Understanding Americans - Some Key Texts

The cultured English mind, until recently, could be defined as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan, the Romantic Poets, the English Novel and the War Poets with Kipling, Sherlock Holmes and HG Wells added to taste. But Americans are not Englishman. Although there is a common linguistic culture and both cultures are being transformed radically by the internet-driven shift from word to image, there is a cultural continuity in liberal America that outsiders need to understand before they accept or contest it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are key texts that emerged from within American culture and took hold of the American imagination in a way that helped define this curious half-idealistic empire. Political texts such as the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address and general journalism and propaganda (which is the origin of the Federalist Papers) are taken as read. Similarly, we are speaking mostly of language although we include three films in our mini-canon.

Like all cultures, American culture is multi-faceted. Every generation produces its unique masterpieces and its defining forms but what we are interested in are the pivotal points where an entire culture shifts direction rather than sanctify some text which liberates or changes just a component of it. In that context, I suggest that there are three key phases in the formation of the American liberal mind which must be seen in the context both of official ideology (the political texts) and an equally important 'intellectual silence' from the conservative Right, seen as anti-intellectual by liberals but also representative of a small town and conservative culture of doing and believing.

The First Phase: The 1850s - Setting the Texts for the Cultural War Against The South

The surge of creative writing in this period (we must not forget the genre-creating work earlier of Poe) may now be seen as a concentrated revolt against puritan authority that was inherited from, but out of time with, English mores of 150 years previously - not in the direction of European materialism (Marx) and existentialism (Kierkegaard) but towards transcendentalism.

This is the point at which the Northern (but not the Southern) culture of the United States moves from being a dialectical variant of European culture into something new and distinctive. It is the point at which American idealism and commitment to absolute moral values turns from aspirational political theory into cultural reality.We may take the major texts, read in schools later, as these five:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (1850): Questions are raised about communitarian authority.
• Herman Melville - Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851): The intensity of questions of good and evil.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): Sentimentalism in the cause of the good.
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): American individualism bonds with the land and with the ideal.
• Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855): The poetic lauding of American earthiness

This immense flourishing of literature on the US East Coast in scarcely half a decade represented an America that was still an offshoot of British culture but that now asserted a distinctive urban liberal and democratic mentality that, in parts, and mostly unintended, helped to fuel the moral fervour behind a bloody war of conquest that was to be touted as a war of liberation after the fact.

This culture was later to invert itself somewhat into philosophical pragmatism as a result of horror at that war (as ably outlined by Louis Menand in 'The Metaphysical Club') and react against populist enthusiasm for moral absolutes but both the belief in force as agent of moral right and a measured antinomian belief in justice and rights over the forms of law has been a persistent value that drives American political action at home and overseas even today.

The Second Phase - From The Late Nineteenth Century to The Mid-Twentieth Century - Understanding & Reforming The Imperium

The first phase was a concentrated burst of generational energy based on an idealistic response to imposed authority from above. It ended in a brutal war that was pursued, albeit not always idealistically in practice, increasingly for 'moral' ends as it moved forward.

Henry James

The next phase is a coming to terms with the expansionary but increasingly anomic ever-expanding federal state that emerged from the crisis. It consisted of two  parts - a mainstream concern with American exceptionalism and how to make it moral, increasingly through a progressive discourse, and an attempt in relation to the South to include a still-alien culture in the whole.

Again, the critiques of capitalism in America are wholly unlike that in Europe. In Europe, there is a war against capitalism as a fundamental socially organising concept from both the Catholic or Fascist Right and the Socialist Left but, in the US, progressives are not arguing against capitalism but against 'bad' capitalism, against monopolies and for smallholders and the 'little man'. The attitude is more one of observation for reform than rage for revolution.

The texts to be read in schools today tell us that, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the US is not all that it could be in the eyes of thinking liberal men.

It is flawed but it is exceptional and it could be better by returning to its original intentions, the intentions, in a strange piece of patriarchal conservatism, of the Founding Fathers or the free-born settler. This is a liberalism that might be considered very conservative and nostalgic in Europe:

• Henry James - Works (1871-1911): Anglo-American subtleties and differences
• Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Fin (1884): A nostalgia for freedom
• Frank Norris - The Octopus (1901): The progressive critique of big business
• Sinclair Lewis - Main Street (1921): The dead weight of small town America
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925): The corruption under the glitter
• Norman Mailer - The Naked & The Dead (1948): Americans at war

The Southern Response

The 'Southern Response' is not so much a response by the South, which is a cultural back-water, but about the South. A choice is made in the early twentieth century not to integrate the black people who live there and in the Northern cities but to mythologise the culture romantically as a lost cause, a cavalier planter culture beaten (as they should have been even in Marxist theory) by kinder bourgeois roundheads. In doing so, the South is pickled in aspic in order to be integrated into Yankeedom while remaining segregated at home:

• Film - The Birth of A Nation (1915)
• William Faulkner - Works (1926-1962): The mythologising of the Deep South
• Film - Gone With The Wind (1939)

It is no accident that the process is book-ended by two major block-busting films. The first rewrites the civil war as a war of resistance on the lines of other doomed tales of resistance much loved by Anglo-Saxons - from Hereward the Wake onwards - and the second shows the romantic but wrong culture of the feudal South as ultimately ill-fitted to the modern world: 'frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!'

Distracted first by war and reconstruction, the nation-creating liberal texts of this middle phase displace resentments in the defeated South and divert a troubled national liberal culture, confused by its own victories at times, into hand-maiden to a State that could ambiguously be an agent for or against the people.

The Third Phase - The Sixties - The Creation of the New Liberal Mind: Fear, Anger & Guilt

The final phase is the one most of us are familiar with. Like the 1850s, it represents a point of concentrated energy that shifts the ground within the culture, creating the Democrat Party of today and the resentments of small-town conservatism that fuel Republican revolts. The texts below cover the three key psychological developments that rule liberal thinking today - environmentalism, feminism and a passion for indigenous movements as somehow more pure than urban man. These are three centres of contemporary radical thinking in politics and the media.

Notice that the works of sexual and 'negro' liberation - though important to those communities - are not on the list because these were primarily matters of direct action and not texts, though the texts were many. And we have two women on the list for the first time - third phase liberalism is increasingly driven by women and women's values to the extent that the crisis of support emerging today lies in the alienation of working class men who could be taken for granted in the first two phases as supportive of their bourgeois betters' aspirations for rights and reform.

Rachel Carson

And there is one film on the list that has almost been forgotten now but, at the time, brought the message of Dee Brown about forgotten history into exceptionally gory focus for a mass population:

• Rachel Carson - Silent Spring (1962): An environmentalist ur-text
• Betty Friedan - The Feminist Mystique (1963): Hardline quasi-Marxist introduction to feminism
• Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968): Existential panic over scarce resources
• Dee Brown - Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (1970): Guilt at the genocide of the indigenes
• Film - Soldier Blue (1970)

The sixties are rightly regarded as a cultural watershed. These types of text and film helped to create a new liberal ideology of rights (especially for women and then for a range of other identity groups based on gender and orientation), imperial guilt and existential fear that drove the babyboomer political project and the opposing conservative communitarian reaction to contest each other right up until the age of the internet.

For those who have not spent time in the American school system (as I have) and are puzzled by the American liberal response to the world, a world which such liberals persist in not trying to understand in its complexity, these three phases may help comprehension of what they are dealing with.

The first phase gives us a genuinely liberal moral absolutism and sentimentality that the world is not what it should be and can be put right by individual endeavour and sentimental good will.

The second long phase shows a determined commitment to mythologising history in order to make things right, a progressive optimism that struggle will return the world to what it should have been if there had been no 'fall' and periodic, latterly apocalyptic, despair at the world as it is.

The last phase focuses on the moral wrongs that are to be found everywhere - in the world as a whole and not just the american world - and that our environment, equality and protection of the vulnerable are 'causes' where, perhaps, facts are not the issue but the will to change things ... which brings us back to the impetus behind the transcendentalism of the 1850s.

And the rest, as they say, is history ...

On Male & Female Brain Differences ...

To many liberals honed on the language of equality, evidence of fundamental differences in the architecture of female and male brains can be dealt with in only one way - denial. But at some stage, they are going to have to face the implications of any neuroscientific findings that undermine much of their universalising project.

We have already provided a number of essays on how social reality is constructed but the essence of that reality is that it is a simulacrum, a creation of often a minority of leading persons in order to enable effective communication and to ensure the control and management of resources.

We have looked (elsewhere) at how sense inputs reconstruct objective reality as individual reality and at how no single individual can see the world precisely as another sees it. The conclusion we have drawn is one of mutual toleration within a framework of a culture that is designed to limit exploitation and protect the vulnerable on a broadly democratic basis.

The Problem of Universalism

The question of male/female difference of brain function is important because the universalism that so often denies individuals the rights of dissident self-expression against the social norm is criminally compounded if this difference fails to be recognised where it exists.

By taking two sets that have already been inappropriately normalised as the type of man or the type of woman (to the detriment of particular individuals in both abstract categories) and repositioning them as one abstract category of human, male and female individuals are being even further alienated from their intimate individual natures.

This is not to be construed as a statement against the equality of persons in regard to their rights to make their own choices within their categories or in relation to other categories but only as a statement against the turning of persons into abstractions where the equality is simply the equality of things to be manipulated by 'guardians of values'.

Understanding differences between broad categories is a first step in unravelling the claims of universalism on the path to understanding the differences between all persons and so their equality as persons with free choices rather than as objects of ideology.

The Politics of Sexual Difference

This is politically important. The then-President of Harvard University was lambasted simply for asking the question in 2005 whether innate differences in male and female brains might be a factor in the scarcity of women in scientific fields. He was right to ask the question but not to assert an answer.

It is a legitimate question.To introduce quotas within functional elements in society that do not accord with objective reality (even if that reality may have cultural or social aspects) is asking for social functionality to be diminished. It may place the liberal who asks for quotas, as social engineer, on a par with the creationist in their potentially damaging effect on knowledge.

The questions must be asked but the answers must not be assumed because it is factually true that there are great women scientists (though few) just as there are men who cannot count beyond ten. The reasons why this is so should be uncovered before blundering in with short term solutions that damage the very enterprise of science itself. The issue may not be one of ability but of will - will to be a scientist perhaps.

This applies across society and across categories. We need to understand difference and then build a society in which difference has no meaning in relation to fundamental equality - which is the equality of autonomy between free individuals rather than the equality of categories manipulated by their leadership cadres.

Culture and Nature

Let us be clear - there is no evidence at all that brain difference is linked to any intellectual ability that should stop women from becoming scientists if they so choose so the issue may be one of certain ideologues trying to demand that women make choices that they do not wish to make and then getting angry at their 'failure' to fit the model as much as one of some claimed patriarchal denial of the right of women to be scientists.

Difference may lay partly in genuine economic or social disadvantage (i.e. blocks to free choice) or it may lie in free choice itself (in which case, it is no-one's business but that of the woman herself). She does not have to become anything she does not wish to be, especially something implicitly dictated by an ideological feminist.

The modern liberal mind seems unable to draw this distinction, one which leads (in this author's view) to a commitment to a socialism of enablement and a libertarianism of uptake that works against the ideology of the middle class progressive who is obsessed with avoiding the serious investment required in social change whilst imposing his or her own values on others.

But let us return to the science - where are men and women really different and what may this mean? The answers are vital medically because, as in issues of race, inheritance does have meaning in disorders of the body and the mind and, if we do not understand these differences, we cannot cure them.

The Revolution in Understanding Difference

If brains are different, then perception and use of language may be different. This means that the very structure of research and experimentation in the social sciences will need to take account of these differences even before research starts.

The revolution in understanding male and female brain differences is very recent. It is no accident that the world of the baby-boomers who are like a sclerotic dead weight on our culture had an academic view that restricted sexual difference to reproduction and mating - and so the brain bits related to sex were judged the only points of difference.

Any liberal of a certain generation with a smattering of scientific education would have assumed, without further enquiry, that males and females were different only in their sex hormones and hypothalamus. The fact that observable human behaviour day-to-day suggested otherwise was put down to culture, not entirely without reason but not entirely with reason either.

All this has been overturned very recently - so recently that the world-views of someone under thirty and over thirty may be be radically different. A conceptual revolution is taking place where the dead weight of the past may culturally inhibit the revolutionary changes required to progress. A conflict expressed perhaps in the war between feminist generations as much as anywhere.

Where Differences Lie

There are now demonstrable differences in many areas of cognition and behaviour - memory, emotion, vision, hearing, the processing of faces and responses to stress hormones and across the brain, far beyond the hypothalamus.

Given that we construct the world through the management of sensory inputs, any differences in mind management techniques and sensory input imply qualitative differences in how men and women construct their reality. Here are some of the findings:-

•     parts of the frontal cortex (basis for many higher cognitive functions) are bulkier in women than men
•     parts of the limbic cortex (involved in emotional responses) are bulkier in women than men
•     parts of the parietal cortex (involved in space perception) are bulkier in men than women
•     the amygdala (which responds to emotionally arising information) is bigger in men than women

The existence of these discrepancies (which, of course, do not relate to particular individuals but to the bulk of persons in a category who are identifiable as being in that category) is a sign (based on experience with other animals) of difference in function - brains are working differently. What this means beyond the crude fact is up for grabs.

Differences also exists at the cellular level. Women have a greater density of neurons in the parts of the temporal lobe cortex associated with language processing and understanding. Similar findings have been made in the frontal lobe. What this means (perhaps nothing) is also not yet clear but it may have a great deal to do with enhanced female verbal fluency - or it may not.

This fact of difference (if not the meaning of difference) is all just common sense and it is amazing that it has taken so long to sweep away ideological presuppositions and think about what we are as biological entities. Sex hormones affect the fetal brain so if sex hormones were recognised as a cause of difference as early as the 1960s, then other effects should have been expected.

The Thorny Question of Toys

The latest thinking is quite clearly that sex differences in cognition are not just cultural and do not result from later hormonal changes in puberty but owe something to these sex hormones and are present from birth. To a degree, men and women think a little differently even before they are born. Again, common sense to any non-ideological mother.

The obvious bone of contention has been the way children choose toys in a sexually dimorphic way, with saddened liberal mothers unable to get their daughters weaned off Barbie or their sons from guns. They have been wasting their time. Even monkey kids choose the same type of gender-specific toys.

What is going on - male toys are things that are propelled through space (cars) or involve rough and tumble play whereas female toys are centred on nurturing. This much is in accord with otherwise over-egged behavioural psychology.

To bend the child away from these instincts is to try to drive brain plasticity from outside - an aggressive approach to acculturation that might be feasible, much as the Soviet theory of the New Man was theoretically cogent, but is asking for trouble with most kids in most situations.

Babies, Faces & Anxiety

One year old girls spend more time looking at their mothers than their male equivalents who prefer film of cars rather than film of faces. Hollywood budgets are built on these differences. When extended back to one day old children, still we apparently find that girls prefer faces to mechanical objects and vice versa for boys. That's day one of existence if true ...

Differences are also clear in how the sexes react to the environment and stress, a material political fact in itself. There are indications (in experiments unrepeatable in humans for ethical reasons) that separation anxiety has different effects in young males and females which may help to explain why anxiety disorders may be more common in girls than boys.

The difference in size of the hippocampus (memory storage and spatial mapping) also appears to be relevant. Men appear to navigate by 'dead reckoning' (estimating distances in space and orientation) while women navigate by landmark. This again is observable in daily life and in rats, so it seems to be in-built in mammalian sexual difference.

Rats!

Although the experiments are done with rats and not humans, females seem to increase neuronal connections in a highly stimulated environment and this is linked to memory formation. Complexity seems to have no effect or the opposite effect on males - they start to forget, perhaps to trim the sensory inputs that they cannot cope with.

However, if a complex but stable environment (with many persons involved) enhances the life of female rats but slightly troubles the male rat, the opposite takes place when stress is induced into the picture - and this accords with everyday observation to a degree.

Male rats learn better if stressed but stress has the opposite effect on female rats. On the other hand, female rats are better at dealing with chronic stress than male rats whereas female rats suffer more from acute stress. Rats are not humans but intuitively we can see two possible social conclusions straight away:-

• A society of men and women must be sufficiently stable and complex with many personal interactions to keep women happy but men need to escape periodically or they become dulled, stressed and unhappy: this seems intuitively correct;
• Teaching boys requires very different approaches to teaching girls - optimal learning requirements are different for the sexes: again, intuitively, this seems right.

Memory is another area of difference where ethical guidelines permit the scientists to move from rats back to humans. There are hemispheric differences in processing emotional difference in responding to stressful events that suggest that the sexes require different approaches to dealing with trauma.

Medical & Social Considerations

Depression also looks as if it should be considered differently in men and women. Men, generally, produce serotonin at levels 52% higher than women. This may be a factor in increased incidence of depression amongst women. Findings on addiction suggest that women can become dependent, on stimulants in particular, more easily than men. We do not present all this as fact but as possibilities - not to be evaded or avoided for ideological reasons but investigated.

There are also (apparently) differences underlying schizophrenia which are currently poorly understood but the point has been made - overall, biological sexual difference is becoming important in understanding the treatment of medical disorders of the brain and, I contend, is becoming a relevant factor in social and political policy as well without in any way diminishing the fundamental human equality which is now accepted as a value in a modern liberal society.

The sensible approach remains one based on the equality of individuals as rounded persons (rather than as universal abstracts) but, within this, the recognition of sexual difference suggests a true equality between males in general and females in general which takes account of their separable nature. We may go further and say that the equality of individuals is not in the least compromised by recognising any form of difference, including age, ethnicity, interests or whatever is simply different.

To force a little boy into playing with a doll for ideological reasons is as oppressive as placing a teenage girl under high achiever stress in a mixed school. To force a male into the chronic misery of a large communitarian household without escape or authority is as cruel as to deprive a woman of extended society and intellectual stimulation.

Some Tentative Political Conclusions

A 'liberal' society that is built around turning a few women into male-type leaders and suppressing the risk-taking and experimentation of males is not a liberal but an oppressive society, as oppressive as one that treats women as second-class citizens and deprives of them of full access to education and their fair share of resources.

And it is important to understand that there is no 'normal', average or typical type of person but only massive variation within a general type of difference so there will always be the man who is more like most women in some aspect than some women and vice versa.

The point is that, in treating persons as individuals, the differences do not matter but the differences do need to be understood when generalising into public policy that is (as a fundamental value) fair to all individuals. Identity politics, for example, is a negation of difference but politics that enable notionally 'normal' male or female behaviour to flourish (even if some men flourish undertaking female modes and some women male modes) is getting closer to a truly liberatory political culture. 

[This posting owes its science to the neuroscientist Larry Cahill's article 'His Brain, Her Brain' in Scientific American but the social and political conclusions are entirely my own]

Minds, Placebos & Orgasms ...

Now here's a funny story. There was this woman, see ... and she hadn't had an orgasm in three years, wasn't making love to her husband, got no pleasure from touching herself and had no sexual fantasy life at all.

And, then, suddenly everything changed - orgasm, love-making, pleasure, fantasy. So what miracle drug delivered all this? No drug at all! She was in a blind test for a testosterone patch and she believed that she was getting the drug when, in fact, she wasn't.

The belief was sufficient to shift her from a state of cold sterility to rampant sexuality and pleasure. This is the power of the placebo effect, the simple belief that something is happening when it may not be.

We make what we are from our beliefs but if the mechanical, technological or physical input is not there, then we may still need some input, something that triggers the re-organisation of our mental state in order to make us something different, in order, indeed, to make us happy.

This is perhaps the tragedy of thousands of years of sterile communitarianism. It has removed joy and pleasure for reasons both good and bad in their time but nothing has yet emerged to strip away this nonsense and give us back our bodies, place them under the command of our own free minds.

The mystery is not that the environment, including our culture, can drive hormones but that we continue to believe that hormones cannot be under the command of minds, that we are not the commanders of minds that can command, to a much greater degree than we believed, our hormones.

We can, within reason, will ourselves to happiness and pleasure - and be willed to misery and happiness by powerful cultural forces which we allow to control us at our own peril. Perhaps we can will our destinies and perhaps we can defy the attempt by others to will our destinies for us.

The dessicated cultures of Middle America and the Greater Syrian desert alike both fear sexual imagery because such imagery can trigger our own wilfulness.

To get sexual pleasure requires that we allow ourselves to close down the centres of our brain that make us watchful (if we are males) or thinking and feeling creatures (if we are female).

To be anxious if you are male or to be thinking or feeling too much (as a female) is to create a huge block in our ability to experience sexual pleasure. Anxiety and thought, in particular, dampen desire - worry, defensiveness and inability to communicate compound the problem.

Is this why intellectuals so often have sexual hang-ups?

Nor does desire have to lead to orgasm - sexologists see the erotic and the satisfaction of the erotic as a matter of achieving pleasure at any stage of the sexual cycle. Orgasm does not become iinvariably central to the process. There is an obsession here in our culture with epiphenomena.

As with so much in the post-ideological age, the game is not one of some 'normal' progressive fulfilment of some pre-arranged cycle regulated by the average person's response times but is, instead, a matter of a variation of responses within an almost infinitely variable sexual community.

The evils of Iron Age religiosity and State involvement in sexuality become clearer when one sees how prescribed models for sexual expression result in proscription of anything out of the allegedly normal range, a normal range experienced by no living person precisely because it is an abstract.

So what is desire? As so often we have been lied to in the rational man's determination to simplify and regulate matters. The standard line is that beastly men are triggered by external tactile and visual stimulation and gentle women by 'a richer cognitive and emotional context'. This results in the dangerous courtly myth of the moral superiority of the female.

This becomes a story of women requiring safety and bonding without ever really teasing out what it is that can make anyone, let alone a woman, feel safe and bonded. If a society prescribes particular forms of bonding and norms of safety, then a woman will bend to that social will instead of her own - and so will a man.

Yet scientists seem to have demonstrated (one is always cautious about scientists) that women can just as much be aroused by sexual imagery devoid of emotional connection as can men (according to the 2007 study of Meredith Chivers at the Toronto Center for Addiction and Mental Health). A whole range of visual sexual activity (including that of bonobos)  was shown to men and women and it was the men who differentiated between the type of actor in the sexual drama.

Heterosexual women, it seems, saw their levels of sexual excitement increase with the intensity of the imagery regardless of the type of performer. Hetero women will get excited by men, women and bonobos alike, whereas men are focused wholly on their preferred sexual style (hetero or homo with no interest in bonobo bonking) and only gay women do not 'get' male sexuality.

Women, it seems, are far more flexible than men in their sexual responses - but are they more enslaved to the social? A 'normal' (ouch!) woman may think in terms of security but this may be misdirection ... it may be that social acceptance is of more consequence.

The key point is that orgasm itself is not purely physical - sense inputs construct an orgasm out of a variety of cognitive and emotional responses but where the orgasm ultimately leads in men and women is instructive.

There seem to be neuroscientific observable differences (leaving open whether they have evolved within the species or within the individual through acculturation) between the way sense and emotion are balanced between men and women.

If there is a species-specific element it may be this. Male orgasm reproduces. Female orgasm may have reproductive benefits but seems to have much more to do with the bonding process referred to above. So much, so cliched.

But we need to tease out this bonding because it may be the context for the possibility of orgasm yet not necessarily relate to the experience itself except tangentially. The bonding impulse may be prior to the pleasure principle. And bonding may be disconnected from pleasure.

Female orgasm is possibly more contextually 'social' than male, more contingent on social reality (the conditions for bonding) and far more prone to have its terms of engagement defined by male proprietorial demands or the jealous communitarianism of matriarchal society.

A woman's ability to exercise wilfulness in choosing her own orgasm faces far more pressure from society, patriarchal or matriarchal, gerontocratic or priestly, than does a male's wilfulness. She is far more likely to be an easy victim of the social norm than a male whose discipline is more likely to be externally imposed than internally accepted.

Research has looked at actual brain behaviour in men and women. Neuroscientists at the University of Groningen scanned brains in a state of orgasm. The results were fascinating. The intensity of male response in the ventral tegmental area was so intense as to be likened to the effect of heroin - suggesting to this author (me) that the global drugs problem is little more than a mass cultural response to sexual deprivation. Ejaculation is a just a high that is designed to create babies.

More to be expected, the ejaculating male shifts energy from the watchful centres of the brain where vigilance and anxiety are to be found into those areas where memory, the visual and emotional are located. In short, the male is deeply engaged in his act at the time of the act, almost certainly fantasising to a degree his reality. We have written on the tantric-spiritual impulse elsewhere and there may be some evidence for this in the language of that curious sub-culture.

However, the opposite happens with a woman. At the point of orgasm, it is as if she temporarily ceases to be - most of the brain goes silent in a way that is still clearly not perfectly understood. The signs are that a woman, at that moment, is liberated from tension and inhibition but also from all moral reasoning and social judgement - blanked out as a person, as a socialised thing.  The woman ceases to think, in effect.

The orgasm may be regarded (and this is me, not the scientists) as a dramatic point of liberation from what social reality demands of a woman, from communitarianism, from priests, from mothers, from patriarchs, from the old and the dessicated. How very dangerous for society!

Paradoxically, the bonding (unless in the oxytocin context noted below) is really a complete non-bonding - as if the female's unconscious is saying, "the bond lies in a total loss of fear of you (the sexual partner) and the world". The silence in the brain is almost deafening.

Perhaps this helps to explain the age old mystery of why authority seeks to control sexuality - perhaps the dangerous liberation of that orgasmic moment (from which, as every man knows, a woman may awake as unbonded as bonded) might liberate women from an allotted role in the past designed to hold things together in societies of scarcity.

The constant allusion in (male) literature to the 'fickleness' of women might also well relate to this orgasmic nature because the loss of being in the act does mean that a woman is not addicted to the partner but can look at the partner afresh if the oxytocin has not kicked in. Above all, the essence of the female orgasm is that the removal of fear and anxiety in a woman's mind is very much more central to her than for a man. And that it is not necessarily replaced romantically by 'love' or its cognates.

Instead the woman may have all emotion stripped out from her at the moment of orgasm - a level of almost Buddhist detachment being evidenced by the neuroscience although there is other important evidence that some types of orgasm are connected to a very specific heightened emotional response, linked to oxytocin, that does imply bonding. Again, there are tantric analogies.

Perhaps (the science is as yet unclear) there are 'detached orgasms' and 'bonding orgasms' for women that exist according to circumstance but that the male simply has a 'high orgasm' that leaves him begging for more and his oxytocin comes from the 'cuddle' and the touch and not the fuck.

Much would be explained by this model. Which type of orgasm a woman has or even whether she has one may have surprisingly little to do with the flow of chemicals into the body but a great deal to do with the intimate, community and social conditions in which it takes place. These are ideally ones of trust but also one where there is no fear or anxiety and the woman herself makes all the choices. But one other thought arises - the fear of addiction.

Sex therapists appear to fall into two camps which tell us more about the libertarian and puritan cultural tensions of America than they do about what it is to be human: those who see the erotic and the orgasmic as essential to long term bonding and those who see it as dangerously addictive.

This is a nonsensical dichotomy. The issue should be one of either will to pleasure or a firm decision, based on full facts, that pleasure is not appropriate in such-and-such a situation for rational reasons. For centuries, pleasure has been denigrated but it may be that there are conditions where survival suggests that this negativity has been appropriate.

Yet, all things being equal, there seems to be no rational reason why any person should actively avoid pleasure, with all its other associated bonding and health benefits, out of an irrational acceptance without question of the values of an earlier age or those of the local dominant culture. Above all, the type of 'liberatory' feminism that sees the male as oppressor rather than as a useful tool for that beautiful state of non-being (alongside the more practical matter of providing for a family) is particularly odd.

A society where males get their regular 'hits' and females get to lose anxiety and their duty of care to the world in an explosion of pleasure periodically is actually more likely to end up in long term stable relationships and well balanced children than one where the males are permanently frustrated and the females see only a world of anxious drudgery as the norm.

Neuroscience can make few claims to understand the sociology of sex but the evidence is heading in one direction - the acceptance of pleasure and the elimination of our fear of addiction in favour of a world of life-enhancing natural highs for men and of brief tastes of nirvana for women.

[This essay owes a great deal to neurologist Martin Portner's article in Scientific American on 'The Orgasmic Mind', 2009/2010. The opinions are, however, wholly mine.]

Iron Age Legends, Mid-Life Crises and the New Sexual Politics

In the last two postings, we looked in depth at a South Asian legend of polyamory and a Burmese legend of traditionalism based on two wives providing a form of equilbrium that was tampered with at one's peril.

Both of these cultures are very different from those of the West, even if the Judaeo-Christian allegedly patriarchal approach to monogamy grew out of a 'two-wife' (or more) approach that is found in many nomadic cultures from the Arabian desert to Mongolia.

The South Asian legend was almost modern in its assumption of freedom and of a negotiated settlement between equals. Perhaps it is now time to look at the tension between the enforced monogamy of the new faiths that emerged across the Ancient World and the wild instincts of the lone male.

With Germanic and Celtic legend (similar but not identical) we add a different element to the pot. Here the increasing assumption is of a marital convention where wives matter. The Greek tragic tradition also introduces the monogamous family as battleground.

Prior to the chivalric re-formulations of the Middle Ages, there is no sense of love that might be multiple as in South India and even the chivalric model ensures that active sexual expression remains monogamous in a pale version of the Burmese model where the household sits to the right and an unrequited love to the left.

There is a lot of 'bad behaviour' of course (otherwise there would be no story). The tale of Arthur and Guinevere early on concerns itself with her abduction though this might be a reflection of Helen's abduction by Paris, with Arthur cast in the role of Menelaus.

However, there is a basic underlying equality in the potential for women to decide their own destinies once they are in charge of a household but only in the household. Patriarchy may be regarded as ideologically dominant before betrothal but a degree of matriarchy (in the household) to be dominant after it.

If the male ethic (the lone heroic wolf or member of a pack) dominates before marriage, he gives way to a separate but equal status after it. A woman can become de facto head of a household, with rule over men, such a servants or sons, in her own right. The matriarch with her 'boys' long precedes Ma Barker.

Assets to be deployed by fathers and carried off by heroes first, women can then be micro-economic warrior queens in their own right, nurturing sons to challenge the father and daughters to trade for power and security.

Nevertheless, the single hero-girl Atalanta and the rare Queen Medb or Boudicca (Celt) tend to raise the possibility of strong political women but little more. The strength is in the household and not in the public person. But then is that not also so with the King once barbarian struggles are over?

Brunnhilde and Kriemhild in German culture are better understood not as decision-makers but as fateful manipulators of a drama. Their passions, demand for love on their terms in the first case and passion as cause for revenge as a matter of honour in the second, set in motion the deaths of heroes.

The relative powerlessness of women in terms of brute force and warrior camaraderie here leads to a culture of psychological manipulation of the conventions that protect their status in a way that has become a trope of Western culture. But this is much more than simple 'women and slave' subversion of 'natural order'.

Even today, feminism has not fully come to terms with the strange mix of biological and cultural drivers for 'woman as necessary manipulator of others' - society and family alike. The alleged propensity to manipulation is often presented as a case of weakness or victimhood. Manipulation as alternative to strength.

However, if, as I suggest, the conventional culture of the West has shifted power from males as lone wolves to males as protectors through 'betrothal', then the male is as often a victim of the conventions (in terms of his inner aspirations) as a participant in an equality of enslavement before the social and habit.

He is 'victim' as much, in these cases, as the woman, especially given the resource constraints and wider risks and brutalities of pre-modern society. It could be argued that what we think of patriarchalism could be a late decadent form in which weak males make illicit misuse of 'Viking' conventions of shared responsibility.

It is as if the Germanic male (in the legend cycles) is fated to 'die' by the honour implicit in monogamy - a miserabilist view but an inevitable one, once a highly-sexed alpha male considers his emotional position in a stable family-based society. Negativity towards full sexual expression becomes a victory against his nature.

So, although we have Cuchulainn and the Greek 'heroes' all playing a successful 'sexual rascal' role in Indo-European legendary cultures, they are seen in the context of a Western culture in which the family has been conventionalised or otherwise within codes of vengeance and honour.

The Greek, Irish (Cuchulainn) and German tragedies are all built around vengeance, honour, loyalty and right behaviour and often have at source the expectation that a man must do something against his natural instincts because this is what is required (there is something of this in the Japanese samurai code).

The 'blonde beast' is actually a creature not of Nietzschean freedom but of obligations and duties that have simply been shifted from the household to honour. If the thesis is household and the antithesis is honour then the synthesis is the Western aristocratic cultural tradition - or at least the code of the mafioso.

An expectation is from others but also from within oneself as a social construction. God has nothing to do with it. Whatever he is, the man observing the legend is now no longer a free animal but a tribal creation even when, like Cuchulainn, his hero is presented as going beyond convention by his very nature.

But the punishment for the hero is always death. The observing male is given a stark choice in this death of a short life that requires superhuman skills to achieve fame or a conventional long one with many joys (and dull moments) but with no relation to the blood instincts that make him feel like a man.

Alhough the 'normal' male desires to be heroic in his imagination (expressed in a hundred video games), he fears his own ability to match the exemplary hero and so falls back into compliance with the given order.

The ideology of family and marriage is thus a necessary compromise that takes place when a man is faced with the fact that heroism will be denied him not by others but by his very nature as an ordinary man. He can blame no one - he chooses that the the costs of the unconventional are far too great to bear.

This is probably at the heart of the famous 'mid-life crisis' which takes place when the prime duty of convention (progeny and economic security) has apparently been achieved and the last chance of 'heroism' (or rather 'being true to one's nature') appears before the hair goes grey and the limbs bow.

Although expressed sexually in many cases, it is really, as always, about power - an attempt to return power to the self after conceding it to the demands of a convention that is seen, rightly or wrongly, as largely geared to the needs and desires of the 'mate' and the progeny.

She, of course, rarely sees it quite like that. In our modern world, even when there is no enforcing Church or tribe and men are still fit when they would have been 'old' in pre-modern times, the rebellion is usually brief. It is generally absurd, A 'not going gently into that dark night' of old age. Balloons are soon burst.

We may see a shift to another conventional relationship (serial monogamy only because that is what women will put up with in general) or a type of adjustment which is simply acceptance that the man will never be a hero or an animal again - if he ever was beyond his imaginings.

The honour system is in its degenerate phase but it is still the base for convention (as ideal) in the Western family yet it is a falsehood to call such an ideology 'patriarchal'. It is a misdirection to do so. It is a system of power relationships where all elements are equally circumscribed and equally bound.

Women were critical to the creation of an ideology whose primary purpose (under the resource-poor conditions of the time) was to protect them materially and tame the male.

Women are not victims of the ideology any more or any less than the men. They are equal victims and equal beneficiaries under appropriate conditions.

If women have found this system often to have become monstrous, it is largely because it is 'unnatural' for many men (who might prefer to be wolves or adopt the strategies of the South Asian St. Sundarar or the Burmese King) and some men, too weak to do otherwise, turn inward and monstrous because the system gets too rigid.

These men, not having the language for their unhappiness, become introvert, break the rules regardless or become nasty under the pressure. The worst become exploitative, sexually deviant in the worst of ways, molest their own kin. They communicate through acts of cruelty and domination. Others are just miserable.

Because the convention appears sanctified by God and society (more by the latter than the former nowadays), those committed to it (including men who have no instinctive hero or animal in them) moralise on its value instead of treating it as a functional ideological tool for maintaining wealth and stability. THey do not consider the possibility of adapting the structures to permit freedom.

Marriage nevertheless can encourage though does not predict love. This is why, against all Western assumptions, arranged marriages can become imbued with love. If it involves coming to terms and not resisting the given, this can result in two persons collaborating well on managing the social and the problems of the material.

New economic conditions have made this system extremely unstable. The acquisition of wealth is now a matter of equality between partners but each is engaged in a separate system of gathering outside the home. And the costs of breaking the system apart are no longer ones of shame but economic loss.

In other words, the calculations that surround love have changed. The social has not boxed people into either enforced love and respect or misery and hate but has created a volatile and insecure negotiation with no boundaries.

Male and female aspirations are now set in a cultural context where very fine calculations are being made as to the costs and benefits of 'being who one is' rather who one is socially dictated to be.

This is not an argument for a turn back to traditionalist forms (because they are no longer truly functional) but to a greater understanding of the adjustments that the ideology of love must take if it is to meet the three primary requirements of those involved:

• collaboration in wealth creation and maintenance or, more negatively, security against accident
• a safe and secure environment for children and other loved ones
• the healthy adaptation of persons from youth to old age in conformity with their inner natures

The old ideology, using the threat of Hell, shame and the law, bound people into fixed property relations, treated children as part of the asset base (because of their role in providing support in old age) and subjugated persons to compliance with collectivism. Individuals could not survive outside their community.

The new ideology (such as it may be) is an unlearning process because it suggests that persons are primary (whether adults or children) and that property value lies as much in the creative and educated potential of persons as in the house they live in.

An iron age mentality was adaptable to industrialisation but not to the new internet world. The modern Western family, tamed by Judaeo-Christianity in ways well if polemically explained by Nietzsche, still existed in these pre-modern codes of conduct.

These have added, alongside the religiosity of texts interpreted by elites, yet another Iron Age level to our modern mind-set. The central point is that families have been or are in transition from structures designed for survival and a relationship with power to associations of persons where power is diffused.

As new technologies liberate us intellectually and emotionally, the imagination and equality of aspiration in the developed world becomes a matter for more direct negotiation (as in the South Asian legend).

But it also suggests that different models for maintaining household prosperity based on 'new traditions' (as in the Burmese legend) may also emerge. This is why we are seeing the lively debates about sexual freedom and alternative lifestyles maturing into a language of responsibilities.

Although traditionalism not only remains in place but intensifies its demands under threat, super-modernity is pushing through new sexual forms and solutions to exploitation simply by abandoning Iron Age texts and ancient legends and inventing structures that actually fit what we are. This should be interesting.

Burmese Legends, Power and 'Jungian' Sexuality ...

To our last post, we can now add other types of legendary Asian arrangemenst to the polyamorous (South Indian). We have the 'licentious'-pragmatic (Chinese), the nomadic-Darwinian (Mongolian) and the imperial-Jungian from Burma to consider.

Chinese legends (at least of an early period) seem to have a pragmatic open sexuality that is thoroughly unromantic from a Western perspective. Confucianism struggled against what it called licentiousness, playing the role of Kallikkaman in last week's Sundarar tale.

Like Christ, Muhammed and the Buddha, probably for good 'developmental' reasons, Confucius' view won out so that we now have the puritanical Leninist-Confucianism of the New Chinese Empire as the eventual result. But it was not always thus ... any more than modern Hindu puritanism was the past.

In one particularly 'licentious' province (Cheng), in the spring ['when the eastern winds have melted the ice and the peach trees blossom'], the 'higher spirits were invoked' and orchids were gathered for which the foot of Mount Tu-Liang was well known.

As the local Chen and Wei flooded the land, the teenagers would go to the orchid beds and engage in sexual pleasure after which the girls were given a flower as a token. This obvious fertility legend sounds much like pre-Christian fertility rites in the West and it is truly a world we have lost.

For an example of sexual pragmatism that eventually leads to the rescue of a wife from a sex-crazed pirate, there is the legend of Ch'en Kuang-jui, the father of T'ang-seng, the floating monk - but I shall leave you to research that complicated early medieval Chinese legend yourself.

Then, there is a Buryat legend about Genghiz Khan. A tribal leader (whose attitude to love is unknown) has two wives. The younger one bore him a child but the older was barren. The older substituted the first's letter to him announcing the fact with one saying that the younger had given birth to a wild animal.

The Khan wrote back to take no action but, again, the older one substituted his letter and wrote another that told the younger to drown the child. The younger was not one to disobey the Khan and she placed the child in a sealed cradle and threw it in the lake as commanded.

Naturally, (since this is a legend), it floated back and the little lad kicked his way out. Needless to say, the lad was Genghiz Khan.

But, again, the ostensible purpose of the legend - why Genghiz Khan is named after the lark's cry (don't ask!) - masks the social tensions within 'patriarchal' warrior culture between women where the youth of the girl is less interesting than her ability to bear the lord a strong son.

A warrior lord may not last long into his middle age (the old age of the era) without strong sons. It is a practical matter. In the real history of such societies, women do not compete so much as wives but as mothers so that their children get access to power when the old man dies.

The price of failure would be the probable death of their child from their half-brother since no fit rivals can easily be allowed to flourish if the sons compete. This is not polyamory but a brutal struggle for scarce resources in a world of survival of the fittest. The slaughter amongst the Turkic Sultans was real enough.

As for Burma, we can start by saying that medieval Burma was at the hard end of patriarchy with the assumption that women were tribute. We find tales, like the Mongolian, of jealousy in the 'harem' against new and beautiful acquisitions (as in the legend of one of Nga Tinde's sisters).

But the stories around King Duttabaung (of which the Nga Tinde sister legend is a minor part) suggest that, despite all the concubines and trade in women, Jung's archetypal view that a male was most fulfilled with two partners of differing psychological meaning appears to be given some evidential base in the two successive triads in the story cycle.

Burmese legends are complex and surreal so the detail here is less important than the structure. A King's son becomes a hermit and has a magical and very beautiful (if not very bright) daughter, Bedayi. The King's Queen, presumably mother to the son, also gives birth to two blind boys.

There ensues a classic story about the Queen saving her two children from the King (details only on request).

After many adventures and the curing of their blindness, the sons meet up with Bedayi and the other older son of the King (whether half-brother or brother) and the eldest marries Bedayi, presumably a niece (though not stated as such).

The standard gangland politics of primitive societies then means that the Queen of Pyu (another Queen altogether) asks the help of the hermit.

The King's son persuades her to take the son-in-law as husband so he becomes King of Pyu with Bedayi and The Queen of Pyu as his partners. Note the father is happy to see Bedayi enter such a household. The Queen has a daughter and dies.

The King of Pyu (the older of the two once-blind brothers) dies. Bedayi marries the younger son who became King in his turn and their child was Duttabaung.

The notion of a wife marrying the next in line of brothers is not uncommon as a means of retaining property rights. After 35 years, this second King of Pyu dies.

Indra (this is a pre-Buddhist tale up to this point) installs Duttabaung, fully mature, on the throne and his two Queens are the daughter of the Pyu Queen (daughter of the other wife of his uncle) and the Nagini Besandi who shares with Bedayi, Duttabaung's mother, the characteristic of having a magical origin - she is one of the serpent-spirits or nagas.

Duttabaung's reign is the great kingly legend of Burma and this legend shifts into Buddhist piety of a kingly type quite quickly.

However, unintended impieties result in him losing his powers, with the most interesting loss arising from within a story that is hard to interpret in any way other than a story of sexual jealousy perceived in cultural terms as disloyalty.

Duttabaung was collecting tribute from India when one of the tributary queens took a 'foul garment' (unspecified in my source), turns it into a cloth and wipes the face of the unsuspecting King with it.

This is an incident filled with notions of taboo but the upshot is that the act results in the disappearance of an 'auspicious mole' (Burmese surrealism at work) and the consequent disappearance of the Nagini Besandi who is clearly his magical link to the land of Burma.

The King compounds his growing problems - he appears to have upset the Buddha in an earlier act and then his beautiful naga who may represent his vital force, represented in terms of sexual energy - by spitting into the ocean as he returns from India and so angering the nagas as a class.

The angry nagas carry him away at a great age on board ship. The legendary cycle can be read at many levels but, primarily, in conjunction with other legends, as a magical account of the history of Burma.

Its kings try to weigh up a right balance of duties to the new religion of Buddhism and to the old religion of the spirits of the land represented by the nagas (and the nats in another cycle).

This historical tension is overlaid by another story about kingship in which the waning powers of the old King (he said to be over 100 by the time of his death on the ship returning from India) seem to be attributed to his excessive wanderings far from his own land, to his consorting with foreign queens on foreign territory and to his lack of respect for tradition.

Sex, as always, is power. Placing the simple brutal business of women as tribute and as guarantee of loyalty from vassals to one side, the five women in the story fall into three broad categories.

The least positive is the trickster Hindu Queen who represents dalliances or inappropriate alliances overseas and with whom we have dealt.

The Queen of Pyu and her daughter clearly represent political and strategic alliance through sexual partnership - land, retainers and the dynastic blood line. The closeness of the royal family in its high status mating indicates a classic case of ensuring right order by keeping it in the family.

The first Queen is pure alliance fodder and her daughter partners the son of the younger brother and successor to her husband who then inherited this Queen's co-wife. (I hope I have got that right).

Both Queens are relative cyphers in the story but there is no reason to believe that they are not honoured and respected.

On the other hand, the magical daughter of the hermit (the possible neice to her two future husbands), Bedayi, and Nagini Besandi are of a very different order.

They are more active participants in the drama and are variously presented not so much as regal cyphers carrying the blood-line like the Queens so much as either rather beautiful but dim (Bedayi in the story of a gourd that we won't go into here) or beautiful but moody (Nagini Besandi walking off in a huff over a desecration).

Although the legend is more about interpreting history, religious struggle, politics and the expression of right order in society than psychology or spirit, we cannot ignore this psychological undercurrent deep within the tale.

Regardless of the ready sex available from innunerable concubines, the King's high status relationships represent a different sort of balance that reflects Jung's opinion (probably based on his own experience) that a man needs two women in his life.

This Jungian observation underpins the very common Western phenomenon of the wife and the mistress. As such, this is definitely not a tale of polyamory like our South Indian tale. Indeed, it might even be that the threat of the Indian Queen is the threat of polyamory to a stable and ritualised system but this is speculation.

What it might be (given that the pattern is repeated twice in one cycle) is an expression, in a warrior-based culture, of a situation where sex is easily available but where trust and at least a version of love are in short supply.

This we see an arrangement within traditionalism that is analogous to the French model of the wife and the tolerated mistress. One might say that the woman who wants to 'own' her man is as unbalanced as the man who insists on 'owning' (emotionally) many women.

The mistress saves a man from servitude (to the household where he may lose his competitive 'edge') and from the brothels (on which resources will be wasted). Or so may go the theory ...

If anything, the arrangement is a formalisation of a 'natural' psychological triad. Although property is at stake, the man is caught between the need to run a household (whether feudal or bourgeois) and the need to be loved or to exist in a more dynamic way, a rather mysterious way that is not at all rational but is disruptive if not tamed. Perhaps it works only where the 'wife' is secure in her possession of the household.

Indeed, if one thinks about it, the disruptive nature of male sexuality and the fact that the property exists because of the male's life force (in that type of society) means that the self interest of the woman in charge of the household is not to tame the drive into non-achievement but to direct it safely into the care of a collaborator, the co-Queen or 'mistress'.

The sexual triad operating within rules of this type may stabilise the system so that the women (treated with respect as high status) manage to get control of power by the back door and both live off the unrestricted dynamic of the alpha male.

The conduct of the Nagini Besandi suggests that the King is as bound by these rules as anyone.

Although in other stories and most cultures, jealousy is a component of all types of arrangements involving multiple partners, what is interesting is that the relationship between the Queens and the magical co-wives appears positive as if both understand their differing roles in maintaining a particular system of power.

This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that there is strong emotion in the story - the hermit is highly protective to his daughter, the first King's Queen is highly protective of her two blind sons to the extent of defying her Lord, the Nagini Besandi walks out on the old King when he breaks the rules and appears to bring a third player into the game.

Perhaps the best we might say of this model is that religious traditionalism and the determination to hold on to property (comparing Catholic France) can construct models in which love is tamed (unlike the free polyamorous approach) into a triadic structure in which everyone knows the rules and no-one asks too many questions.

Above all, the purpose of the Burmese approach and the French approach is to keep property in the family and manage the costs of sexuality in terms of power and wealth more finely. In this system, Nagini Besandi was perfectly within her rights to walk away when the King started to bend accepted rules.

Perhaps also the Burmese legend (and French practice) might cause us to be less sure about a simplistic assertion that women are victims of 'patriarchy'.

The tribute concubines in the harem were certainly victims, though more of in terms of political exploitation with sexual characteristics, a system in which all vassals and peasants were victims of their lords.

However, these high status co-Queens, much like the wife and intelligent courtesan or mistress in the West, present a more complex picture to that of the patriarchalism of the nomadic Mongol type, based on resource poverty and Darwinian approaches to survival.

In this model, nomadic survivalist patriarchalism (much like that in the Bible) is replaced by a collaborative sexual model of developed traditionalism that tames the male's vital energies in the direction of most value to the women involved, given the need to sustain control of power and wealth in a competitive environment.

In fact, against the feminists, it might be said that, assuming a world of competition for resources (which is actually what we have whether we like it or not), the triadic arrangement may be the most successful in ensuring the acquisition and holding of property, the security of offspring and the maintenance of female power in the household.