Appendix C
Homosexuality and the Perception of Sex in Greco-Roman Antiquity
Militant homosexual milieus often rely, in order to affirm the naturalness of their behaviour, upon a supposed normality of homosexuality recognised by Antiquity.
The Ancient Greeks and Romans integrated homosexuality into their cultural norms, approving of it or not, depending on which author you follow. It was considered an erotic — even social — game. But at no time did they associate it with marriage or the family. The current idea of homosexual marriage would have seemed as mad to them as zoophilic unions. A man who engaged in sexual practices with another, usually an adolescent or effeminate pre-pubescent boy (whence the term pederasty) absolutely had to be married with children in order not to excite opprobrium. In Ancient Greece, the erast or active sodomite, considered virile, was distinguished from the eratomen or passive sodomite, considered effeminate and therefore despised.
The Aristophanes of the Symposium explained that at the beginning there were three sexual kinds: male, female, and androgynous. The last named gave birth to rather special men and women with the desire to seek each other out in order to reunite. The women born of females became tribades, or purely homosexual women (dykes). The men born of males became male homosexuals. Thus, homosexuality was thought of as hereditary and proper to a minority, but by no means as natural and possibly affecting everyone.
At this point we should make clear that the term homosexual, derived from Greek, does not signify, as many believe, ‘sexually oriented toward men’, but ‘oriented toward one’s like, of the same sex’, since the root homo derives from Greek homos, ‘the same’ — and has nothing to do with the Latin root homo (man [homme]) which does not exist in Greek, where the corresponding word is anthropos.
Aristotle, in The Nicomachean Ethics (VII:5 and X:13) judges that sodomy enters men as ‘a depraved and infamous practice’. The Spartiates as well as the Theban and Athenian warriors who took an adolescent under their wings in order to initiate him into the craft of arms might have sexual relations with him, but never sodomise him. They could only ‘masturbate between their shut thighs’, as Xenophon tells us. As for Socrates, at least the Socrates dramatised by Plato who reported the dialogues of his master, he does not seem shocked by homosexual loves as long as they did not involve a rupture with spouses.
Sapphism posed no problem for Athenians, but the very idea of lesbian marriage was unthinkable. Homer’s Odyssey features lesbians, in fact bisexuals. Roman literature, poetry, and comedy, presents female love affairs as innocent because they did not make men jealous, and in fact excited them.
The use of slaves of both sexes for sexual games was considered licit. Moreover, the slave markets of the fourth century under Constantine contained a special area where female captives were exhibited — as well as epheboi [young men considered sexually –Tr.], although there were fewer of these. When the Emperor Constantine (306–337 AD) converted to Christianity at the end of his reign, that religion declared an end to these practices, forbidding all forms of homosexuality, basing itself on the Judaic texts of the Old Testament. These, in fact, teach the immutable divine law of the bisexuation (Adam and Eve) of the human race and all others, condemning all forms of homosexuality as disobeying the divine order of creation.
As the British historian, Edward Gibbon, explains, Greco-Roman paganism was profoundly inegalitarian in its deep structures of thought, and rests upon the inegalitarian hierarchisation of human beings, but also of periods of time. Deviant sexual practices, including homosexuality, were reserved for brief, highly regulated periods (banquets, orgies, the Saturnalia, and so on) but were forbidden in daily life where normality reigned, as did the heterosexual couple. It was permissible to let yourself go in a brief temporal parenthesis, which fundamentally did not count. Similarly, a man could, at the limit, fornicate with female slaves without being unfaithful to his wife.
We must remark here on something interesting: Christian egalitarianism eradicated deviant sexual practices by abolishing the hierarchy of time. But twenty centuries later, the same Christian egalitarianism, secularised and atheistic, progressing ever further in its viral logic, has come to consider all sexual practices equivalent, and thus to relegitimise homosexuality and the other forms of deviance it had previously condemned.
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But the reestablishment of the licit character of homosexuality and deviant sexual practices by egalitarian ideology has absolutely nothing to do with what went on in ancient pre-Christian societies. These practices were not considered normal in daily life; you could not do whatever you wanted with anyone at any time. Moreover, the great historian of ancient Rome, Lucien Jerphagnon, puts us on our guard against the clichés about the decadence of morals under the Late Empire where all sexual practices were supposedly tolerated.
Appendix D
Critique of Freudian Psychoanalysis as Anti-Sexuality
Psychoanalysis, especially Freudianism, has been very harmful. Not only because it is an ineffective therapeutic method which has never disburdened anything but the wallets of its victims, but because Freudian scholasticism is a fraud, a pseudo-science. Further still, it has been harmful because of the consequences psychoanalysis and Freudianism have had on sexuality, the perception of which has been thrown off-balance.
Freudian psychoanalysis and its impressive discursive arsenal, popularised since the mid-twentieth century, have contributed to rob sex of its naturalness, its implicit and self-evident quality. By inventing unproven and delirious concepts like the ‘Oedipus Complex’, Freudianism has made sex perverse and deviant. It has paradoxically marked it with a seal of guilt, even in its most normal forms, causing even more damage than Christian puritanism. Freudianism is a sort of perverse puritanism hiding behind a mask of liberation.
Although many pathological behaviours can be explained by repressed sexuality, in wanting to account for all pathologies with sex, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis veered off into monomaniacal obsession. By abandoning itself to sexological rubbish, Freudianism rendered sex deviant, breaking down the dam between the normal and the abnormal, implying that everybody was more or less sexually sick. The perverse idea to which Freudianism led was that the repression of impulses was the cause of psychological problems, whence the legitimising of all forms of deviance. Freudian psychoanalysis opened the way to all forms of sexual release and all perversions, considering the individual libido superior to social norms. The notions of the ego and superego which resulted from Freud’s intellectual ramblings, contributed to this drift. The most striking thing is that none of this came from Freud himself, who was a man of order and a rigorist, but it was his concepts and his disciples who provoked this drift. From this point of view, Freudianism is (paradoxically) both an attempt at a pseudo-scientific and pseudo-therapeutic normalisation of sex and an incitement to pathological and deviant sex. This is why Freudianism is an anti-therapy. Freud’s successors, including the imposter Lacan and the whole rat’s nest of the psychoanalytic profession have only served to reinforce the tendencies toward a sickly vision of sex. A whole battery of self-proclaimed psychoanalysts have disturbed generations of American and European elites.
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After Freudianism, which precipitated the arrival of ‘sexology’, that dangerous discipline, sex has ceased to be mature. It has escaped the processes of both nature and cultural transmission to become a ‘problem to be resolved’. Psychoanalysis, which pretended to cure a mental illness, has provoked mental illnesses. It never cures anyone, but aggravates psychopathologies. The bewildered masters of psychoanalysis have insinuated the unhealthy and erroneous idea (both puritanical and sexually obsessive) that we are all disturbed by sexual repression, and that we must recognise this to regain psychological equilibrium, and so we have the idea that a deviant libido is, fundamentally, normal, and that a normal libido is,
somehow, deviant. The consequences have been very serious. Sexuality has lost all its freshness, its spontaneity, but also a certain erotic innocence.
For psychoanalysis, a normal father is a deviant, repressing terrible secrets he does not admit; but a sexual pervert must be excused because of his family past or his experiences as a child. Always there is the same confusion between the normal and the pathological. All mental affection or illness supposedly has sexual roots which, moreover, are produced exclusively by experience and the environment. This is absolutely contradicted by contemporary scientific knowledge, for which mental illnesses are of genetic, biological, or physico-traumatic origin.
Psychoanalytic ideology has created a lot of sick people by inventing imaginary illnesses. It has created repression in the belief that it was curing it. It has polluted the perception of sex by introducing morbid afterthoughts. It is indeed morbidity that Freudian psychoanalysis has introduced into sex, especially by distilling the wild idea that in every man there is a desire to kill his father in order to sleep with his mother, which constitutes one of the central axes of Freudian dogma. Freudianism has made sex sick with its sexual reductionism. The responsibility of Freudian psychoanalytic ideology for present-day sexual unease and the affective and sexual immaturity of our contemporaries cannot be discarded.
What is striking (but in the end, not that much so) is the intellectual aura from which psychoanalysis still benefits, the prestige that surrounds it, while its credibility is about the same as that of astrology.
Appendix E
Analysis of Pornography
The offerings of the pornographic industry are accessed through the Internet or traditional distribution circuits (mail order), though ever less through magazines. It principally centres around videos and sex toys. Sex shops, which appeared in the 1970s, are in decline. Those that survive try to attract clientele with the promise of ‘encounters’ in private booths for looking at X-rated films. They are in sharp competition with massage parlours featuring clandestine Asian prostitutes. Movie theatres which screen X-rated films have entirely disappeared since the 1970s for a simple reason: the point of watching an X-rated film is either solitary masturbation or the stimulation of a couple. A public auditorium is not suitable for this.
The supply of X-rated films is divided into two categories: 1) mainstream porn [porno bourgeois] as it is called in professional jargon, namely, heterosexual, lesbian, or bisexual porn — including orgies, but without male homosexual relations; and 2) ‘dirty porn’ which, interestingly, accounts for 80 percent of what is on offer, and which is broadcast around the world on the Internet. American (especially Californian) pornography accounts for 60 percent of the world market.
Mainstream porn tries in general to respect the basic principles of eroticism, that is to say, a gradual build-up toward the sexual act, limited to relations between a man and a woman, two women, or two women and a man. It involves no violence and always simulates love and the natural orgasm. In general, the actresses genuinely experience pleasure, although they may exaggerate the expression of it for the camera. About 70 percent of the actresses are call-girls, rarely streetwalkers. Dirty porn, the majority of the international supply, includes a significant number of categories which are, let us make clear, legally distributed. They all correspond to particular, commercially well-defined obsessions. It will be amusing to list a few, without comment.
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There is no need to mention the innumerable classically masculine homosexual videos and their annoying sodomitic banality. Here are a few of the categories on offer:
— Rape and quasi-rape scenes, often involving a White woman and a Black man (you can imagine the influence on certain spectators).
— Scenes presented as incestuous, including mothers, sons, daughters, even grandparents.
— Bestiality scenes with dogs and donkeys, urination scenes, bondage, sado-masochism, and the like.
— Scenes involving the obese, the handicapped, the aged, and so on.
We need go no further: the producers’ imagination is limitless.
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Films are often categorised according to ethnicity, offering scenes with Arab, Indian, Mediterranean, Black, and Asiatic actors and actresses. Scenes of White women with Black men are particularly common; those of White men with Black women are rather rare. In contrast with the dominant anti-racist ideology, X-rated films are strongly racialised. The customer can’t go wrong: North Africans, Blacks, multiracial persons, Arabs, Asians, Indians, etcetera.
The laws do not forbid deviant and pathological pornographic spectacles; they only attack, and without much success, paedophilic sites. But the producers get around these laws cleverly by showing minors who are not really minors, but only look it. The American X-rated industry offers these products under the category teens.
The Internet has also allowed for the development of porn-scene swapping between individuals, half the supply coming from the United States. Many sites are devoted to live masturbation or live webcam scenes. All such sites include advertising. World pornographic advertising revenue, apart from direct sales of professional production ($5–10 billion) reached a level of $50 billion in 2008, making it a mid-level economic sector, but one that is still growing.
It is very difficult to count how many visits to pornographic web sites there are, because of a simple referencing problem. Nevertheless, visits to sites said to be sex-related (including those offering ‘encounters’) amount in France to 50 percent of the whole — a higher percentage than that pertaining to visits to news sites.
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The supply of pathological sexual spectacles meets with a significant market and affects a significant audience; if it didn’t, it would dry up. Many filmed scenes are privately uploaded via the Internet. Pornographic Internet sites fall into two categories: pay sites (usually crooked) and free sites financed with advertising and the recording of visitors’ IP addresses. 80 percent of free sites are American. There are about a hundred American stars of mainstream pornography and 10,000 small-timers. In France, in honest production houses, a male porn star is paid 100–200 EUR per day; female stars are paid double this. A pornographic actor with ‘seniority’ makes about 10 percent more than a beginner because of the demographic development of the market. The production of the 30 minute pornographic movie (the most cost-effective length) distributed on the Internet costs about 20,000 EUR, distribution included. Shooting time varies between one day to fifteen days for the most elaborate films (Marc Dorcel Productions). Many male actors offer their services for free and anonymously, which lowers production costs.
In terms of profitability, (ratio of investment to return), the production of X-rated films enjoys a good average profit of 50 percent per year. Their market is the whole world. It is an industry with no fear of recession and with reliable elasticity — nearly equal to that of the pharmaceutical industry. Its only real weakness is the possible regulation of Internet access. The annual growth rate of the pornographic sector is about 7 percent.
Appendix F
Humanism, Superhumanism
Even if laws, regulations, and moral prescriptions succeed in delaying or forbidding the application of biotechnologies — which one may doubt — their very possibility will forbid any return to the comfort of classic humanism.
In fact, it is toward the superhumanism described by Giorgio Locchi that we are moving, nolens volens [whether we want to or not]. Humanism posits man as an absolute given, a natural fixed point, unalterable and universal. This humanism, which was already an error as regards space (the human species is diverse and unequal in its genetic groups as in individuals) and time (the human species, which is very recent, is subject to phylogenesis like any other) collapses of itself and on itself as soon as man can modify himself and create forms of artificial intelligence which need not even take on a body of
human flesh.
Superhumanism is thus the possibility of thinking of post-human man and of post-human human intelligence. In this sense it is more realistic and closer to human nature than humanism, whose very name is a fraud.
The manipulats we will succeed in producing (and within the framework of an advanced positive eugenics one can legitimately speak of supermen), thinking machines or molecular supercomputers — possibly even conscious — will certainly no longer belong to the ‘natural’ human race, although the latter will still exist. This possibility, diabolical in the eyes of humanists, makes them say that such a plan is an act of aggression against nature. Moreover, it is in this sort of scandalised invective that humanism shows its true face: not that of natural wisdom, but that of magic thought.
For it is humanism that is anti-natural, since it posits the human species as an immutable idol not subject to the laws that govern other species, which places him above them. On the other hand, superhumanism is a kind of naturalism. Man is not an immutable and untouchable essence, but is thrown back into the cauldron of nature. For me, for example, homophile ideology and homosexual marriages are anti-natural and contravene natural law; on the other hand, the creation of manipulats, birth through incubators, positive eugenics, and so on perfectly conform with natural law.
The paradox of superhumanism is that it marks the toppling of the marble statue Man, but that at the same time it opens the gate to the power of human will (at least the will of certain humans, issued from certain stocks) and shatters moral taboos. In allowing man to take himself as material and to create, starting from his own brain, new forms of intelligence or post-human biological formations, superhumanism leaves man behind while demonstrating his will to power.
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