Down the Long Slide

By Nicholas Desai | Tuesday, April 10, 2007

There’s a lot of joy around about the sexual freedoms enjoyed at Dartmouth and other campuses. Someone wrote a piece in the Daily Dartmouth about there being too much sex and that this is unwholesome. “Unwholesome”? Michael Amico wrote a letter to correct:

…Dartmouth students are having threesomes, using sex toys, role playing, blowing each other in bathrooms and masturbating to all kinds of pornography because it’s fun, pleasurable and makes them happy. What’s “unwholesome” about that?

There’s also a certain kind of person for whom this joy prompts a search for reasons to feel bad, and this type should be encouraged to skip his women and gender studies class one afternoon and read the novella Whatever by Michel Houellebecq. The title’s not well translated: Extension du domaine de la lutte or, literally, Extension of the Domain of the Struggle is the original. It has flaws, like all books, but it wonderfully shapes a world that is both familiar and strange. In a way that recalls Dostoevsky, Houellebecq creates situations and characters different from those of most novelists; they seem outlandish, though they are frighteningly plausible and immediately recognizable, more so than stories that depict the ho-hum so as to capture “real life.” His is a world of TV dinners, cheap beer, fast food, information technology, mind-numbing pop music, and meaningless one-night stands, if only his nameless main character desired to wrangle one up. If there is a theme to the novella—which is a series of anecdotes, really—it is that sex has become like business. Sexual liberation promised that civilization, overrated and repressive, would relax and that what had been denied to previous generations encumbered by custom we’d get gratis: physical bliss. But it doesn’t work that way, his narrator thinks:

In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.

And what fork separates the two groups? Effort can help but ultimately there’s looks, dictated by DNA. If you were physically desirable at the dawn of the sexual revolution, bliss it was then to be alive. Houellebecq’s narrator imagines a character named Brigitte Bardot—not the sex object and film star, but “a porker and even a super-porker, with abundant rolls of fat gracelessly disposed at the intersections of her obese body…. the comparison with a sow forced itself on everyone in an inevitable and natural way.” Friendless, she is imagined by the narrator as going home every night to watch TV with her parents: “A dark room, and three beings united by the phototonic flux…” What does such a person make of the free sexual economy, what stories does she tell herself? She’s really in a bind, when you think about it.

Goaded on by sexual liberation (it was right at the beginning of the 80s, AIDS did not exist), she couldn’t make appeal to some ethical notion of virginity, obviously. On top of that she was too intelligent and too lucid to account for her state as being a product of “Judeo-Christian influence”—in any case her parents were agnostics. All means of evasion were thus closed to her. She could only assist, in silent hatred, at the liberation of others; witness the boys pressing themselves like crabs against others’ bodies; sense the relationships being formed, the experiments undertaken, the orgasms surging forth; live to the full a silent self-destruction when faced with the flaunted pleasure of others.

A professor of mine once said that the medievals distinguished envy from sheer covetousness in this way: you covet what you could have but don’t; you envy what you can never have. Envy’s only expression is delight in the fall of the fortunate. For some, envy and bitterness (a key word for Houellebecq) seem the inevitable outcomes of liberation. Another of his characters is the hideously ugly Raphaël Tisserand, a twenty-eight-year-old computer programmer, who enjoys moderate financial success, is obsessed with sex, and remains an incurable virgin. At a club, he by chance gets to dance with a nearly perfect physical specimen—for one song.

As soon as the last notes played the young girl rushed off towards a group of girls her own age. Tisserand remained resolutely in the middle of the floor; he was slobbering slightly. The girl was pointing to him while speaking to her chums; she guffawed as she looked his way.

A good-looking man takes his place. Tisserand, not as self-reflective as Brigitte, can only take so much of this and eventually wants to kill the pair. Brigitte and Tisserand should have gone to Dartmouth: there are some better stories to tell here. The best one is probably social construction: it says that most, if not all, sexual practices and identities are castles in the air, built by language. Hierarchies are flimsy; we can and should tear them down. That, anyway, is the popular version of it. That science gainsays this is of no concern; anyway, the stakes are too high. There was a Face-Book group called “The Dartmouth Fifty,” or something like that; the referenced fifty were the most beautiful on campus, as deemed by an anonymous judge. In the comments section, Megan Danieley, one of the fifty, wrote “i cant decide if this is flattering, empowering, or objectifying...perhaps a delicious perversion of all three...it has revolutionary potential... too bad we all have boyfriendssss” Houellebecq’s resonance with college sexual life is perhaps best shown by juxtaposing this last musing with a thought Whatever’s protagonist has while passed out behind a couch:

They went on trotting out platitudes for a good fifteen minutes. How she had the perfect right to dress as she wished, how this had nothing to do with wanting to seduce the men, how it was just to be comfortable, to feel good about herself, etc. The last dismaying dregs of the collapse of feminism. At a certain moment I even uttered the words aloud: “the last dismaying dregs of the collapse of feminism.” But they didn’t hear me.

Later, a Face-Book user took over The Fifty, somehow, and renamed it “Everyone at Dartmouth is Beautiful!” whose description reads “We are all incredibly privileged human beings as we are all students of this college and the disgustingly rank elitism that pervades this campus needs to be ended.” Under the heading “recent news” is written “you are all equally beautiful men and women:)” After this small revolution (really, a counterrevolution, against the sexual one), this mystery person wrote a short, apparently hastily written treatise on the unique vileness of The Fifty.

So, precisely why you, as our token example fucked-up idiotic self-identified male (hey, after all, I jacked your profile, I totally know everything about you!), want to award points to girls for lessening themselves and by doing so make both the members of the group and those excluded from it so desperate for reaffirmation and insecure about their looks … is totally fucking beyond me when, in theory, the point of this college, is to respect your peers and encourage academic inquiry.

The essay continues in this fashion, seeming to pity those excluded as well as those included. There would be nothing extraordinary about any of these ideas, since they enjoy currency in classrooms and elsewhere, if the screed hadn’t ended with, “ps. Thanks for the initial invite, baby. *kiss*”—an invitation to become one of The Fifty, that is. This was an open letter, and it became necessary to dissuade the public from thinking they were digesting a manifesto by a homely scribbler. Quite the contrary: she’s already won the sexual struggle. This is a bit like condemning the Ivy League while carefully adding that, of course, you got in. The lure of the sexual marketplace is so powerful that even vociferous champions of social construction can’t resist cashing in their chips.

A common tactic of all revolutions that can’t provide what they promise is to insist that the revolution failed because the theory was not implemented correctly and reactionary elements of society were allowed to persist. If sexual liberation feels unfair because you are less attractive than others and therefore getting a smaller slice of the pie or no pie at all (though you are progress-minded and not a prude), you can complain about lingering patriarchy and observe that, in order for liberation to work, we have to restructure our minds to appreciate different forms of beauty, e.g. (insert this delicately, casually) your own.

The current American university may be the freest sexual marketplace ever. Freer than the American city because although you are permitted to do as you wish with your body in New York, fortunes and age differ widely, are better seen, and are better appreciated. Freer than a Margaret Meade-style primitive society because the young are alone on campus, a generation alone, and have recourse to technology that facilitates the acquisition of sexual partners, e.g. birth control, blitzmail. There is certainly differentiation in housing, age, and preferred dining location, but the difference between the contestants is smaller than anywhere else. Nowhere else is it more starkly evident that once the forms and traditions are swept away, biology becomes paramount. Certainly, one can through will power eat healthy food, exercise, or maybe undergo plastic surgery; maybe this will counteract pesky genes that veer your appearance away from the ideal. But for those who lose in the free sexual economy, these efforts don’t help, and some who eat whatever they please and never go to the gym enjoy great success.

In Philip Larkin’s poem “High Windows,” he imagines how liberated life might have looked to the old guard:

...I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds…

Of course, no one thought this way: they couldn’t have known. The mistake was to think that though progress would solve old problems it wouldn’t create new ones. Whether the old problems are worse than the new ones is irrelevant because ideas always mattered less than technology. Birth control makes the whole thing possible and won’t be spurned as long it’s within reach. James Wood in The New Republic exposed one weakness of Houellebecq’s when he put forward that an entire swath of nineteenth century literature was based around the old problem: people stuck in marriages with those they didn’t love, the opposite of liberation. But Houellebecq seems both to hate and love the sexual free-for-all: I bet he wouldn’t revert if given the chance. Magic tricks aren’t as entertaining when you know the secret; the old, formal life is just a bore when you’ve been in the struggle, he might say.

The best bet for those who can’t win at the sex game is to choose games that reward their talents. Houellebecq, discussing business and sex, points out that they do not depend on one another. One can succeed at business and fail at sex; succeed at sex and fail at business; win at both; or fail at both. In the academic world, things other than money can boost your status: accumulation of degrees, a thousand different honors conferred by meritocracy. The ruling class’s mating newsletter, the New York Times Sunday wedding announcements, often read like a succession of marriages between resumes. Dartmouth B.A. and Harvard M.B.A. marries Stanford J.D. and Northwestern B.A. The mother of the latter sits on such-and-such an arts committee. Just think of the degrees their offspring will accrue, the committees on which they might sit.

Irony also prevents the return to form. Take this photograph. During the 1952 Winter Carnival, these women rode in a canoe propelled across a flooded green by a Dartmouth student playing the gondolier. The arrangement looks chivalrous and formal, the kind of thing that might occur today, but only with irony. After George W. S. Trow’s quip that “a fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me,” one imagines that the canoe would sink today without the irony. What the humans see are two ducks, male and female, on their own kind of date. The reaction to this convergence is wide grins from all humans, except for one, the frumpiest one, on the left, whose small smile’s fading fastest. As if anticipating the liberation that the next quarter century would bring, she seems disquieted by the suggestion that these courtship rituals are just dolled up bits of animal sexuality. Of course, this imputes too much; there’s hardly a chance she thought this.

Female visitors and a Dartmouth student go boating during Winter Carnival, 1952.

Down the Long Slide

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