Neglected or Misunderstood Page 11
Her belief that compulsion in education can be done away with is perhaps more importantly, however, a product of her belief in a child’s innate curiosity. It seems unlikely, she proposes, that a child would choose not to develop her potential through the learning centers, since ‘every child at first exhibits curiosity about people, things, the world in general and what makes it tick’ (213). This curiosity is deadened only when ‘unpleasant reality’ intervenes, and ‘the child learns to scale down his interests, thus becoming the average bland adult’ (213).
Perhaps she is over-optimistic in suggesting that compulsion could entirely be removed from children’s education. Perhaps not all learning can be made fun, although it might still be necessary, and children often cannot know what is in their long-term interests. But her comments have value in provoking reconsideration of education, and of why it should be that in its current form it seems to turn so many kids off. Governmental education policies in the UK, the US and other neoliberal societies are not focused on producing educationally rounded and critically engaged citizens, but on preparing the majority for various kinds of alienated work. As a lecturer in British higher education, all too often I encounter students whose intellectual curiosity has survived, rather than been fostered by, their experiences at school. School teachers rightly complain of having to “teach to the test,” of having to dissuade kids from thinking beyond the “model” answer, and of having to subject children to a regime of constant assessment that induces almost perpetual performance anxiety (for the teachers as well as the kids). Firestone’s comments try to think education in less instrumentalized terms: as a lifelong experience that makes available to everyone what is currently the preserve of the few – the chance fully to develop one’s potential and to find an occupation that is personally as well as socially valuable.
A second example of her optimism occurs in relation to the child’s prospective relationships with others in the household. Firestone believes that, freed from its character of property relationship, the adult-child relationship will become radically open to being determined jointly by both parties. They ‘would develop just as do the best relationships today: some adults might prefer certain children over others, just as some children might prefer certain adults over others’ (209). Some such relationships ‘might become lifelong attachments in which the individuals concerned mutually agree to stay together’ (209). But most importantly, ‘all relationships would be based on love alone, uncorrupted by dependencies and resulting class inequalities’ (209).
Highly controversially, the child’s freedom to develop relationships of many different kinds with adults includes ones that are of a sexual character.
Sex and sexuality
Firestone’s imagined utopia is an androgynous one. The anatomical differences that are considered to distinguish two sexes will continue to exist, but artificial reproduction and the ending of male privilege will mean that they will have become unmoored from their historical significance. ‘Genital differences between human beings’ will have ceased to ‘matter culturally’ (11). Men and women will parent or not parent on the same terms, have the same range of work and leisure pursuits open to them and the psychological differences that we today associate with the sexes will have ceased to obtain, since children of neither sex will be required to suppress any part of their personalities in accordance with gender norms. Not only will individuals be androgynous, but culture itself will be too, the Male (Technological) Mode and the Female (Aesthetic) Mode having achieved final dialectical synthesis in a revolution that ‘create[s] an androgynous culture surpassing the highs of either cultural stream’ (174).
Genital differences will have ceased to matter sexually too. The logical outcome of this psychological and cultural androgyny is that the category “sex” is unlikely to be a salient one in choice of erotic partner. Human beings will have shifted towards what Firestone calls a ‘healthy transsexuality’ (54) or ‘pansexuality’ (11) that is precisely not a matter of homosexuality or even bisexuality.
In fact, the Dialectic is littered with some rather discomfiting comments about homosexuality. Homosexual men are ‘often misogynists of the worst order’ she proclaims casually, in a discussion of how women are subjected to male-defined standards of beauty (136). But they are also the ‘extreme casualties of the system of obstructed sexuality that develops within the family’ (53). She does describe homosexuality as being ‘at present … as limited and sick as our heterosexuality,’ meaning that any sexuality that is predicated upon exclusion of erotic attachments based upon the category of anatomical sex is the product of sexual repression as it operates in the patriarchal family (53). But while she is aiming at a sexual liberation that will render obsolete the very categories “heterosexuality” or “homosexuality,” her frequent depiction of male homosexuals as either offenders or victims (at a time when gay sexual activity was illegal in the majority of US states, and homosexuality still an official mental disorder for the American Psychiatric Association) trades thoughtlessly in homophobic terms of reference, and acknowledges nothing of the progressive work being done by gay political activists at the time.
Firestone’s pansexuality is about even more than the undoing of sexual identities, however. Here, Freud comes back into the picture, with Firestone drawing upon his idea of polymorphous perversity. In Freudian theory, this refers to the condition characteristic of infantile sexuality (present more or less from birth) in which the infant’s entire body is capable of functioning as what Freud calls an ‘erotogenic zone’ – of producing pleasurable sensations when stimulated – and in which members of either sex may form the objects of his most intense yearning. This multi-formed (hence ‘polymorphous’) sexuality is “perverse” only from the perspective of what Victorian society considers “normal” sexuality – genital, heterosexual sex – and Freud intends no denigration in using this term. But the infant’s initial disorderly sexuality will undergo a process of territorialization, of classification into sexual and non-sexual zones, as the child’s body develops and as he or she enacts the repressions that society requires. Thus it is that most people subscribe to what is for Freud the entirely mistaken view of sex as having predominantly to do with genitals, with orgasm and as beginning only at puberty.
Firestone wants to undo this process, to obviate the need for the sexual repressions that produce fixed sexual identities and to return people to a ‘more natural polymorphous sexuality’ (215). This will change our very conception of the “sexual,” since, for Firestone, the very binary distinction between sexual and non-sexual feeling is a product of repression; what happens when as children we are taught that certain of our passionate attachments must preclude physical intimacy and pleasure. With emotional and physical affection fully reintegrated, ‘non-sexual friendship (Freud’s ‘aim-inhibited’ love)’ would disappear, since ‘all close relationships would include the physical’ (215). Sexual activity would form only one component within a ‘total’ response to another person, and as such, Firestone believes, exclusive desire for one sex or another would be unlikely, as this could only proceed from making a ‘purely physical factor … decisive’ (although she does speculate, rather oddly, that ‘all else being equal’ people might prefer the opposite sex for reasons of ‘sheer physical fit’) (54, 215). With this diffusion of physical/emotional love across all close relationships, monogamy would of course also disappear. She writes that experiments with “free love” have failed only because the institutions that bring about sexual possessiveness – primarily the family – have not been abolished.
What is it exactly that is supposed to make possible this revolution in sexual and emotional relationships? Firestone’s answer is that the replacement of the family by the household will remove the need for the incest taboo. In Freud’s theory, this is the taboo that instigates the ‘latency period’: the huge wave of repression that takes place in the (male) child at about the age of six, and that obliterates conscious sexual desire so complete
ly that the child appears then to be without sexual feeling until puberty. The child comes up against the incest taboo when he realizes that his passionate love for his mother is so disapproved of by his father that he is threatened with a punishment that is presented, or that he interprets, as a threat to his genitals (castration). In “normal” development the child resolves this dilemma by identifying with his father, which means internalizing the father’s prohibition as his own, and through this he is able to repress the sexual part of his feeling for his mother and transform this into a current of “pure” affection. In Firestone’s rereading of Freud, as we have seen, the boy’s renunciation of his mother has less to do with phantasmatic fears for his penis and more to do with paternal inducements to side with him in return for access to the world of ‘travel and adventure’ (53). It is nonetheless the case, she thinks, that this and subsequent repressions required to bring about ‘sexual normality’ come at the cost of great ‘psychological penalties’ and make ‘a totally fulfilled sexuality impossible for anyone’ (52–3). The reason for the widespread belief that women have a lower sex-drive than men is, she thinks, that the sexual role to which women are pressurized to conform is particularly unsatisfying; although she notes that damaged male sexuality is more harmful – ‘the confusion of sexuality with power, hurts others’ (53).
Firestone believes that the incest taboo will have ‘lost its function’ within the household, since this being such a ‘transient social form’ there would not be ‘the dangers of inbreeding’ (215). However, the gist of her discussion of this taboo is not to see it as a biological imperative, but as a symptom ‘of the power psychology created by the family’ (51) as the patriarchal father claims sexual possession of the mother for himself, obliging his sons to go outside the family to satisfy their own erotic needs. In a reproductive unit that is not premised upon relationships of property in others, this psychological imperative will not apply.
Thus it is that Firestone reaches her highly controversial views on children and sexuality. Without the incest taboo, there will be no repression of childhood sexuality and no dichotomizing of erotic and affectionate feelings – the child will be free to develop relationships that include as much of a physical and erotic dimension as it desires. These may be exclusively with other children, she speculates, but ‘if not, if he should choose to relate sexuality [sic] to adults, even if he should happen to pick his own genetic mother, there would be no a priori reason for her to reject his sexual advances’ (215). Firestone further writes that
Relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of – probably considerably more than we now believe – but because genital sex would no longer be the central focus of the relationship, lack of orgasm would not present a serious problem. (215)
The sexual abuse of children is total anathema to what Firestone is proposing. Nor is she advocating what today might be called the sexualization of children, since what she aims to enable is precisely not the imposition upon children of a sexual awareness that comes from adults, but the expression of what she believes is the sexual feeling that is within children themselves, and only currently repressed. But are not these comments nonetheless dangerously naive, opening the door to the sexual exploitation of children by adults? Firestone would no doubt want to say that this could not happen; that even if a pedophilic drive should still exist after the family and its sexual deformations had been eliminated (which she would presumably doubt), the household’s diffused structure of parenting would mean that there were always other adults to whom a child being mistreated could turn for protection. Yet this assumes the capacity of the child to recognize and identify an adult’s behavior towards them as abusive rather than loving.
Here a problem I have already noted reappears in its starkest form, and it has to do with a malleability required of childhood by some of Firestone’s proposals. It is one thing to say – as Firestone does in her chapter, ‘Down with Childhood’ – that childhood is historically variable; that how children are thought about, and even what they are actually like, varies under different social conditions. This is, I think, unquestionably true. But it is another to treat childhood as being infinitely plastic, as though there were nothing intrinsic to the early years of human life that constrains what it can become. Firestone does not in fact say only that childhood will be transformed. She says that the very concept will be ‘abolished’ (214). She means that “childhood” is simply the sentimentalizing name given to a state of dependence that is artificially imposed upon the very young and that can, under the right circumstances, be thrown off. Her liberated children are in fact in many ways indistinguishable from adults, possessing a capacity for insight into their own long-term interests and judgment as to the motivations and characters of others that many adults struggle to achieve. If one does not trust that even under the radically transformed circumstances of the household children could become like this, then some of her proposals look not only unfeasible, but in some cases, complacently, dangerously, so.
Perhaps a similar problem relates to her discussion of sexuality more generally. It’s important to note, first of all, what liberated sexuality for her is not. It is not what we have today, despite what might seem to be an acceptance of a vastly wider range of sexual attitudes and practices. It is not Ann Summers on the high street and sex toys at hen parties. It is not Internet pornography, and the desire of young males for a girlfriend who is up for everything he has seen on the web. It is not pole dancing clubs, and Girls Gone Wild, and naked dating shows on TV. These things, which feminist writers today including Ariel Levy and Natasha Walter describe as the pornification of culture,63 would have been considered by Firestone to fall under the category of repressive de-sublimation. This concept, taken from Herbert Marcuse, Firestone describes as what happens when a limited revolution is won within the context of a still-existent repressive structure: ‘only a more sophisticated repression can result’ (57). Sexuality is released into ‘“formerly tabooed dimensions and relations”’ but in a manner that is only the appearance of a loosening of social control (57). The sexual feeling that seems to have been made free is in reality being put to work – in the interests of the economy, in the interests of male domination.
Firestone is seeking, by contrast, a genuine undoing of sexuality from its commodification. In common with many thinkers of the second wave, she seems to hold that there is an authentic sexuality waiting to be rediscovered. A term she frequently uses to characterize the sexualities of her day is deformation, suggesting a true form that is bent out of shape by the distorting forces of patriarchal capitalism. Later in the 1970s, French theorist Michel Foucault would offer a conceptualization of sexuality and power that if true would make such an idea – while perhaps attractive – difficult to maintain. For Foucault, sexuality is not repressed by power; it does not await liberation from it. Rather, sexuality is always the product of power relations: pleasure and desire are made possible by power’s operations. There is no sexuality that pre-exists power, or is conceivable outside of it.64
Firestone, however, grounds her ideas of a sexuality that is to be liberated in nature: ‘in our new society, humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality – all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged’ (187). Ironically, and as Nina Power also notes, despite the Dialectic’s powerful arguments against the romanticization of nature, wherever ‘natural’ appears in the context of discussing sexuality, it has taken on positive connotations.65 Since Firestone’s utopia is one in which domination has been eliminated from human relationships, it must be concluded that the ‘all forms of sexuality’ that fall into this natural sexuality do not include ones that involve a desire to possess, control or inflict suffering; that such desires are not native to human sexuality but are the products of the distorting influence of the patriarchal family. Not only is the sexuality to which Firestone wishes to return natural, it is also fundamentally nice.
The prob
lem is that this is difficult for Firestone to sustain. For Freud, polymorphous perversity is the condition of very young infants only; it is not a condition to which adults could or would want to return. The polymorphously perverse infant is such a chaos of drives and impulses that it cannot really be called a “person” at all. The infant is totally self-centered and among its impulses are ones aimed at hurting and destroying. It is only when what Freud calls the ‘reality principle’ sets in that the infant becomes capable of reckoning with an external reality and deferring gratification. A degree of repression is for Freud, necessary for the development of consciousness and rationality; it is certainly necessary for it to become a social being. Recognizing this, Marcuse had distinguished between what he called basic and surplus repression. Basic repression refers to the taming and controlling of primal drives that is needed for the emergence of a person at all, while surplus repression refers to any additional repressions that are only contingently required by a particular social formation (for example, the repression of homosexuality in some cultures). But Firestone makes no use of such a distinction. As Power again notes, ‘she refuses the argument that repression plays a necessary role in the creation of culture.’66 Or even, she simply ignores it. For her, repression can just be done away with, leaving a human being revealed as good in its nakedness. What this confidence about the innocence of polymorphous sexuality does is to discredit the possibility that there may exist something less knowable, less predictable or less likeable in natural human sexuality (if such a thing even exists). It is as if here in the Dialectic Firestone is not able quite to escape the clutches of hippie-Rousseaueanism: there is something good about the human being in his natural state, if only we could dismantle the bad institutions that corrupt him.