Should I Apologise For This Posting? Sex & Power in the Modern World

One of the weirder aspects of our current culture is the ritual abasement of alleged wrong-doers, usually in the form of a forced apology on the advice of 'PR consultants'. My interest relates to something Jordan Peterson has raised. I am not an enormous fan of his total vision which is, in my opinion, flawed in several respects - the stoicism, the concentration on judaeo-christian values, Jungian archetypes and an over-deterministic biologism create the very model of an ideology, a trait that he claims to abhor in others. Or am I unjust and that these traits are those of his followers who have managed to miss his point about ideology? Wherever his new-found popularity leads, he is a reasoned debater with a thoughtful stance on life and he undoubtedly has insights on gender relations which are 'controversial' but none the less on the right side of the game.

His thesis (which is most observable at the point where a new cultural hegemony emerges and displaces another) is that politics is an expression of personality traits. Because sexual difference results in the emphasis of different personality traits (so much, so scientific) in the genders, shifts in the power between genders mean that the personality traits associated with the rising gender began to be valued and then affect discourse and practice under the new order and at the expense of the falling gender.

The narrative of psychopathy (where psychopathy is culturally widened to include a lot of normal male behaviour that does no harm) being 'bad' and empathy (even where an excess of empathy can be as harmful as full-on sociopathy in terms of adequate social functioning) is just one signifier of a cultural change that can be traced to a recent shift of values from the falling masculine to the rising feminine. This has been happening with gathering pace over the last three decades or so, reaching its crescendo in aggressive reaction of now-hegemonic liberals to the insurgency of democratic populism.

All talk of Jungian archetypes here is so much displacement although it is a useful poetic tool for describing what is happening. For actual causes, we have to turn back to a brute materialism. The bottom line lies not only in that women are now voters conscious of being voters as women (though this is exaggerated in its effects) but in the far more important fact that most purchasing decisions for most consumer goods, especially repeat purchases, under late liberal capitalism, are made by women,  Women also take an important role in many male purchasing decisions. Male-dominated corporations have recognised this. They have realised that the huge increase in educated women allows them to tap into this economy more effectively and that single women are also very likely to throw their energies into their work as expression of meaning far more than most men for whom the work is likely to be 'just a job'.

New centres of power have emerged in the corporate sector for women - notably human resources and marketing - just at that point when a particular form of education has introduced an ideology of empowerment for women (feminism). Peterson himself points out in addition that men have withdrawn from the universities and media relative to women so that we can see how the high ground of culture, combined with the entry of women into politics, has created a new female cultural domination where the next stage is a demand for 'gender equality' - which really means a demand that educated middle class women dominate the institutions that hire them in such numbers.

These are just facts on the ground. Economic change has not only shifted political power increasingly towards women (even if this is not yet fully equalised) but it has shifted cultural power in such a way this cultural change is working at a faster pace than the political change that will follow. In general men are giving up on politics but also on culture, the universities and the media where culture is manufactured. The fact of democracy is their last bastion against the possibility of total manipulation by a new administrative elite made up of educated women and the male elements in the 'capitalist' and 'managerial' classes who understand the profit in this revolution or who simply go with the flow of history. The dislike of democracy in liberal circles lately is perhaps a recognition of democracy's 'last fortress status' against ideology.

It is as a result of all this that the personality traits associated with women are becoming culturally dominant. Peterson's concerns are not that these personality traits are not good (rather they are just facts on the ground that come with any increase in power for women) but that we are replacing one imbalanced cultural arrangement with another (male personality trait dominance with female personality trait dominance), that this is creating the potential for the same sort of violent tensions that the first imbalance did - and that this has triggered a populist revolt which also happens to appeal to many 'conservative' women.

For this is an important point, the educated middle class feminism of the new world is deeply presumptuous in its claim to represent all women much as many men are linked by interest and sentiment to the new world of empowered middle class women. This is not a line that separates one gender from another in reality but one that separates two types of personality trait with different expressions in men and women (and which inter-mix with many other traits and histories which ultimately result in all individuals being unique even if they insist on then recombining into tribes and ideologies).

These thoughts were initially triggered by an article in the most recent British Psychological Society's Digest, "Flowers, Apologies, Food or Sex? Men's and Women's Views on The Most Effective Ways To Make Up". This article has one line that tells us that there may be a connection between general female personality traits (though we must make the central point here that these are general traits that differ considerably between women and may be part of the personality type of many men as well) and the emergence of female cultural power in the West - "... women thought their partner apologising or crying would be more a more effective way for their partner to make up than did the men."

Now, observe what happens in a scandal today and then compare it with 50 years - the insistence on apologies and the showing of remorse. The male instinct is that when something is done that is wrong, then apologies and emotion are relatively irrelevant - what is necessary is change in actual behaviour and restitution or recompense with what the wronged person wants (usually sexual relations in the case of men apparently, and there is nothing wrong with that if it is just a desire and there is no question of anything other than consent).

The female instinct is to ignore all that and demand an emotional submission and a change in language (which is symbolic for an expected if unverifiable change in thought). Showing emotion while using submissive language is a near-guarantor that the change of heart is 'sincere'. What the man thinks is important to most women whereas what the woman thinks is less important than what she does to most men. One trait finds security in knowing other minds (which can tend to household totalitarianism) whereas the other trait finds security in 'obedience' and 'compliance'. Again, this is not necessarily reflective what women and men actually do or think but is only what 'gender norms' imply as personality traits become dominant or submissive in society.

If some women might find a sexual act to be a demeaning as a means of recompense, bluntly many men consider a forced apology to be equally demeaning. In both cases, if freely given out of love and respect, there is no issue but if forced out of an imbalance of power or some form of household act of terror (such as 'not speaking'), then there is broadly an equivalence of distaste for what is being forced on the 'loser'. Sexual coercion for women and psychological coercion for men are pretty equivalent in terms of their damage to personal autonomy. The wife-beater and the persistent nag are actually perfectly equivalent when one takes into account of the nature of the victim of the act. Our society tends to recognise the first as problematic (which it is) yet willfully ignore the second as equally problematic.

The female instinct is encapsulated in the Catholic confessional where absolution comes from a verbal formula and then a 'change of heart' yet public policy at the same period of male 'dominance' through the institution of clerical power in society was rarely interested in such things. The paradox of priestly male dominance is that this interlocutor with God is, in effect, a eunuch - cruelly one might say, like many urban liberal middle class males. 'Patriarchal culture' co-existed with 'matriarchal culture' (a fact conveniently forgotten by feminists) but was not formally ideological or totalitarian (although matriarchal culture could be totalitarian within the household as patriarchal culture could be within the court). Male culture just wanted material compensation and simple submission to superior power by dint of language and acts without emotion. The formal act of obeisance is not an apology but something else.

Male dominance strategy was more interested in brute power relations rather than (primarily) control of culture even if Power did control culture through the court. Instead of a celebrity apologising for an abusive act in order to placate female consumers of entertainment products and then be obliged to show emotional regret in order to continue to be able to work, the traditional  'male' response would be to bring that person to justice for a crime but ignore the act if it was not a crime. This latter stance is, of course, now unacceptable - a wrong act is now deemed wrong, whether a crime or not, in a return to a modern version of clerical moralism. Shame (and guilt) are policing methods that are embedded in the community because they have been imposed from outside by the agents of the dominant culture.

The community itself rarely polices these issues today. It has become a matter of public discourse through newspapers, broadcasters and social media. Since the funeral of Princess Diana and Blair's calculated use of emotion to appeal to feminine and media sentiment, emotional responses to events have been manufactured from above as weapons or tools in cultural warfare by ideologically-motivated groups. The vigils surrounding the death of Jo Cox, MP were a perfect example of such manipulation, closer to Goebbels' distasteful (even to Hitler) manipulation of the killing of Horst Wessel than to any reasoned consideration of what to do about rare cases of lone fascist fanatics.

Charlie Brooker's 'Black Mirror' series has several excellent satires on this culture of manipulation but he still looks at it from within his own class, blaming the lumpen mass for its reactions and weakness rather than investigating the ideological manipulation of emotion in a competition between factions within elite groups. All elite groups now engage in this use of emotion as communications tool or weapon and not just the cultural Left. The cultural Left is perhaps simply more adept at it because they have an ideological framework for it.

Ignoring a wrong is, of course, unforgivable (perfectly reasonably) for women where the structures of power have not created the means for 'bringing to justice'. This may be the core of the problem here. After all, many solutions to alleged female abuse would require a legal system that was so intrusive on normal male behaviour (in order to catch truly errant male conduct) that men would live under a regime similar to that of 'The Handmaid's Tale' but under female domination. What is required is a balance of interest between the genders that lets individuals flourish as they are and has rules on lack of consent and bullying but creates a grey air of private life where individuals are allowed to congregate with those that are like them without wider community intrusion. The new warrior liberalism is like the old conservative authoritarianism in that it constantly expands its territory to fill a vacuum, like any empire. It is, in this respect, culturally oppressive even as it raises issues that must be raised - especially regarding the ignorant behaviour of some men to some women.

Western society resolved this in the past through somewhat hypocritical 'codes' outside the law, using shame (or guilt) but these are no longer possible and in any case were oppressive towards those women who were not 'inside the code system' by choice or lack of resources. The Irish Catholic Church's treatment of women 'outside the codes' is a lesson in pure evil. We have not found the way forward yet but it probably lies in 'values paganism' re-instituting 'codes' that permit autonomy and free speech, rewards those who show respect to others in the context of an ideology of self respect and punishes all forms of coercion (ideally, including unlawful state coercion).

We are moving here towards wanting a culture of 'good manners' for private life within a framework of law that punishes severely evidenced wrong-doing (essentially any form of unlawful coercion of the individual). Needless to say, this must include tools for the gathering of evidence and strong and impartial law enforcement. The DPP's recent behaviour in relation to alleged male rape trials was a moral disgrace but women are right to want a debate on the boundaries that dictate the correct behaviour between men and women - a debate which, if undertaken openly and reasonably, might come up with some uncomfortable conclusions for both genders as to their conduct 'in the field' and the necessity for creating social rather than legal solutions to the problem of consent.

This strategic difference between a society in which either male or female personality traits shift from private life to public policy and dominate the whole is fascinating. The shift to female personality trait dominance explains our new cultural elite's determined drive for apologies and that industry of PR people who trot out the need to apologise (rather than make restitution and be subject to material containment) in order to 'salvage' reputation. The person who apologises then has to go into the wilderness and claw their way back if they can (without any real attempt at justice), perhaps on their knees in penance for crimes that may or may not have been evidenced. The new argument that the 'victim' must be believed throws out of the window not only certain standards of jurisprudence but disallows both malice and false recollection in good faith. And yet we all know that, just as some claims are false, other claims are true and cannot be proven so that a moral injustice has been done when nothing can be done.

Social change is thus not effected by a reasoned consideration of how to change laws and regulations to deal with moral injustice but by 'exemplars' - much as medieval Churchmen dealt in exemplars to guide their flock. Regulation and law try to follow, usually finding that things are a lot more complicated than the ideologists think. Alleged wrong-doers are judged not by judges in accordance with the law but by a sort of Salem-like community of social media and mainstream media witches who are uninterested in investigation of the actual truth of claims or with context. This is dark stuff.

'Justice' is offered as a form of communitarian assault on the errant individual but it is increasingly based not on cool and fair assessment of the equality of the genders in their rights to self discovery and self creation but, in fact, on one simple truth - female voters and consumers can dictate terms to the mostly male elites who run the productive end of capitalism and who probably know their days are numbered. However, let us be clear, when this goes wrong, this is not all women judging some men but some women, the educated liberal middle class elite component of the gender, seeking out some men and judging them as representative of all men. This is no different from a minority of male priests seeking out and judging a few women and making claims about the whole sex - which is what happened 500 years ago, more recently in backwaters like Ireland.

Justice as the rational business of formal complaint to enforcement authorities involving courage on the part of the complainant and then the necessary procedures to judge truth or falsehood on the evidence is abandoned as (in effect) 'patriarchal'. The problem is that 'male' courage is socially created - courageous women obviously exist and most men are cowed by power but it has been historically far harder for women to adopt the risks of a courageous stance. Woman are thus often disadvantaged by the ideology of courage as are all vulnerable people in certain social conditions. Justice is not justice if it is not just and there are justifiable reasons for concern that our legal and regulatory systems lag our understanding of the primacy of networked human autonomy in a culture of equals rather than as a hierarchical structure of competing elites embedded in the past.

Those who feel wronged are probably right that they have to fight to get noticed in a society that ignores them until they get noisy and emotional - child abuse victims are the obvious recent example - but they are playing a flawed game in a flawed system. The real requirement here is to unravel the hierarchical elite-based system and replace it with something that starts with a reasoned understanding of what we are really like and not what ideologists think we should be.

There are reasonable arguments that 'justice' has not caught up with the needs of women but it has also not caught up with the needs of fathers or polyamorists so the problem is more widespread than feminist theorists think - it is a problem of the inappropriate parts of Iron Age ideology and industrial social structures being retained while the appropriate parts have been jettisoned. It is a problem of society not being in tune with the actually existing human condition.

This is a new world that is coming and yet it has now spawned its own resistance because not all women share a belief in the necessary extension of the traits attributed to them (such as the apology and grovel being sufficient) into the public domain (while wishing to retain them in the private domain). These 'conservative' women match in numbers the 'liberal' men who have calculated on moral and pragmatic grounds that 'equality' just means that the old order is dead and that they have to find a place in the new order.

We all chuckle when some liberal metropolitan male supporting the new order gets caught out as an 'abuser' (even if this means little more than some crass language or a blundering touch) just as we have always chuckled when some Southern Baptist Minister gets caught out in 'cheating' but both breeds of men have allowed ideology to conquer the reality of their condition which is as creatures of ideology. Both men are often subject to disproportionate witch hunts as exemplars of wrong-doing within their community. All men become 'rapists' to their critics in one world and all churchmen are hypocrites to their critics in the other world - both propositions are absurd. A better truth is that neither sets of men have the courage to be who they are and yet show the rest of the world respect. They have become stupid because they are cowards, unable to live their lives as the persons that they are because history and ideology have dictated personae that drown their true selves. The same has applied to women stuck in households and then humiliated when they escape release in a love affair.

The point is that the human condition (and society is just the public expression of the human condition) requires respect for all human traits, for difference and for variability (which is incidentally another sound point made by Peterson) This includes many other traits, whether libertarianism or authoritarianism or empathetic or (non socially harmful) psychopathic traits, as much as the traits that tend to show difference between men and women because of their biochemistry and brain structures (a difference which science accepts as partially true without drawing any valuation conclusions in relation to the principle of equality).

Our society is rapidly spinning into another round of disaster to match that when male personality traits dominated over female personality traits. You cannot exterminate the 'other'. The key issue here is a fundamental respect for personal autonomy. Autonomy emerges out of each individual's very particular model of perception, cognition and biochemistry as well as history. The uniqueness of the individual is our starting point. From there, comes respect for others and (which is where brute males fall down but also authoritarian female household matriarchs) consent. Indeed if two people want to do anything, no matter how distasteful to others, in private, or to speak of it (since free speech and struggle between persons through robust persuasion are central to the good society) then it is no one's business but their own.

So back to the apology. There is nothing wrong with the apology as either sincere expression of regret or perhaps as tactical tool to end a fruitless squabble while considering one's position (yet is it ever really healthy to apologise for something that you feel you have no need to apologise for?!). But there is a lot wrong with the public institutionalisation of the apology to meet communitarian needs that have nothing to do with the job in hand and force people into modes of submission which actually change nothing, Indeed, the public apology is often little more than cover for a decision not to resign and not to make recompense. It is not embedded within a culture of honour as in Japan where both apology and resignation are carefully encoded within a shame culture with a long history.

An apology in Western culture is simply a response to an assault, an act of obeisance on feminine lines. All an apology of this sort may do in our culture is to trigger the imposition of yet more oppressive rules and regulations that may benefit a certain type of woman in a certain situation but which may limit the lives and opportunities of other women and degrade relations between the sexes. There is no thinking-through of the problem that was demonstrated by the act that required the apology.

We should have more considered explanations to hand, more justice (evidence-based dealing with claims), more resignations, better laws and better law enforcement and fewer apologies and far fewer restrictions on free speech and normal human interaction. We should have more honour and good manners. We should pre-empt the bitter onslaught of an insane social media-driven witch hunt with better education on consent and respect. Our entire culture is in danger of becoming supine before just one personality trait and just one ideology (feminism) just as, in the 1930s, it became supine before another personality trait and another ideology (fascism).

On Monogamy - Part I

This is the first of two ruminations derived from a reading of a 2008 academic paper by Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, 'Monogamy and Polygyny in Greece, Rome and World History' [Princeton Stanford Working Papers in Classics, available online]. The views and conclusions are mine and not his.

Monogamy is 'normal', begging the question of what it is we mean by 'normal' - for us, for society, for a particular society and so forth. 'Normal' means fitting a 'norm', a standard which occasions no comment, that just is as it is. A norm contains no absolute moral worth in itself since slavery was once normal and female genital mutilation is normal today in some societies. The question underlying the question is how something becomes 'normal' in society and whether it accords with our own natures ... or what would be normal to us if we were in command of the social and the social was not in command of us.

Monogamy presents an interesting test case in deciding whether what is normal is imposed or natural. An academic paper by Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, published in June 2008, triggered thoughts since it opens with a question about the normality or peculiarity of Greco-Roman monogamy which, in turn, is interesting to me because it is Greco-Roman monogamy that has set the standard for the Christian world which, in turn, has created many of the unthinking norms of our own culture.

By monogamy here, we mean a social rule that permits only one wife (we have to assume here male dominance whose normality is another question for another time) with no cohabitation with concubines - in other words, the association of an exclusive sexual relationship within a household. It is perhaps not a problem of sexuality (since it does not preclude extra-marital sex outside the home) so much as a problem of property (who has access to it as sexual or just household management partner). The Greco-Roman approach to property provides us with another set of norms that have underpinned Western culture, including capitalism, ever since.

Scheidel notes that genetic monogamy (mutually exclusive mating between two partners) is fairly rare in the animal kingdom and that social monogamy (mutually exclusive pair bonding which is not necessarily connected to reproduction) is common amongst birds but atypical amongst mammals of which we humans, of course, are a species. Humans appear to be unusual - even amongst primates in being monogamous (in effect, a partly social construction) and (he avers) "only mildly polygynous in "genetic" and "social" terms'".

The mildly appears to be an extrapolation from claims about sexual dimorphism and male-female variability in reproductive success which we can take as read. But the reading of that evidence suggests that mildly polygynous does not mean not polygynous and that might be read as either that most people are occasionally interested in two or more partners at the same time or some (a relatively few) males are always interested in two or more partners. This gives us a picture of a free 'natural' society in which most people lived in monogamous states but enabled people in monogamous states either to be temporarily non-monogamous or people to be fully polygamous. The rise of polyamory in itself within conditions of relative social freedom implies the reality of these possibilities although polyamorists still find themselves faced with enormous stigma and social barriers to contend with.

Scheidel's analysis of social conditions perhaps confirms that the polyamorous trend in a post-Christian free society fits with a situation where, historically, most bonding and mating arrangements are monogamous but where societies generally accept polygyny in both its generic and social forms. We might say that most humans most of the time (outside the West) are not rigid in having one system for all but provide flexibility in accordance with the underlying structure of human biological preference. 93% of societies have some form of socially accepted polygyny (polyandry is entirely another matter). Convenience, preference and resource limitations might tend most to monogamy but there is no barrier across the bulk of humanity to multiple relationships in principle, especially amongst elite groups and as 'concurrent concubinage'.

Now, the key element is '-gyny'. The vast bulk of historic social forms are related to multiple partners for males and not for females and may be read in two ways - either that, in general, men and women do not want multiple relationships and are more tolerant of sharing space with other women (which is interesting but unclear and which we may explore in the next posting) or that men simply are so dominant in most social situations that they can impose these social standards and that women are their 'victims' which is probably the 'normal' narrative of most women in the contemporary West. We can read the process of shifting from polygyny in all its forms (including concurrent concubinage) either as the progressive liberation of women from male oppression or as the progressive imposition and cultural enslavement of men to a feminised society. I suggest that both processes have operated in tandem.

The problem with the simple ideological interpretation that monogamy is a liberation of at least half humanity from the other half (or, less charitably, that it is one half's victory in a cultural power struggle over the other half) is that the current stage of human history is unusually free of socially imposed restrictions on sexual conduct. It has become very clear that there are as many women, possibly more, who want sexual relationships classed as polyamorous (that is, the freedom to love more than one person) as there are men. The conclusion may be that women are as mildly polyandrous as men are mildly polygamous and that it is probably true that most women are occasionally interested in two or more partners at some stage while some (a relatively few) females are always interested in two or more partners. In other words that, in a totally free society, and although there may be differences in approach to specific situations, there may be more similarity between men and women in this regard than social norms have permitted.

What we are suggesting here is that we should not entirely confuse polygyny with patriarchy. Nevertheless, what Scheidel does point out is the correlation of matriarchy with monogamy and patriarchy with polygyny. At first sight, this suggests that the link with patriarchy is to be seen in terms of female liberation and female exploitation but this may not be quite what it seems because we have to think about who are the mothers and who are the fathers who rule and how they relate to others of their gender. I would contend that gender here is of less importance than the fact of ruling - it is power that matters.

For example, the logic of the relationship between monogamy and matriarchy might be seen immediately in terms of the need for the mother-to-be to remove all competition from the household - the competition is not men but other women so that monogamy is not a strategy to contain or control men (though that is the net result) but a strategy to exclude other women. A dominant woman can demand in the right social circumstances the exclusion of all other women and the exile of the male's sexuality to the margins in return for exclusivity and stability. That offer, made at point A when emotional bonding is high, might be regreted at point B when the male has literally gone through a ritual that socially closes alll doors to his own future needs and desires - in effect, he has been deluded perhaps by his own hormones or social pressure into a form of quasi-enslavement to which he either reconciles himself or around which he is forced to skulk like a dog. In short, matriarchical monogamy is a power play as anti-liberatory as patriarchical polygyny because it structures social norms around the thrusting of other women to one side (into social nothingness as hidden mistresses, lovers, sex workers and so forth) in order that one woman be dominant in the household. Thus women may be said to oppress women through monogamy as much as (it could be argued) women control and contain (and so oppress) men.

To be fair, we should say, of course, that there are parallel oppressions in patriarchical polygyny but resource poverty means that most normal relationships in such societies remain monogamous - the woman, in such societies, might reasonably say that the man can have his concubine or second wife when he can afford it and not before and such a new entrant into a household would be in a pecking order and be expected to wash the dishes. Elite patriarchal polygyny, on the other hand, brings women into a wealthy household and so provides security but their dependence on the male is clear - the women are not truly free but no more, one supposes, than men who are answerable to other men (the condition of most men in most societies) or if a modern high status female decided to have a harem of poorer males in tow.

The latter type has been historically rare to the point of my knowing of no case beyond some notorious super-elite women such as Catherine the Great and a few Empresses but the point here is that the oppression is at all times one of relative power and wealth before it is one of sexual predation. The predation follows on from the disparities of wealth and power just as the casting couch mediates between the desperate desire of a beautiful young woman to be an actress and the hunger for power and sex of an inadequate pot-bellied aging man with capital. I have no doubt that a society of Amazons with high sexual appetites and great wealth in a resource poor society with too many men around who need to eat would soon develop forms of sexual organisation and household that reflected their power albeit one that would have to deal with the problem of pregnancy. We may live in such a society within our lifetimes.

Monogamy thus has its politics - it is both a means by which women contain and control men and out-compete other women and it is a means by which partnerships of bonded humans are formed to create children or security often under conditions of resource scarcity. As an ideology, it emerges from the first whereas, as a practice, it emerges from the second. It is why so often women engaged in the practice and not requiring to contain and control or out-compete can often reject those ideologies of matriarchalism (such as that of catholicism) and feminism that grow out of anxiety and ressentiment.

Polygyny or polyandry or community variants, conversely, are both a means by which men show their dominant status and control of resources and a means by which in a resource-rich culturally free society individuals meet their psychological and emotional needs. Clearly, the situation is complex but the critical element is competition for, control of and access to resources. We can see that a resource rich society (assuming cultural freedom) is always going to tend to have more polyandrous and polygynous forms without such forms ever being dominant - after all, polygyny and polyandry (like polyamory) are extremely emotionally and resource-demanding alternatives to monogamy. If you do not have spare capital, high revenues and more leisure time than average, monogamy is the easy option and polygynous or polyamorous instincts can be satisfied when it all gets too much by 'cheating' (playing the field and then going home when the game is over).

Scheidel, as a classicist, is particularly interested in Greco-Roman monogamy (as we are for different quasi-political reasons). He presents it as at the geographical faultline between the moderately patricentric Indo-European zone and the more patriarchal world of the Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia. The point about the Greco-Roman model is that it did not permit the exceptions for rulers and elites permitted to the Eastern world. This is important because the constraint here on polygyny is not economic (see above) but a matter of norms - a norm has appeared that restricts others, interestingly the power elite more than anyone else but implicitly anyone else who might accumulate the resources to engage with it. And it is this that was inherited by the Christians as the model to be imposed on the West for the next two thousand years.

In this regard, Christianity cannot be blamed for the imposition, only for the brutal intensification of the system. Homeric heroes lived polygynous lives but monogamy was firmly established in Greek culture at the beginning of  the historic period and was presented as quintessentially Greek compared to barbarian culture. In this respect, Christianity followed Greek practice rather than the other way around: it may be useful to consider Christianity as a partially Hellenised heresy of Judaism. This Greek practice did not stop concubinage (and certainly did not stop slave exploitation or the hiring of sex workers) but it did draw the line at co-habitation. Rome too appeared to be monogamous from its early origins although it too may have seen concubines of which it culturally disapproved but in separate locations (like the French 'maitresse'). Slave relationships, which may not always have been obviously exploitative, existed and could result in issue which could be recognised by the fathers.

And we have not mentioned that the modern institution of serial monogamy is also very ancient. Roman divorce law enabling a succession of wives if that suited the man - so that the law provided a form of patriarchy in simply changing sexual relationships from being lateral in time (the harem) to being vertical with one woman after another. Christianity innovated, almost as a trades union for women and slaves, by making divorce harder and then impossible. Roman men, in effect, found the vertical approach rather easy to have stopped whereas unravelling a harem might have been a lot more difficult, certainly harder for Christians to legislate against. After all, protecting incumbent women conservatively in monogamy would then have been replaced with a strategy of 'firing' lots of women to benefit just one of them under polygamy. I do not believe it has been studied but perhaps Christanity found fertile ground in the West and had more difficulty travelling East because its power to create a mass female base was restricted by its inability to represent all women in principle under patriarchal harem systems whereas it could purport to represent all women under systems of serial monogamy and slave exploitation.

It is thus Christianity that strengthens monogamy to the degree that we now see it today but on this Greco-Roman base, with subsequent wars on barbarian polygamy, divorce and elite concubinage that became central to the Catholic Church's sexual politics (which has never been seen by feminists as particularly progressive in most respects). One might say that male power was systematically endorsed by the Church in return for its sexual containment. This is not the place for cod psycho-analytical theory but the levels of emotional and physical violence that became part of the description of masculinity in the West might or might not have something to do with this 'turn' - while it would be naive to believe that males did not have sexual outlets outside the household, the ideology of sexuality and the household itself became zones of male constraint and emotional silence.

Even today, the norm is that the household is so much 'owned' by the couple (which means, in fact, though not in ideology, by the woman) that it becomes unthinkable for a man to invite a female friend into the home without negotiation on the precise terms of entry.  How many women or men would freely enter a married British household without 'clearing' it first with the woman or man who co-habited ... at a certain point, both husband and wife lose all rights to the most innocent of friendships with the opposite sex under conditions where the household is territorialised as sacred space and yet there is no other space that is not public space or the friend's sacred space. And how many partners would be wary, without reason in most cases, of entering the private space of another person of the opposite gender in return. These codes are not rational but encoded from a particular truth ... the monogamous person has no private space unless they have an agreed space within a space which cannot be accessed except through the coupled space with its rules and taboos.

Jewry followed Christianity much as Christianity followed Hellenism. The West in the last 1,000 years (bar a few radical communitarian experiments and Mormonism) has been resolutely monogamous to this day. Even Mormonism recanted in 1890 and then again in 1904. Today's polyamorous tendency has not actually exhibited itself yet as a movement to change the law to permit consensual polygamy and the few Nordic attempts to recognise Muslim polygamy are really responses to the cultural war between Leftists trying to score points against nativists and populists amd have little to do with any seriously radical or well thought out response to what we are as persons. Monogamy is, in short, the 'norm' in the West (and now not only in the West) and remains the norm despite its lack of normality in history and other societies, the undoubted suffering caused to millions of people 'trapped' within its demands over centuries, the effective death of the Church as moral arbiter across much of the West and the fact that it has declined back into its serial Roman form but with women permitted the same rights as men and despite serial monogamy's often bad effects on children. Indeed, it is so normal that the homosexual community have yearned to enter into that state as civil partners or more.

We might say that monogamy, despite its unnatural (as exclusive) state and oppressions and its undoubted false consciousness, is one of the defining characteristics of the West which has been exported globally as part of the West's contribution to modernisation. Japan legislated against polygamy in 1880, Thailand in 1935, China in 1953 (under Communism which is a form of Western heresy and so ultimately a derivative of Hellenised Christianity), India (for Hindus) in 1955 and Nepal in 1963. That means billions of people shifted into monogamous mode in under 65 years. Whole populations have been 'modernised' into a particular gender relations practice by States with no religious intervention. Only Islam (with secularising exceptions) and Sub-Saharan Africa stand out and both are under immense pressure from modernisers and Christians alike. In the latter zone, something like 20-30% of men are in polygynous unions which might suggest the 'all things being equal' norm that might apply in relatively resource poor and non-free (meaning where women do not have the same choice) societies.

The obvious question is whether the West's new interest in polyamory under conditions where the State does not dictate personal morality and where there are relatively prosperous middle classes (albeit under economic pressure) will reverse this trend eventually. Indeed, it might be that resource pressures on equal young men and women (especially over the costs of a household) might actually encourage polygyny and polyandry. Given a figure for 'natural' polyamorists of around 15% of the population, one might anticipate the emergence of such households who will require legal recognition under conditions of serial polygamy/polyandry - that is, core stable units with partners entering and departing over time until a final stable unit, which may revert to monogamy, emerges over time. Legislating for such a development to cover property relations and child protection while not interfering in private choices may present a challenge for traditionalists and legislators as difficult as past struggles over abortion or gay rights and marriage.

The Flaw in Pascal Beverley Randolph

In any history of the association of modern magickal thinking and sexuality, one of the ur-texts is the 'Magia Sexualis' of Pascal Beverley Randolph ['PBR'], a mid-nineteenth century American, but part of a broader body of work that was, in turn, part of the American transcendentalist approach to occultism. Randolph had a second round of influence, through the translation and interpretation of the work by Marie de Naglowska, in France but the historical importance of Randolph is not our primary concern here. What we want to do is critique his work from a modern perspective and see where this leads.

The flaw in P. B. Randolph's work is one very familiar to contemporary thinkers and not just those who set their stall on 'queer theory'. It is the very notion of polarity between male and female. Indeed, the flaw in all simple thought, one of the themes of our postings in general, is polarity - yin/yang, good/bad, male/female, love/hate and so on. It is convenient and it can be creative but it is not 'true'.

As regular readers will know (taking the last as one of many), I recognise the fundamental opportunity for difference between categories taken in the round - so that there is male and there is female - but there is no value judgement to be ascribed to either, certainly not in relation to each other. Human variation means that there is no exemplar of a 'type' and the Bell Curves of normality shade and overlap in complex and fascinating ways.

We have asserted elsewhere that the differences between the genders are real 'in the round' but are so highly specific and functional that attempts to extend the category that includes some specific attributes in order to represent some absolute, any absolute, is absurd. There are specific partial functions of feminity and masculinity with some public policy implications (and cultural codings overlaying these based on a reading of the functions for their use value in struggles for power or social cohesion) but there is no absolute quality of feminity or masculinity.

The terms of categorisation are always approximations, based on an averaging out of common attributes so that, as several friends have pointed out, a highly feminised male can still be a man, a highly masculinised female a woman and many entities between the two can be properly regarded as something else entirely.

In other words, the sexual relationship between persons can be ideologically 'genderised' as some sort of meeting of opposites or (in gay relations) of 'sames' but the actual practice of sexuality is far more interesting and complex than this, a matter of the 'magic' of personal rather than gender relations. To build a system around (say) a positive female pole and negative male pole, as PBR does, as if the earth's polarity and magnetism automatically applied to people, because of a primitive insistence on a debased form of microcosm reflecting macrocosm, is, to say the least, sloppy thinking.

As solipsistic poetic allegory, it may work but poetry is a perception of existence and not existence itself. This is not to argue that gender playfulness cannot incorporate such absurdities but only that, once understood to be absurd, we must, perforce, move on. Randolph, for example, writes that 'as in nature' the female attracts the male but, in fact, this was not a matter of 'nature' but one of culture, or rather his culture (a culture that determinedly persecuted him).

In another culture, the male attracts the female and the male attracts the male and the female the female and so on - his culture was the rigid culture of the dominant patriarchal male (much as I loathe the loaded feminist term 'patriarchy' as propagandistic distortion today, it does apply to gender relations in mid-nineteenth century church-going middle class Anglo-Saxon society) and his equally disturbed and disturbing fixed matriarchal counterpart.

But having excoriated PBR for writing nonsense at a strategic level, we can dig deeper into his poetic allegory and try to uncover what tactically exists of value in the false metaphor and a cod-scientific approach involving the volts and magnetism of a mid-nineteenth century American autodidact and fantasist. For, the essence of PBR's system is vitalism. Vitalism is not much liked scientifically or philosophically today but, taken as allegory rather than as 'truth', it represents the personal perception of the flow of biochemical change in a person and is a way of explaining what is not yet fully understood by science - the instincts of attraction and repulsion.

Some people are undoubtedly more 'vital' than others (which is not a value judgement about worth but merely an observation). Some have experienced unexplained attractions and repulsions whereas others go through life with no consciousness of their own connectedness to unexplained phenomena. PBR is making an honourable attempt to deal with and make use of a reality that will not bend itself easily to scientific investigation and, although his own system may be nonsense in relation to reality, his awareness of the phenomenon is generations ahead of his own culture.

Instead of repressing this vitalism, expressed most profoundly in sexual terms, he at least makes an honourable attempt to bring it into the open on terms that his generation might just understand - scientific materialism. He gets it wrong but then so did Karl Marx. Both, I contend, moved us forwards (as did Freud and Reich) without being 'right' and subsequent problems arise not from the authors of radical new ideas but from the dumb acceptance of them without critical thought after the event.

PBR, in linking sexual vitalism to another fascinating absurdity, magic, manages to bring in yet another aspect of the matter - the fact that for some persons in some situations sexual vitalism, as a practice rather than a theory, can lead to shifts in consciousness similar to those of some drugs. To extend this to magical purpose in the sense that sexual vitalism will lead to changes in the material world may pile on yet another absurdity in the eyes of many - until we start to consider that (as we have argued elsewhere) much of our reality is social.

Consciousness changes can shift our own viewpoint in regard to that social reality. Therefore, while the magician who thinks that will and magic will cause him to fly in the air is an utter fool, the 'magician' who believes he or she can use sexual vitalism to transform their personal nature and social presence is decidedly not.

However, the most effective argument against magical practice is generally that magical practitioners are not great advertisements for their own method. Their practices seem to be constantly associated with failure and social exclusion, with marginalisation and even with neurosis. To be successful appears to require that you embed yourself wholly in the reality presented by society and, although there is room for singular creativity in one line of endeavour (the way of the 'genius'), any attempt to question the broader grounds of false mass perception is to have one consigned to the mad house, the prison, the execution block or a troubled isolation (the modern solution). But this is deceptive on two grounds.

The first is that the marginalised and isolated are, in the first instance, drawn to desperate measures in order to integrate themselves into the social and yet to individuate. They are drawn to the fantastic and to the magical. The more marginalised they are (as was PBR as a mixed race petit-bourgeois in a racist aspirant and fast-growing society) then the more drawn they are towards such radical metaphors to explain their position. The history of voodoo in Haiti might be an exemplar of this relationship.

The second is that radical thinkers take enormous risks with their reputation to transform themselves and society. The massive dead weight of conventionalism with strike down the pioneer even if, in the long run of history, the flawed insights of that pioneer might prove themselves correct - Nietzsche, PBR, Crowley: all failures of a sort and yet ...

Any 'sensible' person would never think radically but would seek out the conventional, especially if they have a family to feed. Most do. Some simply give into necessity. Others are philosophical zombies, creatures of the social rather than individuals operating within the social. Things are probably better in this respect today compared to almost any previous age but there is still a price, even today, to be paid for not being a zombie and, living amongst zombies, many of us have to have dress in the stench of their kind so as not to be eaten alive.

As for PBR, his approach to sex magic is perhaps still worth reading but only in order to establish just how much he was embedded in the Christian culture of his day. His rules are filled with religiosity, involve complicated and ascetic limitations on behaviour that imply a sexual union that is over a month in preparation and has no serious understanding of sexual differences in orgasm.

Indeed, by the end of them, one's conclusion is that PBR is more concerned to make his congress moral and respectable than to encourage the sort of sexual energy that might transform consciousness. When he gets around to sexual positions, he seems open-minded and no doubt much fun was had but it is a sexuality surrounded by anxiety and magical protection and always conscious that respectability requires that the act be contained within a 'sacred' box.

PBR has nothing to teach us now about sexuality or consciousness except negatively - that is, he tells us that 150 years ago, the power of the conventional fear of sexuality was such that a person with a sense of sexual vitalism had to cloak his nature in the language of the 'enemy': ascetic, 'spiritual', theistic ... and that even a person whose 'passion' for the 'vital' forced him into the role of cultural maverick was forced to bend the knee to social convention if he was to be able to talk in any way about mutual male/female sexual love.

Of course his contemporaries were rutting around like crazy as all generations do but the language of the time meant that men and women had to inhabit separate linguistic environments - that of the prostitute and that of the home. PBR, to his credit, made a serious attempt to include women in a sexual dialogue and he compromised by bringing that dialogue into the Victorian hearth and this is what makes him a progressive force who was not without courage.

Unfortunately, the very act of speaking about the sexual in such a shared discourse proved shocking to Christian sensibilities and so this very mild-mannered and rather dull and exhausting sexual magic became demonised. An attempt to escape from zombie status and communicate sexual love was doomed in that culture at that time. Worse, those who went underground with it brought the compromising language of PBR into their 'spiritual' determinations of what sexuality was and should be and so the mastering ideology infected even the potential for resistance.

However, his existence as an underground figure, rarely actually read, helped to open the door to sexuality as something that could be spoken of between men and women. He was succeeded by equally brave women like Woodhull and Craddock who began a process of transformation that has led to today's freedom and openness. Even today, the American Evangelical Right would drag America and the world back to those neurotic and disturbed days when zombies ruled if they possibly could.

So, although PBR's system was scientific nonsense and his magic onerous and excessively essentialist, he should be lauded today for his eccentric courage and his preparedness to (at least) attempt to bring women into equal status, as sexual partners, with men. In this last he failed to take the final step and he remained 'the priest' but his determination to offer women rights to sexual pleasure (albeit in a weirdly religious framework) should make him a hero to all free persons. The right tribute would be to free his departed soul from the trammels of the religiosity that he felt it necessary to make part of himself to justify what really did not need to be justified at all - human freedom.

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]

Traditionalism & Sexual Magick

Please note that this essay contains verbal material that is sexually explicit and those of an anxious or mildly neurotic disposition or who have an aesthetic distaste for such matters should not read on.

The problem with sexual magic or magick is its history - its practice has derived from the eclectic acquisition of many traditions under conditions where nothing might be said or broadcast to the world for fear of shame or, in certain societies, persecution.

But perhaps a future shift in Western consciousness about sexual autonomy (only one element in the debate about autonomy) does not lie in the appropriation of these traditions or the maintenance of the idea that, somehow, sexuality is so different and dangerous that it has to be surrounded by ritual and performance.

Perhaps sexuality is far more 'normal' than we think even if it contains risks that must be accounted for.

Doubts About Traditionalism

Take the tradition of the retention of semen. This is a Taoist convention apparently linked to longevity but it also emerges as karezza, almost certainly independently, in the modern West.

It links to 'coitus reservatus' (the standard use of Latin is often a clue to a neurotic refusal to face up to what is going on as 'normal') and there are Tantric equivalents.

Magical import has been placed on this practice with an elaborate ritualistic language of spirituality despite it largely being a) an attempt to accommodate high sexual energy with poor contraceptive methods and b) often emphasises the ability to extend male pleasure to a level believed to be spiritual without real regard for the 'vessel' (the woman).

Modern technology can now largely sweep away the fear of pregnancy (with a bit of common sense) even if, ironically, fear of disease now returns us to the condom quite quickly, so the central issue is b) - do such techniques really improve matters or are they based on 'false consciousness'.

We are reminded here that our Taoist friends were not scientifically well informed and, indeed, that they poisoned themselves with mercury intake. Their insights were 'a priori'.

Science seems to be telling us much that casts doubt on the Taoist model - orgasm is in itself a 'good' in terms of health and welfare and we do not now have to rely on Wilhelm Reich for some understanding that it also has positive socio-psychological effects.

For a great deal of humanity, joyful sexual engagement is a major factor in relieving stress and tension but I will leave you to study the links and come to a view, assuming God has not told you not to do so.

Keeping the Baby, Throwing Out the Bath Water

The spiritualisation of the orgasm (incomprehensible to many people but a fact of the matter to others) is merely the extension of the orgasm from 'coping' with reality to a process that, insofar as reality is constructed by perception, radically transforms reality through transforming a person's perception of reality.

The struggle between a given and socially constructed reality and the inner reality of a person, which is at the heart of a great deal of human misery, is not necessarily a sexual matter by any means but sexual repression and transformation through sexual engagement provides a resolution of that struggle for many people.

From this perspective, the effect on longevity (the Taoists' main purpose) of failing to orgasm is not merely unproven but looks to be as precisely as wrong as the imbibing of mercury while the length of the act may indeed have excellent effects on the self-trained male but requires a level of tolerance from most women beyond reason.

Of course both Taoism and and Tantra were quite blunt about the receptacle and submissive nature of the woman. Sincere devotees of their techniques have had to do a fair number of somersaults in the last century to introduce some notion of gender equality and take account of homosexual and 'third sex' aspirations.

But there is no point in throwing out the baby with the traditional bath water because of the 'false' aspects of traditionalism, corrected both by science and by a legitimate modern ethic - not so much one of equality as one of regard for the 'other' as person of value in their own right.

The key issues here are the recognition that sacral sex is a personal development strategy and not couple therapy (as in neo-tantra) and the insight that sacral-sexual techniques mobilise the chemical interplay behind mind and body to create transformative states that can be legitimately interpreted as 'divine' (even if there is no divine objectively speaking).

Honesty & Difference

The obvious problem is that male and female body chemistries have requirements that are so different that the transformative techniques are not likely to be identical.

One school of thought is blunt about what this may mean - the 'other' is abstracted as a vessel and receptacle, albeit one that is treated with respect. There is a whole ethical debate that is inconclusive about whether a 'magical practitioner' actually informs their partner about what they are up to in this respect.

Some of this debate descends into a matter of angels dancing on the head of a pin because all sexual activity involves both a deep inwardness (including unshared fantasy) and a sense of bonding that, at its best, is felt as a merging of persons.  Our Tantra series will explore this further at a much later date.

It is only convention that has Westerners speaking of the bonding in romantic terms without recognising the existence of the former self-absorbed inwardness.

It is not just that the inwardness is often transgressional or incommunicable but the other party is, bluntly, probably not interested in yours because it cuts across their own experience and their transgressive thoughts.

Part of the sheer pleasure of a loving sexual relationship is the right to be yourself in your own head and that is not in the slightest bit incompatible with radical differences in actual experiences (inevitable anyway given male and female body chemistry in any serious heterosexual play) and of different fantasy imagery.

The Mind-Body Relationship in Sacral Sexuality

The baby that we might wish to save in the traditions, alongside a pragmatic approach to technique, is the 'allegorical' role of their modelling of how the body works as perceived by the mind rather than as described objectively by scientists. In essence, we are speaking of different truths for different purposes.

As our biochemistry shifts in response to sensory stimulation, we 'sense' changes in our body that are not the same as emotions. They are physical concomitants of emotions - such as a fluttering in the chest or a dullness in the forehead - and much of the art of 'magic' directed at the body is about the mastery of these sensations and their redirection.

The entire infrastructure of the chakhras, like the circulation of energies in Taoist thought, is a pre-scientific but perfectly realistic attempt to describe actual phenomena that exhibit themselves in different ways in different persons.

Some of these sensations will never be present in some people. In others, they can be awakened.

If these sensations are observed and cultivated, they match the felt sense of an energy that can be guided in a way that appears to be observable in terms of cause and effect through the body until something takes place that can easily be interpreted as of the highest spiritual nature, a transformative moment of devastating effect.

Such descriptions are pre-scientific but science has still not be able to produce its own adequate description of the 'felt' management of the body by the mind, in part because the experience is unique to the individual and incommunicable. The framework for its description is more poetic and analogical than anything science can cope with.

Given that pre-scientific traditional thinking identified some real felt phenomena, we can draw a distinction between the analysis of meaning and working (which resulted in errors over mercury and semen retention) and the actual skill and success of the techniques in making a cause have an effect that could lead to an explosion of new meanings.

In other words, if we can identify the phenomena in ourselves and assuming we will ourselves to a meaning and do not decide, rather than have decided for us, that we would prefer a socialised to an individuated meaning, then these techniques can be learned and improved upon, the better (I contend) if they are stripped of the cultural accretions of the past.

The Ethics of Sex

One of these techniques is the managed use of sexual stimulation ... and, the modern would add, the full body or extended orgasm (of special value to the female who can reach heights in this respect undreamt of by any male tantrik adept or taoist priest).

Ethically, one person could reasonably use another as a magical vessel so long as the process was not a betrayal of private trust in regard to bonding (or involved a conscious decision not to bond on both sides which is perfectly possible) and showed a balance of respect over time.

What do I mean by balance of respect over time? This is that, assuming a bonding beyond one event, and unlike the use of the deliberate use of a 'lower caste' vessel in Tantric or, implicitly, some Taoist lore, a sort of unspoken magical balance is provided between the needs of the partners, with no prejudice intended here against polyamory.

In this context, inwardness is best served by a degree of communication not as to detail but as to attitude, an openness about preferred technique and fantasy, no matter how radical in content, that permits the one to give to the other in Situation A in order that they may be given in Situation B.

This deals with the problem of equality because, at Situation A, the female (we stick to the heterosexual for the argument here) permits the male to lose themselves in adapted techniques for his biochemistry but, in Situation B, the male responds to her biochemical needs in order to get the appropriate level of orgasmic energy for her.

It has to be said immediately that all human beings are on a massively variable continuum of libidinous energy and that this waxes and wanes with perception and with external conditions so there are no laws as such to love-making. Each moment is its own moment so we are left with an attitude, a form of will or a sense of an individuated self.

A Caveat to Criticism

Before we leave the subject, we should not be too negative about the 'retention of semen' model because it does represent a very specific technique that does have its particular use.

There is a biochemical kick-back from certain techniques that halt male orgasm at the very moment before fulfilment. These clearly do have effects that are dramatic.

The mental modelling is based on the idea (that somehow feels right even if it is not right) that the fluids in our body are all closely connected - this idea is very much at the root of the Taoist and alchemical concepts of a furnace in the bowels circulating fluids so that mental and physical acts can purify and drive these fluids towards 'gnosis'.

Not to expend a fluid but to kick it back at the moment of highest felt pressure into the body reverses the orgasmic sensation as a shudder that shifts perception of the body in radical ways - and, with body integrated to mind, changes the mind from one state of excitation to another state altogether.

So, while I have been critical of the Taoist approach or that of Karezza at the macro-sexual level, at the micro-sexual level, it is something that 'works' as a technique. To run one's sexuality on it as a law strikes me as inappropriate but to experience the situation with a willing partner may have individual benefits.

Taking Things Forward

Tradition and past 'teachers' can get in the way of something much more normal that our society allows. It is not just that we have to cope with an historic Judaeo-Christian mythos of repression but also with a trivial public presentation of sexuality for commercial reasons which masquerades as liberation.

Our culture has developed an increasingly untenable situation where we live in a huge shopping window of theoretical sexual possibilities at which we stare like podgy armchair viewers of sporting events, observers and not participants.

Meanwhile, no one dare discuss such matters because the shame culture still subsists at the provincial and daily level, in the home and in the work-place. Desire is massively displaced into an inactive voyeurism - impotence being the equivalent of the sports fan's obesity.

If we shift our perceptions dramatically back to ourselves as individuals who sit at a natural place in the continuum of libidinal energies where it is good for ourselves (including the choice of a-sexuality as well as hyper-sexuality), we can negotiate and calibrate our attitude to sexuality more precisely, ideally making it less an obsessive interest and more a tool for self development and long-lasting relationships.