The Contribution of the Eastern Religions

This posting is by way of a footnote within a series of philosophical notes (covering spirituality, issues of personal identity, ontology and free will). The question has been raised in discussion elsewhere whether the influence of the Eastern religions, central to the creation or elucidation of the 'existentialist cast of mind', was any better than those religions that personalised God in promoting the ‘death instinct’ (the abnegation of our own matter-consciousness) at the expense of the affirmation of life.

My interest here is only in the Vedantic-Buddhist tradition. Nothing that is said is intended to detract from the pragmatic use-value of the tradition for persons and societies now or in the past or to make claims about its (or indeed Judaeo-Christian or Islamic) ‘truth-value’. The issue of the ‘truth’ of a religion has already been covered and is considered by us to be meaningless but often useful. For something to be useful to us does not require it to be true in any absolute sense.

Too much can be made of the East/West dichotomy. After all, in the Indian tradition, there is a Supreme God in Brahma. Some traditions within South Asian culture make this Godhead personal even if the Buddhist strain then spins off into another dimension altogether. The point is that, in the continuum from the Jewish God through Brahma to Nirvana, despite the differences that made Pope John Paul II write so negatively of the influence of Buddhist thinking on the West, all have in common the submission of ourselves to a construction of meaning out of Raw Existence that represents a cast of mind which, whether filled with Christian hope or Buddhist withdrawal, places responsibility for being what one is firmly within a shared vision of Existence that is ultimately social and not truly individual.

I appreciate that this is not what appears to be the case in Buddhism but Buddhist abnegation is embedded in tradition and tradition is, by definition, social and not individual. In this posting, I want to pinpoint two things that we must avoid in dealing with the influence of the East (in this greater context) and explore what we can learn more positively from that influence.

The first thing to avoid is the narrative of decline. In this narrative, once a commonplace in the West but superseded by an equally naive belief in progress, we have lived through successive ages in a cycle of existence that represents decline from a Golden Age. We are now, it would seem, in the Kali Yuga or final Iron Age and can merely await the final cataclysm after which, we are told to hope, humanity will return to a Golden Age (which, of course, is actually perfectly meaningless to you and me because we certainly will not live to see it unless we believe in reincarnation). The literature on apocalypse and hope is wide and includes the radical Christian apocalyptic strain that would see not merely the fall from the Garden of Eden as one book end to the narrative but the end to the age of sinfulness in an apocalypse as the other. To some radical American evangelical groups, the ‘saved’ would be translated directly to Heaven and the rest would wallow in death, pain and suffering.

Although Nietzsche adopted the myth of the eternal return for metaphysical purposes, we have suggested elsewhere that the only metaphor that captures the most credible idea of a really existing God in the creation of our world (as opposed to all other possible worlds in space-time) is that of Its ‘deliberate’ suicide (the nearest we get to a Fall) into undifferentiated matter and ‘potential-for-consciousness’ from which small sparks of matter-consciousness (ourselves) emerge after billions of years of things and processes bumping and grinding into each other in a rather wasteful but nevertheless counter-entropic way until we (and probably other intelligences) come into existence.  This is not to say that there was a conscious intelligence that kick-started the chaos from which order arises or that such an alleged intelligence has any meaning for us but only that, whatever metaphor we use, the conclusion is not one of decline and entropy alone but of increasing complexity causing intelligence and consciousness, albeit in a wasteful way with many dead-ends, and emerging in counterpoint to material entropy.

Whatever narrative might emerge to feed the social order and to allay the despair of societies with limited resources, relying on false hope to get us through the day or to sustain the power of some over others, the best narrative that fits the facts of the matter is a progressive one. This is one of the very slowly increasing intelligence and awareness of individuals (not excluding aliens on faraway planets). The conditions of the best today are significant improvements in terms of the sophistication of matter-consciousness, compared with the state of matter-consciousness (our humanity) in the past. Getting depressed about our cruelty and stupidity as Ardrey's 'risen apes' misses the point that, apes though we may be, we have actually risen considerably in the last 10,000 years or so.

This 'rising' is not the same as increasing ‘happiness’. Happiness can exist just in not being aware of not being happy - much as a well-fed animal might live in the present. The Buddhist might reinterpret this as that tranquillity that removes all the future causes of unhappiness, including those transient states of pleasure that consciousness will remember with regret or become anxious about in expectation or desire. The alleged happiness of the animal (unconscious of threat until it is eaten or dies alone shivering of fever or old age in a pile of leaves) is what underlies the myth of the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age. It is both false (insofar as animals shift themselves under the influence of primal drives from contentment to hunger and fear of depredation much as we do) and the core of that cast of mind that turns away from life – abnegation again.

The determination not to face the pain of existence and the emotions that accompany existence is what underpins faith and its constructions, a way of thought that also has as its purpose, the building up of a workable society in which pain is a given and emotions must be mastered.  There is nothing wrong with this as ‘magic’ in the sense of spells designed to hold oneself and society together but its later sophistication at the hands of philosophers and intellectuals should not be exaggerated. Religion is always built on the sand of fear and anxiety (with a leavening dash of mystic ekstasis for some).

This leads us to consider the second ‘insight’ of the East that the Golden Age is an age of ‘piety’ and of adherence to standards of law, duty and truth (the concept of ‘dharma’). The religious cultures of the West have a similar belief in divinely sanctioned right order and for similar reasons. At this point, we must not be deflected into Marxist or similar radical critiques of religion as a tool that is being used to maintain the social power of the few over the many. Such critics seem to imply that the process of submission is deliberate but the revolutionaries, from Robespierre to the personality cults of the heirs of Stalin, inevitably find that they need some religion-substitute to maintain themselves in power. The response is instinctive.

The habit of submission is intrinsic to humanity. It has been so for most people for most of human history and the obligation has probably been worn lightly and often cynically – true believers in ideas are generally a minority of humanity under normal conditions. As we see in a modern free culture, left to ourselves we tend to believe collectively in many impossible things at the same time and as individuals some of us are quite capable of shifting belief with our conditions of life. Belief is a social phenomenon and is not often a gnosis from contemplation – even if it is the latter, the result can only be communicated within given cultural language so that mystics with similar experiences can develop Judaeo-Christian or Islamic or Buddhist or Shamanistic narratives in communicating what is essentially the same human phenomenon. Such diversity argues against truth.

The religious impulse is thus towards a conservative assessment of progress (that we are in decline) and to the solidification and elaboration of tradition is part of the fear of life that we have noted elsewhere. It is not bad intrinsically but it is not ‘true’ even if these sclerotic systems are best not over-turned (as the Communists demonstrated) lightly. If the idea of the ‘kali yuga’ is best left to natural miserabilists (of which there are many) and the idea of ‘dharma’ (and their Western cognates) is best left to fearful conservatives, then what (other than the proven psychotherapeutic effects of belief) can we best learn from the East if we want to abandon the negative attitude to life.

How can we experience, without illusion, our natural will as a process constantly moving forward socially and individually until brain decay sets in or until material resources run out? How can we negotiate claims that, without narcissism, are greater than those of the society in which an individual is embedded? The existentialist cast of mind is not anti-social or optimistic (since the first is asking to be crushed and the second to have no basis in the facts of existence) but it is still individualist, radical, liberal and an affirmation of life and will against pessimism. Its social conservatism is more apparent than real – a scepticism of new forms of belief that may move us along a notch as social consciousness but which will contain all the hallmarks of traditional systems in another form. No better examples could be chosen than Marxism-Leninism in all its variants or the localised tribal religions of radical nationalism.

What religions of the East in particular can teach us is refinement of psychological method. If we strip away the dead languages and forms of religions that should have no meaning unless lived ‘in situ’, the religions of the East have not been turned to stone by the institutionalisation and excessive systematisation of belief systems under an imposed authority (Christianity) or a social model that is defensive (Judaism) or offensive (Islam) enough to suppress the possibility of an Eastern-style psychology of mind management in the face of Existence.

Although there are techniques within the West that mimic Eastern traditions, it is the East, precisely because faith has been detached from power in terms of dogma (as opposed to ritual), that has preserved either the spark of life affirmation (Tantra) or the skills required to master mind (Tantric/Shamanistic Buddhism). Understanding Eastern ideology is a guide to the underlying principles in an Eastern thinking that is not existentialist by any means (it is always wrong, almost certainly imperialist, to ‘read back’ our concerns into traditionalist cultures).

The Tantric tradition in its relationship to Shiva (the destroyer) rather than Brahma (the creator) perhaps represents a recognition of what transpired after the ‘suicide of God’ to create creative chaos, in a way that makes creative transgression the formation of consciousness, just as survival within evolution requires innovation that might be as likely to be more brutal in predation as it is faster in evading predation. Brahma is not worshipped in general in India because, once creation was created, His work was done. This might be read as a dualistic acceptance of matter in decline (the pessimistic approach referred to above) or as a monistic ‘suicide’ or withdrawal as I have postulated.

Shiva represents the meeting of opposites. He contains within himself that very attribute of beyond good and evil that is central to existential ethics and to Tantra alike. Without destruction there can be no creation. The psychological truth behind this is that, in an impermanent and confusing world where we certainly do not have access to full information (more so today than in a relatively stable traditionalist society), our adaptation to existence on our terms requires the constant recalibrating of ourselves against not only other people and society but our own inherited habits and values. For example, I might be born and live a Calvinist but what happens when my conditions of existence are completely at odds with that faith? I can only go deeper into mal-adaptation and adopt a strategy of trying to bend the world to my inner need for fixity and certainty.

This, in turn, forces me to go outwards and oppress others into conformity or develop a stance of withdrawal from the world – both norms of Western and Eastern responses to change respectively. Or I can adapt my Calvinism to reality (reform) or, alternatively, ‘transgress’, even ‘break down’, in order to find new values that accord better with my nature, an admittedly painful process that might shatter other relationships because, instead of oppressing them into my world view, I am demanding that they do not oppress me into theirs.

Equally to the point, Shiva is Lord of the Dance. Dance is a process and not a thing. You cannot pick up a dance as a thing. You can only perform it or watch it. So it is with mental process. The mind is not a succession of things in the mind but a process of thought and feeling. Shiva is quintessentially the representation of the reality left behind after Brahma did his ‘thing’, his single act. Shiva is constant fluctuation and change. The Buddhist response to this fact of fluctuation and change is to try and find non-change in detachment. Most other religions try to deal with this crisis of change by fixing things in space and time through fixed rituals and dogma.

The Liberal Enlightenment is not much better in this respect – the American Constitution is a religious document, an attempt to fix political existence in political space-time. It is an argument against all written constitutions that they are essentially sclerotic in the very long run. They are religious acts. The association of Shiva with dance and fertility is also not accidental because the central source of discomfort to many people is the libido, not just sexual energy but the life force that underpins the creative and disturbing use of emotion as a tool of self development alongside or even in preference to calculation and reason.

Nor is it just a matter of procreation, the conditions of which institutionalised religions have always sought to control in some way. The sheer energetic pleasure of sexuality has been automatically relegated to the category of transgression because its libidinous energy is, alongside outbursts of violence, regarded as most dangerous to Dharma in East and West. Sexuality thus becomes repressed or ritualised. Even the modern Western penchant for neo-Tantra and fetish is no more than a liberation that is being fought on the enemy’s terms by which transgression becomes ritualised in homage to religion.

Far from being true liberation, the ‘namaste brigade’, expressing sexuality in ill-understood Sanskrit and out of traditional context, and the far more earthy and authentic native fetishists are engaged in a simulacrum of liberation designed to ghetto their desires so that the outside world will not feel threatened. They are still products of fear for all their ‘liberation’. Almost any Eastern concept of value, such as the metaphor of Shiva, needs to be re-translated into the real and actual culture of the West. The dance of more value than the temple dance to most Westerners might, in fact, by the tango – which, in its matching of erotic movement with a high discipline that is without direct sexual intent, is almost the perfect metaphor for the tamed libido. It is not, despite its origins, however, transgressive.

Alongside Shiva, we have the concept of the Great Goddess (Mahadevi) who is the feminine principle writ large. One fine principle of the East from which we could learn is the reaffirmation that men and women are, well, different because the matter part of the matter-consciousness is different regardless of social forms and conditions. Radical feminism in the West often misses the point because in its correct demand for social, economic and political equality, it attempts to turn both men and women into what they cannot be – types of consciousnesses detached from their material base. The Shiva-Mahadevi relationship expresses an erotic truth about the male-female relationship that need have no connection with the proces of dealing with the social, political and economic inequalities in the world of Dharma.

The specific energy of women (shakti) is for women to write about and define and not me but the association of Mahadevi with fertility is not some simplistic association with motherhood but a more complex sharing of feminine mastery of process (as opposed to the rationalism of things). Mahadevi is consort of Shiva, both equal principles expressed, in Tantric thought, by the power of the sexual act between them. In a later age, this can be translated to relations between any two people so that homosexuality and then more than two people as in the dance of polyamory are included but the essence of the dynamic is not procreation but creation – and not of things (necessarily a child, as Catholic intellectuals might prefer) but of processes that transform. This is not just bonking but being. The point is that Shiva is powerless without shakti – the thing is meaningless unless turned into process by a process (consciousness) working on thing-ness(matter).

We are this interrelationship of process and thing. There is perhaps no greater individual working of this than the sexual act where matter merges into pure mental process that, under the right conditions, without any concern for Dharma or what is proscribed by others, can transform the structures of the mind into new ways of thinking.  Such thinking is transgressive only to the degree that Dharma makes such acts transgressive but the art in this is to know that social definitions of transgression are of no consequence if the transgression is responsibly conducted in terms of equality of effects (between persons) and with a true, not feared understanding of consequences.

If the East gives us the creative mentality of Tantra (albeit that this needs to be removed from the Sanskrit and brought into English and de-fetishized), it also brings us ‘technique’. Thoughtful sexual congress is, of course, a technique but the merging of shamanistic and tantric elements into Tibetan Buddhism offer a range of explorations that do not depend on the visions of reality or the belief in reincarnation (Bardo) of Tibetan theocrats. Nor are we wholly dependent on Tibet for their further development – shamanistic techniques are part of the human armoury from Finland to the Amazon and from the back areas of Australasia to the reservations of the crushed American Indians.

If formal religion and the demands of Dharma have a victim, that victim is the a-moral mysticisms of the shaman even if shamans turn up in many guises hidden away in the interstices of all but the most oppressed and totalitarian of societies.  In our free liberal society, shamanic thinking is re-emerging amongst academics, urban rebels and the troubled middle classes even if neo-shamanism with its eco-political dimensions is liable to go the way of neo-Tantra and become a pale pink, tamed and convenient shadow of its real, earthy and often very dark original.

The merging of Tantric Buddhism and shamanism (almost certainly as a political compromise in the highlands of Tibet) has created a certain blind romantic regard in the fluffy liberal West for what was, essentially, an inefficient and oppressive theocracy not much better than late medieval Catholicism. Similarly, whether Kashmiri Shaivism or Tibetan Buddhism, the whole master-pupil relationship is fraught with implicit traditionalist oppression in which a young mind is not taught to explore freely and even (initially) chaotically under guidance but has their brains bent into a traditionalist order that may have no connection to their true will or needs.

The very idea of a master granting ‘permission’ to do anything is absurd even if, like the placebo effect, in Western medicine, the command and control and secrecy aspects of the system may have a role in its success. These are not paths for the free-born Westerner for any length of time and merely dabbling in a tradition is probably next to useless. However, the application of effort, even for misguided reasons, under conditions where the peasants toiled to keep a lot of idle monks in rice who had little to do but think, has resulted in an experimental laboratory of enormous sophistication for technique. This provides an opportunity for study in what these techniques can do for Western man, stripped of the religious overlay and the implicit ‘death instinct’ of Buddhism.

The West has taken up meditation with considerable beneficial effects. There is more work to be done in understanding the relationship between sound and mental states (mantras) and visualisation and ritual as transformative for some personality types (including the use of mandalas). Body movements (such as mudras) and breath control add body to perception as tools in the armoury of changing mental states to order.  Whether we want to attain the control of our autonomic system of some adepts is another matter – the question ‘why?’ is the greatest contribution of Western culture to humanity – but investigation into what amounts to control of perception in order to change mind states strikes this writer as containing the seeds of change for our ability to take command of our lives in the context of a world where we are constructed by the perceptions of others.

The detachment of Tibetan Buddhism has been criticised as an abnegation of life by me here and elsewhere but detachment (perhaps better understood in a Japanese Zen context) is a tool to the same degree as Tantric sexual transgression. There is no reason in principle why the same mind cannot make use, as tools, of both possible states of being – shamanic ecstasy and detachment at separate times and even at the same time. The height of human attainment might be those rare states in which one observes one’s own ecstasy or can be ecstatic within one’s own detachment.

In this context, the visualisation techniques in relation to Bardo may be of immense importance since they are really a sophisticated version of the shamanic journey into the underworld. The adept (in a manner not to be undertaken by amateurs) goes through a form of ‘death in the mind’ and comes alive by working back through the levels of mind until full perception is re-attained. This is analogous to the more chaotic and often lengthy process by which the ‘triggered’ existentialist recreates themselves out of the shattered remnants of old values (a minor key ‘transvaluation of values’).

The existentialist might argue that the discipline and ordering system of the Buddhist might remove from the process the value of the pain, suffering and shock of the admittedly mentally risky existentialist path. The risk is the art. The association of a ‘teacher’ or ‘psychotherapist’ may get in the way of a final resolution even if it stops some vulnerable people from topping themselves or going clinically insane. What speaks most strongly for the Tibetan way of seeing is that it pre-supposes the value of every moment of existence. It shares with the existentialist model an acute awareness of death not as something to be feared but as something that defines life.

The existentialist mind, without solace of reincarnation, merely turns this back on itself to intensify the existence of life including its engagement with the social and with the acceptance and enjoyment of the transient pleasures of life - as part of that high valuation of each moment of existence. Both traditions also understand the importance of impermanence which brings us back to a mentality that sees the world in terms of processes rather than things.

If you see the world as a collection of ‘things’, you are soon aware of entropy whereas a Heraclitean world of processes means impermanence and instability but it also means an awareness of positive changeas possibility and as actuality, a form of progression (at least in mental terms) as each mind state is succeeded by another that exists only because of the previous mind state. The Buddhist, of course, is seeking to pacify these mind states in order to achieve the tranquillity and calm that will ensure safe passage through the key days of reincarnation (Bardo) but the existentialist will be seeking to excite these mind states in order to create himself or herself.  Assuming no senile brain decay, the last state before death is one of no regret - the final state of a work of art that either leaves some legacy in the minds of others (signs and symbols) or things in the world or is simply a private viewing of the greatest work of art we will ever see - our own self.

On Pole Dancers and Others ...

My last blog posting on the May 13th Conway Hall Debate on Sex Work reminded me of a piece I wrote for Facebook connections five years ago and not published more widely at the time. I reproduce it here with my usual technique of adding notes where I have something to add or I have changed my mind.

May Day 2010

Some weeks ago, there was a thread debate on feminism and I was asked to reproduce, in a more considered format, the general thrust of my argument. The origin was a difference of opinion, largely amongst women, on sex-positivity and its role in liberating women - some might say from the historic dominance of men and others might say from their own self-imposed and inherited limitations in the face of the world.

Could a pole dancer be more fulfilled than a woman who had taken up the law? Not a silly question when a political lawyer, Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of New Labour, has declared war, according to the Times of September 18th, [1] on the culture of corporate entertainment linked to lapdancing clubs.

Pole Dancing & Physical Intelligence

Even a cursory review of the 2010 US Pole Dancing championship's video shows women at the peak of physical performance to the extent that we might say that these women were showing levels of physical intelligence that easily matched the legal intelligence of Ms. Harman. [2]  One female respondent [3] noted that pole dancing itself isn't very sensual --- but I am in awe of the strength and control these dancers have over their bodies. Precisely. I was just immensely impressed with the strength and assuredness ... She added:

I arranged for a group of my girlfriends to do a pole dancing workshop a few weeks back (all of us self-described feminists - and most actively involved with woman's rights movements ... and they all found it an incredibly enriching (albeit somewhat painful) and liberating experience. I think the assumption is that its done by women for men. False. Unless of course that is your choice. It certainly wasn't any of ours."

It is not just poledancing that has been taken up by sex-positive women. There is also the capture of burlesque by arty girly girls for girls and the global girl power of belly dancing.

Progressive Feminists Just Don't Get It

But some progressive feminists just don't get it - you take what was a male demand and subvert it into female choice and empowerment and, above all, sheer fun. The splits, of course, are something that no man can do safely and not end up with a squeaky voice. All men are astonished and not a little envious at this ability ... c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas sexe. But even if it was 'sex' - what is really so very wrong with that if it is consensual and non-exploitative or at least no more exploitative than any other activity in late capitalist society. If men and women mutually enjoy and play with forms of 'objectification', then why not?

Impressive in skill terms, pole dancing always get this faint sense of censoriousness from some feminists ... someone has 'issues' and it ain't me or my sex-positive female friends. It is always a woman's right to choose and that, in my view, includes a choice between stacking shelves in a supermarket and expressing physical intelligence before an appreciative audience ... the progressive feminist aesthetic must not be imposed on others, men or women.

The Psychology Of The Industry

Now, let's take the view of another woman on the thread ...

... you'd be surprised how many of those panty stuffing bills can add up by end of the night. You won't get rich, but you'll make more than you would answering some dentist's phone and filing his insurance claims. And you get to drink and stare at hot naked chicks all night. lol I've had far worse McJobs ...

Something to consider: there is a difference between athletic displays of pole dancing in a "non-sexualized" context outside of a stripclub environment [...] and how it's rendered in a club.

In a club, there is a lot more raw sexuality being generated from the dancers and the patrons. These currents are both harmonious and chaotic, given that so many different psychologies are bringing their lot to the table. It keeps things interesting.

There is also tons of pseudo sexual posturing and sheer hubris, in place of (or along with) technical skill. When it's done properly, by reasonably well integrated people, it's sensual and 'sexual'.... And if anyone is left feeling a bit sheepish, it's usually the onlookers. ;)

'Progressives' always look for the worst cases of exploitation and then extrapolate backwards to limit freedoms for the rest of society ... like the prohibitionists in America worked back from the drunkeness and corruption of Tammany Hall in New York and banning drink for everyone, resulting, unintentionally in the creation of American organised crime as a political force.

More Positive Approaches

Referring to, say, conditions in, say, Uzbekistan [4] is no help in referring to conditions in London or San Francisco. On the contrary, the Uzbek case also argues for economic development, regulation and normalisation, certainly the end of stigmatisation within the sex industry. The positive policy aim should be to ensure that maximum labour value is transferred to performers/workers rather than the capitalists and that the supply of sexual services (and drugs and risk games such as gambling) is in the hands of legitimate business and not organised crime.

Apart from anything else, the 'respectable' (actually rather self-centred) middle class' refusal to understand how human drives and wants must and can be met legitimately permits the large-scale accumulation of capital by organised crime. This eventually destabilises their sweet cosy world of armchair disapproval. Mexico, for example, is about to plunge into an anarcho-criminal civil war for precisely this reason [5]. I would not fancy being a 'respectable' bourgeois when that happens.

My objection to aggressive policy progressives (especially a certain sort of feminist who claims to speak without authority for all women) is that they are not merely unpleasant and authoritarian but profoundly and deeply stupid.

The Real Rights Of Non-Respectable Women

Men often hold back from comment out of a culturally determined fear of feminist reproach (I do not) and it is women themselves who come slugging back to assert their rights to make their own choices and exploit legitimately the drives and wants of men. In this context, it is women who are being deprived of the right to do what male-dominated business does in exploiting the desire and wants of women for retail therapy and cosmetic improvement. The 1970s feminists rightly demanded that women's desire to look good should not be dictated by male requirements.

Economic liberation has, nevertheless, increased fashionable and cosmetic expenditure because it is women who want to look and feel good for themselves and each other (men really don't notice quite as much as they would think). Same with sexuality - 'progressive' feminists consider all sexual objectification and performance as patriarchal. They are idiots.

Sexual Game Play

Many women, maybe most women when liberated, love sexual objectification and performance (by men for their pleasure as well) so long as they are in control of the image and the play, including games of submission and domination that are safe, equal and consensual. Many feminists are thus not feminists at all, just a-sexual or repressed or ideologically tormented or filled with 'ressentiment' or unable to play the game and don't want others to either. But it is still their right to be as they are.

My only objection is the role that they play in public policy as 'respectable' but ignorant oppressors of others, male and female, in close alliance with male moralists [6] and, dare I say it, sexual neurotics and wimps.  Most educated men have more than adapted to this new game play - the best of them play as equals, the weakest simply act as pawns shelling out their cash for temporary if necessary gratification.

The liberatory process now requires that men and women understand and respect each other's natures and adapt without abuse or exploitation in their personal relations and, if necessary, accepting mutual exploitation on equal terms with full information. Here is the place to refer to Elizabeth Pisani's TED lecture on sexuality and health care - a brilliant exposition of a scientific approach to human rationality - the brief interview with the Indonesian transgender prostitute captures the point perfectly. Sexual services are rational on all sides.

The analysis by my friend (above) of what actually goes on in a Western 'establishment' is spot on. There is a sort of controlled sub-Dionysiac erotic tension that is just play-acting in which both sides get something out of the exchange. Included in this exchange is a powerful sense of domination from the performing side over men in a position of unfulfilled desire - the classic 'tease', only controlled and within bounds. Burlesque once had the same function.

There is a type of person who cannot comprehend the powerful cathartic effect on this play-acting which is certainly not orgiastic, is a game between moral equals, is carefully calibrated and which ends when the performance ends. Men are still often pigs but in real life far more than in the theatre. Personally, I don't get it 'in situ' but then the theatre to me is a relatively uninteresting experience. I am not one ever to suspend disbelief. My reaction is the simple pleasure of observation without any sense of power or control on either side, an erotic voyeurism best appreciated without the audience.

I much prefer a conversation with the person and, if it leads to consensual pleasures, they are, for me, non-commercial. I sell only my alleged charm and genuine interest. I buy with that currency only appreciation and the sensuality towards which a conversation may lead. I truly love and like women even when they mystify and confuse me. I would rather spend my evenings listening to women talk than getting my pleasures from a gang of men watching but not participating in sports or the strip. But then I always was a bit different :-)

The Criminalisation of Pleasure

Some women once earned substantial sums and gained significant social respect in underworld societies through the sex industry before progressives and fundamentalists began to undermine the economic base of that community in the 1920s and 1930s in America. Although this began with Comstock and was represented by the Hays Code's deadening effect in a later period, puritanism just drove women underground, lowering pay levels and increasing abuse and exploitation and control of the 'trade' by larger-scale criminal enterprises.

The war on sexuality is a sociopathic war, an exploitative war against the human spirit and, above all, a war on the weak by the 'respectable'. Our biggest child abuse scandal is not in lap-dancing clubs but inside the Roman Catholic Church amongst 'Christians'. Since the 1970s, the emergence of soft visual 'porn', the feminisation of burlesque, stripping as a legitimate business and pole and lap dancing has created a middle way. Good business ensures [7] that the girls are protected (and not as well as they would be if they were recognised and unionised instead of stigmatised) as the best means of getting some men to pay for the yachts of other men through indulging their pleasures and weakness.

The 'harder' end of the industry has a much tougher time now as a result - the internet 'gives away' much material and the new 'soft' industries give outlets for beautiful women with no other prospects the chance to make money without actually selling use of body. Of course, they may choose to sell direct sex and there are still serious issues to do with exploitation but those who do know what they are doing can do so at higher prices with more protection.

The Price of Stigma

Intelligent regulation and enforcement would help stabilise wages but only where the industry is not stigmatised, staffed with migrants and pushed underground under the patronage of criminals corruptly suborning law enforcement, all thanks to the 'respectable' society of feminism and christian moralism. Again, the problem is one of economics, stigma and idiocy ... there is a lot of research that is inconvenient to progressives and feminists on this. There is not only Pisani's common sense approach.  Laura Maria Augustin's book on 'Sex at the Margins' looks set to demonstrate what most researchers know - that the sex trade represents rational choice in a world of globalisation and poverty.

Other British research is conveniently never referred to by organisations like the Fawcett Society when they slip from campaigning (rightly) on equal pay and rights into feminist ideology on matters of sexuality. My sex-positive friend added in my defence as the thread progressed that:

I think Tim (and I know I can say this for myself) would like to see women and men culturally and socially situated where they are being nurtured in all ways that will produce the healthiest and happiest people ...

...who are truly free to make the choices that will please them, armed with the basics of educations, options for earning decent livings.

I agree with her. She added that we were in a time of radical cultural flux:

People are experimenting with different religions than the ones they were raised, or not raised to adhere to. The sexual revolution has it's most recent incarnation in the gay rights movement, which is in full swing, and is no small challenge.

Communication has provided the means for "regular" people to conduct intelligence gathering, which has resulted in the Catholic Church, for instance, being cornered on their numerous, planet wide, long standing pattern of child abuse.

[...] In any thriving society, the able help the able to thrive and conquer. That which is crumbling and falling is in that condition for a reason, and (under many circumstances) should be allowed to continue to deteriorate. I do not mean people. I mean conditions.

[...] on the subject of exploitation. Some of the women you would meet in that industry who have the biggest personal problems would not argue the case that they were being exploited.

In fact, they'd very proudly tell you that they were the exploiters, and having been closer to some of them than I'd ever like to be again, I can confirm that some deeply antisocial personalities who, like other criminal types, are outcast by personality default from "normal' society, wind up in sex work.

So much for the myth of the "sad, forlorn hooker with a heart of gold." I've never met one. They are survivors. And survivors tend to be grazing at the low end of the human spectrum.

They are not living in any sort of constructive way, and they don't want anyone else to be either. Soul crushed people. They get fired a lot, even from strip clubs. ;)

A Hard Realism Required

That hard realism is part of the point. The 'survivor' has a distinctive psychology, one that passes by the armchair ideologist and the theoretician, incomprehensible to the comfortable lives of the middle class winner whose own resentments underpin an essential cruelty towards those struggling below them. The question [8] often is: what are we going to do with the sociopath?. The authoritarian instinct is to contain or militarise, the progressive is to pretend that they do not exist or that they can be 'reformed'.

But there is no evidence that sociopathy can be fully contained or reformed out of society (it even has species-survival benefits) - and it certainly needs to be recognised. This fact really upsets liberals who persist in thinking that 'bad behaviour' can be corrected through imposed love and education. Sociopathy and other inconvenient behaviours (like sexual enthusiasm, gambling, addiction, drugs and so on) need to be noticed as real (the first failing of 'nice' society) and then engaged with and socialised.

Only then can we contain harm, not through idiot prohibitionism or burdensome and moralising regulation but through practical and rational incentive-based policy, much as Pisani suggests. This seems to be impossible for the limited brains of politicians, churchmen or liberal ideologists to comprehend. The middle class liberal often cannot face the extremity of evil to be found in the world. So they cannot punish serious harm. Serious sociopathy is just 'understood' and killers roam the streets within a few years of acts that cripple and destroy the lives of others.

It is axiomatic, for example, to these 'wets' that the death penalty is always and absolutely wrong. Those on the margin have no such illusions. They know there are tolerance boundaries and they set them firmly. For the liberal, there is no margin because of the silly belief in absolute equality and in redemption - stupid inheritances from Christian theory - and a genuine fear of 'struggle', the necessity for persons to make mistakes, take risks, gamble, to get out of Hell and into the 'Community'.

Most people's experience of Hell is romanticised and mediatised through film and television. It is sanitised through the portrayal of extreme horrors when the reality is far more grinding than anything these 'nice' people can contemplate. The high point of this romanticisation of Hell is that filmic work of genius Sin City where the heroisation of Hell is cathartic and given an almost Soviet realist feel by the end. It is not like that.

It is about hundreds of thousands of people living in mental states that require drugs, who seek transcendence through risk and where sexuality is part currency, part creation of identity. My point is terribly simple - these people are people. They are not objects [9]. Their struggle has to be respected. They also have to be shown routes that they can take out of Hell. They need protection from their own worst cases - the exploiters, the abusers, the killers, the authorities' own corrupt agents in the field. It is not sexual objectification that is the crime but liberal objectification of persons!

What Is To Be Done

The first stage is to remove stigma, accept a greater degree of risk in society, integrate. The second stage is to regulate, educate and guide. But the second stage is dependent on the first - it depends on risky and sociopathic behaviour being out in the open, observed, with boundaries drawn that are realistic and not based on the latest idiot contribution of anal obsessives in the health and safety culture. If it was good enough for Christ to include hookers in his Heaven, it is good enough for us to have a drink with a lap-dancing single mum who is making a rational economic choice in working in a club.

Furthermore, she might get to enjoy her work and turn a necessity into an art, an affirmation that she can do some things well on her terms and can accumulate her small bit of capital to open up her own shop, cafe or dance school (as one bright lapdancer I met clearly intended). This woman (so she said) went to a major charitable trust(perhaps naively) and asked for the same sort of help that they give freely to young toughs in Lewisham but was rejected. Why? Was it because it was helping a young woman move from lapdancing to owning a dance studio, making best use of her physical intelligence (and a lot more intelligence than that, much more than I have experienced amongst the cliche-spouting university-educated hausfrauen of Middle Islington)?

Maybe not. Perhaps the Business Plan was just not good enough. But I suspect that she was stigmatised - our whole culture is stigmatising the rational choices of working class and vulnerable women because it cannot face the truth that, out there, life is not only not perfect, it is not perfectible.

Standing Up To The Bien-Pensants

If 'progressives' were truly serious about climate change, they would raise petrol and airline ticket prices to astronomical levels. If they were serious about 'exploitation' they would undertake a massive tax-based redistribution of capital. Instead they tinker at the people's expense. Life is a struggle but struggle is good and many of these strugglers do, eventually, not end up in the gutter but with good and productive lives. There is the instructive tale of the Russ Meyer starlet who became a grade school teacher and spent her life fearing that her past would be exposed. When it was, it was no great deal - she was a good teacher. That's all we need to know in common humanity.

So why make it so difficult for these people? Why not encourage them to see their lives as way stations to something better instead of marginalised holding pens for those who have no voice. Where were these 'liberals' and churchmen when they were first abused? Nowhere. They have no right to judge. Only these women have rights. Any decent feminist would respect them and their choices - and only seek to get them out on their terms from under the heel of their own pasts and the gang bosses that the establishment effectively hires though neglect to run these inconvenient industries. I have nothing but a profound contempt for the feminist hausfrau's obvious disdain for the most vulnerable simply because they use their few assets to give themselves a decent living.

Our first commentator above noted that ...trying to oversimplify the sex industry and paint everybody's experience as the same is extremely myopic Indeed - so you must remove the stigma AND the abuse: two sides of the same coin. And you do this through the integration of this community into society and economy and improving the conditions of 'white trash' (as they are sneeringly considered even as they are being 'reformed') instead of leaving them to fend for themselves. 'White trash' are people too. They have rights to free choice.

To summarise, sex positive approaches to feminism are not substitutes for economic equality or basic rights but they are a corrective in two directions against the tendency of progressives to drive essentialist feminist ideology in directions that are, bluntly, anti-human. At one level, sex positive feminism permits women to make their own choices about pleasure and objectification that best suit their economic conditions as they really are. It allows them to make rational economic choices without stigma.

At another level, sex work helps many of the poorest and most vulnerable in society to find routes out of social and economic marginalisation through making use of their limited assets, ultimately accumulating sufficient capital or connections to become the social equivalent of the grade school teacher. In the former, we are talking about mental, social and emotional liberation against the preconceptions and demands of mother and big sister as much as, probably more than, those of men. Getting it right about sex-positivity is also about self-confidence and getting it right about family and marriage.

In the latter, we are talking about removing the block on mobility from below created by an excessive reliance on education and 'respectability' and an opportunity to help the process of turning back the tide of social misery that progressivism and churches have done nothing to reverse. Sex-positive feminism is not the be-all or end-all of human liberation but it is an important component of it, one in which women themselves decide what is acceptable in the use of their own bodies at the time when they hold maximum market value in an imperfect world.

I suspect that women will feel very free to respond and with some vigour but I hope that this time we get a few brave men to say something intelligent and not behave like fearful self-censoring liberal whiteys at a black power meeting.

Notes

[1] This would presumably be September 18th, 2009, when New Labour was still the Government of the country. This now seems like aeons ago. We breathe easier in many ways despite the excesses of Theresa May. 

[2] In the original there was a link to a remarkable performance on YouTube. Some copyright troll appears to have taken exception to the music and the world is now deprived of the experience ... the effect of copyright trolls on simple pleasures over the last half decade is incalculable. Naturally, subsequent references to the video have been removed. 

[3] This refers to those women commenting on the hidden Facebook thread and they are not named because they do not have their consent to be named.  However, it is I who am being discreet, not they. They were frank and open and I admire them for that.

[4] This perhaps obscure reference has sex work in Uzbekistan stand for all emerging world sex work as different from sex work in the West because of the different social conditions. I count pole dancing as a form of sex work not in order to diminish it but, on the contrary, to describe it. It is the use of sexual allure or attraction to part others from their cash. Much of Hollywood's acting is sex work in this sense. 

[6] Mexico still teeters but has not yet fallen. Meanwhile we have a quasi-organised crime state in Islamic State and Europe is being destabilised by the mergence of organised criminal smuggling rackets out of Africa and through the Balkans. Add the emergence of similar racketeering corrupting the South East Asian states and we see the situation is getting worse on a global scale without actually tipping over yet to system collapse in the West - but maybe it is just a matter of time.

[6] The links between contemporary ideological feminism and faith-based religious fundamentalism are particularly disturbing and were raised at the Debate on May 13th. 

[7] I should have written 'should ensure' - it cannot be 'good business' at this present time because it remains stigmatised and unregulated.  

[8] I was not, of course, meaning to suggest that pole dancers or, indeed, sex workers are sociopaths. What I was trying to say is that sociopathic behaviours as defined by conventional morality are often rational situational responses to social conditions and that moralising about them is meaningless since many moralists would behave in precisely the same way if they found themselves in those same conditions. In some ways, I approve of sociopathic responses in some extreme conditions of socially generated poverty and exploitation as necessary checks and balances on those who turn a blind eye to such conditions. The organism must survive and reproduce ... it is possibly the only human right that is not invented. 

[9] One of my frustrations is that feminist objectification theory is selective and false in two senses. First, that it fails to recognise the normality and 'rightness' of general objectification as a general means of surviving in the world (which I have discussed elsewhere). Second, that the anti-objectification camp themselves treat their enemies - males and sex-positive or vulnerable females - as objects. The first is stupidity and the second is hypocrisy.

The Sex Work Debate

On May 13th, I was in the audience for the misnamed 'London Thinks' debate at Conway Hall on sex work. There was precious little thinking going on as two sets of allegedly empowered females went hammer and tongs at each other from fixed positions. There was certainly no serious representation of the male point of view, barring an excellent call from the floor for positive unionisation of sex workers by a representative of the TUC. The audience was quite factionalised and often aggressive (despite some very able chairing by Samira Ahmed).

The most useful intervention, other than the TUC speaker, came from a pleasant young female and black Londoner (again from the floor) who refreshingly rose above a sea of identity politics to talk in a matter of fact way about the sexual culture of young males in her circle with tolerance and openness. If this is the young today, roll on time so that they can run the country!

On the one hand, we had representatives of the anti-sex work lobby who seemed to rely on dubious statistics, ideological formulations that stereotyped males (such as the villainous and insulting term 'rape culture' and the absurdly simplistic 'patriarchy') and the extrapolation of horrible personal experiences into general public policy,. This is never ever a good idea. Their final position was the Nordic Model - the criminalisation of male customers and (allegedly) social services support for vulnerable women, although how the hell that latter would happen, in an age of austerity and all-round administrative incompetence and authoritarian malice in the lower reaches of our system, beats me.

On the other hand, we had what amounted to a small business lobby speaking the language of quasi-Thatcherite economic rights set in a stone of centre-left theory about exploitation. Ideology again - almost pat out of a lobbying text-book. They seemed to see the male as little more than (ironically) an object - the customer or 'punter' to be fleeced of his funds. However, their solution to a social reality was far more sensible - the so-called New Zealand model of decriminalised but regulated sex work designed to ensure health and safety and legal protection for the workers.

I was persuaded that this latter model was the right one although I have been struck by the comments of a friend about German decriminalisation which seems to have solved the problem it was designed to solve - taking organised crime out of the game much as the legalisation of betting did in the UK many years ago - only to entrap women in classic large-scale capitalist enterprises where the conditions are better but not good.

There is damn-all for sex workers if big capitalists skim off the earnings of labour on the standard capitalist model and nothing is done about stigma or the wider social conditions that lead to vulnerable or poor women being directed into this work reluctantly because there are no alternatives. One suspects the Germans are simply trying to corral their vulnerable migrants and underclass into manageable units rather than invest in policies that might raise questions about the single market, incompetent pan-European law enforcement and the costs of transforming the conditions of the lower decile in any society by bringing to bear the resources and skills of the upper decile.

The point is that our society should cut through all this nonsense and get down to basic principles. The problem of sex work is lack of consent on the one hand - which the sex workers themselves point out can be handled with improved and better financed law enforcement that respects the sex workers as persons - and general economic conditions on the other. If a sex worker actively chooses sex work, then this is her or his business and as he or he is right that the alleged prostitution of the body is no worse (subject to health and safety considerations) than the alleged prostitution of the mind by a corporate lawyer (under some circumstances). There is also many a male trapped in a loveless marriage and a dead-end job whose liaison with a sex worker is the only thing between him and suicide - the girls in such cases should be trained as social workers, be considered economic assets and get a regular living wage.

Issues of consent can be handled by sound policing while those of reluctance and poor choice by decent social policies that educate and help people out of poverty, alongside regulation for health and safety, and, above all, the elimination of the vicious stigma applied to these people and their dependants. What is not helpful is driving this trade underground so that the nice people cannot see it (oooh, look the law is working! like hell!), creating the illusion that there is no problem by having periodic show trials of punters or (on the other hand) banging up the girls (in particular) in cattle farms albeit with human resources departments and regular visits from government inspectors.

We need reforms not to the behaviour patterns of women and men (we are dealing with human beings here and not Kantian saints-in-waiting) but to the behaviour patterns of bureaucrats and policemen. We still do not have, as the Rotherham abuse cases have shown, social strategies for investment in the most vulnerable people in the care sector aged between 12 and 18 nor do we have a strategy for handling the massive flow of economic migrants which feeds the sex trade's worst aspects.

Instead, the moralists and fools simply want to throw those women and men who have reached some form of stability in life and have made choices as human agents, no different from those have others stacking shelves or waiting at table, into the hands of the criminal classes. They also clearly want to have males who purchase sex treated as if they were paedophiles, humiliated in show trials. We are still not dealing with the central causes of paedophiliac exploitation as Government works hard to evade its historic complicity in its criminal networks, so it is scarcely likely that the same people will get much of a handle on migrant and underclas exploitation without revolutionary change in our national political culture.

Everyone evades what is necessary - national investment in bringing the most vulnerable to the point where they can make sound and healthy decisions for themselves and the encouragement of conditions for sex work in which the sex workers themselves own their own businesses and bodies and law enforcement actively protects them from bad customers and the underworld alike. There is much to be said for the New Zealand approach in this context - as a start. Above all, if sex work is to continue at all (and it will, regardless of governments) it should be under conditions where the price goes up and the sex workers get the profits precisely because the only people doing it are the people who want to do it rather than because they have no choice in the matter. The moralists and seventies radicals should back off now and leave it to the socialists and trades unionists ...

Jealousy

Jealousy is like rage ... a fact of experience. But, like rage, it might also be taken as a signal of an underlying issue relevant to one's dealings with a person who is being emotional. Yet it is not a justification for accepting their emotional world view as yours simply out of fear of their emotion's effects on you. Respect does not mean acceptance of their world view, just acceptance that they have this world view. It is just a fact that must be taken into consideration.

For a strong emotion not to be respected, recognised and even (without compromising oneself) accommodated to the extent that one can is a sign of callousness and even of stupidity but to allow another's strong emotion to dictate terms to you on fundamentals is a sign of weakness on the one side and of bullying on the other. At its worst, low level permanent jealousy, anger or misery become a form of psychic vampirism by which one person becomes increasingly defined by the mental chemistry of another person. Thus can we define the worst of relationships.

All emotions have this quality either of potentially enhancing dialogue and personal growth or of being agents of control and attempted ownership but jealousy is the most interesting of all. It is the most explicit in its central claim - that X, in some way, has (actually almost certainly unjustifiable) ownership rights over Y. In fact, X can never own Y unless Y permits ownership (at its worst a form of masochism and at its best love). If the ownership is not freely given and that gift sustained on free terms over time but only depends on the fear of the effects on X's biochemistry of the intensity of Y's biochemistry, then the ownership implicit in X's jealousy is simple bullying. Acquiescence is then little better than slavery and may be cowardice or stupidity.

This is why an intense emotion is a major testing ground for a relationship and should strengthen it whereas chronic emotional pressure will either weaken that relationship or turn it into something neurotic and perverted - into the 'autism for two' referred to in 'The Coming Insurrection'. The two sins of emotion in a relationship lie at the two extremes of emotional perversion - not to express emotion strongly on the one hand and to use emotion as a controlling tool of ownership on the other. We all know from observation that struggles for power and dominance in personal relationships are as intense as that of States for energy resources. The fear of the righteous use of emotion - the explosion designed to communicate the otherwise incommunicable - is looked at with fear and loathing in our culture and for good reason.

First, an emotional explosion has to be seen in a context of distrust that the other party will respect the outburst, listen, learn but stand their ground on essentials while conceding ground on inessentials - and be acute enough to understand that the essential is not in the detail and that compromises are possible in many directions and most of the time. Second, our culture is made up of people who fundamentally lack self-esteem, of any pride in themselves, and who live in a world of zero sum games where a relationship is always won or lost like a game of poker rather than developed, expanded or shared like a game of chess.

The typical type in our modern culture has invested so much of themselves in the mirror of the other that they dare not show an emotion that might break that mirror (even if it is just as likely that it would strengthen the relationship), while 'chronic emotion' can be used as a weapon to constrain, hem in and define the other as fenced property. Instead of seeing another relationship (perhaps of simple friendship) added to the whole as an opportunity to redefine and strengthen the primary relationship for the long term, to improve its quality, the 'jealous' reaction would rather pull down the whole pack of cards and walk away. Is this not the case in so many destructive divorces, destroying the lives of children, where one party is simply too proud not to demand all-or-nothing?

The acute emotion of jealousy (or rage) is vital in pre-empting the death grip of convention on a relationship and, if not causing unhappiness, then promoting its decline into formality, role-playing and even the status, sexually and socially, of being a zombie, the sort that can have no conversation beyond house prices, pensions and what each does for a living. Western humanity lives in a permanent state of feeling threatened. The saddest aspect of it all is that we feel most threatened of all by the loss of an 'other half', another malign intervention of Platonic mythology. That fear ends up at the very root of a deathly conformity that leaves us functioning robotically or depending for salvation on secret vices.

The paradox is that our cultural obsession with 'cheating' (not so much in Europe where the matter tends to be dealt with as a form of cultural blindness but certainly in the US) creates the very crisis that it fears. By setting down absurdly 'perfect' relationship standards in the first place, we are driven as a culture into secrecy and fetishism and towards a lack of accountability - indeed anything and everything is done that is possible to avoid a confrontation over meaning in a relationship, one that might involve the expression of positive or negative emotion.

The misery lies not only in any actual loss (though people may have been living a limerent lie for a long time, one that needed to be faced) but in the constant nagging fear of loss and of loneliness. 'Autism for two' raises the stakes by making couple-dom central to the culture in a way that ensures that there can be no intimacy elsewhere. Above all, personal potential may be constantly defined in the terms of another emotional centre, one who casts themselves as successively victim or inadequate when they are neither of these, just different and to be respected as different. New distrust emerges as a result of misplaced past trust, based on an illusion of perfection, whereas a truly sound relationship would have involved a proper dialogue over emotion, under conditions where both parties would trust each other enough to allow truth-telling.

Think on this. How is it even possible that one party 'cheats', that is, is unable, because of our culture, to share with their primary partner the needs and desires that led them elsewhere?  Why are so many women and men frightened of telling the truth to what are, in effect, their best friends if they are, indeed, 'perfect soul-mates' which, of course, they are not. No such thing can exist without compromises that may prove too hard to maintain over long periods of time. The answer is obvious, people 'cheat' not because their primary partners are not soul-mates but because soul-mates are never simply simulacra of the partner and things do change - and should change if we are not to be zombies. No one can take the burden of being a perfect soul mate without subsuming themselves under another and denying all individuality. People 'cheat' because they cannot have a 'perfect soul mate' conversation about not being 'perfect'.

The cultural assessment of all this soon descends into a dim-witted bar room gut sense that a 'cheater' is a slut (if a woman) or weak and inadequate (if a man) but it might equally be said that the 'cheater' is simply a terrified coward in not standing before their primary partner and expressing desires and needs about which there may indeed be an accommodation. Jealousy is not envy but these alleged vices are close and if we look at envy (by, say, one woman of another's looks and attractiveness) we see similar central problems of self esteem and resentment and similar ambiguities over the expression of feeling.

Like jealousy and anger, envy is a fact. To condemn it morally is absurd. A wise person avoids jealous, angry and envious persons if they can but that may not be possible in an existing relationship so it is the contrast between the acute and the chronic that we have to look at. An acute burst of envy sends a signal that seeks reassurance just as an acute burst of anger is the first statement in a negotiation and jealousy is a call for dialogue. Chronic envy or 'ressentiment' is a soul-destroying absurdity, like chronic anger or jealousy. It calls for either an acute moment of catharsis or a fundamental breach.

How many people go through lives of resentment, depression (which is just rage turned inward) or unhappiness and self-doubt because they were unable to ball up their feelings and throw them at their partners as a demand for dialogue? Yes, economic and social entrapment (the fine business of holding things together with a mortgage or having a bunch of relatives who have pre-defined you) may make this difficult but not to do so is to allow oneself to be trapped and defined not only by the other but by all the others behind them. In effect, you will be socialised into chronic misery.

Negative emotion is thus essentially conservative. A person has land-grabbed a bit of social existence and now wants to keep what it has (jealousy) or resents someone else's lucky or more skilled land-grab (envy). Such conservatism is at the root of all that is nasty in politics, society and culture. It is corrosive. But all these emotions have their purpose. We are told that they arose out of evolutionary conditions to ensure that a man did not waste resources in raising others' offspring and a woman had the resources to raise her own but evolutionary biology as justification for jealousy is a cop-out. These are unscientific assumptions but they are widely believed and so become true.

The issue is not jealousy at all but being deceived or lied to, yet our culture has created the conditions for continuous deception because of the zero sum game most of its frightened, isolated players are engaged in. The discovered can lose everything and be subject to barracking and intolerable shaming and socially enforced guilt so it is no wonder that he or she lurks in the dark instead of expressing themselves responsibly in the light. The social has constructed its own dark and dreary underworld.

What is more interesting is the psychological truth that, whilst resentment, depression and misery result in the almost complete de-sexualisation of couples as they spend more time together, high emotion will trigger passion and sexual intensity. It might even be argued that a determined compliance with each other (generally, sado-masochistic in that one party is dominant) is tantamount to the slow murder of a relationship by strangulation, whereas a sense of danger and risk, but above all, dialogue, paradoxically maintains the bonds that brought two people together in the first place.

To do all this effectively, however, requires an acceptance that no person can ever be owned, that they are dangerously unknowable free agents and that risk and loss are challenges that enhance life - and, then, since all is paradox, the dead 'autism for two' might well be replaced by an unbreakable bond between persons and misery might be replaced with 'joie'.

Abraham, Hagar and Sarah - Death in the Desert

According to the Bible, Abraham took a slave girl (Hagar) as his concubine and then married her to provide an heir, in agreement with his existing wife Sarah. Hagar produced Ishmael but then Sarah conceived and produced Isaac. Sarah then demanded that Abraham drive out both Hagar and Ishmael into the desert (and so to probable death). Abraham found this difficult and he only did it when he found out that God 'wanted him to do it'. We are creeped out now by people who say that 'God wanted them to do it' but this is the Iron Age Levant.

Many relativistic excuses (mostly post-facto based on the fact that 'it all turned out right in the end') can be made for the behaviour of these persons but this story is at the very root of the mythos of three world religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). It has been accepted without thought as representing God's word and so as a fundamentally ethical story. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about this and not say simply that this is just a story that history has made irrelevant. It is a story of great cruelty and we must ask what it came to imply for later humanity.

The first implication of the tale is that sexuality is a practical matter. Production of children, not pleasure, are at the root of the story. This is perhaps the most forgivable aspect of the tale ethically because times were hard and there was a logic to the attitude. A pragmatic ethical polyamory or polygamy may be one logical lesson of this history, yet this is the one rejected by at least two of the Great Religions that derived from it. The story of Hagar understandably permits a more open attitude to concubinage in Islam but both Judaism and Christianity were to adopt a position where Sarah's matriarchal rights were to be privileged over both those of the patriarch himself and the concubine/first wife.  For three thousand years, this has been presented as moral - but is it?

Far from being patrarchalist, Judaeo-Christianity starts its story, the story that then leads to Abraham and Isaac, with a tale of matriarchal struggle and power, of female competition. It tells us straight way that the subsequent three thousand years are the story of the triumph of one woman over another rather than that of a man over women. It undermines from the beginning the claim that Judaeo-Christianity is patriarchal and only patriarchal.

The second implication is the positive denial of emotion, of love, implicit in the story and the cruelty and resentment of the dominant matriarch. Abraham is twice denied his feelings by God - both here in regard to his feelings for Hagar and later in his feelings for Isaac on the sacrificial altar. God rewards the catty older woman over the younger. The 'patriarch' himself seems to have no power himself to bring the two women into line - it is his weakness before female rivalry that is the most noticeable feature of this part of the story.

What is going on here? Levantine man clearly had feelings. He was a human being. It seems that God does not approve of feelings, of emotion coming from within. Such emotion must be subordinated to the abstract - the theory of what is destined, written long after the event - and therein lies the tale. God's law, in the end, appears to suit Sarah as dominant wife and God himself as Authority. Patriarchal authority does not belong to the human patriarch at all - his wishes are ignored and he takes the easy way out. The authority belongs to an abstract and invented entity intended to buttress the power of the matriarch. It is as if the Great Goddess (if she ever existed) has proved a lot less useful than a Great Father because only through the latter can male physical power be re-appropriated for the real head of the household, she who is to be obeyed, though perhaps I take things too far and should not over-interpret the text.

But God does help Sarah to become dominant over Abraham in this matter and then takes Abraham away later to enforce his own direct dominance over him in the matter of Isaac. This is not a tale of patriarchal power at all but a tale of the assertion of priestly power (represented by this invented abstract thing called God) over the male by means of a Godly favoured female, a female given implicit domestic power in order to define the terms of the Law. The feminist analysis of Judaeo-Christianity is thus deeply flawed. It refers to patriarchalism when the Judaeo-Christian tradition is, much as Nietzsche described it, an alliance of weakness, of priests or intellectuals and middle class, property-owning women, designed to tame the free choices (which include sexual and emotional choices) of males and exclude other women.

This may not be a bad thing in itself because it depends where you stand in the game and there is only good or bad in relation to one's stance in that game. A certain form of order triumphed and made its rules stick. It is a contingent set of rules but, whether good or bad, it should still be seen for what it is and not for what it would be convenient for us to think it is in our later age. The Catholic Church, of course, took the Judaic system and went one better by (at least in theory) sexually neutering its priests so that all sexualities in the domestic setting were concentrated on the dominance of a mother advised by eunuchs. Marriage was to transfer the male from libertine to dog and excluded females to be sentenced to be sluts or nuns. Male sexuality and any female (or homosexual) sexual competitors were shunted to one side. God stood for an exclusivity that was prepared to eliminate (metaphorically and socially) its rivals through force of customary law, an elimination performed on Hagar.

And what of Hagar? She did all right in the end, being at the core of a polygamous Islam, but we can relax only if we take at face value that her destiny was one of providence and not, in fact, chance. She and her son could have died out their in the desert and only an 'act of faith' (ho, hum!) says that that was never going to happen.

So, what was the cost of this system of social control designed to bring order to society (for that is what this story is about)? Abraham is weak - he allows his natural feeling for a woman and their child to be thrust aside by the strictures of priestly (God's) and matriarchal law. Natural feeling will be torn from him later (saved only at the last minute) but this first case is not just abandonment, it is also also attempted murder. Let us remember - both Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the desert, in effect, to die. So a weak man and a proud and manipulative woman (with a little help from an ideological construct called God) sentence a weaker woman and a child to death without once questioning the morality of their action. Yet this morality (or lack of morality) is at the very centre of Western culture. Is a murderous callousness at its very heart?

On Objectification

Once upon a time, it was self-evident that God existed and that He was good. Today, it seems equally self-evident to many that there is a thing called sexual objectification and that it is wrong. Just as some people will never not be able to believe in God, so others will never be able to do anything but impute negative moral value to the market in sexual display and observation.

The New Clericalism 
   
People who have such opinions, whether about the existence of God or the moral horror that is lapdancing, have a right to those opinions. They can go to church or avoid lapdancing clubs as suits them. But what neither should do is dictate the terms of freedom for others.

The Church has largely been chased away from public policy (not quite far enough in our view) but feminist extremism is reaching its apogee of power and may yet institute its horrors on us through the Nordic model. In Hackney and in the progressive communities of the 'new feminism', Church and post-Marxist graduate ideologue have been converging to build critical mass for new social myths and new oppressions, the pseudo-theocracy of the authoritarian activist.

The 'progressive' feminist position was even converging at one point (perhaps still is) with that of the communitarian right - the theory of objectification is flowing into a bed already scoured out in the desert by the Judaeo-Christian concept of 'sin' and by Islamic concepts of womanhood. The thesis is that objectification is a thing that is real and that it is bad and that is what we will deal with here. Both statements are dubious. But we will accept, for the sake of taking on these people on their own ground, that there is something called objectification: that is, that persons treat other persons as things-in-themselves and then we will ask whether this is quite so bad as post-Kantian rectitude asserts.

Sinister Philosophy 

The idea that objectification is a bad thing in itself arises (in modern thought) ultimately from a reading of Immanuel Kant - moral value must lie in never treating another person as the object of one's desires without their interests being at heart. This is fair enough but the way it has been extended by Theory is another matter. This Kantian model, already distanced to a degree from what it is to be human in practice (his position was a moral exhortation rather than a description of the actual situation of humanity where we have to wait until Nietzsche for a fair assessment), got extended by the progressive Left into something very much more demanding, especially under Marxist influence.

Two further ideological formulae were added. The first was that using the labour of another to improve or enrich or take pleasure was always  'exploitation' so that the only unexploited person was one who lived beyond the market in some putative future socialist paradise, a fit religio-metaphysical parallel to the traditionalist's Golden Age or Lost Eden. But the second was more sinister. If Marxism made all current human relations potentially exploitative, another school of thought within Marxism but allied to progressive liberalism and derived from Plato, suggested that consent to exploitation was not permissible because any consensual element was a form of 'false consciousness'.

The Rule of the Few

In other words, Kantianism as interpreted by Marx and Platonic Liberals (regardless of similar but theological criticisms of displaying oneself and observing others) came to mean that: a) we lived in a system of mutual exploitation but b) some people who understood this system had the right to limit exploitative behaviour as preparation for its eventual ending. The denial of personal autonomy explicit in submission to God had come full circle to a denial of personal autonomy in the face of not Providence but History or Right. You can't keep a good sado-masochistic authoritarian nut down for long, it would seem.

The Marxist and Liberal debt to Christianity is as strong here as Christianity's to Platonism. Poor old Kant has long since been left behind and Nietzsche ignored. One central belief here is that mutual exploitation is never beneficial nor ever a reasonable and even pleasurable aspect of being human.
There is the belief, already noted that some people have a right (one not coming from God but from 'reason' or 'analysis') to decide who is being exploited and then judge that this is wrong. But a third belief is that the persons who are then defined as exploited can have no voice in the matters because they are ignorant.

All three of these beliefs are somewhat vile because they systematically deny agency to an individual in whatever situation they happen to be in and deliver them up to the situation as interpreted by others. The first belief denies humanity its right to be human and twists it into a rationalist simulacrum of itself. The second is inegalitarian not by way of attribute within a free society but by the fiat of the few who seek to command the many. The third shows contempt for the ability of persons, no matter how 'lowly', to make decisions in their own interest.

Objectification as Temporary States of Being

But let us get back to objectification itself which contains two states of being (we will not call them rights because this concedes too much ground to the 'progressives') - that of displaying and that of observing. The dialectic of displaying and observing is separate again from a personal decision to do one or the other.

A central if implicit psychological theme of much 'objectification discourse' is that display or observation are assaults not only on the person who objects to these states in others but on 'society' - that is, even if no one objects to a display or observation, in some mysterious way there is an observer of the display or of the observation who does. This observer would seem to be the re-invention of God but on terms that pander to the superior knowledge of the intellectual who can interpret Him.

In fact, most, though not all, display and observation falls into the category of the victimless crime at worst and, at best, as a matter of civil dispute between the displayer and the observer or the observer and the observed. The discomfort of one person is otherwise privileged wholly without any equity being invested in the inconvenience of another.

Worse, the politics of objectification means that the State and the community (in a grim repetition of the dark days of Judaeo-Christian control of public policy) are brought into play in order to demand that the observer not observe and the displayer not display. This is only the mirror image of a theoretical State demand that the observer must observe and the displayer must display that we see in the contemporary surveillance State. Obliging people by diktat to observe or not observe or display or not display is of the very essence of totalitarianism.

Politics of Disgust

No policy equitably forces the unobserved to be forcibly observed or the undisplayed to be forcibly displayed. Quite rightly. men and women are not forced to parade naked down the street but the man or woman who wishes to parade naked down the street is always regarded as having broken some law (even when, in fact, they have not).

We are, of course, embedded here in the politics of disgust and in the conservative politics of custom, forgetting that custom was once invented and often invented by earlier versions of the 'disgusted' personality types who most object to the sexual or display rights of others.

But let us get down to basics here because most reasonable restrictions on display and observation have nothing to do with the community or the State, and certainly nothing to do with the minority of 'activists' who exist within some text-based ideological framework. They are a matter of good manners and manners are never a matter for States.

Let us now reverse the radical feminist position: free persons generally know their own interest and politics should only be about increasing the flow of information to persons (education) and of free resources (economic redistribution which is where I part company with classic American libertarianism) as well as creating opportunity to escape untenable situations. It should not be about moral condemation of private acts.

The Moralists as Waste of Political Space
  
If the State and the ideologues cannot deliver full information, resources and escape valves (the three key tasks of the State other than security), then it is for ordinary folk to make the best decisions that they can about getting through the day. If that includes a drink, a flutter on the horses, a bit of drug-taking, lapdancing and even prostitution, these must be assumed to be rational decisions.

A woman or man who makes such choices is not 'weak' or 'inferior' but is dealing the best way they can with their circumstances and they are more likely to escape those circumstances if they are harmful to them if they are respected for their efforts and given what help is available without moral grandstanding from 'committees'.

But most people involved in display and observation are not at the margins of society. Display and observation are central to what it is to be a human being. The right to be naked, the right to get maximum economic value out of your looks, the right to aspire to look good, these are all sneered at by extremist feminists and yet this is what people want. None of those who want this are in any way to be regarded as inferior to those who choose to clothe themselves from top to toe, avoid make-up, look frumpy - and vice versa. These are just life choices.

Observation is a pleasure. There is a reasonable anti-exploitative argument that anyone in the adult industries should be decently paid, have appropriate healthcare facilities and not be forced into anything that was not consensual - but this applies to all workers in all industries. Conditions in some adult entertainment industries are clearly better today than in some sweatshop suppliers of manufactured items that radicals use every day without thinking how they came to be.

Choice is a Value
  
There is, however, no argument (if people make free choices that are economically rational and are not enslaved) against the right of people to earn revenue from physical attributes or skills for the pleasure of those who observe. To say otherwise is to deny humanity to the observer and economic value to the observed.

The alternative of feminist moralism is that the observed ends up in a dead end job with less money and probably a worse sexual mate while the observer becomes depressed and possibly vicious. But there is bigger charge to answer for those opposed to the theory of objectification. Feminist theory would claim that it is wrong in itself to observe or engage with another person sexually as a commodity or as an object for use.

However, the privileging of sexuality is curious here because there are other aspects of human activity that are equally fundamental and where one is normally treated as a commodity or as an object of use. We are treated like this every day as consumers, as voters, as contracted workers and spiritually by religious and community leaders.

The Peculiar Hold of the Sexual
  
What is the peculiar hold of sexuality in this general attitude to the use of humans as commodities and objects of use. Why is sexuality given a sacral nature that is not by any means essential. This fascistic over-emphasis on sexual purity is really just the special interest of one part (some women and some men) of one part of the community (all other people).

Logically, if we were truly serious about objectification, we would have a general critique of commodification and, of course, some very radical feminists manage this purist position - being anarcho-socialist feminist atheists without employment who effectively live outside society.

But, for most people most of the time, this is an utterly absurd stance. To survive in the world not only economically but in terms of simple pleasures and psychologically with some constructed meaning and participation, we require a society in which exploitation not only takes place but must take place.

The question of exploitation is not that it takes place but how to make it 'fair' - that is, how is the exploitation to be limited to the essential for mutual survival and then balanced out so that the few never exploit the many. How, in other words, is a pleasurable mutual exploitation going to result in a society where exploitation is a pleasure for all and everything balances out.

The Market & Desire
  
The market to some extent, over time, manages to do some of the balancing but not very effectively. The State does have some role in correcting imbalances and civil society (notably trades unions) has another but both the State and civil society have a tendency to be captured by ideologues and people of simple mind.

The theory of objectification has created an 'absolute' where our situation is one of 'relatives'. Thus the man who looks at a naked beautiful woman is designated a 'pervert' and the woman who strips for him as a 'slut' when, in fact, truth to be told, the man is just being a man (of equal worth to a woman) and the woman is stripping him of his resources.

The roles can be reversed. A woman may spend her money to see some inconsequential film that would bore any man silly because the 'star' offers her a fantasy that is really not so different from the man's but just involves less interest in exchange of body fluids.

Human desire is important. It fuels us as persons. It makes us who we are. Those who satisfy our desires should be well recompensed. And the person who thwarts desire by stopping the trade in desire through some asinine theory from academic philosophers is worse than dessicated, they are anti-human.

Disrespect and Objectification
  
Objectification is simply part of the social trade in desires. Perhaps we can move steadily towards an equality of desires. The real revolution for women must be to ensure that their desires are given equal weight to that of men rather than allow the suppression of the desires of both men and women for some dream of a socialised a-sexuality.

There is no intrinsic reason why objectification as such shows any disrespect to a woman (or to a man's) personal or intellectual capabilities. This is a feminist myth that deliberately misunderstands the nature of time, of context and of choice.

The central point here is that any act of objectification is not permanent. Objectification is a period of time during which a desire or the fantasy is lived. It is not a state of permanent being but a state of temporary being. When the moment is over, the participants return to what they were or at least are changed inwardly by the experience (in very personal ways that can never be assumed to be 'good' or 'bad') but the objectifier has no hold over the objectified unless the objectified is a neurotic - which is, bluntly, their problem. Most of what happens in most situations is imagined and distant.

This fundamental error of objectification theory - that it is exploitative - is important to understand. It confuses structural exploitation (where coercion lies within poverty or the limits of some communitarian authority) with a momentary exchange. Poverty may dictate the terms of the exchange but it is the poverty or other external matter, bullying probably, that is the problem. These post-Marxist pseudo-radicals need to get back to problems of coercion and poverty and away from imagined problems of culture and language.

Vicious Totalitarians
  
In nearly every area where extremist feminists rant against other women's choices, they are thus acting as somewhat vicious totalitarians because they are taking the symptoms for the disease.

The only objection to a woman being portrayed as weak or submissive in pornography, for example, is the same as one portraying a man as weak or submissive - that is, if the man or woman was coerced or not decently treated during the process. Otherwise, it is his or her decision to sell and his or her decision to buy.

Moreover, and this is central to my argument, equality between men and women permits perfect equality of desire. To condemn males for their desire as 'aggressive' or 'perverted' and privilege women in theirs is grossly unfair and leads to the logic of a negation of desire for both men and women, equally, as the only way to restore 'fairness'.

Feminist Ariel Levy thinks that modern society (as if there was such a reified thing) 'encourages' women to objectify themselves. The tone could only come from a text-worshipping academic. Such language denies the right of women to decide for themselves their own status as both subjects and objects in contexts they choose. Some are being led into submission to academic theorists in a manner little different to those who were led into futile and cruel political ideologies in the first half of the last century,

Feminist Perspectives

Levy is said to have been surprised at how many of her interviewees saw the new raunchy culture emerging in the twenty-first century as representing the triumph of feminism because it showed that American women had become strong enough to display on their terms and accept objectification as empowering. She should not have been.

While many women are embarrassed or made uncomfortable by the male or indeed female gaze (and good manners suggests that they should not be so embarrassed in private relations), many others take immense pleasure in it.

The ultimate absurdity lies in a male critic, John Stoltenberg, who condems as 'wrong' (where do they get their ethics from), any sexual fantasy that involves visualisation of a woman. This is so anti-human as to beggar belief. This could be a saint in the desert. Objectification is just what all persons do and it should be embraced not as unethical but as challenging.

The real issue here is understanding the line between reality and fantasy. The fear of the feminist and their fellow-travellers is legitimate - lack of equal regard and coercion - but their consequent analysis is quite simply ignorant.

Fear and Coercion
  
The radical feminist theorist lacks judgement and balance. So terrified are they that thoughts about inequality and coercion might lead to actual inequality and coercion that one suspects that the theory is about their own anxiety in this respect more than it is derived from any real understanding of how most persons understand that boundary.

Stoltenberg is an extreme example of the dehumanising tendencies of this deep neurosis amongst people of the text, one which derives from their deep belief that texts matter. To them, if texts matter, then thoughts which are made up of the same material (words) matter - and thoughts that lead to texts must also lead to acts.

Of course, in the real world, things do not work like that. Texts are not quite that important any more but, more to the point, thoughts are often substitutes for acts and ensure that acts are not perpetrated  - while acts are often thoughtless. Unravel the primitive humanist belief in the validity of the text, the delusion of the educated and suddenly a lot of the problem evaporates as mist drifts away in the morning sunlight.

The culture of the intellectual confuses act, text and thought into a false coherence that excludes all ambiguity despite the fact that all actual human relations are about ambiguity, confusion and compromise. All intellectualisms that have not understood this, particularly Platonic, Kantian and Marxist thought, build an entirely false picture of social reality - and from that great pain and suffering has resulted.

Text, Thought & Act
  
To actual persons engaged in the world, however, act, text and thought are very different, with text both a technical manual for action and a means of inspiring thought and imagination. However, words themselves limit action and people engage in consensual objectification in very precise contexts.

What is more remarkable, given the frustrations of modern life, is the lack of viciousness on a day-to-day basis. Even the most cursory of reading of the history of erotica will indicate that viciousness increases to the degree that sexuality is repressed and all sexual expression involves a degree of objectification.

Camille Paglia, a feminist to be admired in this respect, puts it well: "Turning people into sex objects is one of the specialties of our species." To try to change this is to try change humanity which, given the nature of our evolution, means, in effect, a cultural Sovietisation of sexual relations. A grim prospect indeed!

Paglia understands that humans are defined in part by their ability to conceptualise and to make value judgements about the beautiful to which I would add their ability to contextualise themselves and to differentiate between various functioning realities in different contexts.

Objectification Theory - An Insult to Women
  
The theory of objectification ends up as deeply insulting to women - not only because it removes choice (in itself an assault on their rights as persons) but because it has an abstract theory dictate that choice in regard to the use of their bodies as well as their minds and deeper nature.

Yes, we (and not just girls and women) develop our view of ourselves from the observation of others and, yes, the whole person questions this and challenges those views in their own inner interest but, no, the social construction of ourselves is not a bad in itself if it is critically challenged not on the basis of theory but of that of personhood.

What happens in much feminist theory is that a wholly theoretical construct of what it is to be a woman - an essentialist construct - is positioned outside society and beyond the individual. The way that feminism has distanced itself from the existentialist critique of De Beauvoir is downright embarrassing. A woman is ordered to comply with that essentialist positioning. She is, in effect, dragged into a theoretical future and away from herself.

A Caveat on Body Image

Now a note of caution is required. All this is not to say that a false relationship between one's own body image and social expectations is not a serious mental health issue in some cases but these are cases of personal adaptation in which the person is not critically engaged in their own being or has suffered some negative private psychological pressure.

Personal issues which seem to be aligned with feminist theory must be taken into account but we must look on these as problems for persons which have objectifying aspects. In other words, there is not a crisis of objectification but a failure of healthy objectification, indeed probably a crisis of healthy desire and playfulness.

The body image issue in such cases is vitally important but it is specific and not general. The imposition of strategies based on objectification theory to all men and women in this context is as absurd as dictating severe diet or lifestyle changes to all persons because some persons suffer serious physical health from specific dietary or lifestyle problems.

As in physical health public policy planning, there is a severe danger here that progressive rationalists chip away at the freedoms of the many in order to deal with the problems of the few and so begin to undertake social engineering that relates to their own political aesthetic rather than to the real needs of the many.