A Radical Notion
© Melina Magdalena (2006)
Sex in the Brave New World
Remember Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World" (originally published in 1932), where the State controlled and managed human fertility and human sexuality? With the implementation of a strict routine of medication, people were encouraged and incited to have casual sex regularly, albeit in a sterile, factory-like manner without the accompanying neuroses of human relationship. Children were created in bottles and raised by the State, a system which is echoed today in the drive to have babies and toddlers cared for in institutions while their mothers go out to work.
As reviewer James Schellenberg writes in ‘Challenging Destiny: Science Fiction and Fantasy Reviews http://www.challengingdestiny.com/reviews/bravenew.htm (viewed on-line, 1/7/2006) “Huxley is worried about a state of mind … that puts happiness into a materialistic paradigm and then uses it as a method of control, justified as what the people want.”
In his review, Schellenberg reflects on the character of Lenina, who befriends the Savage, a man who was brought up outside of the System, and how “… Lenina and her sexuality often stand for everything that is wrong and corrupt and vacuous about this system …” Could it be that Lenina appears so grotesque in contrast with real live human women, for many of whom the relational aspects of sex are just as, if not more important than the physical?
As far as female sexuality is concerned, it’s important to realize that Huxley wrote the book before The Pill technology emerged and western climates changed from one of sexual restraint and limitation, to promiscuity and permissiveness. After The Pill came on the scene, males were to rejoice that there was now nothing to hold back the tide of female sexual energy. Females were to fully embrace their new freedoms and give their bodies over to sex wherever, whenever and with whomever.
It’s this technology that mirrors Huxley’s vision of fulfilling people’s materialistic desires and calling this happiness. By eliminating the fear that sexual activity will lead to the making of babies, marriages and families; by buying and ingesting The Pill, women can avoid the need to bind their male sexual partners into long-term financial contracts which are designed to ensure that their offspring are adequately provided for.
I first read the book as a sixteen year old, and recall sensing how isolating and lonely an existence would be, in those individual cells, each inhabited by a single person, where one’s interactions with others were segregated, measured and regulated so that no two people could ever know each other. I thought it was cruel.
What’s the point in living at all?
Something that Huxley managed to express very well in his book was the development of a societal aversion towards children, which has also become a strong element in contemporary western society. Just as the relationships between castes and sexes were managed and regulated, in Brave New World, so were the relationships between generations. So much so, that old people delivered themselves to be killed, because nothing but their physical remains were of any further use to society.
The question of ‘what’s the point in living at all?’ is central to Huxley’s vision. It’s a common question, first encountered by most disenchanted adolescents, and revisited from time to time as we are pummelled against life’s challenges. Why do humans continue to reproduce so mindlessly? Who says that the proper way to live is to go to school, get a job, marry and raise a family, play with your grannies and die? Why bother? Where does it get you? What does it get you? You can’t take it with you when you die.
Is it just a matter of grabbing at pleasures where they arise, and damn the consequences? Should we all just make a pact to look after ourselves and let future generations do the same? Should we humans commit mass suicide, and leave the planet to the innocent and more deserving?
Bestowing of Meaning
John Wyndham’s "Consider her Ways" (1959) is another book of speculative fiction in which society is sharply divided into castes, and the role of women is explored. In his vision, children are borne only by particular women, whose elevated role as Mother begins with conception and ends with birth (a vision recently echoed in the cloning film ‘the Island’, although for Wyndham, the cycle repeats and doesn’t end with the killing of the woman immediately after she gives birth).
I find the preoccupation of these two male writers with the role of women and childbirth quite fascinating. Wyndham’s book goes so far as to posit a manless society. Heinlein is another whose writing to me displays a great deal of misogyny, in which women are generally relegated to the undignified role of the sexually objectified.
The feminist speculative utopias I have read, including "Herland" (originally published in 1915), "The Demeter Flower" (Rochelle Singer, 1980), "Woman on the Edge of Time" (1976) and "Door into Ocean" (Joan Slonczewski, 1986) posit societies in which the begetting and raising of children are natural, conscious, valued and central aspects of the communities they describe.
In these feminist novels, the problem of men and the nature of man is a central theme. Is this simply a foil for the preoccupation of male novelists, for the nature and role of women? Why is motherhood so central to the women novelists and for the men, a medical problem at best, and a neurosis at worst?
Is it significant, that in researching this article, I came across a web-page by the fundamentalist Christian Right, which denounced all feminist speculative fiction? (Clear Goal for Utopia, by John and Clara Godwin, see ‘Feminist Utopias’ http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Publications/Utopia/utopia1wa1.htm viewed on-line, 2/7/2006).
Funnily enough, it is the spiritual haves who tend to reproduce with far more fervour than the spiritual have-nots. Leaving aside the obvious religious reasons for this (the meek shall inherit the earth; raise up your armies to conquer the infidel; bear sons so that you shall be rewarded in heaven) I wonder whether the confidence to reproduce also stems from a conviction that it is in relating, that human endeavour acquires a significance that elevates it from the mundane, physical and mechanical, to something more magical and sacred? Humans who relate to something bigger than themselves – whether that be Gaia, God, a Higher Self, Christ, Wilderness or a set of Deities – are automatically in a relationship with the rest of the world that non-believers lack.
It is true that we ourselves are the bestowers of meaning on every aspect of our lives, and that without bestowing such meaning, there is little point in anything, except to do our little but in maintaining the status quo and holding up the power structure.
The Baby Bonus
Indeed in Howard’s Australia, the cost of children is high on the government’s agenda. Women are now being paid thousands of dollars to bear children. Only future generations can justify the actions of past generations. Unless we have children to be born in hospitals and then go to child care and then school and then university and eat and play and consume and do their bit to maintain the economic cycle of production and consumption, we might as well all lie down and die. There’s no point at all.
Howard’s disdain for cultural and artistic expression as a basis for meaningful human endeavour is easy to explain away because in these domains, the causal relationships between production, consumption and profit are not so easily characterized. Contrast this with his so-called passion for sport, where sport is not just a game of winning and losing, but entails much value-adding in terms of media interests, advertising, and a myriad of sport-related product-lines and it is obvious that his enthusiasm is purely capitalist. I’ve seen no evidence of any vision beyond the level of spiritual manager and bureaucrat. Howard’s policies inspire nothing, but the oft-thwarted pursuit of material happiness.
Would Australian women keep having babies if they weren’t being paid to do so? It’s clear to me that Huxley’s ‘soma’ is money. Money is where the power lies; not in human relationship, not in cultural expression, not in community and certainly not in family. Apparently, people will do anything they are told to do, as long as they are paid for it. Money is a scarce commodity. More money is in the hands of a few powerful people, than the rest of the money that is sprinkled like poppy seeds amongst the general population.
How racist is Howard’s agenda? Is it just to balance the rampant reproduction of the newly arrived to our shores, that he wants the more well-established women of Australia to have babies? His welfare policies further enlighten those who look for the hidden agenda. Surely it’s not a general call to reproduce, (though the Baby Bonus beckons at the quick-fix needy poor).
Wouldn’t Howard prefer to populate the country just with the offspring of certain individuals – well-educated, heterosexual professionals with property? Wouldn’t this be fair enough? These are surely the parts of society most able to raise healthy, clever, contributing children for the next generation. But think a little deeper – what will these children do when they are grown up? Our society is not egalitarian, even though the Baby Bonus goes to all sectors of society. What about the children of the poor, the working-class, the refugees and migrants? The children of the middle class will grow up to be the managers and teachers of the milling millions whose parents were less able.
Ultimately, what is wrong with this? Isn’t this the way the world has always worked? It’s hardly radical; hardly a departure from the norm. We all know society is divided into the haves and the have-nots. We all know how desperate the have-nots become, how they struggle and strive to change their status. Perhaps they will be seduced into thinking the Baby Bonus will enable them to achieve that step up the ladder to financial security?
I see Howard’s vision as manipulative, grandiose, narrow and disappointingly shallow. It attracts the support of the many precisely because of its conservatism. How often do we stop to ask the question ‘what’s the point in living at all?’ In our secular world, we do everything we can to avoid such questions. It is when we are brought face to face with them, if we lose our partner, lose a child, lose our job, that we finally admit that these questions have been in hot pursuit like the Greek Harpies, and have hounded us for years to pay attention to them.
Motherhood minus the father
In my world, I have come to question the role of fathers as anything but sperm donors. That is an extreme and radical statement, and I don’t wish to detract from the families in which mothers and fathers both play important and contributing roles in the raising of children. However, I know of so many families with absent fathers.
In these families, The Pill has not saved anyone from reproduction. It has not liberated the women from their pre-ordained role as mother. It has not rescued the children from lives of unstinting poverty. And the people in these families are obliged to fulfil Howard’s expectations for how single mothers ought to live.
These women, these mothers have not borne their children in order to get the Baby Bonus or the Pension (a.k.a. Parenting Payment Single). In the majority of cases, their children were conceived within heterosexual relationships that went wrong. These mothers, girlfriends and wives never anticipated the depths to which their sexual relations with men would take them.
Their children have been deserted by the men who fathered them. The wrongdoings of these men have resulted in long-term disadvantage for their children, which could be redressed either by enforcing some kind of contractual arrangement between the parents which made the father liable to support the children until they were financially independent, or by the government recognizing the value of motherhood and supporting the mother to raise the children in dignity until they were financially independent.
Though it purports to, Australia does neither of these very well. Instead, mothers and children are left in the lurch, perched upon a fragile twig of welfare offerings, struggling to maintain work and family balance, fighting to fulfil their side of the mutual obligation equation, when single-parent families are never recognized within the government schemata of how Australians ought to live, and the Government makes them beg for every cent they get. The double standards are never acknowledged, which is why it is so frustrating to take these issues into a community which meets them with the blank face of hostility and misunderstanding.
So I say to those women who want to have children and do not have male partners who will support them in raising those children – you won’t gain anything by not having them, so you may as well find some sperm and inseminate yourselves without agonizing over the lack of a father in your future child’s life. Eliminate him from the equation. Do not expect anything from him, whether financial, emotional or sexual. Give him no claim on the child. He’ll only want that if he feels it is to his economic advantage to use his biological bond in order to evade fiscal responsibility.
That is my radical notion. In my feminist utopia, children are conceived and brought into a world of love. Their mothers are valued and the work they do in raising them is recognized and rewarded so that families live comfortably and productively.
Children are cherished and educated by the community. No man or woman abducts, rapes and murders an eight-year-old in a public toilet. No priest molests choirgirls and altar boys. No brothers, uncles, cousins, step- or grandfathers or foster parents abuse the children under their protection and care.
In my feminist utopia, women are not ‘just’ mothers. They are expected and encouraged to contribute to their community in every way they can. Everything they do demonstrates what important, valued contributors they are, to the society of which they are part.
