Some want to be people holding the ‘tough’ position, those whom nothing can shock; on the other hand, others like to see themselves as having a sense of ‘when things have gone too far’. Others, loudly, like to see it as ‘more sad than shocking’.
The Talking Tough can’t-be-shocked position is an attempt to drain the works of their power over that person. But it is whether or not and how you enjoy ‘being shocked’ that tells.
There is another position which holds that anything to do with the expression of sexuality has first to be theoretically tested to determine if it is transgressing prevailing progressive ideological sensitivities (called ‘debasing’ or ‘ trivialising’).
To transgress against these progressive sensitivities is not to be confused with transgressing against mainstream mores or sensitivities, which is considered acceptable.
The radical tradition, the transgressive attitude in the arts, is held by people who feel that they hold a truth or have created something which will shock, offend or, preferably, instruct someone else against their will.
This, I was to learn, is also known as the ‘in your face’ attitude. A most inviting term.
Most artists do not like to think that they are primarily serving and reinforcing their own distinctive sub-community.
But I rush to argue that to fulfil this role of serving and reinforcing does not diminish the arts.
There is a civilising trickle up effect or, in the case of erotica, as bon vivant Peter Blazey says, a ‘tickle up’ effect.
The reverberations and influence of art within a society are sinuous, unpredictable and indispensable.
‘Early western pornography was linked to freethinking and heresy, to science and natural philosophy and to attacks on absolutist political authority,’ says Lynn Hunt in her book The Invention of Pornography (1993).
It still is, and along with freethinking, philosophy, science and attacks on absolutist political authority, is still rather cliquey.
I found, at the racecourse and so on, that people generally do not read or expose themselves to that which fails to delight, fails to stabilise, fails to meet their cultural needs.
I did not consider this unnatural. On the other hand, I do have a slight problem with little jockeys in silk garments sitting on large horses galloping around a circle.
Which leads me to another curio, which runs against the supposed effect of transgression: the distinction between what is ‘enjoyed’ and the social position of the viewer who is doing the ‘enjoying’.
A study by two female researchers found that women who read romance novels involving the rape of a younger woman by an older man, followed by love between this older man and this younger woman, tended to hold liberal or feminist views on social issues (quoted by Philip Weiss in Harpers magazine, March 1993).
Other evidence also makes it very unclear what the effect is, if any, of witnessing and enjoying material which ‘transgresses’ one’s beliefs.
Even committed decadents such as myself do not, as the Australian media tend to think, have a steady diet of Decadence. For example, I have a bad knee which tends to interfere with the more complicated positions at times.
We too have to take our clothing to the dry cleaners. It may come as a surprise to some, but in any given week we may be decadent for only a few hours.
It does, however, change one’s outlook for the rest of the week. We find.
But to return to the rather secretive nature of erotica and the rather reclusive nature of much art.
Paradoxically, it is the news media which tries to treat the world as a single public space, as a single large room where we are all gathered to be ‘shocked’.
I find that it is the news media which believes (but cannot practise) that all that is available to sight, and all people, all activities, all conduct—that is, wherever a reporter can reach—must then be brought back and dumped into the most public of arenas: into the news.
But after dragging everything into the public arena of the news, the media then behave like the youth quoted by Montaigne (see above), and begin its castration.
They do not acknowledge that some art is more akin to the Nightclub, the Cabaret and the Secret Society than it is to public life. That it is not meant for everyone. This includes erotica.
When the media drags erotica into the ‘living room’ of the ‘average’ family they do so only in a deleterious and incomplete way. They never do it for fun.
The Australian Weekend Magazine tried to discuss the Mapplethorpe exhibition but dodged what it saw as the most controversial images—that of ‘explicit’ (?) ‘shots he took of very young children … whose innocence he both elevated and exploited, and about which the biggest question mark must hang’.
When reading the article we look for an example of these shots of very young children over which hangs ‘the biggest question mark’ but find that we are given no illustration (nor, might I add, did the Anerican book Culture Wars, which is a book aimed at fully examining the questions of public funding, censorship and art, including specifically Mapplethorpe’s work).
Rupert Murdoch, through his company HarperCollins, published Love Cries, which the Sydney Morning Herald described as ‘A Vile Book for Mean and Pitiful People’.
The Sydney Morning Herald did not publish an extract from the book to illustrate what it was that the literary editor saw as vile. Nor were there photographs of mean and pitiful people.
The news media is unable to illustrate what it is that is being talked about and can only create imaginary monsters and by so doing provoke false discourse.
I return to the Mapplethorpe exhibition.
The curator of the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, Bernice Murphy, is reported as saying, ‘The problem with the prurient gaze, however, is that it looks only for sexual content and misses the rest … pornography functions by complete distancing from any sense of personal identification.’
One would hope so. On occasions one is profoundly relieved that one is distanced ‘from any sense of personal identification’.
The new rule seems to be that you shall ‘respond’ sexually to persons, animals or artworks, engagements, involvements, escapades or follies, in their entirety as infinite and complex creatures of the universe—or NOT AT ALL.
And only if you are passed as emotionally ‘fit’.
The perverse, the less than savoury, the emotionally imperfect are to be denied their innocent fun, or any lapses into prurience—whatever offence that may be.
At the Clinic we see sexual venture and its extraordinary pathways of behaviour as available to any who wish to try them.
‘Decadence—what is its authority?’ I was often asked at the racecourse, in the street and at parents’ meetings.
I told them that Decadence incorporates words beginning with ‘R’. Reversal of common propriety, regression from supposedly correct behaviour, revenge for the injustice of simply being alive, and relief from the integrity of self.
Puzzled parents often asked me, ‘Why is there so much difference between the way the Decadent tradition treats some forms of pederasty and the way the mass media, social workers and the law treat them?
‘Why are the “Pagan” or the “Decadent” so treasured by Bright Things and why do these traditions see the benign, the delightful, or even the preferable, in what others see as evil?’
I tried to explain, in the parents’ groups, to the RSL clubs, and at the racecourses, how philosophical systems, or life views, use different vocabularies to describe the same thing. Or does the existence of different vocabularies show that, whatever it is, it is not the same thing?
It just so happens that the Decadent life-approach is a little more embracing and forgiving, and sees some of our social alarm about sexuality as being ill-begotten.
So some would see the Regency Rake or the Femme Fatale as being rather jolly at times (bores at other times, but aren’t we all).
Others with a different vocabulary and world view,
would see the Regency Rake and the Femme Fatale as pathologically disturbed.
However, I patiently explained that Decadence and erotica, in one of its strongest stances, rejects and avoids explication by ideologies.
It refuses theoretical inclusion (including this one that I am constructing).
It refuses to claim a social role.
Erotica strives to gain release from progressive political theory, for example, so as to extend, through unredeemed effort, a less neat, less categorical, less organic expression of the human condition (see, even here I drag in a humanistic defence—the wider expression of ‘the human condition’, etc. I hear the Dadaists of long ago, the French avant garde of long ago, pointing at me with disdain).
The Decadent mission would be imperiled by seeking to redeem itself within the terms offered by humanism, political theory, journalism, law or theology.
To do so would be a surrender of its own claim to be uncredentialled (a chimeric claim, perhaps).
Erotica as an art, at its wildest, is the devoted and perverse application of genius and style to the unredeemable.
It does not argue, cannot argue, that ‘knowing life’ will necessarily bring joy or reform or even happy memories. It is a venture of unpredictable outcome. And therefore it is not something for everyone.
I found much interest among the general population in my discourses on erotica, although many chose to politely disagree and found my explanation less than satisfactory.
Some raised questions concerning their own children and I was able to put them at ease by explaining that Germaine Greer documents the far freer and more sensuous physicality of adults with children in nonwestern cultures. ‘Pleasures are taken with children’s bodies that would be defined, in our culture, as abuse or rape,’ she says. (Of course as sophisticates we recognise this as the erroneous tribal-cultures-always-get-it-right argument. And its corollary, of course, is that western cultures always get it wrong.) However, we agree that there is a thin line sometimes between being abused and being amused as a child.
They were curious to hear that Donatello’s David, which is seen as one of the most important and revolutionary works in the history of art, could also be seen as a work of child pornography. (We recognise this as the erroneous Antiquity Legitimisation. If Ovid was dirty-mouthed, it is all right for us to be dirty-mouthed.)
We said quietly but pointedly that some of the young are predisposed to strange paths by the multitudinous factors which create personality. They will find their own sexual ways by venture and by self-discovery. As an adolescent I did not desire my parents’ guidance or protection (except, of course, that which came from good manners).
I did appreciate outside suggestions, especially from literature, and in some cases, I appreciated a well-put suggestion.
Mostly, I preferred that Someone Slip Something Into My Drink.
Having understood this, the parents went home, somewhat relieved, and many, I am sure, more confidently left the windows of their children’s bedrooms open.
I would like to believe I rose in their estimation because of my frankness and my willingness, as a much-hounded erotic writer, to come out into the world to talk with them, albeit incognito.
Sadly, throughout all my investigations no one tried to Slip Something Into My Drink.
As with everything, there is an absolute categorical distinction between doing something and depicting something. It is decidedly safer, in some cases, just to read about it.
In conclusion, the Clinic agreed with Walter Kendrick in The Secret Museum: ‘Pornography names an argument not a thing.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
On the DISORDER
of Age as a Guide
to CONDUCT
I cannot accept the way we determine the span of our lives…
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, 1533–1592,
‘ON. THE LENGTH OF LIFE’
Just little sillies who are not sure what they are…
WENDY
A DREADFUL uproar has broken out at the Clinic over the question of what was once known as the Peter Pan ‘complex’—is it a neurosis or is it another example of the wonderful theatre of the personality? Of the transmutability of self? The ever-dazzling ability of the self to outmanoeuvre time, age and the trammels of the more timid conventions of conduct.
Some journalists, in their profiles of successful men, especially, disdain the Peter Pan complex and try to place people’s behaviour by age. They are often glad that Peter Pan figures are at last changing into ‘proper adults’ or at least losing their Peter Pan image, or they worry that some are not losing this image.
Roman Polanski ‘has at last begun to look his age’. Saint Laurent is ‘more of a baby than a youth’. Both these examples are from the New Yorker. ‘Sting (Gordon Mathew Sumner) is middle-aged,’ a journalist gloats in You magazine.
Journalists seem overly pleased that Polanksi has been stopped from involving himself with thirteen-year-old girls and has married.
Journalists have become the Conduct Prefects, running hither and thither to find those who are not Behaving Themselves. I talk not of the criminal code but of other behaviour, such as ‘being your age’.
At the Clinic we have broken into two warring factions. Dr Débauché strongly defends the artistry involved in developing a Peter Pan complex, while Dr La Barbe defends maturity and its attendant responsibilities.
‘All children, except one, grow up,’ says J. M. Barrie in the book Peter Pan (1911).
Barrie says in the book that mothers do not wish their children to grow up.
Evidence of this can be seen in the Maori film Once Were Warriors, where the mother is advised by her woman friend to ‘take a chainsaw to the apron strings’ of her ‘soft’ eleven-year-old boy.
Peter Pan himself claims that he did not have a mother.
Not only had he no mother, but he had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them ‘very over rated persons’.
Two issues concern the Clinic:
What, these days, is the appropriate behaviour and appearance for any given age, and do Peter Pans have a legitimate place in our fin-de-siècle society?
When asked his age, Peter Pan found it was not a happy question…
He told Wendy that he did not really know, because ‘I ran away the day I was born’.
So did I, figuratively.
Dr Débauché argues that in his reply Peter Pan is stating that he avoided not only ‘growing up’ but also avoided assuming any given ‘age’.
Peter Pan said he ran away because he ‘heard father and mother … talking about what I was to be when I became a man’.
The Clinic queries his reply to this question. Earlier, Peter Pan said that he ‘had no mother’.
Perhaps he meant that he had ‘no mothering’.
One can have a ‘mother’ but escape ‘mothering’. Especially in these times of day ‘care’ and other parking stations for children.
In other generations the time given to ‘mothering’ has varied. I do not seem to recall any mothering at all.
Curiously, Adorno points out that in mythology, the heroes who represent the emancipation of the human from fate always lost their mothers.
Peter Pan lived with ‘the lost boys’—children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to Neverland to defray the expenses.
They are children who are freed of adult supervision.
‘The children who fall out of their perambulators’ are neglected children, under-socialised children who probably grew up with an attention deficit.
Some of the lost boys (and girls) become decadents and puddle along in debauchery and flighty irresponsibility but are generally OK.
Some are more than usually creative but it is my experience that they are not to be relied upon to help with the assembly of IKEA furniture.
In 1911, they would say of someone who was not particu
larly diligent about maturity and its responsibilities that he ‘jumped on the back of the wind a lot’.
Peter Pan could ‘jump on the back of the wind’.
Jumping on the back of the wind isn’t all that easy, either.
‘I don’t ever want to be a man,’ Peter says to Wendy with passion. ‘I don’t want to be a man … if I was to wake up and feel there was a beard!’
I disagree with some at the Clinic who believe that in this statement Peter Pan was referring to waking up some fine morning and feeling a beard on the person beside him.
I believe that he meant that he would hate to awake and find that he, himself, had grown a beard.
I commiserate with Peter Pan and the question of beards. I am one of those men who does not rejoice in their beard or the growth of hair on the body.
I argue that he was not wishing to be ‘a silly who does not know what he is’, as Wendy would put it. He was wanting to avoid not gender, but adulthood as defined by his times.
Wendy attempts to coax Peter to adulthood. ‘Peter,’ said Wendy, who is described in the book as the comforter, ‘I should love you in a beard.’
‘Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man,’ replies Peter.
I have always found the ‘keep back, lady’ statement by Peter Pan as being uncharacteristic. This, in my experience, is not the talk of a fairy.
Perhaps Peter did not want to enter manhood because he was tired of having a doctor holding his balls and asking him to cough.
To return to the issues. The unfaced question which wanders through the thinking of our society, and which is tearing apart the Clinic, is of what is maturity constituted and, together with this, the value of ‘keeping alive’ the child within, and whether this is possible.
Some people believe there is value in holding on to the ‘childlike’ capacities and bemoan the loss of them in their own children or in themselves.
Why do so many parents see the drawings of their children, for instance, as a supreme act of creation? Some parents even praise ‘traced’ drawings, which were forbid den in my childhood as fraudulent.
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