What does it matter if one’s spouse secretly satisfies their sexual needs in institutional brothels? This is what happened during the reign of the stable bourgeois family which we vituperate today with ignorance and malice. As I shall suggest, there is nothing shocking about the idea of brothels for wives, where they can secretly find temporary lovers or mistresses. The essential thing is to preserve sexual hypocrisy and disconnect the concept of conjugal union from that of romantic sexuality.
Indeed, the principle purpose of marriage is perverted as soon as one assigns ‘love’ as its ultimate end. Reasoning in an Aristotelian manner, one could say that love and sex are a component of marriage but not at all its necessary telos.[7] Sex and love are means that have been inappropriately transformed into ends. The principle telos of marriage is the construction of a lineage by means of procreation, and not simply the union of two beings who ‘love and desire each other’, even if romantic desire may have its place.[8] A lasting couple that forms a family, the building block of a nation, is not based on ‘love’ in the adolescent sense, nor on a passing sex fantasy, but on a partnership which evolves with time, based on ethnic, cultural and social commonality; on shared values and a family strategy.
Of course, even today one can find stable, fertile couples and united families. But these have gone from being the majority to an ever-smaller minority, despite what Le Figaro[9] or other conservative publications say to reassure themselves (the Coué[10] method).
The Politisation of Love: Symptom of Neo-Totalitarianism
The overuse of the word ‘love’ is characteristic of our age, in the English-speaking world especially. We should also note the overabundant use of the term ‘love’ in Christian rhetoric since the 1960s. ‘God is Love’ is a theological affirmation seldom used by Christianity until the middle of the twentieth century, and unknown to Judaism and Islam. The increase in references to love in Western ideology is a secularisation of Christian charity, paradoxically coinciding with massive dechristianisation. At the same time, churches have converted to the worship of the Rights of Man,[11] formerly rejected because of its profane and materialist character. This cult forms the basis of the official and quasi-legally binding Western ideological Vulgate, from which arise three principal imperatives: humanitarianism, anti-discriminationism, and anti-racism — each inscribed on the tablets of the law.[12]
This politicisation of the idea of love has occasioned not only a gigantic tidal-wave of humanitarian discourse, but also immense public expenditure, especially in favour of growing foreign populations whose parasitic character it is illegal to denounce. The unbridled humanitarian cult of love for the Other is not merely a symbol of emasculation and ethnomasochism in Western populations (as I have demonstrated many times in other writings),[13] it is also accompanied by — and this is only an apparent paradox — an explosion in social violence (criminality), violence of representation (audiovisual media), a weakening of civic and economic honesty, the withdrawal of citizens into communitarian folds, the expansion of Islamist fanaticism, the appearance of barbarous primitivism in a large fringe of the youth (mainly of foreign origin despite discrimination in their favour) and, for working and middle class native French, severe deterioration of their quality of life and their civil liberties.
This ideology of obligatory love for the Other functions as a soft form of totalitarianism, in which public discourse flies in the face of observable social facts — a phenomenon similar in part to what was seen in the Soviet Union, though minus the gulags. Power is monopolised by a doctrinaire professorial caste with exclusive access to the mass media, whose ideas are not shared by the majority of the native population. Opponents can only express themselves in marginal outlets, and even then at the risk of defying the law. For, as Marxist-Leninists used to do in Communist countries in order to protect their dogma, this caste has reintroduced limitations (which get more extensive over time) on freedom of expression and even of thought, not to mention limitations on property rights and the freedom to hire at will.[14] This ideology, protected by a generation of judges who share it (whether sincerely or not matters little), does not hesitate to violate the Declaration of the Rights of Man to whose authority they appeal in order to justify unconstitutional freedom-killing laws and in order to leave the realm of positive law by a return to subjective, introspective law, similar to Soviet or Medieval law. As in the Soviet world, today’s ideologues are not content with disseminating their views via the communications media, but seek also to diffuse it monopolistically through the school system (primary to post-secondary), which has ceased to be an apparatus of public instruction only to become one of public upbringing, i.e., a propaganda apparatus in the service of official dogma, especially in matters of history and morality.
It can be said without exaggeration that in today’s ‘free’ Europe, as in the totalitarian regimes of the early twentieth century described by Hannah Arendt,[15] the media, culture, and the educational system agree in not diffusing anything but this ideology, and that any who violate it are either marginalised or otherwise punished. Everything is done to keep their voice from being heard. The Internet as well is clearly subject to censorship, if not total shutdown of some Websites. (The Internet’s reach is exaggerated anyway, given the dilution of messages in the enormous mass of competing messages, and with so many niche Websites.) But above all, those Websites most frequented by the ‘general public’ — the only effective ones — are impermeable by any dissident thought. Disagreements can only be expressed (under surveillance) in sealed bubbles visited only by those in the know.
Finally, the covert (and sometimes avowed) purpose of this ideology of love for the Other, or xenophilia, is the destruction of the European peoples in the cultural and physical sense, i.e., the disappearance of Europe. The constant defence of race-mixing and immigration — supposedly so beneficial — along with the prohibition on opposing them are a part of this strategy, just like the numerous attempts to destroy national historical memory, or the imposition of officially subsidised faux-art. The central paradigm of the ideology of love for the Other is: ‘The Other is better than we are; we must learn from him, for we are inherently guilty and bad; the Other is more at home among us than we are.’[16] This amounts to a monstrous deformation of Christian charity, which results in a totalitarian ideology that destroys all social bonds and produces violence and servility.
Love is Not a Gift, but a Calculation
Apart from rare exceptions, the sentiments grouped under the word ‘love’ are not jewels of altruism. The various forms of love are self-interested strategies. Moreover, egoism and altruism are not opposites but complementary, like yin and yang. Love is always an investment from which one expects a return. Even parental love, often presented as disinterested, is not really so; one expects benefits in return: family pride, a return of affections, solidarity in one’s old age, and so forth. Conjugal love obeys the same rules, for beyond the parade of apparently gratuitous affection, it must provoke a return of the same from one’s spouse. One loves for the sake of being loved, not for the sake of loving. Love is a gift that supposes a return. But one must not conclude from this that love is a cynical and hypocritical lie. The hypocrisy and cynicism of love are consubstantial with it and necessary to it: a positive thing. Only, one must not blind oneself and think that love is unrequited altruism.
Non-sexual love — friendship — obeys the same rules. All friendship expects solidarity, a return, and is thus not disinterested; but this does not mean that there is no such thing as sincerity in love. The forms of love most free of altruism are romantic love and libidinal love: these, based on the desire for possession, are fragile, ephemeral, and geared to the short term; their aim is that the beloved provide us with pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure. The proof of the egoistical nature (in a non-pejorative sense) of these forms of love is found in romantic disappointment and jealousy: once the partner breaks the ro
mantic pact or refuses to ratify it, love is transformed into hatred or thirst for vengeance. This is natural, and hardly to be criticised.
Christianity has accustomed us to the idea of ‘pure love’, a gift without an expectation of any return, as in the love of God or Christ for men (‘whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’), i.e., the imperative to love even those who hate you. But there is something pathological in that position which, moreover, the Catholic Church has long muted. (The commandment: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, on the other hand, is restrictive and only applies to neighbours.) But this position, if made absolute, demands that one love one’s enemies, even more than others, with the key imperative being forgiveness. This idea is unrealistic and very dangerous. It is psychologically utopian, for it ends in moral disarmament and masochism. Judaism and Islam, moreover, have never given forgiveness and unrequited love as extreme an interpretation as that of Catholic theology after Vatican II, which in many ways defies common sense. Indeed, in the traditional theology of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the love of God for man is calculated and conditional. God loves on the condition that you obey and do not sin; otherwise, punishment will befall. There is no unconditional love involved. It does not exist, and to pretend otherwise falls within the category of utopian deliria. Evangelic Christian love as a gift without return, as love of enemy and executioner, is a blindness and illness of the spirit, that is, a form of fanaticism: not of strength but of weakness, not of affirmation but of collective suicide. It verges on masochism, as we saw in the case of the murder of the monks of Tibhirine.[17]
* * *
Let us now turn, more prosaically, to the sexual and conjugal bond. In relation to the permanent couple, that is, in which sexual attraction is moderated, the balance between the benefits and inconveniences of the romantic pact is even; the romantic exchange is stable, for the libidinal elements are balanced by the other terms of the contract (familial, financial, etc.); the emotional-sexual is compensated for by the rational. Even if the couple’s sexual pleasure is moderated, and, indeed, nonexistent after a certain time, the cement of family and social interests predominates in the romantic calculus. Conjugal love, being strongly tinted with friendship and habitual attachment, is nonetheless established. The contract is stable and reinforced by filial love for parents. The couple is not an isolated romantic duo but the central pillar in the architectural structure of a family. This model was championed in Roman antiquity well before Christianisation, and it spread in conquered Gaul.
On the other hand, in the case of an emotional-romantic and libidinal union, egoism (the search for immediate pleasure with one’s partner) overrides altruism, and deliberation regards the short term. It is the casino of pleasure: everything is intensity and superficiality; future plans are lies, vows are false, attachment is simulated. The language of passion is all the stronger the more the bond is transient and hesitant. Moreover, the people involved do not know one another well; only their bodies learn to explore one another. The passion is libidinal (in which the other is only a mirror of oneself) and abolished all insight and judgment, and at the slightest deviation such feelings turn to indifference and hatred. But this sort of amorous storm is perfectly admissible — in spite of its dishonest character — if it limits itself only to a liaison and does not try to transform itself into a conjugal bond.
Romantic friendship: two persons sexually attracted to one another (pure libido) and bound by a sincere friendship free of passionate love is a fairly strong form of bond, although it is rather rare. Paradoxically, the fact of being in love with one another in the emotional sense threatens the bond, for the passion generated by romantic emotion provokes multiple crises. Desire without emotional passion, but with a certain dose of friendship, is as solid as anything. The enemy of the durable bond is, to borrow an expression of Stendhal’s, crystallisation,[18] in other words, fixing the emotion of attraction in ice, in which the partner is idolised and imagined in a false light, but also instrumentalised as a tool of one’s own pleasure.
Intense but fleeting passion is part of life and one of its adornments, but it becomes devastating as soon as it wants to be durable and confuses itself with the conjugal bond, which is for the long term and of moderate intensity. The sex drive is ephemeral and changing, among men especially but also among women. It is based on evolving fantasies. The search for pure, raw sex without attachment, and with a simulation of love, is part of nature (especially masculine nature) and a physiological necessity. Moreover, the purely sexual, libidinal, emotionally superficial, transitory tie, free of the poison of jealousy, renewable with new partners, is greatly preferable and better balanced than romantic love (a mixture of libidinal attraction and emotional amalgamation), which always ends badly and brings more unpleasantness than pleasure to daily life.
There is no such thing as gratuitous feelings. Every loving impulse, sexual or otherwise, is interested. On the other hand, sex can participate in love or not. The loving impulse can stimulate or inhibit sexual desire and capacity. These psychological mechanisms are of an extraordinary complexity. Concerning love at first sight (the ‘coup de foudre’, falling suddenly and deeply in love), neurologists have observed that it unleashes a hormonal storm and modifies the electrical exchanges in the brain. But love at first sight can result in a durable union, though ephemeral unions are more frequent. On the other hand, the most solid as well as sincere conjugal attachments generally do not begin with sudden infatuation, but are a mixture of calculation and an affection that is kept under control.
The orgasmic coalescence of lovers, mixed with their spiritual elevation — the mutual giving of each to the other combined with ineffable sexual pleasure — belongs rather to the realm of literature, poetry, and aesthetic dreaming than to lived reality. The couple is bound together by habit, tenderness, interest, care of children and (a phrase that has been forgotten!) ‘domestic bliss’. Of course, sexual desire persists, secretly present; however, in almost all cases its intensity rapidly drops and ends by disappearing. But the sexual relations of the couple — fertile and cooperative, and which have as their object the maintenance of the union — are of secondary importance.
The most lasting couples — an increasing rarity in Western society — are those who continue the sensible though vilified model of the bourgeois marriage that I spoke of earlier. This model enjoyed its apogee from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century among the middle class, and collapsed suddenly in the 1960s. Based on the balancing act of the golden mean, bourgeois marriage mixed moderate but continuing sexual attraction, a mutual social and economic interest in living together, respect for the wife, a will to create a lineage, significant socio-cultural similarity, hypocrisy for dissimulating and managing adulterous liaisons (hence the importance of legal prostitution), and the building up of a patrimony to be transmitted. When the couple gets old, this leads to a habitual tenderness much stronger than the passionate and ephemeral simulation of today’s young couples.
A final point: when we consider rape, we can see how the very instrument of love, its outcome — that is to say, copulation — can be transformed into a weapon of aggression and domination. One thinks of the proximity of Eros and Thanatos in this transmutation. The ritual of rape for the purpose of humiliating an enemy population or a hated ethnic group, practiced by today’s suburban thugs, is a very ancient practice. It is not a matter of impulsive rape practiced by frustrated and pathological men, but a behaviour on the part of men, frustrated perhaps, but otherwise normal, and who are often also married fathers. The act of love is absolutely indistinguishable from this heinous act, and its symbolism is completely reversed.
The Decline of the Duty to Continue the Lineage
The great American sociologist Christopher Lasch (1932–1994), author of the celebrated Culture of Narcissism, was an implacable critic of modern individualism, a one-time prog
ressive who lost his progressive illusions. He wrote a work he never published, but which was brought out posthumously, called Women and the Common Life.[19]
For Lasch, the challenge to bourgeois values, especially in matters of sex, the couple, and the family, constitutes a false emancipation. Sold to the public as liberation and progress, this emancipation most often confines individuals to an infantilism and egocentricity which make it impossible to flourish within a community and a stable, natural family.
The traditional Western marriage, founded on sexual attraction, mutual respect, fidelity, and a long-term contract of family formation formed a sort of equilibrium point equidistant from the arranged marriage in which the wife is made inferior and today’s purely adolescent union: sexualised, deritualised, without obligations, and thus terribly ephemeral. According to Lasch, this traditional Western conjugal love that long produced balanced families owed as much to the women’s struggle as to Christianity. But this conception of marriage and conjugal love crumbled under the blows of libertarian neo-capitalism. Emancipating woman from patriarchal authority has subjected her to ‘the new paternalism of advertisement, big business, and fetishised merchandise.’ Children, removed from family authority to become fully fledged consumers, find themselves directionless, isolated in the social jungle. By Lasch’s estimation, this change in mores is a form of alienation disguised as liberation; it has been the cause of social catastrophes. Women have lost much as well: notably power over the education of their children and the domestic economy. Have women gained in sexual fulfillment? No, because according to Lasch, feminine sexuality ‘formerly regulated by the Church and now by medicine, is too organised, too conscious of itself, too predictable.’ In Lasch’s view, ‘marriage is the balance between freedom and happiness.’
Sex and Deviance Page 3
