to Stendhal and Beauvoir, let me offer this quote from Beauvoir’s essay for our commentary:
Music, painting, architecture, everything he cherished, he cherished it with an unlucky lovers’ soul; while he is walking around Rome, a woman emerges at every turn… by the regrets, desires, sadnesses and joys women awaken in him, he came to know the nature of his own heart; it is women he wants as judges: he frequents their salons, he wants to shine; he owes them his greatest joys, his greatest pain, they were his main occupation; he prefers their love to any friendship, their friendship to that of men; women inspire his books, women figures populate them; he writes in great part for them. ‘I might be lucky enough to be read in 1900 by the souls I love, the Mme Rolands, the Melanie Guilberts…’ They were the very substance of his life.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Vintage Books, p261)
Jacinta: Sad. Mais touchant, tout de même. It seems like it’s both a joy and a torture. Joy in remembrance and contemplation, but suffering in the presence of their indifference, or disdain, or discomfort. And that’s how you feel? But then you have me. But of course you am I. Am you. Am I?
Canto: Haha, well it’s more like how I used to feel, before I became a dried out old husk. I could tell some comically sad tales of my youth, but now I think of these things in a more abstract way. And admiring the example of bonobos as the human way of the future is about as abstract as it gets, so I feel very comfortable about it. And I talk to myself a lot, but I’m not even sure any more if my imagined interlocutor is female.
Jacinta: Ah, the way we were. So, all passion spent, you can focus on more important things like war and peace, global warming, artificial intelligence, female empowerment, wealth inequality, the WEIRDening of the world…
Canto: And, of course, bonobos. I really would like to be one. Just for one day.
References
Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex, 1949
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a dutiful daughter, 1958
Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, 1890
Stendhal, Love, 1822