Closing of the American Mind (16 page)

In this light we can discern the outlines of what has been going on recently among us. Conservatives who have been heartened by the latest developments within the women's movement are mistaken if they think that they and the movement are on common ground. Certainly both sides are against pornography. But the feminists are against it because it is a reminiscence of the old love relationship, which involved differentiated sexual roles—roles now interpreted as bondage and domination. Pornography demystifies that relationship, leaving the merely sexual component of
male-female relationships without their erotic, romantic, moral and ideal accompaniments. It caters to and encourages the longing men have for women and its unrestrained if impoverished satisfaction. This is what feminist anti-pornographers are against—not the debasement of sentiment or the threat to the family. That is why they exempt homosexual pornography from censorship. It is by definition not an accomplice to the domination of females by males and even helps to undermine it. Actually, feminists favor the demystifying role of pornography. It unmasks the true nature of the old relationships. Their purpose is not to remystify the worn-out systems but to push on toward the realm of freedom. They are not for a return to the old romances,
Brief Encounter
, for example, which gave charm to love in the old way. They know that is dead, and they are now wiping up the last desperate, untutored, semicriminal traces of a kind of desire that no longer has a place in the world.

It is one thing, however, to want to prevent women from being ravished and brutalized because modesty and purity should be respected and their weakness protected by responsible males, and quite another to protect them from male desire altogether so that they can live as they please. Feminism makes use of conservative moralism to further its own ends. This is akin to, and actually part of, the fatal old alliance between traditional conservatives and radicals, which has had such far-reaching effects for more than a century. They had nothing in common but their hatred of capitalism, the conservatives looking back to the revival of throne and altar in the various European nations, and to piety, the radicals looking forward to the universal, homogeneous society and to freedom—reactionaries and progressives united against the present. They feed off the inner contradictions of the bourgeoisie. Of course fundamentalists and feminists can collaborate to pass local ordinances banning smut, but the feminists do so to demonstrate their political clout in furthering their campaign against “bourgeois rights,” which are, sad to say, enjoyed by people who want to see dirty movies or buy equipment to act out comically distorted fantasies. It is doubtful whether the fundamentalists gain much from this deal, because it guarantees the victory of a surging moral force that is “antifamily and antilife.” See how they do together on the abortion issue! People who watch pornography, on the other hand, are always at least a little ashamed and unwilling to defend it as such. At best, they sound a weak and uncertain trumpet for the sanctity of the Constitution
and the First Amendment, of which they hope to be perceived as defenders. They pose no threat in principle to anything.

Similarly, some conservatives are heartened by recent feminist discussion about the differences between men and women and about the special fulfillment of “parenting,” forbidden subjects at earlier stages of the movement, when equal rights was the primary theme. However, this discussion has really only been made possible by the success of those earlier stages. There may indeed be a feminine nature or self, but it has been definitively shaken loose from its teleological moorings. The feminine nature is not in any reciprocal relation to the male nature, and they do not define one another. The male and female sexual organs themselves now have no more evident purposiveness than do white and black skin, are no more naturally pointed toward one another than white master and black slave, or so the legend goes. Women do have different physical structures, but they can make of them what they will—without paying a price. The feminine nature is a mystery to be worked out on its own, which can now be done because the male claim to it has been overcome. The fact that there is today a more affirmative disposition toward childbearing does not imply that there is any natural impulse or compulsion to establish anything like a traditional fatherhood to complement motherhood. The children are to be had on the female's terms, with or without fathers, who are not to get in the way of the mother's free development. Children have always been, and still are, more the mother's anyway. Ninety per cent or more of children of divorced parents stay with their mothers, whose preeminent stake in children has been enhanced by feminist demands and by a consequent easy rationalization of male irresponsibility. So we have reproduction without family—if family includes the presence of a male who has any kind of a definite function. The return to motherhood as a feminist ideal is only possible because feminism has triumphed over the family as it was once known, and women's freedom will not be limited by it. None of this means returning to family values or even bodes particularly well for the family as an institution, although it does mean that women have become freer to come to terms with the complexity of their situation.

The uneasy bedfellowship of the sexual revolution and feminism produced an odd tension in which all the moral restraints governing nature disappeared, but so did nature. The exhilaration of liberation has
evaporated, however, for it is unclear what exactly was liberated or whether new and more onerous responsibilities have not been placed on us. And this is where we return to the students, for whom everything is new. They are not sure what they feel for one another and are without guidance about what to do with whatever they may feel.

The students of whom I am speaking are aware of all the sexual alternatives, and have been from very early on in their lives, and they feel that all sexual acts which do not involve real harm to others are licit. They do not think they should feel guilt or shame about sex. They have had sex education in school, of “the biological facts, let them decide the values for themselves” variety, if not “the options and orientations” variety. They have lived in a world where the most explicit discussions and depictions of sex are all around them. They have had little fear of venereal disease.
¹
Birth-control devices and ready abortion have been available to them since puberty. For the great majority, sexual intercourse was a normal part of their lives prior to college, and there was no fear of social stigma or even much parental opposition. Girls have had less supervision in their relations with boys than at any time in history. They are not precisely pagan, but there is an easy familiarity with others' bodies and less inhibition about using their own for a broad range of erotic purposes. There is no special value placed on virginity in oneself or in one's partners. It is expected that there were others before and, incredibly to older folks, this does not seem to bother them, even though it provides a ground for predictions about the future. They are not promiscuous or given to orgies or casual sex, as it used to be understood. In general, they have one connection at a time, but most have had several serially. They are used to coed dormitories. Many live together, almost always without expectation of marriage. It is just a convenient arrangement. They are not couples in the sense of having simulacra of marriage or a way of life different from that of other students not presently so attached. They are roommates, which is what they call themselves, with sex and utilities included in the rent. Every single obstacle to sexual relationships between young unmarried persons has disappeared, and these relationships are routine. To strangers from another planet, what would be the most striking thing is that sexual passion no longer includes the illusion of eternity.

Men and women are now used to living in exactly the same way and studying exactly the same things and having exactly the same career expectations. No man would think of ridiculing a female premed or prelaw student, or believe that these are fields not proper for women, or assert that a woman should put family before career. The law schools and medical schools are full of women, and their numbers are beginning to approach their proportion in the general population. There is very little ideology or militant feminism in most of the women, because they do not need it. The strident voices are present, and they get attention in the university newspapers and in student governments. But, again, the battle here has been won. Women students do not generally feel discriminated against or despised for their professional aspirations. The economy will absorb them, and they have rising expectations. They do not need the protection of NOW any more than do women in general, who see they are doing at least as well with Reagan as they did with Carter. Academically, students are comfortably unisexual; they revert to dual sexuality only for the sex act. Sex no longer has any political agenda in universities except among homosexuals, who are not yet quite satisfied with their situation. But the fact that there is an open homosexual presence, with rights at least formally recognized by university authorities and almost all students, tells us much about current university life.

Students today understandably believe that they are the beneficiaries of progress. They have a certain benign contempt for their parents, particularly for their poor mothers, who were sexually inexperienced and had no profession to be taken as seriously as their fathers'. Superior sexual experience was always one of the palpable advantages that parents and teachers had over youngsters who were eager to penetrate the mysteries of life. But this is no longer the case, nor do students believe it to be so. They quietly smile at professors who try to shock them or talk explicitly about the facts of life in the way once so effective in enticing more innocent generations of students to pay attention to the words of their elders. Freud and D. H. Lawrence are very old hat. Better not to try.

Even less do students expect to learn anything about their situation from old literature, which from the Garden of Eden on made coupling a very dark and complicated business. On reflection, today's students wonder what all the fuss was about. Many think their older brothers and sisters discovered sex, as we now know it to be, in the sixties. I was impressed by students who, in a course on Rousseau's
Confessions
, were
astounded to learn that he had lived with a woman out of wedlock in the eighteenth century. Where could he have gotten the idea?

There is, of course, literature that affects a generation profoundly but has no interest at all for the next generation because its central theme proved ephemeral, whereas the greatest literature addresses the permanent problems of man. Ibsen's
Ghosts
, for example, lost all its force for young people when syphilis ceased to be a threat. Aristotle teaches that pity for the plight of others requires that the same thing could happen to us. Now, however, the same things that used to happen to people, at least in the relations between the sexes, do not happen to students anymore. And one must begin to wonder whether there is any permanent literature for them, because there do not seem to them to be permanent problems for them. As I have suggested earlier, this is the first fully historical or historicized generation, not only in theory but also in practice, and the result is not the cultivation of the vastest sympathies for long ago and far away, but rather an exclusive interest in themselves. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are adulteresses, but the cosmos no longer rebels at their deed. Anna's son today would probably have been awarded to her in the amicable divorce arrangements of the Karenins. All the romantic novels with their depictions of highly differentiated men and women, their steamy, sublimated sensuality and their insistence on the sacredness of the marriage bond just do not speak to any reality that concerns today's young people. Neither do Romeo and Juliet, who must struggle against parental opposition, Othello and his jealousy, or Miranda's carefully guarded innocence. Saint Augustine, as a seminarian told me, had sexual hang-ups. And let us not speak of the Bible, every
no
in which is now a
yes
. With the possible exception of Oedipus, they are all gone, and they departed in the company of modesty.

When young people today have crushing problems in what used to be called sexual relationships, they cannot trace them back to any moral ambiguity in man's sexual nature. That was, of course, what was erroneously done in the past.

Civilization has seemingly led us around full circle, back to the state of nature taught to us by the founding fathers of modern thought. But now it is present not in rhetoric but in reality. Those who first taught the state of nature proposed it as a hypothesis. Liberated from all the conventional attachments to religion, country and family that men actually did have, how would they live and how would they freely reconstruct those attachments? It was an experiment designed to make people recognize what they really care about and engage their loyalties on the basis of this caring. But a young person today, to exaggerate only a little, actually begins
de novo
, without the givens or imperatives that he would have had only yesterday. His country demands little of him and provides well for him, his religion is a matter of absolutely free choice and—this is what is really fresh—so are his sexual involvements. He can now choose, but he finds he no longer has a sufficient motive for choice that is more than whim, that is binding. Reconstruction is proving impossible.

The state of nature should culminate in a contract, which constitutes a society out of individuals. A contract requires not only a common interest between the contracting parties but also an authority to enforce its fulfillment by them. In the absence of the former, there is no relationship; in the absence of the latter, there can be no trust, only diffidence. In the state of nature concerning friendships and love today, there is doubt about both, and the result is a longing for the vanished common ground, called roots, without the means to recover it, and timidity and self-protectiveness in associations guaranteed by neither nature nor convention. The pervasive feeling that love and friendship are groundless, perhaps the most notable aspect of the current feeling of groundlessness, has caused them to give way to the much vaguer and more personal idea of commitment, that choice in the void whose cause resides only in the will or the self. The young want to make commitments, which constitute the meaning of life, because love and nature do not suffice. This is what they talk about, but they are haunted by the awareness that the talk does not mean very much and that commitments are lighter than air.