Problems with Utopias: Sex

Every utopia falls apart on the issue of sex.

Who should have it? How often? Marriage? No marriage? Polygamy? Abstinence?

PJ O'Rourke once wrote that humans are the only animals to feel shame after coitus. Consequently, humans surround the sexual act with rules, restrictions, lore, art, mystique, warnings, excuses, labels.

Modern-day progressivism is inherently reactionary as it attempts to label what ultimately cannot be labeled: inner perception and lifestyle choices, which are often a confluence of environmental and biological factors. What people like. Whom people like. How often they like them.

There aren't enough labels in the world.

Which doesn't stop the utopians and moralists and everybody else from trying.

Gilman postulates a kind of platonic-meets-abstinence culture. She is as direct as her class and culture permit, which means not so much (the Bohemians were more direct, but not as outspoken as people think). In the book, Jeff and Celia obviously get busy immediately after their marriage since Celia is pregnant before Ellador and Van leave Herland. Terry gets more and more riled by the lack of sex until he attempts to rape Alima. This act gets him thrown out of the country. Take into consideration: a wife claiming rape by her husband was not accepted until the mid-to-late-twentieth century, so Gilman is presenting a strong feminist viewpoint.

Interestingly enough, Gilman allows Van to reflect that Terry hasn't been entirely understood or treated fairly. For one, Van castigates Alima, Gilman's version of the character, for playing come-hither games with Terry.

Ellador doesn't play come-hither games with Van. She doesn't want to get pregnant (the old-fashioned way) and birth control, though it existed in the nineteenth century, was not all that reliable. Consequently, Ellador and Van have a semi-platonic relationship (in my version, Terry states that Alim believes they've gone further than they admit).

The unfortunate--and rather unimaginable--outcome (says this product of willing wives within Mormon polygamy) is that Herland woman are presented as almost entirely uninterested in sex. I challenged this idea by postulating that the Northern citizens of Herland (Alim's hometown) bond and live together.

And before anyone starts shouting, there is evidence that members of societies in which there is a low count of the other sex (China, for instance, is low on women for reasons entirely connected to Mao), the majority sex will form relationships, including with same-sex partners, whatever an individual's personal proclivities/label. People like to bond. And people like sex. Welcome to human nature.

No utopia knows what to do about it.

Religion is often a scapegoat here. The current, near-pathological insistence on name-calling by progressives challenges that assumption--or, at least, the assumption that religion is alone in its efforts to put sex (all that messy biological stuff) in its place. 

 

Utopias, religious and otherwise, from Plato to...name someone...are doubly stymied because the very individual nature of a very individual act (as Martin says in Frasier, "Sex is between you and the person you are doing it to") often challenges the long-term vision of the state.

The consequence is that often utopian creators/leaders tie themselves into endless knots trying to resolve problems within created systems, which systems depart considerably from the reality of those individuals and the biological, human body.

It's a mess. Utopias don't like mess. 

Chapter 16

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding