The Revolution Will (Not) Be Erotic

The Revolution Will (Not) Be Erotic ​

AH.com thread “Questions on American sexual mores”

NestorMakhno said:

This was inspired by a conversation I recently had with a British student, surprised how different America would actually be from the things he had heard about it in Europe. He said that he was surprised that we don’t constantly have orgies, or go around naked. Granted, it was more than he was used to, but how moderate it seemed in comparison to the media over there.

Given these circumstances, I might as well go through the major questions and errors for all the Europeans, Indians, Brazilians, etc. on the thread. Ask anything, and I(or other Americans) will be able to answer you on certain question. (Note, our experiences might differ depending on where we are.)

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UpNorth said:

Here in Ontario, will still have some confusion about what goes on, even after we were reunited with our fellow North Americans.

One of my comrades is a Philadelphian who isn’t bad looking. When she first moved to Oshawa, some idiot classmate of mine put his hands on her ass, thinking that American city girls are willing to fuck anything. (The guy got a broken nose)

A teacher from Detroit had to come in and tell us that believing in free love requires emphasizing consent and healthy relationships.

My friend from Philadelphia says that the stereotypes seen in movies only happen within very intimate circles. Outside of a beach or indoors, the most you’ll see is people not wearing their shirts.

By intimate, they mean “within a circle of people you trust.”

Is this the case in most American cities, or are places that are like what my crude classmate assumed?

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AVeryTrueDemocrat said:

Most of the country. We’ve had it drilled into our heads that consent is the key part of sex and that meaningless sexual encounters are detrimental to a healthy sex life and to forming relationships with people in the future.

I almost never see toplessness here. Occasionally, on a particularly hot day, but otherwise, we don’t have it here, but it and other forms of nudity are just normal, never really treated otherwise.

I do often wonder why people are ashamed of their own bodies.

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TotalBrit said:

I don’t feel ashamed of my body, but I have no desire to thrust it out and display it to every bloke on the street.

I mean, there is a certain specialness to sex and sexuality that I feel is ruined by the constant insistence of “sexual liberation”

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Skaelingking said:

I mean, she (?) has a point.

I mean, that whole “specialness” of sex argument is more a personal idea, no? If someone feels unashamed of their bodies, regardless of what others think, they ought to be allowed to express it. I really have no problem with it, and beyond the shock value, many would concur with me eventually.

Hell, I go through the newspaper rack each day, and find magazines full of swimsuit models. I’m sure they will accept the revolution once they know what it’ll entail.

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NestorMakhno said:

We acknowledge that sex is not something to be treated lightly or want to impose our choices on others.

However, the revolution was meant to destroy any artificial barriers between people. This include bourgeois sex mores. Revolution requires the full liberation of the people including from the confines of tradition

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EmpireOfEndlessMonologues said:

A lot of these misconceptions are actually really old. Way older than the internet. The idea that American girls were easy, that sexuality was totally free and uninhibited in America, that it’s a land of godless degenerates consumed with hedonistic pleasure; they were well worn tropes when I was a schoolboy over three decades ago.

These ideas could spread in a low information environment, before the world of interconnected information technology. And it took root based on a certain kernel of truth; the revolution overthrew a lot of old cultural practices and extolled a free individuality unburdened by customs about controlling sex to control the labor of people and the inheritance of property.

So the small number of people who travelled to the United Republics came back with a shallow understanding of the difference, and the tales spread. I remember learning the hard way in my uni days when I did a cultural exchange in Miami that it ain’t a fantasy land. My first serious relationship ended because I cheated on her with another woman. It was a consensual, polyamorous relationship, because not only did I get resentful when she brought up a potential liason with another man, I also slept with another woman without telling her or getting her approval before hand.

I really can’t say whether people had more or less sex there than in Britain. The biggest difference was that they talked about it in mixed company, and one did not really brag or tell tall tales about one’s exploits. Uranian and Sapphic relationships had lost most of their fetishistic edge. Casual group sex wasn’t unheard of, but realistically this was a bunch of university students. We didn’t have the time or energy left for something that complicated.

But by the time of the internet, when you could just go ask someone across the Atlantic if it was so, this was all firmly rooted. The American bathhouse is right after the oriental harem as part of the language of Othered eroticism, and that’s hard to change.

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Krishna said:

I remember during that dark age that there were EBC programs like “America: Land of Sin” or “Modern Sodom and Gomorrah”. Used to show us in school in fact. This was, of course, during the intersection of the high Cold War tensions of 80’s and the Video Nasties scare.

Of course, by the time I was in uni, it was more to the tone of “America” and “Cinema Verite”, which were more nuanced interpretations of America.

My main inquiry revolves more around history: Was the “First Cultural Revolution” really the intense period of insane bacchanalia and bizarre practices that it’s made out to be in history texts, or is that also an exaggeration?

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Ma’at said:

Oh totally exaggerated. There were a lot of conflicting things going on in the 1930s. On the one hand, you have things like the decriminalization of sodomy and sex work, the exultation of free love by major cultural institutions.

But on the other hand, and this really gets missed a lot overseas, there was a lot of sobering discussion about consent and sexual violence. Women had been fighting their subaltern status for a while now, and it was really breaking through. Beside’s Alfred Kinsey’s famous reports on sexuality, you also had Alice Paul writing Woman and Socialist Freedom , which was for us what The Second Sex would be in France and Britain almost twenty years later.

So while you have a major attack on reactionary cultural institutions, there’s also a simultaneous attack on male privilege, and not just in the workplace. And the socialization of domestic labor, public housing, and the children’s creches ensured that even mothers had basically no economic dependency on their husbands.

It was never neat or easy. A lot of people were getting exposed and struggle sessioned as sex creeps, and a lot of dinosaurs were wondering if this was going ‘too far’, just like the dirty laundry being drug out in European social media lately. Really, the bourgie creeps getting called out on social media have it easy comparatively. The process was a lot more violent here, though probably quicker and more final.

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Excerpts from Siobhan Odenkirk,Consent: A History(San Francisco, CA: Diana, 2010)*

A “second wave” of feminist discourse and agitation had been immanent at least since the Great War shattered faith in the gods of our Fathers. It had been simmering for a decade and a half; in the working women’s clubs, among mothers forming the cooperative crèches, in the sex workers’ unions battle against the pimps and police, and in the authors of the femme renaissance.

These separate threads intertwined and crystallized into a movement following the publication of Woman and Socialist Freedom. Alice Paul, a feminist intellectual turned communist fellow traveller, had been collecting material for what became WSF since at least 1915.

Paul had done her duty to her country, and found work in an armaments factory to do her part for the war effort. Long active in the struggle for women’s suffrage and other first wave feminist struggles, the experience in proletarian living profoundly affected Paul. A daughter of an influential family of Quaker intelligentsia, the time spent among working women tore back the veil between her privileged life and the real lives of working women, whose lives became ever cheaper amidst the drive for war economy.

The sadistic system of factory management was doubly insidious for working women in ways that could not be discussed in polite society. As the government began to criminalize idleness, the ration system clamped down on the availability of many basic necessities, and women were forced to support their families with their husbands off at war, sexual predation was endemic.

Paul herself never disclosed any personal accounts of such solicitations, contrary to the innuendos of her bad faith biographers. Her papers do, however, contain the tales of numerous other women who she worked with, whose stories she chronicled.
[…]
Paul’s attempts at exposing the abusers did not gain the kind of traction she had hoped. Bourgeois newspapers refused to print such accusations, and soon she found herself dismissed from her job at the H.R. & Sons Chemical Works. Journalists with the socialist press proved more receptive, and she began her long partnership with Max Eastman’s journal Masses.

During this partnership, Paul began to increasingly identify with the socialist cause. But her personal frustrations with the movement intensified following the Armistice. Her comrades often infantilized her, though not as much as the wives and lovers of male prominents.

Like most beautiful women in the movement, she was courted intensely by her male comrades. In rebuffing them all, she gained a reputation for being a Sapphist, frigid, a tease, or ‘barren’, an archaic pathologization of female sexual infertility. Whatever her actual inclinations were, she took them to her grave. Her real comrades all agreed that the cause always came first for Paul, and it ultimately her private feelings on romance and sexuality are unknown.
[…]
Paul began refining her thesis throughout the twenties, continuing to gather material from women’s groups. The prim Quaker rubbed shoulders with New York prostitutes in humility befitting the Nazarene, cataloguing their struggles against sexual violence. Other days, she would pry old friends from high society on their frustrations with their husbands dalliances and the lack of fulfillment in their own sexual relations with their husbands.

The most insidious of old customs, the old legal exemption in rape laws concerning a husband’s relations with his wife, would soon catch her special attention.

Amidst her research, Paul also did educational work, particularly with the Pioneer League. Most of what she discussed with young men and women would not be controversial even ten years later: reproductive health, contraception, respect and equality between the sexes. But in the 1920s it earned her several prosecutions for that ill-defined notion of “obscenity” until the United States courts finally gutted the old practice in 1926.
[…]
Paul’s own part in this period of revolution was in fact quite unremarkable, until 1934. She was one of many feminist theorists and activists working within the Workers’ Party, fighting for many of the same struggles. Paul delivered the final manuscript for Woman and Socialist Freedom to Pathfinder Press in Spring 1932. Originally slated for a September release, the book was pushed back to December and again to February 1933, to shift publishing resources towards immediate agitation goals.

Well anticipated among women’s groups and the party literati, the events of the Civil War would push back its publication until late 1934. Already hotly anticipated, for many women’s groups the delays only increased anticipation. And the violence of the revolution not only shattered the voices of tradition, it had greatly amplified the voices of women’s groups for their role in bringing the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat into power.

Thus, Woman and Socialist Freedom became one of the best sellers of 1934, blowing through its original print runs and requiring multiple subsequent runs. The suppression of the British publication for “Obscenity” only further boosted its popularity at home and among communists abroad.

It was also scathing, and not just to the dying old order. While her supplementals and critiques to Engels’ own account of the rise of patriarchy were well received, it is her frank discussion of how patriarchal values persist even among revolutionaries that caused scandal.

Perhaps most notable is her invocation of the Master-Slave dialectic in the relations between men and women. Men, she writes, “covet women for their desirability. Their beauty, their power of motherhood, is hidden behind the veil of mystery. But rather than reckon with his desires, man externalizes it to the bewitching other, who ensnares and inflames his appetites.”

In this regard, man both loves and fears woman. He at once exerts patriarchal violence through custom and law to control her labor, especially her reproductive labor, but also renders himself a powerless victim to her powers of femininity.

These customs may have had their origins in the control of reproduction, but the culture of patriarchy also reproduces itself for non-economic reasons. Even socialist men are molded in the custom of patriarchy. The task of the proletarian dictatorship must then be to undo centuries of inherited tradition, to break the yoke around the neck of women.
[…]
Woman and Socialist Freedom outlined some practical policy proposals, most of which were already the demands of major women’s groups: the socialization of domestic labor and the abolition of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor, the abolition of all legal barriers to women’s roles in the public sphere, the abolition of the private sphere and the male domination that occurred outside of the public eye.

These proposals received perhaps less attention than her frank discussions of female sexuality, particularly the Sapphic relationships that she celebrated. But perhaps most charged was the discussion of sexual consent.

For the first time, someone had publicly affirmed the wordless cries of all women (and men) who had been subject to sexual coercion and victimization without overt acts of battery. Rape was not merely the act of rogues in back alleys against women out alone at night. It was an act of violation of the body and autonomy of another, accomplished through fear, coercion, extortion and/or intoxication.

The anonymized, harrowing accounts of sexual violence and the widespread failure of men to even consider if their partners desired a sexual liason drove public controversy to a fever pitch. And among the victorious revolutionaries, the battle lines were never easy.

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Review: Lupita Torres, Alfred Kinsey and the Politics of Sex (Montgomery, NA: Eros Publishing, 1999)*

Kinsey was not a revolutionary. His own diary describes the muffled crack of the guns as he hid in his cellar in Cambridge during the tense streetfighting in the spring of 1933. But when the new order asserted itself, he found himself in amiable company

The world was changing in ways beyond anyone’s control. And in the swirling chaos of the Cultural Revolution, a professional entomologist with a sex research hobby could suddenly grab Archimedes’ lever and move the earth.

When classes resumed at Harvard in the Fall of 1933, Kinsey’s long-delayed “reproduction” class was the most popular on campus. It is here that Lupita Torres begins her discussion of Kinsey’s life work, flashing back as relevant to Kinsey’s earlier life. In this regard, Alfred Kinsey and the Politics of Sex is not so much a biography as it is a study of a man’s work.

The description is particularly vivid. Originally meant to be a class restricted to graduate students and married undergrads, the newly unrestricted course grows to the point where it must be moved to Harvard’s largest lecture hall. Students sit on the staircases and huddle in the corners.
[…]
All that was solid had melted into air. While Kinsey’s graduate student assistants worked to diligently translate documents from Hirschfield’s Institute in Berlin, Kinsey began collecting anonymized sexual histories from students, the seed for the major sexology surveys that would come.

For modern readers, such a spectacle seems almost absurd. But Torres also effectively communicates the rupture in social attitudes that such open conversation represented. Citing pervasive pre-revolution myths about sexuality and biology hammers this home, the most striking is the Western medical community’s dismissal of the existence of the female orgasm.

Such knowledge had always existed among some groups. But the epistemic dominance of patriarchal ideology had suppressed it, and counterexamples were stigmatized and pathologized. It is perhaps telling, Torres laments, “that the existence of feminine sexual pleasure, its celebration, had to be broken into mainstream episteme by a man. In this act, however laudable, we see the limits of the Cultural Revolution, which would have to be continually challenged and overcome.”
[…]
As Kinsey’s national celebrity grew, so did his attachment to the institutions of the Workers’ Party. While the nature of his research unnerved many of the old guard, Premier Foster and Culture Secretary [Louise] Bryant were keen on using it as a weapon against bourgeois culture.

Funding and support expanded his project beyond his wildest dreams. The small survey turned into a nation-wide project in cooperation with Proletkult, with dozens of research teams compiling data for it, and the establishment of a national Institute for Sexual Science., with Kinsey serving as its first director.

The controversial research conducted at the Institute is particularly worth mentioning. Torres discusses the inversion of controversy in contemporary critics versus period critics. In the 1930s and 40s, conservative critics of the Institute lambasted the scientific study of human sexual response in laboratory conditions, focusing on the use of volunteers from the local university population. This practice was likened to pornography, something that had not been illegal since the mid 20s but still nonetheless had an enduring cultural taboo against it.

What escaped criticism then has become the subject of retrospective criticism. Torres criticizes the Institute for supplementing the data by hiring sex workers. Largely buried within the data and not recognized in the time, the practice of employees of the Institute using public funds to liason with sex workers ostensibly for research purposes was highly common. In a period where sex workers were fighting for basic recognition and to assert their basic human dignity, the Institute’s reliance on their labor (and the unethical misuse of it for personal ends) while remaining silent on the issue until 1949 is a major black mark on the project.
[…]
The Institute’s most enduring legacy is how it reshaped public discourse on sex. From its establishment in 1937 onwards, Kinsey and the inner circle of cultural vanguardists at the institute effectively set the general line of the party on sexuality. The results of the research was widely promulgated in every one of the party’s organs, from the Pioneer League youth and schools to the military’s regulations on fraternization.

Institute publications argued forcefully for the destigmatization and acceptance of homosexual relations, transgender people, polyamory and norms of enthusiastic consent in sexual relations. The Institute’s influence shaped the general criminal code project, resulting in the universalization of adolescent exceptions to age-of-consent laws, denying parents the use of the law to enforce control of their child’s sexuality. It also greatly influenced the medical system’s permissive attitude towards contraception and abortion.

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Excerpts from Nina Hartley, Sex and Revolution, (New York: Bantam, 2007)
_
“Dirty Commies and Bathhouse Bacchanalia”_

As we have seen, the personal-political was hotly contested within the party apparatus. It was one thing to affirm on the shop floor or party cell, the revolutionary catechism renouncing bourgeois moralism amidst the ongoing insurrection against capital. It is quite another to put that into practice.

Like the Bolsheviks in 1918, the Workers’ Party would trash the entirety of the pre-revolution criminal code as a matter of course. This did not, as reactionaries feared, turn the country into a libertine bacchanalia overnight.

It did, however, mean that in the councils of soviet government, all aspects of conventional moralist control would be subject to rational scrutiny for the first time in living memory. The schwerpunkt for this battle would prove to be bathing.

Sanitation is the bedrock of civilization, and under the anarchy of capitalism, it was often neglected. Before the guns of the revolution had even gone cold, the municipal soviets in the new nation were beginning to reckon with the age-old bourgeois nightmare: the unwashed masses.

The typhus epidemic in the winter of 1933-34 spurred the Metropolitan Central Executive Council into action. The workers’ assemblies had been hashing out a program to deal with the city’s substandard housing, the squalor of overcrowded apartments, many without hot running water. As an interim step, the workers presented a demand for the creation of public sanitation facilities: communal laundries and baths. Existing commercial facilities would be expropriated, but they were deemed insufficient for the demands at hand.

These were simple programmatic demands, purely functionary, but they’d soon take on a life of their own. Among the city’s literati, the public’s need for adequate bathing facilities lit a fire of imagination. An op-ed in the 6 May 1934 issue of The Daily Worker injected utopianism into a simple health demand. Evoking the splendor of the ancient Roman thermae, writer Stanislav Kazan* transformed the issue into another prong in the fight against atomized bourgeois individuality.

Bathing was more than just about health and smelling pleasant. It was about liberated sociability, for man to get back in touch with his species-being long alienated by the artifice of bourgeois society.

Public baths had not been unknown in the United States. Various Turkish or Russian style baths had opened in New York and other cities to private clientele. But in the context of the 1930s, public bathing had been quickly transformed with Communist social purpose. The decadent paganism of mixed bathing could now be openly broached.

Amid an unusually hot summer, the Metropolitan government re-opened many Turkish baths as public facilities open to all, free of any charge. The response was chaotic. Lines stretched around the block, as many workers sought to enjoy the splendor of the finer things in life they’d been previously excluded from. Other public bathhouses in the city were to be renovated for communal style bathing.

It was, of course, far from uncontroversial. Even men and women who’d proudly championed the cause of nudism and ending bourgeois body shame found themselves quite timid in public, mixed bathing. Most accounts of the early days describe an almost silent awkwardness to the public bathing milieu.

But acclimatization happens slowly, and even the most strident of Church groups soon gave up the public protest of such pagan rites. The worst fears proved to be mostly unfounded. Even in the context of public communal bathing, men and women tended to bath together in single-sex groups, keeping respectful distance.

The new facilities established across Metropolis were lavish. The first opened, the Central Park Baths, was a huge neo-classical facility, as much recreational as it was sanitorial. Bathers would enter a large marble atrium, decorated with paintings and statues both new and old. Exercise rooms, for both traditional classes as well as free-form, stretched on both flanks of the atrium. Deeper in, changing and locker rooms flanked the halls. Bathers could exit directly to shower rooms to clean up before having their pick of cold, warm or hot baths. Bathers would socialize or soak in the filtered water, or take turns giving each other massages.

The image the Metropolitan Health Secretariat promoted was one of good clean fun, healthy and non-sexual. In the liberatory moment, the idea spread quickly throughout the urban areas. Of course, when it comes to human sexuality matters are never so simple. Efforts to hide away, restrain or repress sexuality fail in unpredictable ways. Just as in the stories of young French or British church-goers preserving their virginal purity by experimenting with anal sex, life finds a way.

Period propaganda for the new social bathing exudes sensuality while pretending sex doesn’t exist. One notable mural, reproduced in magazines across the country, depicts healthy young Revolutionary Army soldiers going to baths while on liberty. The nudity is purely artistic, no erections or vulvae in sight. But it is impossible to deny the homoeroticism in the athletic young men, like Adonis chiseled in marble, massaging each other’s aching backs.

And while most people went to the baths for sanitation and relaxation, and they weren’t the dens of sin that foreign reactionaries decried, “sin” did find a niche on the periphery.

Commercial activity moved into the periphery. Many cities would rent out space to small cooperatives such as barbers, salons, and a relative newcomer, the professional masseur/masseuse. The “full body” massage parlor quickly became a euphemism for a kind of socially acceptable sex work, providing plausible deniability for both worker and client.

Similarly, a kind of plausible-deniability hook-up culture developed around the baths. Since many were open all night to provide services for shift workers, teens and young adults could use the relatively quiet night shifts to find areas for private hookups in the lounges, steam rooms, and whirlpool tubs. Since late shift staffing usually fell to younger unmarried workers, this kind of arrangement was quietly facilitated.

The need for privacy is the dividing line between social nudity and sexual nudity. And while the development of new mores to govern this liberated form of self-expression took time and numerous missteps, what is often missed by reactionary accounts is just how strong that barrier really is in the UASR.

It’s been part of our culture for over seventy years now, and has become old-hat. The conventions have shifted. In the 30s, the baths were utilized by everyone, whether out of necessity or conscious political choice. Present day, convention dictates that children bathe at home, and the first time going to the public baths is a rite of passage into adulthood. Still, you will see everyone there, the good, the bad and the ugly.

On my last trip to the Central Park baths, the building was still as glamorous as it had been when it opened. After exercising and showering, I decided to lounge in the warm baths for a bit, and let my troubles soak away. To my right, two hairy old grandfathers were playing chess by the pool side, playfully kicking at the water as they moved their pieces. At the same time, a pair of friends had just gotten off work were circling about in the water in front of me. They were maybe twenty, talking gossiping innocently about their colleagues. The young man circled around her, hesitantly trying to nudge the conversation towards his romantic interest in her. Across the way, some construction workers, a little chubby around the waist, had already reached their two-drink limit, laughing heartily about the coming rugby game.

Nothing really would have changed had the participants been wearing swim trunks or bikinis. Contrast that to the image, oft used in Franco-British exploitation pornography, of the public baths filled with young, sexy hard bodies enraptured in drug-fueled orgies. Such a scene is hot on the heels of the old standbys of “hot young woman seduces the builder/delivery boy” and “powerful businessman seduces his secretary” in terms of popularity in their erotic cinema.

Such a fantasy persists, despite all the wide-eyed tourists finding the boring reality of social nudity, because it seems deep down, they still cannot conceive of people being naked together for any other reason than sex.

This is of course, not to say that our own history of erotica is perfect. Similar themes of domination and exploitation have their own sordid history here, but that is the subject of another chapter. But the point is that our tradition of social nudity is neither the squeaky-clean image in our public propaganda, nor is it sordid and oversexed. Like our clothed life, the experience varies wildly. Nudity is not essentially sexual, but it is pointless to protest that it has no relation to sexuality. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation