After 9/11, I wrote a piece called “Risk of Contamination” for Brendan Lemon, who was then the editor of Out Magazine. In the essay I compared the way fear of the female body as a contaminating agent of maleness operated in both western and eastern philosophies and practices. I said a crisis in the concept of masculinity in both the east and the west was endangering the world, and I said this crisis in the concept of masculinity linked geo-political factions that otherwise saw themselves as enemies.
I feel a need to review these ideas. I do not believe the identity of anything is fixed or pure. It is mixed. It has always been mixed. “The natural” is a human construction. As soon as human beings learn something, it feels like we have always known it. That is the way “the natural” is born. This post is drawn from excerpted pieces I have written and email exchanges with friends.
The concept of “maleness” is defined in all religions and in the societies shaped by religions as “not female.” In religions and other ideologies of enforced, gendered power, the function of perceived femaleness is to comment on maleness. In these structures, femaleness is a contaminating agent that must be segregated from maleness, lest it pollute and degrade maleness. How do you keep it separate? You confine and control the female body, especially the sexual female body, in public and private space. You determine whether it can freely engage in sexual behavior. You maim and kill it if it expresses desires that threaten the sovereignty of males to control it. You attach notions of honor and purity to it that constrict and sometimes destroy it. You determine it must be draped and shorn to limit its sexual power over males. You outlaw abortion. No one cares about unborn embryos. They care about organizing the female body’s social role.
Here is the kicker. The practitioners of the most orthodox and rigid ideologies of male supremacy suspect maleness is already hopelessly contaminated. They know in some part of their half-conscious minds that if there were really such a thing as an essential male nature and an essential female nature, none of this policing would be necessary. The fear of contamination becomes a symptom that the contamination has already occurred and that people are hopelessly mixed. Fascism and other forms of totalitarianism are the shit-storm tantrums released when knowledge is simultaneously registered and disavowed. It is the crazy inside doublespeak and doublethink.
Every fascist and totalitarian regime immediately legislates to control the female body and force it to comply with its perceived biological function as a way to reinstate all forms of control and order. This is symbolic and also believed to be a practical remedy for social unrest. The out-of-control female body, in polluting everything, incites all reversals of ordained divisions of power. Outlaw abortion, and the poor will abandon their unions. If that doesn’t actually work, make poor people poorer.
All the other hatreds that exist around the perceived contamination model operate on the same system as the gender binary, so you could say they are modeled on this central hatred. You do not end misogyny, sexism, gynophobia, and patriarchy by addressing race, economics, class, ethnicity, and cultural diversity, because hatred of the female operates in all of these other systems as well. You might get rid of racism, homophobia, etc. by addressing what is at the heart of the gender binary and its false definitions of what a male person is, what a female person is, and what a person of mixed sex identity is. Only female humans are reviled entirely on the basis of being female . . . male humans are reviled for an aspect of their perceived identity that is separate from their identity as male humans . . . i.e. black males, Latino males, gay males, disabled males, Muslim males. I am in no way saying the injuries of racism are less horrendous than the injuries of misogyny. Included in the injuries of misogyny and sexism is that women are the only humans who actively militate against their own increased freedom and mobility. Who does something like that? A large number of white women voted for Trump, maybe not the disputed 53% statistic, but many.
The following comments on race evolved in a conversation with a friend who wanted to compare race and gender hatreds. This is from my email: We now know race is entirely a social construction without biological validity, and we know that around 60,000 years ago the homo sapiens we all evolved from moved out of Africa and across the globe. I think there may come a time in the future when so-called white people will no longer exist. Humans will all be mixed and their skin colors different and darker shades. That won’t end prejudice based on skin color, perhaps, but it is an evolving condition, always undergoing transformation. Although race may not be a real and fixed identity, phobias and hatreds around the perception of race difference are definitely real things. The same can be said of homosexuality. Humans do not exist in a homosexual/heterosexual binary, but the reality of homophobia is real. With regard to the male/female binary, that, too, is in many ways socially constructed, since there are more than two sex identities. Still, most people are born with either female or male sexual characteristics, and on to this binary has been layered a giant philosophy and ideology of difference. I said earlier that in patriarchal cultures, religions, and societies—meaning all the ones that now exist—maleness is defined as not-female and female is less defined than used as an instrument to comment on maleness. In any binary, there is always a power difference, and when there is a power difference, the group constructed as less powerful is policed, lest its less powerful essence contaminate the group that has power. In the gender binary, the female body is segregated, covered, and ritually cleansed to keep it from physically contaminating the male body and the male sphere, and the female body is maimed, jailed, and murdered for perceived transgressions against its so-called ordained roles. (The idealized female body is a subset of the reviled female body . . . neither is real or has anything to do with what women are and feel themselves to be.)
This model of policed and inferior beings is the core model on which all other forms of phobic hatred are based. It is prior, many thousands of years old. Using the term “male” to signify “the powerful” and “female” to represent “the subordinated,” then whiteness is male and blackness is female. Heterosexuality is male and homosexuality is female. Christianity is male, and Jews and Muslims (in the west) are female. Western colonial practices are male, and eastern subordinated countries are female. The deserving wealthy are male, and the undeserving poor are female.
All propaganda campaigns of binary hatred use the same slurs to diminish the disempowered and policed group and these slurs are essentially the same as are attributed to females. Jews in Nazi propaganda and people of color in white dominated societies, to name two, are described as hyper-sexual, closer to animals, scheming, untrustworthy, tribal, clannish, disgusting in their social and physical practices, deformed in their physical beings and characters. Hence they must be segregated or destroyed lest they degrade the power body which is always at risk of mixing, miscegenation, contact, etc. and thus weakening the pure. So what I am saying is not that all women have it worse in society and culture than other oppressed people. Not by a long shot, depending on class, skin color, economic opportunities, etc. I am saying gynophobia and the misogynist and sexist practices that issue from it is the blueprint for all hatreds shaped by binary thinking and binary levels of oppression and double standards.
What we are seeing in this country now is a violent reaction to the success of a black president and the candidacy of a female running for office. Trump has given white, heterosexual, unhappy male humans a forum to express the way they have been made to feel their power curtailed. White heterosexual male privilege is not supposed to know it exists. It is supposed to be taken for granted by everyone. It is supposed to be understood as natural, even to the people still moving in the world with that assumption, and yet this has changed. It has been challenged. It has been turned into a thing for contemplation, not a component of nature and of the natural. At least this has happened.
To see how I used some of these ideas in a piece of art criticism, here is an excerpt from an article I originally published in Tikkun.
From a review of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001), a film about the rise of Nazism:
Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.” is a messy concoction of startling and plodding ingredients, but in moments of originality, it boldly grapples with fears of otherness. . .. The film comes alive in the middle section when we are introduced to Gigolo Joe, played by a radiant Jude Law. Joe is a robot designed as an ardent sex partner, and he is the most charged and canny presence on screen. In this section, too, Spielberg presents a wise and witty gloss on decline-and-fall thinking and the scapegoating of perceived cultural polluters. “A.I.” depicts a dystopia that is a consequence of our failures. Due to the misuse of Earth’s resources, the ice caps have melted, coastal cities are submerged, and the population has become tightly controlled, hence the need for robot children. At this point, robots, known as mechas, have become so advanced many are indistinguishable from humans, called orgas. The ranks of mechas have swelled because they labor without food. But although created to serve orgas, mechas are hunted and ritually tortured in gatherings called Flesh Fairs.
The film is shot almost entirely from the perspective of mechas. David and Joe are captured and caged, and we see a Flesh Fair through their eyes. The atmosphere is part rock concert, part Nuremberg rally. The audience is a mob, whipped to a frenzy by a promoter’s rhetoric of race hatred and ethnic cleansing. “This is a commitment to a truly human future,” he brays, as buckets of acid eviscerate and liquefy sacrificial mechas. He swears by “the law of blood and electricity.”
Gripping and sly, these scenes illuminate the mechanics of dread. The fear is of contamination, some sort of pollution seen to have a diluting, enervating effect on a group that considers itself whole and defined by essential and fixed characteristics. Castration anxiety, in other words. The threat of contamination is perceived to be from outside. All campaigns of hate against perceived others and all laws against miscegenation are based on the notion of a purity at risk of becoming degraded. In this understanding, the invigorating effects of hybridization aren’t valued, if they’re even recognized. Rather, mixing is imagined as a decline and fall. In the mind of the person who sees such threat, a sentence keeps looping: “Things used to be better, but now the times are sick, and the infection has to be cut out.”
The film shows there is never a time when this fear isn’t ticking away, because as soon as the idea of purity is formed, worry forms about its fragility. As soon as there is worry, it feels like proof that the contamination has already occurred, so in the minds of purists, the present is always a time when things are worse than they were in an imagined, safer past. Fear of otherness is a forceful denial that dilution has occurred, because the secret belief is, indeed, it has.
The orgas are aware that the boundary between what characterizes them as human and what defines mechas as nonhuman is continually shifting. “I’m real,” an orga child taunts David, as the boy, recently resuscitated from a cryogenic coma, clomps around with prosthetic devices on his legs. Amid a dump site filled with extinguished mechas, damaged mechanical beings rummage for replacement parts, attaching a new arm or jaw with an ease that humans awaiting organ donations can only long for. On a wall in the building where David is fabricated is a painting depicting “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a fable about the power of mass suggestion and the difficulty of acknowledging reality that is staring you in the face.
Who are we now? The mapping of the human genome, the increasing miniaturization of computer chips, research into brain function, and advances in robotics—all these promise increasingly intelligent, sentient machines, some of which will aid human beings by mixing with and penetrating them. Implantable devices are in the works that will enable blind people to process visual images and people with spinal cord injuries to use their leg muscles. Does anyone consider the heart patient now living with a mechanical ticker and people with other prosthetic devices less human? Today, amputee runners, outfitted with titanium legs, can outstrip sprinters with flesh-and-bone limbs. The metal legs don’t look like human legs and aren’t trying to imitate them. They are beautiful according to their own aesthetic. The freak over there has always been inside us.