One Nine Five: Mediation

I apologise for being away so long. The last few months have been hard; the next four years are all to likely to be a dreadful time. It seems that we live in a time when we should be talking about the politics of Resistance rather than about the social intricacies of sex and romance. I am, as I told you when we began, rather on the Left. I have nothing in common with the new regime in America, and I find the new regime illegitimate, corrupt, bigoted, and appalling. I have hoped that the remaining Free World--- let's say NATO ---would invoke the "responsibility to protect"  doctrine in international law and undertake armed humanitarian intervention. I have hoped and prayed for the skies above Washington to fill with Dutch and Danish and French paratroops and for the members of the new regime to face trial. If you think I wouldn't welcome that, you're very wrong. I don't want to live in a bad re-make of "Shadow on the Land" (1969).

Nonetheless, I set out a few years ago to write here about sex and romance and the social games we play around those two topics. I want to keep writing, even if I have to make myself look away from politics and make myself look for topics that don't leave me emotionally drained.

A friend in London Town tells me that I should continue to write about the idea of "emotional labour". She writes---

About the emotional labour thing-- It resonates with me at the moment because I have just been spending three weeks with a good female friend/colleague. With her, the emotional labour is equally shared, and we are very good about taking turns. It has been refreshing--which has made me aware of how one-sided most of my relationships with men are and have been in terms of that emotional work. Not the case in all of those relationships, of course, but definitely the vast majority.

 If you're having to mediate someone else's emotional responses to the world, you are essentially, and often necessarily, putting your own feelings second. It's not necessarily a bad thing, as you say--indeed, it's very important. it's just something that does tend to be a bit gendered in its provision (like, say, house-work and buying holiday gifts) and perhaps often goes unrecognized by the beneficiaries. It's one of the reasons why there is that cliche of the man who becomes depressed approximately 1-3 months after breaking up with his girlfriend/wife, having initially been pleased about the breakup. It's also why many divorced men, who have become used to someone providing for their emotional needs, tend to quickly get attached again, where women will more often rely on their female friends for their emotional needs for a good while following a divorce while they figure out what they want from a future partnership. These are generalizations, of course.  But in my own experience, most women, and a very few men, do it naturally. Unsurprisingly, these men I know who do know to share the giving and receiving of emotional support are particularly dear, long-term friends.

I was thinking about what I expect from girls in a relationship. Validation, certainly. I do expect a lover to make me feel valued and valuable. I do understand my friend's invocation of the cliche of male depression a month or so after a break-up, even if the man himself initiated it. You realise one night that there's no one to talk to, no one on the other end of the phone, no one there across a table. One of the very worst things about a break-up isn't so much the anger and bitterness, or even the sexual deprivation. It's the silence on the phone, the lack of another voice.  That's what I've always hated most after a relationship ends--- the silence. There's no one to talk to late at night, no one to go with for coffee at a late-night cafe.  There's silence where there used to be conversation, and that's an incredibly empty sensation.  This isn't just about the loss of pillow talk and flirtation. It's about living in a space where it's possible not to hear another living human voice for weeks. 

This goes to the social pressures that keep men from having male friends who'd function as a support network. Male friends may help you bury that inconvenient body, but they're not people to whom you'd turn for emotional support. 

So...where does that leave us? What are we to think of the need for a partner as someone who'll provide support and solace and defense against emotional upheavals? What are we to think of the very different networks men and women construct for friendship? And...are we still allowed to think that one of the key parts of a relationship is having a partner who will act to make you feel better or keep the outside world at bay?

One Nine Four: Performance

One of the big issues I'm noting out amongst the devotees of the Social Justice Cult is something called "performing emotional labour". This I suppose replaces "micro-aggression" as the latest example of Evil in social relations. It seems to mean the work women--- and it's always used as being something women do ---are expected to do in providing emotional support to male partners. It's used to mean work women have to do in a relationship to keep their male partners on an even emotional keel--- listening, offering support and solace, being there in moments of crisis or despair.

Now, no one likes an emotional leech. And some people really are emotional vampires in a relationship. But "performing emotional labour" seems to imply that any emotional support offered to a partner in a relationship is somehow illegitimate, that any expectation that one be a listener and emotionally supportive of a partner is inherently exploitative.

That seems to go along with with the general attitude in the Social Justice Cult that any social or interpersonal expectations or obligations are suspect at best, and very likely oppressive or exploitative  tout court.  We've come to a place where social and personal obligations aren't seen as holding societies together, but as ways of grinding others down.

In any of my romantic relationships, I want two things---- sex/romance (obviously) and a haven. I very much want and need out of a relationship what Lasch called "haven in a heartless world", a place to go for safety, respite, and refuge. A place to go for support.

That isn't, or shouldn't be, a gendered thing. You offer up the same support to your partner as they do for you: Ride or Die.  You listen, you support them against the outside world, you offer loyalty and a willingness to be there for them.  You offer solace and encouragement and comfort. You're on their side; they're on yours. Listening to their problems, taking their part against others, having their back. This is what makes it a relationship. Will it mean investing time and emotional resources? Absolutely. But that's what you do. And it's always reciprocal--- must always be reciprocal. Ride or Die.

If you feel oppressed because someone with whom you're partnered needs solace or encouragement, why are you bothering to pretend to be a partner? The idea that any personal obligations should exist in a relationship has become suspect...why? How did this happen? Is this related to the same attitude that makes actual telephone conversations an emotional ordeal? Is this related to the same attitude that makes it a grave sin to speak to strangers? Is this related to the same attitude that wants society made up of armoured monads who interact only at arm's-length?

Any thoughts on this?

SIxty-Six: Cages

My friend did ask me about the parts of contemporary visions of manhood and masculinity that "suffocate" and "marginalize" men. Well, that I'm uncomfortable ever calling myself "a man" has to be connected to that, doesn't it? That "manhood" requires constant re-affirmation, or that it's a title that can be lost in an instant--- those things count.

I've followed a few links my friend sent to articles about the failures and dangers of contemporary ideas of masculinity. I can't say that I'm too impressed with the articles. One kept invoking the idea of "hypermasculinity" in American culture, but never explained--- never tried to explain ---what the base line for masculinity was.  Calling something hypertrophied means nothing if you don't know what the ordinary--- normal ---form is like.

And there seems to be a failure to look at the history of the concept. The articles all tended to focus on the idea that contemporary ideas of manhood are linked to physical force and physical strength and assert such things should have no place in a "true" vision of manhood. Okay, well, that's a respectable argument to make. But you have to be aware that over the last three or four thousand years, manhood has almost always been defined in terms of things martial. Manhood was something that entailed being ready to engage in combat. That's certainly true in the West, all the way back to Homer. It's true in the other cultures I know anything about, too. Make the argument if you want that it shouldn't be so, that there should be clear alternative paths to being seen as a man, paths that don't focus on physical force. Make the argument that the older ideas are obsolete and dangerous. But I think you have to have to recognise that martial prowess has been associated with manhood across all kinds of cultures for a very long time and ask why and ask why that link has endured. Asking that strikes me as key to finding a replacement.

There was also a tendency in the articles to turn a critique of manhood into a critique of male sexuality, to critique particular forms of sex (e.g., penis-in-vagina heterosexual sex) as being so linked to ideas of being a "real man" that they were somehow oppressive and morally corrupt in and of themselves. I understand what the original intent was. The idea was to argue that other kinds of sex--- meaning largely gay male sex ---were no less "manly" than PIV heterosex. The critiques managed to go beyond that, though, to end up somehow arguing that enjoying or wanting to have basic PIV heterosex is a sign of moral failure, or at least a sign of failure of vision.

I might have to laugh here for a second. At least one of the articles I read kept attacking ideas of manhood for promoting "stoicism", which it took to mean a kind of emotional deadening. I can look at the bookshelf by my writing desk and see a copy of Gregory Hays' 2002 translation of Marcus Aurelius and what goes through my mind is that no one writing in the articles has the least idea what stoicism was all about. Let's just leave that aside for the moment.

There are suffocating parts to contemporary ideas of manhood. I've always thought the most painful one is how risky it becomes to have male friendships. Aristotle wrote long ago that friendship was the highest good--- no one male would say that now. To have close male friends after a certain age (usually somewhere in one's early or mid twenties) is to risk being thought gay. And not just that. I want to be very clear on that. There's the fear that other males would think you're gay if you had close male friends once you were old enough to have graduated university.  There's another social risk, too. Women might think you were gay, which would make hooking up much more difficult, and they might also dismiss you as a Peter Pan, as someone who still prefers "immature" relationships to a "mature" relationship with a significant other or wife--- i.e., to "settling down". I know that fear all too well. I've never married, of course. It's easy enough for anyone hostile to argue that I'm "really" gay, and that having male friends is a clear sign of that. I know that it's a fear that makes me afraid to still have male friends. I really have no male friends in the way I had them as a boy or as an undergrad---- people with whom you could share thoughts or argue about ideas, people you could go visit and hang out with. I understand about homophobia in both senses of the word, and I know what I've internalised. I know that I miss having friends, but I also know that I couldn't pick up the phone tonight and call anyone male and just...talk. There are girls I could call, girls I could talk with late into the night. Though...the girls who are my friends are almost all former FWB girls.  It's hard to know quite what that means. What I do know, though, is that I am afraid--- or at least uncomfortable ---with the idea of having male friends now. I hate having to feel afraid, and I hate being afraid of being thought gay... I'm not sure what I'm more worried about--- social mockery by people (meaning other males)  who'd think I was gay or having girls dismiss me out of hand as a potential sexual partner if I they thought I was gay.

Nonetheless, there you are. There was a time when men had friends, when friendship was valued. That's no longer true. And it does leave me sad.

There are other things, too. Fear of age, fear that as a gentleman of a certain age, I can't meet the visual and physical requirements of the contemporary of the muscle-carapaced, body-sculpted mid-twenties image of manliness. As a gentleman, though, should I need those things? Shouldn't I be able to rely on attitudes and values rather than on body armour? But...isn't fear of age something else altogether, something like fear of death, or of impotence in its generalized (and not just sexual) meaning of lack of power, whether that's vitality or the ability to attract girls?

There is so much here to think about. I hope my writer friend will respond, and I hope any of my readers will respond, too.

Sixty-Three: Distinctions

I found a blog post today that argues that we have to wholly re-vamp language in order to have ways to discuss relationships that aren't "problematic". The argument seems to be that Western culture applies the evil idea of binary division to love and that this inhibits relationships from evolving beyond the "problematic".  It's taken as a given that all binary divisions are evil, of course. The particular evil binary here is the division of romantic-sexual and platonic love. The argument I suppose is that all relationships, like all categories, should be fluid and amorphous, and that any fixed distinctions led to exclusion, marginalization, and oppression.

The blog post claims that a new language is needed to "accept the possibilities and realities of asexual romance, primary nonsexual/nonromantic love, nonromantic sex and sexual friendship, romantic (nonsexual) friendship, queerplatonic nonsexual relationships..."  Let's leave aside for a moment the very awkward word "queerplatonic"and just think about a very clear distinction here. Relationships either involve sex or they don't. They can change--- move across the dividing line in either direction ---but there is that clear distinction. A sexual relationship can be romantic or not, monogamous or not. But it's clearly different from a non-sexual relationship, and driven by different dynamics. And we do have words for all the things on the blogger's list. We know what FWB means, we know (even if the term isn't used much these days) what "romantic friendship" is. We've had those terms for rather a while.

I am baffled by "primary non-sexual/nonromantic love", mind you. Does that mean that there's some secondary relationship that is sexual/romantic? If so, isn't that just a way of saying that someone has a close friend and a lover? How is that not about two different relationships--- relationships for which we already have terms?

I have to say that "queerplatonic" is just an awkward and silly and unattractive word. It seems to mean a relationship between two people of the same sex that's emotionally deep and long-lasting but not sexual. But didn't Jay & Silent Bob give that the much better description of "hetero life-mates" years ago? And how exactly is it different from a close same-sex friendship, except in using "queer" to imply (or confirm the suspicion) that all close same-sex friendships must be "in reality" sublimated gay affairs?

Sex is a dividing line, and it always has been. Relationships where sex is or likely soon will be happening have a very different emotional content from those where sex isn't or hasn't or won't be happening. That's not just about jealousy, mind you. Even the most casual FWB relationship has different drivers from a non-sexual friendship, and has different expectations and a different sense of timing. Adding sex to a relationship, even in its most casual form, adds a very different set of questions, questions about when sex will happen, about whether it'll happen again, about how one's performance was assessed, about how third parties will treat the news. 

I have to wonder if this particular attack on the evil binary is based on a desire to see the power and distinctiveness of sexuality drained away, to argue that sex  should not have the power to define a relationship--- which is part of the argument that sex can be taken out of male-female interactions, or that intense sexual/romantic love is somehow unnecessary or suspect. There's a subtext here, and an agenda. We already have the vocabulary for different forms of relationship, so what's at issue is something more conceptual, more ideological.

Any thoughts on this? Are your own relationships hampered or thwarted by a lack of vocabulary to describe what you want? What distinctions do you draw amongst your relationships?   

Twenty: Elegy

This is Theodore Roethke's poem "To Jane: My Student Thrown by a Horse”: something sad and lovely. A student of his had been killed in a riding accident, a student whom he loved--- from a distance, without touching, as someone with whom he shared a love of literature. The last lines of the poem are heartbreaking in an unexpected way. They're about the anguish of not having the standing to express grief, of not being in a role where one is allowed to express grief where someone the poet has loved has died. English has words for love in its varied forms, but we use them so awkwardly, so uncertainly. And here in the new century, we're so afraid and so suspicious of love. We place far too many limits on who can speak of love or loss, on who we're allowed to love. As open as we are about so many things, we use the words for love with less and less assurance and--- increasingly ---with a hint of shame and suspicion...

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

O, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.