THE PLANK DECEMBER 12, 2007
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Ugh. There is a LOT to say about David Gelernter’s article “Instant Sex: And the sad demise of romantic love” in this week’s Weekly Standard. But most of it is really just too obvious. Gelernter’s tired sad old point is that premarital sex, because it limits the “huge power of blocked passion,” limits one’s ability to fall in love. (Of course, this only applies to women, who, we are told, must be virgins to fall in love. For men, on the other hand, as he points out in possibly the most repellant sentence I’ve read this year, “Experience suggests ... that a few casual, premature sexual encounters at the whorehouse level, with persons you couldn’t possibly love and never count on meeting again, can’t do much damage to your capacity for romantic love.” See you in Amsterdam, Dave!)
But what’s particularly awful about this article is that it doesn’t attempt to base itself even on the dubious science studies and anecdotal evidence that people like Wendy Shalit and Laura Sessions Stepp use. Instead, Gelernter relies on Great Authors – Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and James Joyce. And here is where he runs into some real difficulties. Perhaps Gelernter never got that far in Ulysses, but can he have forgotten that Joyce is the great celebrator of the (decidedly nonmarital) female orgasm? Austen, fine, no premarital sex in Austen. But Austen is scarcely about romantic passion of the flowery Harlequin variety Gelernter seems attached to – her novels are about the transactional, rational, social bonds of marriage. When “the heightened state of consciousness” that Gelernter is frothing on about occurs in Austen's novels, it’s generally portrayed as a dangerous and antisocial force, as with Marianne's love for the unstable Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. The dichotomy Gelernter is creating would be entirely alien in Austen’s world – not to mention that a world in which an unmarried woman past the age of 25 is a social leper is (good Lord, one hopes) not one to which even Gelernter would consign us.
Finally, Shakespeare. Even if we skip over the fact that Shakespeare was writing in, ahem, the 16th and 17th centuries, a time when most women lived their short lives as essentially chattel to be bought and sold (again, I very much hope that Gelernter isn’t dreaming up some happy paradise of dowry payments, forced virginity testing, 25 percent death rates for pregnancies, etc.), Gelernter is getting it all wrong. He writes that Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It represent a chaste passion leading into marriage, untempered by social pressures to “hook up” (in the lexicon that Sessions Stepp has made so awkward and unsexy that perhaps she may finally succeed in ending the practice as well): “... peer pressure used to support the girl who said no ... not the young man and his burning blood. ... None of her girlfriends, boyfriends, or elders were telling Rosalind, ‘Go ahead; everybody does it.’ Nor could Orlando have told her, ‘If you don’t, Celia will.’ And no officious busybodies were handing out birth-control pills to young women in the Forest of Arden.”
Well, no they weren’t – because the pill wasn’t invented yet. However, condoms made from animal intestines were, and you can be sure they were widely used in a time when STDs like syphilis generally meant death. As for peer pressure and pressure from men, it’s hard to know how to begin to answer that, given that easily the majority of poetry written during the Renaissance had the goal of persuading women to sleep with you without getting married ("gather ye rosebuds while ye may," and so forth). The tactics were just as transparent and occasionally nasty as they are now, if not more so – sleep with me and I’ll write you a poem, sleep with me or you’ll get old before your time, etc. And the sex was just as premarital -- that was the whole point of it; married sex was slightly less fun when the idea of choosing your spouse was a fantasy played out on the stage, but rarely in real life.
To recap: the old days were simply worse than the new ones (and if Gelernter disagrees with that, I’ve got a 16th-century dentist I’d like to introduce him to). And literature makes a very poor expert witness, especially when you're twisting it to shore up already absurd arguments.
Update: My colleague Brad Plumer points out that Lydia and Wickham never quite make it to Gretna Green in Pride and Prejudice, so there is
premarital sex in Austen. But, of course, that episode in Pride and
Prejudice is about the dangers of young passion as opposed to tempered,
socially acceptable courtship -- not about how premarital sex ruins
what would otherwise be a happy idyll of chaste romance. Lydia and
Wickham are destined to bad ends no matter when she loses her virginity.
--Britt Peterson
11 comments
NO PREMARITAL SEX IN JANE AUSTEN?
Sense and Sensibility : Willoughby knocks up Col. Brandon's ward.
Pride and Prejudice : Lydia runs off with Wickham (and Austen makes clear they aren't bundling).
Mansfield Park : Maria runs off with Henry Bertram (ditto).
Emma : Harriet Smith has a small illegitimacy problem.
Persuasion : Mrs. Clay ends up living with the younger Mr. Elliot.
As far as Shakespeare is concerned : was Gelertner asleep when Mercutio and the Nurse talked bawdy nonstop (well, until Mercutio died, anyway) in Romeo and Juliet?
- daved63
December 12, 2007 at 3:22pm
Gelernter rightly notes how sex and "falling in love" square off. Then he bets on the wrong fighter.
Holding off on sex because you want to have a fruitful, positive relationship with another human being makes as much sense as going to the supermarket when you're hungry; you'll end up with a basket full of crap you'll never eat, much of which will turn fuzzy in the crisper.
"Falling in love" is the culprit here. It is, in fact, selfishness of the highest order: its purpose is to validate the self-as-director-of-Life's-screenplay. It has nothing to do with loving another person as he or she really is, which cannot be done adequately until we know them well, which takes time--too long for "falling in love."
Love someone without knowing them? How arrogant.
Fucking somebody, conversely, is an efficient, easy (assuming one is honest about it) way to get to know them (and they us). It's also a lot more fun than couples therapy, blogging, church, work, school, flu shots, and looking for parking (among 3,517,889 other activities). Sex, in fact, can be the cure for falling in love; lust can keep a relationship alive while the infatuation dries up and falls off, like a scab. And if we can survive a bout of infatuation, there's hope we can learn to love each other.
It's a privilege to love another human being. Gelernter shouldn't be so cavalier about it, to equate it so facilely with his shallow, solipsistic "falling in love." Nor should he disparage perhaps the best way to accomplish it.
- williamyard
December 12, 2007 at 3:57pm
Somebody at TNR might send Gelernter copies of Measure for Measure or Romeo and Juliet, for starters. Also, it's not like the institution of marriage goes uncriticized in most of Shakespeare. And finally, the idea of holding Polonius up as a model of good parenting is kind of ridiculous.
- aazlant
December 12, 2007 at 4:17pm
GARBAGE IN....What happens when you let a professor of computer science write a magazine article about romantic love? If the computer science professor is David Gelernter, you get a sentence like this one, explaining why it's wrong to take the...
- Anonymous
December 12, 2007 at 6:17pm
For some reason--perhaps simple Right solidarity--neocons never allow any distance between them and theocons on any issue.
- henderstock
December 12, 2007 at 6:35pm
Neocons rarely allow any distance between themselves and theocons.
- henderstock
December 12, 2007 at 6:55pm
Kudos to Britt Peterson on a very effective riposte- cum-blanket condemnation of priggy chauvinism.
_There, now it's in the directories again_.
- teplukhin2you
December 12, 2007 at 8:07pm
Sorry for the double post. Take your pick.
- henderstock
December 12, 2007 at 11:05pm
Political Animal, you beat me to it. A computer science professor on romantic love...
- ClumsyMohel
December 13, 2007 at 2:56am
As I recall, there is at least one Shakespearean play with a couple who had anticipated the wedding...Measure for Measure. And the one character who condemns them is the villain of the piece. [Whoops...somebody else also remembered that one.]
Still, the whole wingnut argument suggests some acquaintanceship with the bard:
"War and lechery, war and lechery. Nothing else holds fashion."
- AlanK
December 13, 2007 at 9:54pm
“But what’s particularly awful about this article is that it doesn’t attempt to base itself even on the dubious science studies and anecdotal evidence that people like Wendy Shalit and Laura Sessions Stepp use.”
No he doesn’t his argument is more complex than theirs
One of Gelernter’s points, as I read him, is that if one snacks all the time after a while you will be unable to appreciate (love) a good meal. This is the easy part.
It is only one of the points he makes, he also makes a distinction between “loving someone” and “falling in love or being in love, or romantic love for short.” He goes on to say that
“being in love is a protean state with remarkable characteristics that change the human mind forever. It underlies much of Western art, and certain aspects of religion. It is a painful but powerful state, a psychological crisis that used to be resolved (if you were lucky) by marriage--which breached the dam, released the built-up flood, and allowed a new and higher level of normality to return.”
Here he makes the Freudian point that repression is necessary for civilization to come into being at all. To him marriage is a vehicle for taming the passions and its dissolution threatens to deaden the senses as well as undo the civilizing effect of being in love.
“Instead, Gelernter relies on Great Authors – Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and James Joyce. And here is where he runs into some real difficulties.”
On the other hand, I agree with many of David Gelernter’s critics that his use of literature doesn’t help his case. But this is because literary evidence is a double edged sword and not because he is wrong.
In any case I would have used Denis De Rougemont’s “Love in the Western World” or even Stendhal’s long essay “On Love” and perhaps Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” instead of Shakespeare or Jane Austen. Even Proust, who shows the many sidedness of love, would have been preferable.
- jacksondyer
December 13, 2007 at 11:47pm