Sex, Politics, and Operation Dildo Blitz
Sex, Politics, and Operation Dildo Blitz
I planned on posting an essay on a different subject today. In fact, I had another essay all written and revised, waiting for whatever fame and fortune a weekly blog post by a writer well out on the cultural fringes can expect these days. That essay is going to be cooling its heels for another two weeks before it gets its day in the sun, though. A comment I made during a recent speaking gig, which was duly recorded and posted to the internet, sparked quite a little tempest in a couple of minor online teapots. I don’t follow social media, but I have friends who do, and several of them happened to tell me about certain saliva-flecked rants responding to the comment.
If people want to denounce me, of course, I have no problem with that. I’ve criticized various people fairly harshly over the twenty years I’ve been blogging, and it would hardly be fair for me to object if others decide to return the favor. Nor do I have any intention of taking back the comment that has some people on the far left spluttering through yet another predictable tantrum just now—in fact, quite the contrary. Less biased readers, however, may reasonably want to know the thinking behind my suggestion that a certain recent protest against the Trump administration reveals a great deal more about the psyche of many of the women involved than they likely want to bare to the world.
This is why we’re going to take a break from the current discussions on this blog and talk about Operation Dildo Blitz.
Operation Dildo Blitz? Why, yes. That was the official name of a protest this April in which crowds of protesters flung an assortment of artificial penises at various buildings associated with things they don’t like about the Trump administration. As protests go, you have to admit, this one wasn’t exactly a stroke of genius. A good protest should impress the government officials it seeks to influence, and the passersby it hopes to recruit to the cause, with the importance of the grievances the protest is about and the seriousness of the people who want the government to redress those grievances.
Flinging rubber sex toys at government facilities doesn’t further either of these goals. For that matter, I can’t imagine any way in which officials looking out through windows at this eccentric spectacle were inconvenienced at all, or any way that the passersby who witnessed it were even slightly impressed. Bewildered and amused? Sure, but that isn’t exactly helpful to the cause.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t anything like the only way that the protests against the Trump administration have taken on a sexualized tone. Consider the way that the most common profane English word for sexual intercourse gets used so relentlessly in these protests. It’s gotten to the point that it’s almost surprising to hear Trump’s name from protesters without that overfamiliar monosyllable tacked to the front of it, and plenty of graffiti, signs, and the like follow suit. Our culture’s habitual use of that word is strange enough as it is—the next time you hear it used, imagine that it was replaced by the phrase “enjoy passionate sex with” and see what that does to the meaning—but that’s even more true than usual in this case.
When people behave in weirdly counterproductive ways, it’s often useful to stop and try to figure out what’s behind their actions. As depth psychologists have been pointing out for a very long time, it’s precisely when behavior doesn’t make obvious sense that it offers a window on what’s going on below the surface of the individual or collective psyche. Gregory Bateson, whose brilliant essays on the etiology of mental illness have been shamefully neglected by today’s pharmaceutical-obsessed psychologists, pointed out that even the most seemingly bizarre utterances of schizophrenics make perfect rational sense if you realize that they’re attempts to discuss things that their families of origin insist must never be mentioned. Elaborate personal symbolisms that other family members can’t or won’t interpret correctly allow the schizophrenic to say the unsayable in a roundabout manner.
Treat Operation Dildo Blitz as a dream or a neurotic fantasy, in turn, and it isn’t at all hard to catch its inner meaning. To begin with, in today’s America, nearly the only context in which a woman hands a straight man one of her sex toys is when she’s asking him to use it on her. Yet the symbolism goes deeper than this. In the sort of magical thinking that pervades the deep places of our minds and survives in folk custom, to cast something at someone is to communicate the properties of the thing cast onto the person on the receiving end of the act. We still throw rice at newlyweds because rice grains, being seeds, are symbols of fertility. This applies just as well in the present case. The Trump administration is not exactly lacking in over-the-top machismo, and so it raises interesting questions about why people protesting it would want to pelt symbols of the regime with emblems of virility.
There’s still another level to all this. Dildos, vibrators, and other sex toys have become the hallmark of the independent, assertive, self-sufficient feminist woman in today’s America. Go visit sex shops that cater to women, read online or print media aimed at an urban middle class female audience, or check the collective consciousness of the liberal end of American female culture in any other way that comes to mind, and you’ll find these objects portrayed relentlessly in such terms. What does it mean when hundreds of women from that demographic are throwing their sex toys at government buildings, as though offering up these emblems of their sexual autonomy as sacrifices on the altar of Donald Trump?
It means that a process long under way has taken another step, and thereby hangs a tale.
One of the reliable constants of human sexual behavior is that dominance and submission are wired deep into the sexual side of the psyche. These don’t necessarily take the heavily scripted form you find in the BDSM scene these days, not least because outside that scene, most people like to take on both roles in a fluid interplay of assertive and receptive behavior. Even the most macho guy, for example, will be delighted if now and again a woman with whom he’s in a sexual relationship shoves him back onto the bed and pounces like a hungry tigress. One of the issues that makes sexual life challenging in today’s America is that people in the urban professional middle class by and large don’t have that freedom any more.
To understand why, we’re going to have to talk a little about rape. I certainly don’t dismiss the seriousness of that issue; my late wife Sara was a rape survivor, and early on in our relationship I spent a lot of time helping her deal with the aftereffects of some very traumatic experiences. It’s also true, and appalling, that women who are subjected to violent rape have a dismally poor likelihood of getting any legal redress for those ghastly experiences. Many US police departments effectively roundfile reports of rape, and the likelihood of a conviction even for rapists caught in the act is very low.
Every rule has its exception, and that’s as true in this wretched state of affairs as in any other. Within the urban middle class and the universities that feed into it, accusations of rape take on an enormous force, as if to make up for the criminal justice system’s failings. Women in those classes who suffer violent rape still generally can’t get successful prosecutions, but a man’s career can be destroyed by the claim that he is a rapist, even if all the evidence indicates that he’s innocent of the charge. “Believe all women” retains its power in that setting, if in no other, and men are well aware of this. That’s why so many men in that class have simply stopped dating altogether, and go out of their way to avoid being alone with a woman even for the duration of an elevator ride. It’s simply not worth the perceived risk.
Those men who still nerve themselves up to date women from liberal urban middle class backgrounds very often practice the dating equivalent of defensive driving, going out of their way to avoid anything even remotely assertive unless it’s carefully negotiated beforehand. It’s reached the point, in fact, that many young men on university campuses will not have sex with a woman unless she’s willing to let him videorecord her in advance, saying that she consents to have sex with him, and detailing exactly those acts she’s willing to do.
Thus women of that class rarely have the freedom to enjoy any of the more receptive and submissive sexual roles; they have to be the initiators, the dominant partners, the boundary-setters and enforcers, all the time. This is very much of a piece with the entire panoply of identities and behaviors that have been manufactured by the media and used to market products and services to women of that class. They’re supposed to be independent, self-sufficient, assertive, and self-actualizing all the time, never relaxing into a more receptive role even for a little while—and especially not in relationships with men. This kind of rigid behavioral pattern is difficult for anyone to sustain, especially in the teeth of natural human urges, and it likely plays a significant role in the sky-high rates of diagnosed emotional problems and psychiatric prescriptions among women of the class we’re discussing. It’s the same syndrome that drove so many men of the same class to heart attacks and nervous breakdowns in the middle years of the 20th century.
Inevitably, any such imbalance drives the return of the repressed, and we’ve already had some whopping demonstrations of that in recent years. The astonishing commercial success of E.L. James’s novel Fifty Shades of Grey a few years back is a case in point. It’s not actually a novel about dominance and submission; instead, it’s a novel of fantasies about dominance and submission. I’ve been told that people in the BDSM scene despise it, partly because it’s so shoddily written, but also because its portrayal of BDSM is absurdly distorted. Nonetheless its sales, mostly to urban middle class women, were astoundingly high. That shows clearly enough what was moving through the crawlspaces of our collective sexual consciousness at that time.
Romance fiction is another sensitive thermometer of the same type. I’ve commented here before that romance novels used to embrace a very wide range of possible relationships between men and women. Twentieth-century romance writers such as Georgette Heyer rarely used the same pattern twice, dancing around all the variations of assertive and receptive behavior two people in love can explore. That’s changed in recent decades. The great majority of today’s romance novels feature a powerful, dominant bad boy, whose cruelly handsome face, rippling muscles, and boldly assertive acts in and out of bed reduce the heroine to quivering jelly. Once again, it’s not hard to see which way the wind is blowing.
That leads us, of course, to bad boy syndrome in the world of actual dating. Yes, I know that quite a few women of the same urban middle class demographic we’re discussing respond with outrage if you mention that a great many women in that demographic say they prefer sensitive, gentle men, but won’t actually date them, preferring to go home with bad boys from the local singles bar. Nonetheless, this is quite true, and you can prove it for yourself by the simple expedient of going to the singles bar of your choice next Friday night, buying a drink, sitting back in a corner, and watching the antics of the other people present. For quite a significant number of women these days, there’s a wide gap between the men they think they ought to want and the men they actually want, and it goes in the same direction we’ve already discussed.
The irony reaches a white-hot intensity in the subculture of MAGA dating. (That’s the least impolite phrase I’ve yet encountered for this curious habit.) It’s been a source of wry amusement to me for many years that so few people realize that nothing is ever really private on the internet, and will blurt out the most embarrassingly personal details on online forums that anyone with a decent search engine and a talent for search strings can find with a few dozen keystrokes. There’s a whole subculture of liberal women who go out of their way to date men who support Trump, and talk about it with other women who share the same kink.
The common thread in those examples I’ve read is the same one we’ve been following all along in this post. These women are attracted to MAGA men because the latter are assertive and dominant—that is to say, stereotypically masculine. They slip off to places where they can meet such men in much the same spirit that Southern men who don’t want to admit that they’re gay drive across the county line to find a gay bar and, in the euphonious phrase I’ve heard Southern women use, “get shot by the bun gun.”
It’s probably necessary to pause here and head off a misunderstanding that gets deployed far too often in discussions like these. No, I’m not saying that all women, or all women in the liberal urban middle classes, secretly want to be dominated and therefore should be relegated to the kitchen, or any such drivel. I’m saying that most women, like most men, naturally move back and forth from assertive to receptive roles in emotional and sexual relationships. Are there exceptions? Sure. There are people of both sexes who are only comfortable in one or the other set of roles, but they’re in the minority. Most of us enjoy the dance.
The problem, again, is that sexual culture in today’s America demands that women in the liberal urban middle class demographic behave according to the stereotype of the liberated, assertive, self-sufficient feminist, even when staying stuck in that role leaves them feeling emotionally and sexually unfulfilled. It backs up that demand by threatening men of the same class with career-ending consequences if they take on an assertive role with women, even if they have every reason to think it’s consensual at the time. That, in turn, gives male dominance and female submission the thrill of the forbidden, and leads to a whole series of attempts to satiate that forbidden desire, either via surrogate forms such as fiction or in the kind of shamefaced, hole-and-corner way that the violation of sexual norms generally involves.
It also leads, in turn, to weird forms of acting out the forbidden in a symbolic way. That’s why in Victorian England, when men of the respectable classes were expected to be masterful, self-controlled, and always dominant over women, the single most common kink among men—“the English vice,” as it was called everywhere else in Europe—was being flogged by women. While there were noble exceptions, the identity of most English men of the respectable classes was so deeply entangled in the caricature of masculinity pushed on them by their culture that they couldn’t even conceive of trying to loosen up and enjoy the normal give and take of active and receptive interactions between members of a couple.
Instead, they engaged in the same sort of symbolic gesture on display in Operation Dildo Blitz, where hundreds of women flung emblems of virility in the notional direction of America’s number one bad boy. That, in turn, was what lay behind my comment that a remarkable number of liberal women these days act as though they desperately wish that Donald Trump would bend them over his knee, yank down their panties, and spank their bare bottoms until they reach orgasm. I don’t happen to know how many of them actually fantasize about this, though the popularity of MAGA dating suggests that it may not be a small number. Yet something of this sort is clearly present in the subconscious minds of a great many women who publicly insist they loathe Donald Trump with every fiber of their being.
One final point probably needs making. I don’t have a solution to suggest for the tangled mess of dysfunctional behaviors and stifled desires I’ve sketched out in this little essay. I don’t think there is one. Over the last century and a half, the Western world has passed through a dramatic transformation in sex relationships, in which the subordination of women that’s been standard in more or less every other society all through recorded history has largely if not entirely broken down. So vast a change will necessarily have impacts that unfold over a timescale of many generations, and some of those impacts aren’t going to be any fun to resolve.
It would be helpful if men and women alike could be honest with themselves when their desires and their ideologies come into conflict. It would be even more helpful if they could be honest with their lovers. Still, honesty has never been our species’ strong suit, and I don’t expect that to change any time soon. We’ll just have to keep trudging along, dealing with things as best we can, and trying to find ways to make relationships a little less difficult in the years ahead.
Source: Ecosophia
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