More Readings on Sexuality
Sex in History (1980)
Reay Tannahill
Art Nouveau and the Erotic (2000)
Ghislaine Wood
Sex in History is over forty years old but still provides an informed, often wry, and certainly intelligent
review of the history of sexuality. It is a first point of call for
anyone new to the subject who is looking to understand how we became what we
are both as a culture and as individuals (at least in the West). Tannahill's judgement is excellent, given the facts at her disposal. I strongly
approve of her refusal to take at face value any later imposition of theory
on how minds worked in the past. We can know nothing of past thoughts. The Freudianism that was still regarded as respectable when she was
writing the book is now seen for what it is - another 'grand projet'
from comfortably off dead white males and their camp-followers. It gets
only a couple of mentions and then with not much respect. Good! She is also not sentimental. The Amerindians may have been treated
appallingly by the Spanish conquistadores - their culture if not their
persons by the incoming bishops - but the sexual laws of the Aztecs and
Incas show no indication of 'noble savagery'.
If there is a message of this book, it is that increased state power and
empire tend - whether from Constantine or any of the other thugs who
get to the top - to increase interference in the life choices of
persons. Perhaps we are seeing this today in the desperate attempt by weak liberal democratic states to reassert control over their anarchic populations using the excuse of 'safeguarding' the vulnerable. This alone must encourage a slight prejudice towards anarchy
and against super-states but that is another story. Tannahill also wrote an equally informative
book on the role of food in history (as well as a book on cannibalism)
so that, just from reading this one author, you can be well primed on the nutritional
and emotional drivers behind history. The book ends with the AIDS
epidemic of the 1980s and, of course, it does not include the latest research
into many of the stories she tells here nor does it tell the story of
the last two decades. The entire LGBTQ revolution, the arrival of polyamory albeit still at the bourgeois margins and the anti-human emergence of activist identity politics are thus not covered. Since the late 1980s, the character of sexual
liberation has changed yet again and we have entered a new world of interactive
net-based communications.
Still, this book gives us a grounding from an
informed liberal perspective. It should have the effect, if read
today, of enabling us to remain highly cautious of any dabbling in our
sexual lives by priests, governments and 'respectable' feminists. If
there is a criticism, it is that Tannahill takes perhaps at too much
face value the mythic narrative of 'patriarchy', forgetting that male
power is rarely a matter of black and white but has depended on women
choosing to accept the situation and then manage it from within to their own benefit. The
greatest enemy of both the free woman and the free man appears, throughout history and as demonstrated by Tannahill repeatedly, not so
much the patriarchal male as the authoritarian and conservative female to whom the
powerful male will bend for the quiet life.
Respectability, generally based on the desire to exclude the 'other' and preserve privilege, has so often been cover for feminine control of the alpha male and in support of a racist protectionism - British wives came to Imperial India to ensure white men did not have liaisons with brown women. Anglo-Saxon feminists often promoted birth control not for the right reasons, to give women more control over their lives, but as a war on migrant, black or working class population growth. It is rare nowadays to find a book that creates an inner anger but this one does at this point, an anger less at the patriarchs (though these should cause disdain enough) than at the war on their sisters by middle class respectable women. The imposition by these harridans of prohibitionist morality created an illusion of the good society and drove exploitation and villainy underground, institutionalising not merely hypocrisy across the West but, eventually, organised criminality in the US through a massively countr-productive prohibition rather than regulation of vices.
This is not to exonerate 'patriarchy' (if that means male bullying, coercion and exclusive power) but it is to question the accepted view that 'respectable' Judaeo-Christian morality did much more than protect some at the expense of others. Any good done was at the cost of a massive perversion of the human condition, encouraging an apartheid, quite conscious in some circles by the end of the nineteenth century, between men and women and a conspiracy of sexual silence and of exploitation at the expense of the less propertied, the uprooted and, bluntly, the more sexually aware. The Catholic Church has to be the most disturbing organisation short of the Nazi Party ever to have interfered in human sexual relations. It is the death instinct institutionalised - a movement of self-reinforcing power that has managed not merely to last two thousand years but will undoubtedly be mounting sexual control missions to Mars in another two thousand. There is a tendency to believe that some institutions cannot be criticised as too 'sacred' - the British monarchy, Parliament, Jewish mothers - but nothing is too sacred for criticism if it does bad things. The really bad thing with the Catholic Church is that it has set up a moral standard that drives sex so far underground as a taboo (unlike the spiritual traditions of Tantra or Tao) that vile acts are tolerated for fear of exposing the inability of the system to impose its standards on society - and as if not saying or showing is not doing. The scandal of child abuse by priests and of the treatment of 'fallen women' in Ireland is not recent. It is embedded within a culture of silence and hypocrisy.
Personally, I sympathise with the Church's position on abortion but the stand against sex education, contraception and homosexuality and for celibacy in the spiritual community, for sexual silence and for damn-close-to-enforced child adoption in the past (a strategy also adopted by racist imperialists) are all expressions not of the right to life but of the death instinct and of the desert. There are many good priests and catholics but the religion certainly has its dark side. It is a cheap shot to say that the Church had its own brothel during its Avignon period yet, while enforcing sexual continence on the masses, there is evidence enough (it is only common sense given the human condition) that some churchmen were far from celibate and often exploitative. The justification has often been that the office and the man should be regarded separately but the point here is that the office made claims affecting others while keeping back relevant information about its own conduct. The Church denied the humanity of its own officers in order to deny humanity to its own members.
The book is not entirely about Western attitudes - it covers East and South Asia and the Americas before and after the Spanish Conquest, as well as telling a reasonable tale of Muslim sexual mores and their translation into that peculiar revolution amongst the Frankish upper classes, courtly love. Christian miserabilism (which has strong Roman intellectual antecedents) and a courtly apartheid culture which objectified both men and women into stereotypes has become central to what it is to be 'Western'. The point of the courtly love model (which was a mere literary conceit when it started and only became serious with industrialisation) is that it turned women into wimps or harridans with nothing in between. How can you have a decent relationship with another human being if you are worshipped as a stereotype? How can you develop a relationship if you can only do it by becoming a stereotype? Such stereotypes are still deeply embedded in Western marital culture. Dialogue, any serious communication, is discouraged because any open discussion is almost inevitably going to expose 'difference' and 'difference' means that the stereotype ceases to be a stereotype.
If the marital deal is to be predicated on an ideal instead of on a dialogue, there is every incentive to avoid conversation and exposure of one's inner life in case it 'rocks the boat'. Eventually, if the illusion cannot be maintained, misery ensues or one or other party 'snaps' - going into hysteria or towards prostitution and secret sex in an age of restriction or towards divorce or detachment in an age of freedom. 'Respectable' people would like to legislate against prostitution and divorce but you cannot legislate against hysteria or for happiness. Indeed, one of Tannahill's themes is that respectability's attempts at legislative control of sexual behaviour is invariably disastrous in its consequences (Fawcett Society, please note). She also uses the case of the various British Contagious Diseases Acts, clumsy attempts to halt the spread of veneral disease through regulation of prostitution, as an example of the damage caused to the community by moralists attacking basically sensible if flawed legislation!
The apartheid of courtly love created two dichotomies, not only between men and women but between 'us' (a tamed aristocracy of blood) and 'them' (humanity in the raw). Courtly love moderated the Judaeo-Christian death instinct that would have preferred castration and celibacy to sexual pleasure by bringing raw sexuality within some tolerable ideological bounds. From there, allowing for some aristocratic reversion to the animal in the eighteenth century, Christian virtue danced a dance of death with the aspirations of the propertied to maintain 'standards'. These standards, modelled on what the aristocracy was believed to be rather than what it was, were taken up by the middle classes in the nineteenth century and then by the working classes, especially the 'respectable' socialist working classes, in the twentieth. An entire rapacious culture of 'respectability' then extended across the white settler world and became a component of radical nationalism in Europe. It was copied by nationalists elsewhere who thought that they were liberating themselves from the West but whose cultural 'modernisation' merely meant a new slavishness to its mores. We have noted elsewhere how the Meiji restoration and then the MacArthur period after 1945 imposed such modernisation in Japan - yet somehow, in the last half-millennium, only the Japanese and arguably the Russians have managed to resist total cultural subjection in matters of sexuality. The pressure on Japan to conform in order to be 'Western' is enormous.
Tannahill, without emphasising it, points out how the politicisation of Western women has had a direct relationship with eugenics, racial and class prejudice. The rise of women in politics is not quite the story of progressive enlightenment that we would like to believe. This was the story of just one class of women determined on the control of the males of their own class and on the organisation and acculturation of everything below them to their 'standards'. These people were as culturally dangerous as any bunch of celibate priests. In fact, other than in the mad 'kinder, kirche, kuche' era of interwar Europe and the separate hypocrisies of patriarchal catholicism, the Europeans have often retained the basis for a healthy liberalism in sexual matters by insinuating freedom as part of a revolt against the Church.
Respectability, generally based on the desire to exclude the 'other' and preserve privilege, has so often been cover for feminine control of the alpha male and in support of a racist protectionism - British wives came to Imperial India to ensure white men did not have liaisons with brown women. Anglo-Saxon feminists often promoted birth control not for the right reasons, to give women more control over their lives, but as a war on migrant, black or working class population growth. It is rare nowadays to find a book that creates an inner anger but this one does at this point, an anger less at the patriarchs (though these should cause disdain enough) than at the war on their sisters by middle class respectable women. The imposition by these harridans of prohibitionist morality created an illusion of the good society and drove exploitation and villainy underground, institutionalising not merely hypocrisy across the West but, eventually, organised criminality in the US through a massively countr-productive prohibition rather than regulation of vices.
This is not to exonerate 'patriarchy' (if that means male bullying, coercion and exclusive power) but it is to question the accepted view that 'respectable' Judaeo-Christian morality did much more than protect some at the expense of others. Any good done was at the cost of a massive perversion of the human condition, encouraging an apartheid, quite conscious in some circles by the end of the nineteenth century, between men and women and a conspiracy of sexual silence and of exploitation at the expense of the less propertied, the uprooted and, bluntly, the more sexually aware. The Catholic Church has to be the most disturbing organisation short of the Nazi Party ever to have interfered in human sexual relations. It is the death instinct institutionalised - a movement of self-reinforcing power that has managed not merely to last two thousand years but will undoubtedly be mounting sexual control missions to Mars in another two thousand. There is a tendency to believe that some institutions cannot be criticised as too 'sacred' - the British monarchy, Parliament, Jewish mothers - but nothing is too sacred for criticism if it does bad things. The really bad thing with the Catholic Church is that it has set up a moral standard that drives sex so far underground as a taboo (unlike the spiritual traditions of Tantra or Tao) that vile acts are tolerated for fear of exposing the inability of the system to impose its standards on society - and as if not saying or showing is not doing. The scandal of child abuse by priests and of the treatment of 'fallen women' in Ireland is not recent. It is embedded within a culture of silence and hypocrisy.
Personally, I sympathise with the Church's position on abortion but the stand against sex education, contraception and homosexuality and for celibacy in the spiritual community, for sexual silence and for damn-close-to-enforced child adoption in the past (a strategy also adopted by racist imperialists) are all expressions not of the right to life but of the death instinct and of the desert. There are many good priests and catholics but the religion certainly has its dark side. It is a cheap shot to say that the Church had its own brothel during its Avignon period yet, while enforcing sexual continence on the masses, there is evidence enough (it is only common sense given the human condition) that some churchmen were far from celibate and often exploitative. The justification has often been that the office and the man should be regarded separately but the point here is that the office made claims affecting others while keeping back relevant information about its own conduct. The Church denied the humanity of its own officers in order to deny humanity to its own members.
The book is not entirely about Western attitudes - it covers East and South Asia and the Americas before and after the Spanish Conquest, as well as telling a reasonable tale of Muslim sexual mores and their translation into that peculiar revolution amongst the Frankish upper classes, courtly love. Christian miserabilism (which has strong Roman intellectual antecedents) and a courtly apartheid culture which objectified both men and women into stereotypes has become central to what it is to be 'Western'. The point of the courtly love model (which was a mere literary conceit when it started and only became serious with industrialisation) is that it turned women into wimps or harridans with nothing in between. How can you have a decent relationship with another human being if you are worshipped as a stereotype? How can you develop a relationship if you can only do it by becoming a stereotype? Such stereotypes are still deeply embedded in Western marital culture. Dialogue, any serious communication, is discouraged because any open discussion is almost inevitably going to expose 'difference' and 'difference' means that the stereotype ceases to be a stereotype.
If the marital deal is to be predicated on an ideal instead of on a dialogue, there is every incentive to avoid conversation and exposure of one's inner life in case it 'rocks the boat'. Eventually, if the illusion cannot be maintained, misery ensues or one or other party 'snaps' - going into hysteria or towards prostitution and secret sex in an age of restriction or towards divorce or detachment in an age of freedom. 'Respectable' people would like to legislate against prostitution and divorce but you cannot legislate against hysteria or for happiness. Indeed, one of Tannahill's themes is that respectability's attempts at legislative control of sexual behaviour is invariably disastrous in its consequences (Fawcett Society, please note). She also uses the case of the various British Contagious Diseases Acts, clumsy attempts to halt the spread of veneral disease through regulation of prostitution, as an example of the damage caused to the community by moralists attacking basically sensible if flawed legislation!
The apartheid of courtly love created two dichotomies, not only between men and women but between 'us' (a tamed aristocracy of blood) and 'them' (humanity in the raw). Courtly love moderated the Judaeo-Christian death instinct that would have preferred castration and celibacy to sexual pleasure by bringing raw sexuality within some tolerable ideological bounds. From there, allowing for some aristocratic reversion to the animal in the eighteenth century, Christian virtue danced a dance of death with the aspirations of the propertied to maintain 'standards'. These standards, modelled on what the aristocracy was believed to be rather than what it was, were taken up by the middle classes in the nineteenth century and then by the working classes, especially the 'respectable' socialist working classes, in the twentieth. An entire rapacious culture of 'respectability' then extended across the white settler world and became a component of radical nationalism in Europe. It was copied by nationalists elsewhere who thought that they were liberating themselves from the West but whose cultural 'modernisation' merely meant a new slavishness to its mores. We have noted elsewhere how the Meiji restoration and then the MacArthur period after 1945 imposed such modernisation in Japan - yet somehow, in the last half-millennium, only the Japanese and arguably the Russians have managed to resist total cultural subjection in matters of sexuality. The pressure on Japan to conform in order to be 'Western' is enormous.
Tannahill, without emphasising it, points out how the politicisation of Western women has had a direct relationship with eugenics, racial and class prejudice. The rise of women in politics is not quite the story of progressive enlightenment that we would like to believe. This was the story of just one class of women determined on the control of the males of their own class and on the organisation and acculturation of everything below them to their 'standards'. These people were as culturally dangerous as any bunch of celibate priests. In fact, other than in the mad 'kinder, kirche, kuche' era of interwar Europe and the separate hypocrisies of patriarchal catholicism, the Europeans have often retained the basis for a healthy liberalism in sexual matters by insinuating freedom as part of a revolt against the Church.
However, compared to the US, even the
British come across as one of the more liberal of nations, successfully
negotiating (in general) some sort of freedom out of the weight of
respectability. America today,
still culturally the dominant nation on earth even if in decline, sends out two
contradictory signals. The commercial marketplace operating since the
'liberatory' 1970s sends out a story of sexual liberation and
licentiousness, a lack of privacy and discretion, that destabilises many
traditional cultures whose upper castes, in aping this, rediscover
sexual habits that they deny to their masses. On the other hand,
three hundred or so years of puritanism, Biblical patriarchy, respectable
feminism and political fear have created a domestic political culture
where the sight of a nipple on prime-time television causes a national
cultural crisis, a politician is judged on his fidelity to his partner
rather than his competence and sexuality is the subject of endless study
and torment in which every sexual act becomes a political one.
America is like an inconsistent parent - censorious one day, not caring the next. No wonder the world acts like a dysfunctional family. The villain of the story is not, of course, feminism. On the contrary, widespread contraception and the women's movement of the 1970s created the conditions for an appropriate liberation of both men and women based on the elimination of the 'respectable' as a necessary condition for the good life but it is a revolution that is still localised and metropolitan, still childish, certainly immature. Men, shell-shocked at being blamed for many crimes they have not committed, still confused as to whether they actually committed them or not, are developing their own responses, based not on the conduct required by agrarian or industrial societies out of time and place but on what men and women are actually like over their life cycle. The villain here is a malign synthesis of the desert mentality of the Christian hermit and the courtly model of the 'lady' that transmuted itself into Puritanism and then High Victorian horror, cultures of respectability where all went to church and where prostitution was the only deal able to be done by poverty-stricken women and men living an elaborate lie.
America is like an inconsistent parent - censorious one day, not caring the next. No wonder the world acts like a dysfunctional family. The villain of the story is not, of course, feminism. On the contrary, widespread contraception and the women's movement of the 1970s created the conditions for an appropriate liberation of both men and women based on the elimination of the 'respectable' as a necessary condition for the good life but it is a revolution that is still localised and metropolitan, still childish, certainly immature. Men, shell-shocked at being blamed for many crimes they have not committed, still confused as to whether they actually committed them or not, are developing their own responses, based not on the conduct required by agrarian or industrial societies out of time and place but on what men and women are actually like over their life cycle. The villain here is a malign synthesis of the desert mentality of the Christian hermit and the courtly model of the 'lady' that transmuted itself into Puritanism and then High Victorian horror, cultures of respectability where all went to church and where prostitution was the only deal able to be done by poverty-stricken women and men living an elaborate lie.
Respectable dames, whose attitudes would drift down into the classes they
oppressed (or gave employment to, if that suits you better), required
leisure. While their menfolk employed thousands of prostitutes to give
them something that could not be discussed at home (and brought back the
risk of veneral disease), the girls had servants - thousands of them as well.
751,641 girls over ten were domestic servants in 1841. Within thirty
years, the number has risen to 1,204,477. Given the conditions in which
these girls worked, the labour use of their bodies and the lack of use
of their minds was no better than prostitution unless you are
determined to consider a morality of 'respectability' as an end in itself. This is the conservative world of a moralising Dickens. The institution of
temple prostitution might have been a lot better for some women than
the drudgery and obligatory attendance at church on Sundays in order to be
told that everyone had their place. The issue comes up today when
'respectable' women, ensconced in nice jobs as lawyers, tell working
women that their lap-dancing should be legislated out of existence so
that they can be check-out girls at Sainsburys on a third of the wages. As
Tannahill points out, the High Victorian myth of the family and their
respectable women presided over an explosive increase in prostitution,
an epidemic spread of veneral disease and the introduction of a morbid
taste for masochism amongst the middle class male. She does not say but
we would add that it created the conformist death instinct that
materially contributed to the dumb willingness to die in a trench for an
abstraction.
That abstractionism, in one country, Germany, turned into a killing machine for the destruction of, symbolically, the race that had kicked off the Judaeo-Christian ethic but then got left behind as its (from a human sexual perspective) Frankenstein creation of Christianity transmuted into the hell of its opposite in national socialism. A Freudian might regard Auschwitz as the grandson attempting to murder the grandfather - Western culture is often a continuum of misery rather than a set of progressive revolutions. Deal with the poverty of women and deal with the right of a man to be a man and society might be improved, but this has not been possible until recently. The cult of the 'lady' and the cult of the perfect marriage (at its most demotic in the Hollywood romantic movie) has contributed to creating a 'faux'-progressivism, a top-down moralism that has crushed the souls and spirits of many men and most women.
Since Tannahill wrote her book, we have seen further revolutions in the West - an increased economic equality between the sexes, the slow removal of the faiths from moral governance except where individuals, as is their right, choose to embrace them, the acceptance of non-exploitative consensual sexual difference as 'normal' and the acceptance of a variety of sexual partnerships and liaisons that merely require government to intervene to protect the weaker party 'in extremis'. The point of the revolution is that the culture of the desert has begun to be replaced by a culture of the oasis for many. The land is being irrigated slowly by a refusal of ordinary people to be told how to run their lives by 'essentialists'. Of course, things 'may have gone too far' in the sense that children are being brought into the world without stability and that exploitation continues, especially in parts of the sex trade but such problems are not soluable. Many arise not from viciousness per se but from stupidity and liberal economics and globalisation. Education, the creation of non-censorious communities, government regulation to deal with exploitation rather than morality and improved barriers on trade where it is exploitative should be sufficient.
That abstractionism, in one country, Germany, turned into a killing machine for the destruction of, symbolically, the race that had kicked off the Judaeo-Christian ethic but then got left behind as its (from a human sexual perspective) Frankenstein creation of Christianity transmuted into the hell of its opposite in national socialism. A Freudian might regard Auschwitz as the grandson attempting to murder the grandfather - Western culture is often a continuum of misery rather than a set of progressive revolutions. Deal with the poverty of women and deal with the right of a man to be a man and society might be improved, but this has not been possible until recently. The cult of the 'lady' and the cult of the perfect marriage (at its most demotic in the Hollywood romantic movie) has contributed to creating a 'faux'-progressivism, a top-down moralism that has crushed the souls and spirits of many men and most women.
Since Tannahill wrote her book, we have seen further revolutions in the West - an increased economic equality between the sexes, the slow removal of the faiths from moral governance except where individuals, as is their right, choose to embrace them, the acceptance of non-exploitative consensual sexual difference as 'normal' and the acceptance of a variety of sexual partnerships and liaisons that merely require government to intervene to protect the weaker party 'in extremis'. The point of the revolution is that the culture of the desert has begun to be replaced by a culture of the oasis for many. The land is being irrigated slowly by a refusal of ordinary people to be told how to run their lives by 'essentialists'. Of course, things 'may have gone too far' in the sense that children are being brought into the world without stability and that exploitation continues, especially in parts of the sex trade but such problems are not soluable. Many arise not from viciousness per se but from stupidity and liberal economics and globalisation. Education, the creation of non-censorious communities, government regulation to deal with exploitation rather than morality and improved barriers on trade where it is exploitative should be sufficient.
Contrasted with the West in
this book is what is now clearly its rival, China, never more so than today. This rivalry was far
less clear in the 1980s and so China is placed alongside India and the
Americas as just another 'other'. Today, we must see China differently. It offers us two contrasting traditions whose dialectic will be as
influential as the Judaeo-Christian death instinct and courtly love have
been in the creation of the Western soul. The first tradition is
the yin/yang patriarchial but ultimately sexually vibrant culture of
Tao. The other is the conformist order-driven top-down culture of
Neo-Confucianism which is not, by any means, anti-sexual but is
concerned with public propriety. A point made by the author here
is that Chinese sexual life is rich but intensely private. We may
extrapolate that Neo-Confucian resistance to Western radical sexual
liberalism need not be assumed to mean puritanism in private, although
foreign conquest and the malign influence of Western missionaries and
Marxist earnestness (as well as state-driven population control) have
driven much of the richness away and replaced it with a dogged
seriousness that would gain the approval of many an Anglo-Saxon harridan
seeking to re-moralise society.
It is impossible to predict the
future but we can see a war of trends - private resistance to the
commercialisation of sex just as it spreads around the world, acts of defiance against hypocritical leaderships and faith leaders, the
continued rediscovery of sexual complexity and its normalisation in the
urban West, the attempt of 'respectable' elites to contain a revolution
from below driven, in part, by the new communications technology,
and cultural tensions within highly puritanical new powers as prosperity
reintroduces dissident sexual indigenous traditions amongst younger
and more prosperous generations. As for 'respectability' and
social control, it is not dead. It remains strong, as always, on the
alleged 'progressive' side of the political spectrum. Politicians like Harriet Harman seem to want to use legislative sledgehammers to crack the nuts of exploitation. The
Fawcett Society in its war on prostitution was the grim successor to
Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the
dim-witted prohibitionist movement whose fruits were the embedding
of organised crime into American society. This book is recommended
because it is humane. No-one humane could be a political 'progressive' nowadays when it comes to responsible sexual freedom and there is perhaps genuine reason to fear (in the UK) what a Labour Government may bring us under 'feminist' and activist influence.
On a lighter note, Art Nouveau and the Erotic is an excellent short introduction to the
erotic underpinnings of Art Nouveau, the design movement that introduced
a faux-aristocratic decadence to the European middle classes as the
nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. The book is a
small potboiler designed, with a number of other similar books, to
accompany the Victoria & Albert's major exhibition on Art Nouveau in
2000 by its Assistant Curator, Ghislaine Wood. However, the illustrations are superb, her judgements (though the book
ends abruptly on a weak review of homoeroticism and androgyny) are fine
and the text links images and texts with skill but, be warned, it is a
slight book that could be read in an hour.
Some of this material is very raunchy indeed. It suggests a culture that was struggling to pull itself out from under conservative traditionalism and not knowing how to do so. The mix of eroticism and misogyny is heady but you know from the beginning that it could go nowhere. Europe was not ready to be libertarian rather than pretend to be libertine. The movement was already ending as war loomed in 1914 and the subsequent fifty years of fascist nationalism, near constant war and then nuclear anxiety suggests that the middle classes got a bit of a scare and drew back into their shell quite quickly. After all, in an age of mass democracy, the prospect of the erotic becoming an interest of the servant class, of workers in the factories and of women themselves will have encouraged the middle classes to return to the safe havens of church, respectability, order and property and to the secret sex of the brothel if necessary. Nevertheless, while the ideology behind Art Nouveau might be highly suspect and neurotic at worst and unfulfilled and yearning at best, the actual art works are often very beautiful and inspired. Amidst the sleaze, there are women of great beauty, jewellery of exquisite craftsmanship, engaging 'rococo' vases, porcelain and furnishings and some masterpieces of genuine erotic power (such as Rupert Carabin's very late post war chest Regard chaste, laisse-moi and the associated sculpture Deux Femmes of 1918/1919 and his sinister and Sadean armchair of 1896 with its naked woman bound and embedded into the back).
There is also the question of the esoteric nature of much Art Nouveau. One suspects that in a pre-Freudian era, most ordinary observers either did not make a sexual connection to the work, or the sexual material was for the private delectation of 'connoisseurs'. Many of these artists either seem not to have thought about what they were doing in any depth or to have allowed their 'vicious' side (in the sense of lauding what the age would have termed 'vice') to be presented within closed communities of haut bourgeois customers. This lack of understanding comes across most vividly in what is so obviously (to us) a double phallic symbol at a girl's Catholic school built in Paris in 1895 (Architect, Hector Guimard). Either the artist was cynically having a laugh at the expense of the entire Catholic Church and of the local traditionalist bourgeoisie or all parties naively failed to see the symbolic import of the design motif. Whether deliberate or not, bourgeois girls in this Catholic School every day walked past a design indicating two giant tumescent willies holding up the building where they were supposed to learn about Catholic morality in order to become both good wives and mothers of the sons to be slaughtered on the Western Front just a decade later. Almost certainly, prelates, teachers, parents and the girls themselves never saw the irony because they did not see the art as Freud taught us to see it.
Although we like to think of decadence and the soft organic forms of Art Nouveau artists and architects as antithetical to corporatism, mass production and fascism, you can see the lineage of Soviet, Fascist and Nazi realism in the Middle European Art Nouveau posters of the 1890s and 1900s. There is a continuity between the late nineteenth century bourgeoisie and the culture that collapsed in a welter of blood and mayhem in 1945 - expensive private vices covered up by exhortatory fake nobility. The type of High European Culture in this period was probably that highly intelligent thief Hermann Goering rather than Thomas Mann. German 'strength-through-joy' romantic naturism, represented by Fidus, constructs a sublimated sexuality that treats women as vulnerable objects, when, that is, they are not threats - one of the cultural components of German nationalist neuroticism. The Soviets appear to have simply ignored sex as a bourgeois preoccupation.
Some of this material is very raunchy indeed. It suggests a culture that was struggling to pull itself out from under conservative traditionalism and not knowing how to do so. The mix of eroticism and misogyny is heady but you know from the beginning that it could go nowhere. Europe was not ready to be libertarian rather than pretend to be libertine. The movement was already ending as war loomed in 1914 and the subsequent fifty years of fascist nationalism, near constant war and then nuclear anxiety suggests that the middle classes got a bit of a scare and drew back into their shell quite quickly. After all, in an age of mass democracy, the prospect of the erotic becoming an interest of the servant class, of workers in the factories and of women themselves will have encouraged the middle classes to return to the safe havens of church, respectability, order and property and to the secret sex of the brothel if necessary. Nevertheless, while the ideology behind Art Nouveau might be highly suspect and neurotic at worst and unfulfilled and yearning at best, the actual art works are often very beautiful and inspired. Amidst the sleaze, there are women of great beauty, jewellery of exquisite craftsmanship, engaging 'rococo' vases, porcelain and furnishings and some masterpieces of genuine erotic power (such as Rupert Carabin's very late post war chest Regard chaste, laisse-moi and the associated sculpture Deux Femmes of 1918/1919 and his sinister and Sadean armchair of 1896 with its naked woman bound and embedded into the back).
There is also the question of the esoteric nature of much Art Nouveau. One suspects that in a pre-Freudian era, most ordinary observers either did not make a sexual connection to the work, or the sexual material was for the private delectation of 'connoisseurs'. Many of these artists either seem not to have thought about what they were doing in any depth or to have allowed their 'vicious' side (in the sense of lauding what the age would have termed 'vice') to be presented within closed communities of haut bourgeois customers. This lack of understanding comes across most vividly in what is so obviously (to us) a double phallic symbol at a girl's Catholic school built in Paris in 1895 (Architect, Hector Guimard). Either the artist was cynically having a laugh at the expense of the entire Catholic Church and of the local traditionalist bourgeoisie or all parties naively failed to see the symbolic import of the design motif. Whether deliberate or not, bourgeois girls in this Catholic School every day walked past a design indicating two giant tumescent willies holding up the building where they were supposed to learn about Catholic morality in order to become both good wives and mothers of the sons to be slaughtered on the Western Front just a decade later. Almost certainly, prelates, teachers, parents and the girls themselves never saw the irony because they did not see the art as Freud taught us to see it.
Although we like to think of decadence and the soft organic forms of Art Nouveau artists and architects as antithetical to corporatism, mass production and fascism, you can see the lineage of Soviet, Fascist and Nazi realism in the Middle European Art Nouveau posters of the 1890s and 1900s. There is a continuity between the late nineteenth century bourgeoisie and the culture that collapsed in a welter of blood and mayhem in 1945 - expensive private vices covered up by exhortatory fake nobility. The type of High European Culture in this period was probably that highly intelligent thief Hermann Goering rather than Thomas Mann. German 'strength-through-joy' romantic naturism, represented by Fidus, constructs a sublimated sexuality that treats women as vulnerable objects, when, that is, they are not threats - one of the cultural components of German nationalist neuroticism. The Soviets appear to have simply ignored sex as a bourgeois preoccupation.
Art Nouveau, at its darkest in its
revolt against conformity, contains the seeds of the Nazi attitude to
Catholic Christianity. Huysmans in A Rebours constructs a decadent
milieu for a bored aristocrat and then passes through Satanism to the
great Catholic field of redemption beyond. Later, George
Bataille, possibly France's greatest philosopher of sexual
transgression, more subtle than De Sade and more attuned to the street
than Foucault, would juggle sexual excess with Catholicism in a fit of
bad faith. Later still, Catholic priests would collaborate with fascist
dictators in competition with the sexual barrenness of Bolshevism where 'no sex
please, we're Communists' was the standard morality of the day. The
most transgressive picture in the book (in this context) is undoubtedly
the exquisitely erotic Study for a Crucifixion by the Czech Frantisek
Drtikol (1914), though Felicien Rops will always trump anyone in the
range of his aggressive satanic sexual imagery. Drtikol's work
shows a very sexually attractive naked woman in the form of the Christ
on the Cross. This type of image has emerged in high erotic art ever
since - and even (in the guise of St. Sebastian) in Japan as one of the
avatars of Yukio Mishima. A modern feminist artist might have done
something similar to make some crass point about God being a woman but
this work of Drtikol's is just erotic Sadism - and it is sexy as hell!
This 'Catholic' dialectic between private transgression and public conformity, whore and madonna, the Republic of Salo and the discipline of the Waffen SS is a theme that runs through European (though not Anglo-Saxon) bourgeois history. Compare the women of J. W Waterhouse with the fevered imaginings of the Europeans. You see the same 'patriarchal' and 'bourgeois' culture but one that is kinder and less tormented and, of course, romantic in its symbolism. No wonder fascism never took hold in Britain. On the other side of the Channel was a European culture terrified of modernity, terrified of the mob and terrified of its own impulses - it ended up with the banal Eichmann in Budapest, Goering's hunting parties and art work thefts and Himmler's mad paganism. This may seem extreme but the themes of these monsters were writ in the culture of which Art Nouveau was an undoubtedly beautiful expression. The uncleaness of the a-social, life as art and the purity of the pagan within an essentially catholic culture were common denominators in Hitler's ideology and the milieu of Art Nouveau. As the uniforms of the SS attest, the flowers of evil can be exquisite and art has no intrinsic morality. But, returning to the period, while most of the movement is one of design rather than art (of which Aubrey Beardsley's line might be the noble type) yet artists of the calibre of Klimt and architects of the calibre of Gaudi might be considered part of the movement. We must not forget that this book concentrates on the erotic and that much of Art Nouveau was more an organic reaching out to a certain starkness of form by the time it reached the workshop of Mackintosh in Glasgow. Art Nouveau was not in itself necessarily 'dangerous' but the culture from which it sprang was undoubtedly poisonous if attractively so in many ways..
There is one masterpiece of the period, however, that rises above its fear of woman to show a combination of anxiety and compassion that comments directly on the repressed and medically challeged 'condition humaine' of the period - Edvard Munch's stunning colour lithograph, Madonna (1895). This work expresses better than any other of the period the confused sexual attitudes of a world where whores and madonnas were separated by a vicious cultural gulf in which the males of one class, with the silent connivance of their females, were fascinated by, used and despised the women of another. This masterpiece of horror speaks to the neurosis of the period. It also exhibits a fascination with sex that suggests a compassionate desire for things to be other than they are. In its pagan fascination with biology and the organic in its most popular form, the dark side of Art Nouveau was also the movement of a bourgeois age that was terrified by sexual disease and of the human rats (as many saw them) of the ghetto. Some 'nice' middle class people, dangerously, in our period of crisis, look on the 'chavs' on our council estates with the same arrogant disdain. Munch's Madonna is both an indicator of the bourgeois neurosis that would lead to Lodz and Warsaw and a yearning for a sexual expression that could allow the free woman and free man to love safely. Sadly, in this confusion of aspirations - for cleansing and for engagement and love - it was the neurotic obsessive-compulsive desire for cleansing that won out in the end. The rest, as they say, is history.
This 'Catholic' dialectic between private transgression and public conformity, whore and madonna, the Republic of Salo and the discipline of the Waffen SS is a theme that runs through European (though not Anglo-Saxon) bourgeois history. Compare the women of J. W Waterhouse with the fevered imaginings of the Europeans. You see the same 'patriarchal' and 'bourgeois' culture but one that is kinder and less tormented and, of course, romantic in its symbolism. No wonder fascism never took hold in Britain. On the other side of the Channel was a European culture terrified of modernity, terrified of the mob and terrified of its own impulses - it ended up with the banal Eichmann in Budapest, Goering's hunting parties and art work thefts and Himmler's mad paganism. This may seem extreme but the themes of these monsters were writ in the culture of which Art Nouveau was an undoubtedly beautiful expression. The uncleaness of the a-social, life as art and the purity of the pagan within an essentially catholic culture were common denominators in Hitler's ideology and the milieu of Art Nouveau. As the uniforms of the SS attest, the flowers of evil can be exquisite and art has no intrinsic morality. But, returning to the period, while most of the movement is one of design rather than art (of which Aubrey Beardsley's line might be the noble type) yet artists of the calibre of Klimt and architects of the calibre of Gaudi might be considered part of the movement. We must not forget that this book concentrates on the erotic and that much of Art Nouveau was more an organic reaching out to a certain starkness of form by the time it reached the workshop of Mackintosh in Glasgow. Art Nouveau was not in itself necessarily 'dangerous' but the culture from which it sprang was undoubtedly poisonous if attractively so in many ways..
There is one masterpiece of the period, however, that rises above its fear of woman to show a combination of anxiety and compassion that comments directly on the repressed and medically challeged 'condition humaine' of the period - Edvard Munch's stunning colour lithograph, Madonna (1895). This work expresses better than any other of the period the confused sexual attitudes of a world where whores and madonnas were separated by a vicious cultural gulf in which the males of one class, with the silent connivance of their females, were fascinated by, used and despised the women of another. This masterpiece of horror speaks to the neurosis of the period. It also exhibits a fascination with sex that suggests a compassionate desire for things to be other than they are. In its pagan fascination with biology and the organic in its most popular form, the dark side of Art Nouveau was also the movement of a bourgeois age that was terrified by sexual disease and of the human rats (as many saw them) of the ghetto. Some 'nice' middle class people, dangerously, in our period of crisis, look on the 'chavs' on our council estates with the same arrogant disdain. Munch's Madonna is both an indicator of the bourgeois neurosis that would lead to Lodz and Warsaw and a yearning for a sexual expression that could allow the free woman and free man to love safely. Sadly, in this confusion of aspirations - for cleansing and for engagement and love - it was the neurotic obsessive-compulsive desire for cleansing that won out in the end. The rest, as they say, is history.