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Romanticizing the Crudity of Sex
Gnosticism, courtly love, and hypermodern disenchantment.
We tell stories about everything, including sex and romantic love, to avoid confronting some harsh truths. We’ve always done so, and we still do despite the relatively recent ideal of scientific objectivity.
The question is whether any of the uplifting fictions we live by are honorable as well as reassuring.
Animistic and Patriarchal Rationalizations of Natural Obligations
For many millennia there was no culture of romantic love. The pair bond evolved to support the mother’s onerous job of having to carry and give birth to encephalitic, helpless infants who needed to be socialized for an extended period. Stone Age mothers couldn’t have done so alone in the wild, so the clan learned to empathize, and mothers and fathers felt a rush of warm emotions for each other.
But the first religious stories about love would have been animistic celebrations of how natural processes seemed to the nomadic hunter-gatherers. Later, when people settled down in civilizations that allowed for greater social specialization and for class divisions, sex and love were governed by patriarchy and by religious myths which protected that prejudice.
The Jewish creation myth, for example, depicts women as having second-class status, both because they were created after men as “helpers,” and because women are supposed to be morally inferior, having been the first to succumb to satanic temptation.
The point is that men typically had the power in ancient kingdoms, so they ruled in the bedroom too. Kings had harems of dozens of sex slaves, and women generally belonged to men. Marriage was a pragmatic, economic matter of the transfer of property from father to husband.
Individualism, Gnosticism, and Romanticism
But there were glimmers of individualism in ancient spiritual revolutions that outlasted even the patriarchal theocracies that tried to suppress them. In the Axial Age of the first millennium BCE, in India, China, Greece, Persia, and Palestine, sages began to tell more all-encompassing moralistic stories than those that propped up the patriarchal power dynamics.
For the mystics and prophets, all of history was a progressive adventure, a battle between good and evil. God was an abstraction, not a reflection of any kingdom or royal family. Or God was the essence of consciousness within everyone, including women and slaves.
The Catholic Church persecuted the subversive Gnostics as heretics because the Gnostic myths were elitist and unconducive to the politics of oppression and exploitation — which the compromised church of paganized Judaism favored.
Gnostics were even more radical than the Jesus of the four gospels (although the Gospel of John conveys some Gnostic ideas). For the Gnostics, we’re all alone in a universe that functions as a prison and that includes our very bodies. All that can save us from servitude to amoral nature is liberatory knowledge. The goal was to band together to learn how to escape the created universe. We were all cast, then, as the ultimate rebels, and the devil was reinterpreted as a Promethean savior.
That spirit of humanistic Gnosticism fed into the European Renaissance as it drove modern philosophy, science, and industry, since technological advances could liberate us from nature when the Gnostic’s esoteric mystical speculations failed. But this humanism also reappeared in Catharism, which overlapped with the troubadour’s model of courtly love.
Like the Jains of India, the Cathars were pacifistic, ascetic, and relatively egalitarian, believing that all people are in the same dire situation, cosmically speaking: we’re all divine spirits trapped in an amoral material world. Cathars were antinatalists since they inferred that procreation only continues the cycle of human servitude.
The troubadours were medieval poets who took this nascent humanism in a different direction. The Gnostics conceived of elaborate metaphysical systems that enable our liberation from our fallen state in nature, and the Cathars resisted nature by renouncing even sexuality. But the troubadours worshipped honor and eros and sang of how, with the right cultivation and romantic partnerships, we can transform the world’s sinister aspects.
We were still rebels, but not against the demonic gods that supposedly ruled over the universe. Instead, knights and lovers were rebels against mundane habits and philistine biases; they were caught up in a chivalrous code, in a moral vision in which gentlemen and ladies eschewed the crude functions of animals and acted out their parts in a perfected society, even if that society existed only in their imaginations. Chivalry and the cult of courtly love were comparable in these respects to Confucian humanism.
Again, the contrast was between nature and a romantic, idealized portrait of society. Gentlemen and ladies were dignified, cosmopolitan individuals who meant to rise above the Machiavellian political order and the classless pursuit of social dominance. These elites took themselves to be cultivated and initiated into what was effectively the kingdom of God on earth — except this was more like a kingdom for secular humanists since the God in question was Eros. Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” immortalized that idea of the transcendence of romantic love.
Modern Romantic Myths
That lineage from ancient mysticism through Gnostic humanism to the cult of courtly love has passed into our late-modern ideals of romance. Romantic comedies show how love conquers all in the end, and we contrast those stories with the profane ones from reality television, such as “The Bachelor,” “Jersey Shore,” or the “Real Housewives” in which grotesque, decadent or vulgar figures grasp after status in petty displays and squabbles.
What the seemingly less idealistic stories from “reality TV” have in common is a frustrating lack of communication between the stars. But this is consistent with the troubadour’s cult of romantic love: with the right cultivation, love can conquer all, so by contrast a broken-down society can be only a showcase for farcical and bestial games.
Still, this kind of naïve romance can seem old-fashioned to us. We honourary neoliberals speak, rather, of “partnerships,” treating marriages still as business arrangements, because our governing myths are those that propagate capitalism.
Out of respect for our elders, we go through the motions in our wedding ceremonies, resorting to the symbols of the rings, the exchange of vows, and the blessing from a religious or political official. Although we’re incredulous towards all grand narratives and teeter on the brink of nihilism, we want this preoccupation of ours with sexual intimacy to have some deeper meaning.
The Grotesqueness of Sex
Why do we tell stories about love and sex? Because the reality of our “love life” is humiliating and is the greatest source of human hypocrisy. After WWII and the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s, we shame those who exhibit even the minutest sign of racial bias, but we hold as sacrosanct the preferential treatment we show to our loved ones.
Families are sacred, and we assume this not so much because we believe that families are blessed by God or that the universe cares about us or our children or about what we do in bed or whether our species endures for a million years or goes extinct tomorrow.
No, we revere our spouses and children and hold everyone else in lesser esteem because we’re held captive by chemical reactions which entangle us in legal arrangements. We want to start a family not because we choose to, but because we’re driven to by biology and by society.
Yet these degrading emotions and instincts conflict with the Enlightenment ideal of the dignified individual, of the rationally autonomous person who deserves democratic control over her political representatives and who has the right to self-determination and to seek happiness even at the expense of the rest of the planet. The early modern myth was that the magic of the invisible hand will preserve this mob of competing individuals and reach an enviable equilibrium that we couldn’t hope to reach if we decided at the outset to be less narrow-minded and to cooperate on purpose.
Our religions often tell us to start families and to procreate, yet that social conservatism is hardly consistent with religions’ more subversive, “spiritual” conceits. That’s why religions also have ascetic, world-weary traditions in which we’re supposed to renounce sexuality and all other human biases from the political to the familial. That conflict between the prosocial and the mystical, subversive sides of religion shows that we’re torn about how to respond to the unsettling existential facts.
No matter how much we take ourselves to be engaged in “lovemaking” rather than in rutting like animals, sex is an embodied experience. Sex and sexuality are humiliating in the literal sense that they bring us down to earth and to our mere bodies. Sex is a physical act between objects with grasping arms, slobbering mouths, and engorged genitalia, between bodies that sweat, grunt, and groan with pleasure from friction.
Identification with the body is, however, the primordial horror. Consider the implications of recognizing that we’re nothing but our bodies. Think of the monstrous injustice in the variety of bodies, from the disabled ones to those that hit the genetic jackpot. Think of the inevitable smallness in the perspective of bodies limited by their five senses and their amoral chemical bonds with other, select bodies. Think of the countless gross errors and abuses such bodies are bound to perpetrate. Notice, too, the smallness of our lives that would begin in squealing ignorance and end as worm food.
Sex is the substance of romantic love, and it’s because sex brings us back to our bodies that we try to elevate sex and restore our dignity as “modern persons” by telling so many tall tales about romance, love, and lovemaking.
Perhaps the only such story that doesn’t overtly foster hypocrisy is one that features our existential role in this absurd cosmic drama.
Why do we form social bonds? Not just because we’re biophysical puppets, but because we’re minds that seek respite from the universal wilderness. As the troubadours said, we can transcend animality, acting as if the world weren’t so brutish and unfair, as if our ideals mattered.
At least, that’s a story we can tell.