Simon Copland

Yesterday I got back from an amazing weekend in London.

Taking the trip at the instigation of my friend Tim, who was playing in a show with his band FourPlay and their special gues Neil Gaiman over the weekend I took the opportunity to have a long weekend. Boy, it was worth it!

Last week I was feeling flat, stressed, anxious and overwhelmed. I hurt my back earlier in the week and was struggling to sleep. But, unfortunately I still had heaps of work to do, so I couldn’t just rest and get better. It made for one rather unhappy Simon.

The weekend away made me realise once again how important holidays are. Working as a writer I find that I often end up working all the time — I take my computer wherever I go and it is hard to stop myself from working on that next piece, or editing my books. But just having a few days where I didn’t do any work was amazing for my mental health and enthusiasm. I got to just chill in London — I went to a couple of shows, wandered through the streets, had some beers, went to the Welcome Collection exhibition and met with a few friends. I completely and utterly cleared my head.

I also remembered one other valuable thing — the importance of getting away from my damn computer! Anyone who knows me knows that I rarely go anywhere without my laptop. I almost feel naked without it. I took it to London but after some indecision about it I finally decided I was better locking it away than lugging it around.

For just this one weekend, it was bliss. Not being able to use my computer I didn’t end up sitting at a cafe feeling guilty because I wasn’t writing that piece I needed to get done. There was nothing I could do but read or watch people go by. That was lovely!

And in doing so I realised the power, again, of the pen. Instead of taking my computer around I took my notebook (I always take my notebook wherever I go) and with a bit of a clear head and some inspiration from the FourPlay concert I ended up writing three and half short stories in my notebook. I was that guy who sat late and night with a beer writing things down while everyone else got drunk on their Friday nights. But it felt good. I got away from the constraints of “work” and got to express my creativity in whatever way I wanted. And I came out, I think, with some good stuff. I will try and go over them sometime this week and see if there’s anything worth popping up on here (or sending elsewhere).

So that was London, and a good lesson about getting away, not just from my city, but from my workspace as well. Being creative means being creative about how you go about sometimes, and I learnt that this week.

A couple of other notes.

First, if you ever get the chance you should go and see FourPlay play — particularly if they are teamed up with Neil Gaiman. The concert was just fantastic — a mixture of great original tunes, covers and spoken word backed up with some amazing string music. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. I also hear they are working on a new and exciting project, so let’s be excited for that!

Second, I also went to the Welcome Collection in particular to see their Institute of Sexology Exhibition. It was excellent. I haven’t been to a museum so creative and well put together in quite a while. Not only were the exhibitions interesting, interactive and informative, but they had regular tours as well as workshops on creative writing and more. And it was all for free! I know I will be back and I think you should head there too.

So London! As I said on Facebook, for me it is still not quite as awesome as Berlin (my favourite city in the world), but it comes pretty damn close!

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the excellent book, Sex at Dawn. I loved Sex at Dawn and really think everyone should read it. But I ended my review with a word of caution/concern — and here it is explained. 

At its heart Sex at Dawn is science book. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá outline a vast array of scientific evidence to back up their argument that our sexual history is based on polyamory, not monogamy. But Sex at Dawn also presents a political and moral argument as well. Ryan and Jethá not only talk about the biology of our sexuality, but also make a moral case for the expansion of polyamorous and monogamish relationships in our society. In fact the book dedicates an entire chapter at the end outlining polyamorous movements where they reference authors such as Janet Hardy, Dossie Easton, Dan Savage and more.

I don’t have a problem with this. I think this is a moral argument we should be making. Yet, I am concerned that Sex at Dawn makes this a biologically deterministic argument. We should all be polyamorous because we are “born this way.”

This is the basic thrust of the book. It is heavily focused on biological evidence towards polyamorous relationships, using anthropological and archaeological evidence to then back up the biological claims. I laid out some of the arguments in my review last week, and there are heaps more if you read the book. .

As I am concerned this biological and anthropological evidence is pretty strong. But I am concerned they, and in turn many in the polyamory movement, are relying too heavily on this evidence.

This reminds me a lot of the gay movement. Many lesbian and gay activists have taken on the “we are born this way” mantra; the idea that our society should accept homosexuality because it is just in our genes. There is nothing we can do about it. But as I have argued in the past this argument has stopped us from making a far more convincing argument: that homosexuality should be accepted simply because there is nothing wrong with it.

This is what I fear the biological determinism of Sex at Dawn could lead to. It is an argument that we should all be polyamorous because that is what we are born to do: we should be polyamorous because we cannot escape our biology. This worries me for a few reasons.

Firstly, it ignores the fact that humans have been willing and able to make many active decisions to reject our ‘nature’ for many many thousands of years now. Just look at where we live. We no longer live “natural lives”. In fact, as Ryan and Jethá argue, our bodies are able to adapt to what has often been considered unnatural events — adapting to be able to consume lactose for example. We at experts at destroying our nature and then adapting to unnatural behaviours. Why not be able to do this with sex?

Leading on from this, a biological deterministic approach deny the opportunity for people to make active choices about their sexuality — whether it to be polyamorous or monogamous. I for example have made a very active choice to be polyamorous and I am proud of that choice. That is important to acknowledge. In a society where heterosexual monogamy reigns we have to celebrate the others who have the bravery to make active choices to live outside of this norm — just as well celebrate those who decide to stick with the norms. We must celebrate sexual diversity — something that biological determinism fails to do. Biological determinism just puts us all into little boxes — we are all born this way and just have to deal with it.

Finally, a biologically deterministic approach opens up the potential for continued discrimination for those who make active choices that aren’t scientifically “natural”. I suspect there is nothing natural for example to the use of whips, chains and ropes in sexual activity, just as there is nothing natural to most of our methods of contraception. But that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with them. These are active sexual choices that people are making and ones we should be celebrating, not ones we should be searching for natural causes of.

And here is the crunch of the matter. Our acceptance of sexual activity should not be based on biology but rather on the measure of ‘harm’. We should not be asking ‘is that act natural’ but rather ‘is that act harmful?’. If the answer to that question is yes then we can have an issue with it, but if not we should leave it alone. Of course harm is subjective and different for many people. We cannot classify it in any stringent way. But it is the only way we can judge sexual practices.

Now, I suspect that if I were to put this to Ryan and Jethá they would probably agree. That is at least what I’ve gathered from what I have read from them so far. Also, this shouldn’t take away from the awesomeness of this book. I still give it five stars and think everyone should read it. But it is something we need to be wary of. If we are going to promote polyamory, or any other sexual choices, we need to do so for radical and moral reasons, not rely on biological determinism.

After a couple of week’s break, here is blog three in my series in conjunction with the team at left flank, Sex and Society. Make sure check out blog one (the prehistoric family) and blog two (the rise of the nuclear family) before you read these ones. If you’ve already read them, that welcome to blog three: capitalism and women’s oppression.

How are capitalism and women’s oppression connected?

In my last blog post we discussed the rise of the nuclear family and the connection between the class system and the shift in roles between men and women. This week we’re going to explore how modern capitalism has perpetuated the oppression of women.

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Let’s start a little differently however. I think it’s time to bring up the opposition to Engels’ theory of the oppression of women. There has been significant anthropological and scientific debate around the standard narrative of human sexuality, but for the purpose of this blog post I want to focus on the feminist arguments against Engels (a quick thanks to Jasmina Brankovich, who has been debating these issues with me in my first post).

This feminist charge against Engels was led by Simone De Beauvoir, who in her groundbreaking book The Second Sex stated that Engels’s theory is “disappointing” with “the most important problems (are) slurred over”. De Beauvoir’s arguments are complex (check this link to see them in depth), but they boil down to what I call a “naturalist” approach to gendered oppression. De Beauvoir acknowledges that economics has played a role in women’s oppression, but argues this only occurred because men used their superior physical strength to take advantage of shifts in economic circumstances. She contends:

Without adequate tools, he did not sense at first any power over the world, he felt lost in nature and in the group, passive, threatened, the plaything of obscure forces; he dared to think of himself only as identified with the clan: the totem, mana, the earth were group realities. The discovery of bronze enabled man, in the experience of hard and productive labour, to discover himself as creator; dominating nature, he was no longer afraid of it, and in the face of obstacles overcome he found courage to see himself as an autonomous active force, to achieve self-fulfillment as an individual.

In other words the development of tools and agriculture gave men the opportunity they had always been looking for to oppress women — primarily through the domination of nature. As leading feminists such as Sherry Ortner (who builds on De Beauvoir’s work) argue, women — primarily through their capacity to have children — are seen as more connected to nature than men. Hence men expressed their domination not only over nature, but over women as well.

These theories form part of an account of “the patriarchy”. There are lots of different definitions of the patriarchy, but the theory is largely based on the contention that men have oppressed women for all eternity, with this oppression operating rather autonomously from economic circumstances. Different feminists give different reasons for this (i.e. the female connection to nature), but what is key is that the oppression of women operates across historical periods, with men using economic circumstances to work together to continue this oppression. Economic circumstances are therefore not the cause, but a tool used to oppress women.

I will leave these theories to one side for the moment.

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If we want to explore the connection between capitalism and women’s oppression we cannot go beyond the current mainstream form of familial expression — marriage. Marriage today is largely seen through the lens of “love”. Yet, this has not always been the way.

Let’s go back to the standard narrative of human sexuality. This narrative is based on what Helen Fisher calls “The Sex Contract”; the idea, based in Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, that women require men to be able to provide for them and their offspring, while men will not provide those resources unless women ensure fidelity. Men and women engage in a contract — resources for fidelity. This is the ‘nuclear family’ I started to describe in my last blog post.

As I argued last time, the biological determinism of this narrative is incorrect. Yet the economic foundations of modern marriage are surprisingly sound. The question is though, how did this structure maintain itself with the rise of industrialised capitalism?

One of the unique things about industrialised capitalism is that it had the potential to radically change gendered relations within society. With the growth of the factory people flooded to cities, in turn losing much of their small amounts of private property. Industrialised capitalism became an equaliser of sorts — everyone, men and women, were now workers. Women were entering the workforce, with their oppression now occurring through capitalist exploitation. This is why Engels predicted that capitalism would see the end of the proletarian family.

So how is it that even when capitalists were desperately looking for workers to fill their factories women ended up back in the home? Many argue male workers banded together to keep women out. Heidi Hartmann for example argues that male-dominated unions organised to keep women higher paying jobs for men, primarily through excluding women from the workplace. Yet many others disagree with this. In their essay “Rethinking Women’s Oppression”, Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas argue unions were both too weak to win fights against the inclusion of women, and in many cases they actually worked heavily to benefit women’s economic rights. So what is their answer? Brenner and Ramas look back at biological arguments, arguing that whilst a biological deterministic approach (that dominates the standard narrative) is false, the:

Biological facts of reproduction — pregnancy, childbirth, lactation — are not readily compatible with capitalist production, and to make them so would require capital outlays on maternity leave, nursing facilities, childcare, and so on. Capitalists are not willing to make such expenditures, as they increase the costs of variable capital without comparable increases in labour productivity and thus cut into rates of profit. In the absence of such expenditures, however, the reproduction of labour power becomes problematic for the working class as a whole and for women in particular.

Here was the problem. In the early stages of industrialised capitalism men, women, and children all ended up in the factory. However, as people moved to the cities, the infant mortality rate shot through the roof. In Manchester, for example, there were a recorded 26,125 deaths per 100,000 thousand children under the age of one. This was three times the rate of mortality rater of non-industrial areas.

With the rise of industrialised capitalism workers were robbed of control of production process, and in turn robbed of their capacity to incorporate reproduction into the needs of production. In simpler terms, being forced to work long hours in unsanitary factories made it much more difficult for workers to properly look after their children. And, as Tad Tietze argues, “this created severe problems for the system’s ability to ensure the reproduction of the working class.” Capitalists were watching as their next swathe of workers died in front of their eyes.

Brenner and Ramas argue the creation of the “family-household system emerged as the resolution to this crisis.” The idea of the “family-household system” was introduced by Michèle Barrett in her book Women’s Oppression Today, described as a structure

in which a number of people, usually biologically related, depend on the wages of a few adult members, primarily those of the husband/father, and in which all depend primarily on the unpaid labour of the wife/ mother for cleaning, food preparation, child care, and so forth. The ideology of the “family” is one that defines family life as “ ‘naturally’ based on close kinship, as properly organized through a male bread- winner with a financially dependent wife and children, and as a haven of privacy beyond the public realm of commerce and industry.”

As capitalists were not willing, nor able, to provide services for parents to nurture their children (paid maternity leave, childcare centres, etc.) and with household services (maids, cleaning services, etc.) being too expensive for the working class, women were forced back into the home to look after children and complete domestic duties. As Tietze argues: “The capitalist family thus had to be consciously constructed, with all the coercive and consensual elements of that process — a process involving significant state and extra state mobilisation in terms of ideologies, laws, policies, regulations, work reorganisation, and industrial relations strategies, including settlements around the family wage, etc.” The family-household structure had to be developed in order to ensure the survival of the capitalist system.

That doesn’t mean women stopped working, but when they did they faced particular disadvantages. Brenner and Ramas argue there were particular classes of women who were working at this time; those with children, who were widows and those married to men with unstable incomes. “These women constituted a particularly defenceless and desperate labour pool,” they write. With domestic responsibilities making it difficult to organise in unions and a lack of mobility making it difficult to find better jobs, women were stuck in lowing paying, often part-time work. Hence we see the development of the gender wage-gap — a gap that continues until this day.

Herein lies the roots of female oppression under capitalism — roots we still see today. While some women have broken through the “glass ceiling” the majority still suffer both because of a historical disadvantage they have faced in the labour market, but also due to a capitalist class that is unwilling to provide the resources required to nurture children (which is still largely seen as a woman’s job). Paid maternity leave has been a huge fight, while services such as childcare are expensive and hard to come by. This leaves women still at a disadvantage.

While these roots are economic, however, that cannot explain sexism in its whole. These economic roots have also created cultural realities. There are a number of examples of this, but let’s just look at one: the perception of female sexuality. The repression of sexuality (through ideas that women have low libidos to the medicalisation of female sexuality through the “illness” nymphomania) is perhaps the greatest form of the ideological oppression of women. We (men in particular) are all taught early on in our lives that female sexuality is erratic and therefore the right of men to control. This has been ingrained culturally, and is probably most graphically expressed through continued high levels of sexual and physical violence targeted at women. Yet, if we think about it, this has a material foundation. When women are required to be monogamous the collective oppression of their sexuality is “logical” (although not moral). This is just another way to ensure women complete their economic roles.

Herein sits sexism and misogyny in our society — a system with material roots that expresses itself culturally and economically. Any attempt to defeat women’s oppression therefore requires tackling both sexist culture, and its economic base. We cannot do one without the other.

In my next post I am going to explore the connection between queer oppression and capitalism. I look forward to it!

As part of my research into ‘Sexy Capitalism’ I recently read the book by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá: Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality.

Sex at Dawn for me was a revelation. Well maybe not a revelation, but certainly an exciting and perspective-changing piece of work. The book dives deep into our sexual history and provides a convincing account of how our predominant stories about this history (i.e. that the nuclear family and the patriarchy) is simply false. As the authors state:

“Deep conflicts rage at the heart of modern sexuality. Our cultivated ignorance is devastating. The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species’ sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido- killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life’s irreplaceable joys: family stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual, intimacy? Are those who innocently aspire to these joys cursed by nature to preside over the slow strangulation of their partner’s libido?”

The book starts with the premise of what the authors call the “standard narrative of human sexual evolution”. This is not new stuff and if you are a human you are likely to have heard this story many times. It goes something like this (this is the truncated version):

1.) Boy meets girl

2.) Boy and girl asses one another’s mate value from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agenda/capacities.

– he looks for healthiness and sexual fidelity

– she looks for wealth and social status

3.) Boy gets girl: assuming they meet one another’s criteria, they “mate” forming a long-term paid bond – the “fundamental condition of the human species”

Our stories are normally much more romantic than this, but at the most basic level this narratives dominates our telling of human sexual history.

This story is based on a few assumptions. A woman needs a man who has a high level of wealth and social status to ensure he can protect her and look after their children. In return a man demands fidelity to ensure the children he is looking after are his. A man is not going to spend lots of energy on another’s genes. In doing so monogamy, and male domination over females, is in our nature — it is what we have always done to survive.

Ryan and Jethá however take a contrarian view. They argue this story is not about something that is ‘natural’ but is rather the result of particular social developments. They offer a range of evidence to support this and it is impossible to cover all of it in one review (you should just read the book) but here are a couple of stand outs.

First, Ryan and Jethá look at our closest biological cousins, the apes. What’s interesting here is the many myths that exist within or understandings of apes — primarily because when it comes to sexuality different ape species are very different. For example, many advocates of the standard narrative point to the existence of gibbons, who are completely monogamous, to back up their claims. But as Ryan and Jethá point out, our closest relations are not gibbons, but are in fact, bonobos. And when you look at bonobos you will find a range of interesting behaviours. Bonobos live in female-centered societies, war is rare and absent, and sex serves as an important social function. Bonobos are polyamorous with both male and female apes having regular sex with multiple partners. If you want to look at our extended family therefore, they argue, you are better looking at bonobos than at gibbons.

The authors then back this up with biological and anthropological evidence looking at human beings. Again, so much to cover, but for example, they argue that human sexual organs are evolved to be ready and raring for sex at any time. This evidence ranges from the fact that women can and do have sex at any point in their menstrual cycle (which differs from most mammals) to the existence of male testicles on the outside of the body, which allows men to have sex at any point of time. Beyond this, the two argue that women in particular are biologically evolved to have sex with multiple partners — with evidence ranging women’s ability to have multiple orgasms in a single session (which largely differs from men) to the way in which women make lots of noise during sex (which Ryan and Jethá argue is an adaptation designed so women can call potential other mates during sexual activity).

Finally, Ryan and Jethá use a bunch of anthropological evidence to back up all of these claims. Anthropological evidence around the existence of polyamorous hunter gatherer societies is not new, but this is interesting nonetheless. The authors for example look at the Mosua in China, a polyamorous society in which women and men have sex with many partners and where children are looked after by mothers and their immediate relations (the idea of a ‘father’ is non existent). In this society there is no shame associated with this — people have sex, enjoy it and do it proudly.

Brought together all of this evidence is convincing. Ryan and Jethá produce an extremely excellent piece of work, which, while research heavy is entertaining and very funny. They actively convinced me of our sexual history, leaving me with a greater desire to investigate more into this topic. It is definitely worth a read.

However, and this is a big however, I have a concern. I fear that basing this work on biological determinism (i.e. that ‘polyamory is natural’) could eventually undermine their claims. That is the topic of another blog post however and one to come!