[1]
J.A.S. Collin de Plancy. Dictionnaire Infernal. Paris : E. Plon, 1863. Page 71.
Potential new freedoms often first become visible in practices within the ruling group itself. Since existing prohibitions are imposed by this group, its members are the first to violate those prohibitions when it suits them. That is one of the few freedoms reserved to a group whose relationship to other people is inherently perverse; it is marked by dominance just as are gender relations within the ruling group itself. Any freedoms appropriated by the ruling group must necessarily become perverse—to that extent, at least, its members remain human.
(Theweleit, op cit)
I know I'm supposed to be happy that the New York Times [2] finally noticed that the Republicrats are not just against abortion, they actually hate sex, but the happiness is bittersweet. I feel like the crackpot who's been marching around the public square with the big sign that says, "The End is Near." And now, the fucking world is caving in and I'm proven right.
Or maybe I'm just taking myself way too damn seriously.
I have written many, many times (some would say--enough all fucking ready) about the sense of dread and paranoia I have about the connections among Fundamentalists, Republicans, Fascism and the war on the Body. Those feelings are not going away.
For me, attacks on the body are the proverbial canary in the coalmine. On one hand, regulating what the body can and cannot do--who it can have sex with, whether it can regulate its own fertility--seem far-removed from the world of politics. On the other, I think they have everything to do with politics.
As a graduate student, one of the things I noticed in my studies of European history from 1000 to the present day is the repetition of certain patterns. The identification of liberalizing movements with sexual "perversion," and how the reaction to that movement involved a reinstantiation of mythical sexual mores in which women were nothing more than asexual breeders, and where men's sexuality was also disciplined in ways in which their only release was either with their "good" wives or with prostitutes, who are ironically, most prevalent in societies in which sex is repressed.
I've been thinking, again, about this topic. I've been thinking about the parallels in our own culture, in which Bill Clinton became the rightwing symbol of sexual perversity, and where the 2000 Supreme Court Putsch was part-and-parcel of a reactionary, revolutionary obsession with control of bodies.
Oh shit. I'm not explaining myself very well. Let me quote Theweleit for a minute.
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Volume 1: women floods bodies history pp. 364-65
A few pages ago, I wrote of civil servants and petit bourgeois males in the era of German classicism, that they abandoned the revolutionary struggle to propagandize for a new morality. That seems typical of groups and strata that belong to the ruling class, but have not been allowed to exercise authority directly. We witnessed the same process in the relationship of the defeated decentralized d’Urfe to the court of the victor, Henry IV. D’Urfe began to criticize the sexual mores of the court after he had been vanquished in an armed struggle for power. The so-called heretical movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Franciscans and Dominicans, for instance) aimed their attacks not at the Church hierarchy as a whole, but at the dissolute life of large segments of the priesthood, prostitution in the convents, and so forth. The “heretics countered those transgressions with an ideal of physical asceticism, not one of revolution. They, too, assailed authority with a new puritanism. (The same can be said of Christians in the late Roman Empire.)
Sooner or later, all of these groups would gain access to power without a revolution. They would have a chance to train their new morality on social inferiors (although it had evolved in opposition to superiors). But for the time being, they focused their efforts on the bodies of women from their own strata, or on the images of high-born women (which grew out of an exaltation of women of their own strata). Asceticism and new moralities always seem to emerge from the groups Elias calls “strata fighting on two fronts.†The power of such strata extends only downward; it is used against the sexuality of the general population rather than against the immorality of rulers.
Evidence to support the claim that truly oppressed classes attack ruling classes because they deprive them of life (and not because of the obesity of those gentlemen or the harems they keep) can be found in the activity of the peasants at the time of their revolts (ca. 1525), or in proletarian life during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in both cases, revolutionary activities coincided with freer sexual attitudes. For the most part, these groups did not respond to the sexual perversity of their rulers with a new morality (although their leaders frequently did).
And so, while ostensibly, Clinton was the target of this repressive energy, the Bush administration, which is full of "do as I say, not as I do" moralists, has not been disciplined by the mass that put it into power. But, the rest of us have. The war on gays and lesbians has coincided with a war on reproductive-age women. We are being attacked on two fronts: the first is that non-reproductive sex is unnatural and that the only purpose of sexual activity should be the creation of babies; the second is that it is specifically white women [3] who are failing to breed at replacement rates, thus guaranteeing the eventual demise of Western Civilization [4] (and liberals, too).
It does not matter what certain members of the administration do at this point. The forces that seek to discipline the rest of us in service to their aims no longer demand that kind of consistency. It is part of what Theweleit has referred to as "inherently perverse" in their relationships to other people.
Fascism is alive and well in the United States. And no, that does not mean Bush is Hitler. Fascism is about a lot more than Nazis. It is a way of looking at the world in which rigidity finds itself threatened by fluidity, and thus seeks to control it.
I leave you with something that Umberto Eco wrote 11 years ago, prior to the situation we now find ourselves in.
Umberto Eco [5], "Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt"
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
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