This post is intended, in part, as a continuation and a revision on my previous post of comments on the movie "Her," although my intention here is not to dabble overtly in movie references. Rather, the point of this post is to move into territory in which I am very poorly versed - theoretic issues on Freudian psychoanalytic thought and, in particular, the role of the unconscious as a repository of mental processes, the expression of which in everyday life would violate social norms. Like many of the more theoretic posts I contribute to this blog, there is really nothing conceptually new here as much as it constitutes an effort on my part to integrate a new way of thinking into my conceptual arsenal. That is to say, I'm thinking out loud, online, about Freudian theory, the unconscious, and the relationship of love to sex because these questions feel really pertinent to me at this peculiar moment in my life.
To Begin, Again, On Romantic Love, Religion, and Representation
The central conclusion of my previous post is that romantic love involves the search for connection to a transcendent, disembodied other, an eternal, timeless, and infinitely existent love object, expressed, in various terms, by the concepts of mind or soul. That is to say, romantic love involves the embrace of an idealization distinct from the material (sexual) reality of human beings. In these terms, I argue that romantic love is an essentially religious practice (i.e. a belief in God is, in principle, not distinct from belief in a love object - both concepts imply something transcendental to material reality). Again, approaching in this manner from a Marxist perspective, there is nothing innately wrong with romantic love (or any other religious/metaphysical thought). Like every other religious practice, it has a function in making human existence bearable or resolving basically existential questions on the purpose of living. More fundamentally, in my view, this approach resolves itself into an ontological impasse. As a Marxist, I simply cannot theorize love objects because they have no material existence/reality. From a Marxian theoretic perspective, the relevant issue is not the truth or falsity of a love object as much as it is the effects of romantic love on individuals (as bearers of particular class positionalities).
I can flesh out my Marxian argument on romantic love (as religion) a little further, however. Concretely, the idea of a love object or even the perceptual experience (e.g. the human associational equivalence of divine "revelation") of a love object is distinct from the actual, transcendent reality of the love object. That is to say, analogizing again in reference to conventional religion, the idea of God is distinct from the reality of God. We can analyze the formation of the idea of a love object even if the love object's actual existence cannot be fathomed because it is immaterial. Again, approaching this question from my particular, Althusserian reading of Marxian theory (indebted in important ways to Freudian psychonanalysis), the mental process producing a love object is overdetermined by an infinitely expansive number of constitutive material processes on an infinite regress through time.
Differing from a more conventionally "modernist" appraisal on this conclusion, the idea of overdetermination here is not meant to be an ontological cop out, but a recognition that the processes we are analyzing cannot be approached objectively. If I take seriously the idea that material reality is the outcome of every physical and social process in the universe, then an objective theory would have to encompass the entire universe in order to explain any one infinitesimally small part of it, an impossibly high validity threshold. To borrow an idea that I attribute to Ernesto Laclau, every theory or analysis produces constitutive outsides that elude integration. Objectivity is beside the point for theory - the job of theory is extract minuscule pieces of material reality in order to construct a persuasive argument that can subjectively shape the lived experience of the processes to which theory refers. In this sense, the point of theorizing romantic love and/or sexuality is not to construct an objective understanding of these processes (because, in any case, no such understanding is possible) but to shape the way that they are lived.
With all this in mind, I finished my previous post with the reflection that romantic love is shaped by physical bodily references and, hence, the idea of a permanent disarticulation of physical sexuality from the idealized content of the love object is untenable. However much I might love a woman for the mind/soul that I imagine she has (constructed perhaps, from assembled pieces of expression in her words or actions), I cannot transcend the physical realities of her face, her hands, her legs, her hair, her neck, her lips, her breasts, the tonalities of her voice reverberating within my ears and playing over again sweetly in my memory, etc., as the means for assembling an image of my beloved. Likewise, while my understanding of how to please her and fulfill her desires might be integrally related to my (perpetually inadequate) understanding/imagination of her mind/soul, the forms through which I act and through which, in response, she acts upon me will indisputably be physical in nature. In these respects, romantic love, as the mental process through which a love object is produced, must involve an interaction between bodily physicality and imagination of the intangible, eternal qualities of a person. The intertwined nature of sensual bodily experience and mental processes produces a repertoire of imageries (memories of real and fantasized experiences) facilitating continuous mental assemblage and re-assemblage of the self and the other/love object (as masses of assembled imageries) relative to interpersonal contact, per se, and the social contexts of the contact (e.g. familial relations, economic status, cultural norms, etc.), alternately intensifying and/or undermining the experience of love.
To extend the theme, such processes mirror the formation of religious conceptions. The faithful must constantly revise their conceptions of God with every personal physical experience of material reality even if the default response is that both good fortune and deprivations exemplify God's will in the world. The difference involves the physical (or, at least, electronic) immediacy of representations. That is to say, the faithful find inspiration in a world of representations of God, both in the majesty of "nature" and in manufactured religious art, including "divinely inspired" writings. Such representations imply, for the religious faithful, the transcendental existence of God, both in God's own natural creativity and in the collectively manifest responsiveness of man to the love of God in artistic forms. But the faithful knows that God does not reside either in the Grand Canyon or in the majesterial artistic renderings of the Sistine Chapel. Every tree and stone and drop of water in nature belong to the universe of material reality, as does every piece of cedar carved into a cross or sandstone sculpted into the image of a bodhisattva. God transcends the material universe.
Likewise, a love object transcend materiality, but the lover experiences the immediacy of its representation in another human being. Thus, a particular woman might represent the object of my love, exist as the material manifestation (in physicality and words and actions) against which I produce the image of my love object, and constitute the means through which I materially express (through words and physical contact) my devotion to my love object, I must know that she is not my love object and that my love object does not reside in her body. Love objects are immaterial, transcendent, timeless, and spaceless. Romantic love dabbles in the transcendent realm of souls, disconnected from physical bodies and the material universe of atoms and molecules and photons. Is it any wonder that more and more married people wake up to the realization, after five or ten years of marriage, that the person lying next to them is not the person they thought/imagined they were marrying? Sadly, they are right! The object of their love was a product of their imagination and now they have been left to negotiate an erstwhile lifelong relationship with a real human being (yet another argument for the institutional poverty of the marriage contract as a means of nurturing or otherwise "enforcing" love).
Mundane Sexuality, as if the "Hook Up" was all there was
I want to loop my way back into the question of romantic love (as religion). On my way there, however, I want to move onto its opposite in the spectrum of consensual, interpersonal erotic relationships. What if physical sexuality is all there really is and all that really matters? The image that I have in mind here might approximate a reduction of human affective emotionality to a proverbially "animalistic" level (i.e. the reduction of human existence to instinctual drives to eat, sleep, and f#%k). In such a view, romantic love would amount to the pretty wallpaper covering over our animalistic motivations. At this point, it would be worthwhile to introduce an alternative set of reflections on love and sex developed by MIT philosopher Irving Singer. Singer, whose work I have been becoming acquainted with over the last couple of weeks, has spent much of his academic career theorizing the historical development of love and sexuality in Western societies and of philosophical and artistic reflections on the nature of love (see Singer (2009), Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing Up. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
My interest in Singer's ideas at this point relates to the particular way that he characterizes the writings of Freud and, before him, Schopenhauer on the relationship between love and sexuality. Not having seriously studied the writings of either, I'm inclined to take Singer at his word in connecting the views of each on love and sexuality, especially in regard to Schopenhauer. Critically, Singer argues that both Schopenhauer and Freud reduce love to an illusory force reinforcing instinctual drives for human biological reproduction. According to Singer, for different reasons, Schopenhauer and Freud effectively conclude, separately, that human existence is reducible to the play of animalistic imperatives (manifest, for Schopenhauer, through the "Will," as a universal, unruly natural force, and, for Freud, in the "id," as the individual repository of instinctual matter), papered over through interpersonal attachments consummated under illusory conceptions made by both parties. Defending a functional role for love founded on a structural distinction between appraisal and bestowal as principles of interpersonal valuation, Singer rejects these positions as inherently cynical devaluations of the potentialities of loving relationships for human development. Moreover, he credits Freud's reflections on case studies of wealthy, adulterous fin-de-siècle Viennese husbands, complaining of an incapacity for sexual arousal in relations with their wives, for the perpetuation of a romantic era dualism between romantic attachment (love) and sexual libidinal desire (lust), derived or otherwise supported, in part, through Eighteenth century conceptions by Hume denigrating marital relations characterized by irrational sexual passions in favor of marriages grounded in a mutual, sober, well-reasoned concern for interpersonal care (see Singer (2009), 67-79). Thus, for Singer, Freud not only warrants blame for labeling romantic love an illusory construct but also for denigrating "companionate" love (e.g. the love of aging spouses devoid of sexual relations but abundant in mutual care and respect) by advancing a conception of divergence between love and lust.
Both these charges against Freud deserve some amount of critical appraisal. First, as a disciplinary matter, we need to consider the fact that Freud, unlike Schopenhauer (to whom Freud apparently, nonetheless, acknowledged a certain amount of intellectual debt), is not precisely a philosopher. He is a therapist and, thus, a practitioner of methodologies intended to alleviate chronic emotional conditions in afflicted patients. By commenting on the treatment of his adulterous male patients, informed by intensive investigations and efforts to uncover the unconscious emotional material driving such sexual practices, Freud advances an analysis of the evidence in front of him, not an abstract theoretical hypothesis on the innate infidelity of males or even of wealthy, bourgeois males in marriages with proper (i.e. boring), Victorian-era bourgeois Viennese women. Relying for my second-hand understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis, in large part, on a dated but nonetheless highly informative perspective by English pschoanalyst Juliet Mitchell (see Mitchell (1975) Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women. New York: Vintage Books), Freud evidently deploys an empiricist/positivist epistemological frame unreflectively in analyzing his case studies and, in this manner, stymies the efforts of later philosophical critics like Simone de Beauvoir to translate his conceptions into rigorously developed rational theoretic structure. As such, an implicit degree of separation exists between the analyses of Freud's therapeutic case studies and the philosophical underpinnings of psychoanalysis.
On the other hand, this degree of separation should not be overstated. No formally constructed body of knowledge, constructed through sensual observation is ever devoid of philosophic reference points, truncating the masses of information available for analysis in order to produce a coherent set of insights. The concepts that Freud developed in order to illuminate therapeutic practices reflect an understanding on the complexity and malleability of mental processes shaped in turn by his relationships with his wife, family, children, fellow analysts/colleagues, etc., and by his appropriation of learning. We need to analyze Freud in order to uncover all of the expressed or otherwise implied constitutive sources of his analytic mindset (i.e. how were Freud's therapeutic practices, crystalized as the methodologies and conceptions of Freudian psychoanalysis (to borrow Freud's own term) overdetermined by the life experiences and learning of Freud?). Freudian psychoanalysis may reflect a broader transition within the philosophical bases of psychotherapeutic practice, per se (i.e. a shift away from more crudely physiological, biologically deterministic understandings of mental processes toward the complex, incomplete interaction of instinctual drives and socio-cultural behavior modifications), but our understanding of such a transition needs to be situated within a longer philosophical history against which Freud was more a creative integrator of existing ideas than a philosophical innovator. In this respect, Singer may be correct in highlighting Freud for criticism of the ideas he advances on love and sex, but such a criticism also rightly demands the interrogation of divergent traditions of thought (both the romantic turn in German Idealism, reflected in Schopenhauer, and the latent conservative pessimism of English Empiricism, in Hume) that came to fruition in Freud's psychoanalytic methods.
More fundamentally, in regard to where I am going with this post, I have a sense that there is something to Singer's project, even if I do not entirely agree with where he is placing Freud. Simply stated, Singer attempts to elevate particular functional rationale of loving relationships beyond purely sexual/biological motivations. I am not sure that this entirely contradicts Freud's position, or even that of Wilhelm Reich, a pioneer in mixing Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis and one of the theoretic forbearers of sexual revolution/"free love." Neither Freud nor Reich appear to have been so rigorously committed to an image of human sexuality reduced to an animalistic play of instincts. For that matter, in a purely Freudian position, anchored in Freud's insights on the formation of the individual unconscious/repression and sublimation of sexual drives, the unmediated domination of sexual drives over human behavior appears neither possible nor, necessarily, desirable as an outcome of therapy. Moreover, given his larger experience in studying the history of loving relationships and evolving philosophical conceptions of love in the Western world (see The Nature of Love trilogy), Singer's portrayal of love as an evolving cultural construct, most recently democratized through romanticism, seems, at least in my understanding, to parallel psychonanalytic insights into the evolving cultural structuring of sexuality against instinctual drives. There is, undoubtedly, far more insight to be gleaned from Freudian psychoanalytic examinations of love, in relation to sexual drives (Eros), than mere simple reflections that love papers over the ruthless biological necessity of human reproduction. On the other hand, Singer's critique compells a thorough reconsideration of what Freudian psychoanalytic thought actually has to say about love, in relation to sexuality.
With these background reflections on Freud, via Singer's critique, in mind, this section needs to address a fundamental question: what exactly does it mean to "hook up?" If the sexuality of younger Americans is increasingly becoming defined by the hook up, then does this mean that we are reverting to a more animalistic mode of sexual interaction? Do Singer, Freud, Reich, or any other thinkers (psychoanalytic or otherwise) have any meaningful insights to offer in evaluating what hook up culture is all about and what it bodes for love?
As a preliminary comment to these questions, it makes no sense to argue that we are "regressing" toward "animalistic" sexualities insofar as we are and will always remain, biologically speaking, animals! There is a certain arrogance evident in such characterizations, implying that something in the human experience raises our species above "nature" rather than situating humanity within a larger nexus of physical and ecological processes (i.e. a particular ecological niche defined by our extremely wide geographic dispersion, our particular utilization and production of tools from the most rudimentary to the most sophiticated, our particular capacity for environmental adaptation, and our ongoing patterns of intra-species genotypic and phenotypic variation) with every other animal species within their own ecological niches. This point here is, therefore, semantic. I might replace "animalistic" with "crude" or "primitive," but some hint of ambiguity might remain. What I mean, most emphatically, is sexual activity with no hint of an emotional connection between partners.
In my view, this characteristic does not, however, adequately characterize hook up culture. I have not been, in any sense, a significant participant in hook up culture and, by and large, I am past the time in my life where it should even be relevant to me (although I reserve the right to find it interesting and at least a little compelling!). In coming to some kind of an understanding of what is going on here, I am leaning on researchers into the practices of, predominantly, college aged individuals. In this respect, Stamford sociologist Paula England has produced some interesting findings on hook up culture (see "Understanding Hookup Culture with Paula England," by Media Education Foundation, at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Q2L7YQ2Hk). The impression that I get from this research is that a hook up constitutes, on the one hand, an informalization in the formation of interpersonal erotic relationships (at least with respect to heterosexual relationships, the focus of England's work) and, on the other hand, an accelerated sexualization of this process, both in relation to conventional dating. Notwithstanding the openness of England's research in defining what actually constitutes a hook up, the practice seems to suggest the existence of a continuum, encounters involving kissing/making-out, to hand manipulation of genitalia, to oral sex, to vaginal and/or anal intercourse. Any or all of these behaviors may be constitutive of a hook up. In many circumstances, hook ups, at least for the college aged individuals in England's research, involved (sometimes substantial) use of alcohol by both partners prior to sexual activity. Moreover, hook ups may be one time events between partners, may string together multiple encounter in which there is no certain expectation that the hook ups will constitute a relationship between sexual partners, or may string multiple encounters that, at some point often preceded by the "talk," result in a monogamous, emotionally connected relationship between the partners.
With this degree of variation, and substantial degrees of gendered differences in expectations on the potential for a hook up to lead to something else between partners (a key focus in England's research), it seems clear that, conceptually, the hook up does not constitute a "regression" to animalistic dominance of sexual drives in heterosexual relationships. If, in certain ways, particular operative norms and moralistic restraints evident in previous generations have been loosened in hook up culture, then it also seems that traditional moral judgments regarding promiscuity, especially for women, continue to be in force. As such, England notes the opinion of male survey respondents that certain women who came off as "slutty" might be acceptable for a hook up but not suitable, within their minds, for a committed monogamous relationship. In fact, England's presentation of her findings seems to imply that the substantive effect on moral judgments (and, especially, on the opportunities for women to exercise more sexual freedom in heterosexual relationships) of replacing a strict, conventional practice of dating with the hook up appear neglible.
Clearly, the point here appears to be that any given hook up and the interchanges between individuals prior to the hook up seem to communicate a range of sexual signals between partners, and these signals are, themselves, mediated by (or, more properly, effected within) the larger, accumulated cultural context within which both partners develop a set of expectations, through prior life experiences, formal education, and diverse familial or community-based (e.g. religious) moral instruction, on the relationship between love and sex (and on the proper roles of each gender within heterosexual relationships relative to initiation). Indisputably, it seems, we are heading back to Freud's (and Althusser's) overdetermination in evaluating what hook up culture means for the individuals in the generations constituting it through their sexual behaviors.
Before I leave this detour onto hook up culture, I need to return briefly to evaluate what the theories and practices of Singer, Freud, and others might suggest about the hook up. Singer's focus, in this respect, remains on the functional significance of emotionally-connected, loving relationships to human development. It should be clear that there is apt to be something missing in the hook up, or in casual sex as a institution per se, when it comes to generating and sustaining meaningful emotional development/maturation by one or both partners. Singer's interjection of the concepts appraisal and bestowal are pertinent in gauging this argument. Singer differentiates here, arguing that appraisal constitutes the ability to discover value in the self or another, while bestowal constitutes the creation and attribution/projection of new value (Singer (2009), 52). In these terms, the hook up, at least as characterized within England's research, remains continuously at the level of appraisal and, more pointedly, at a very shallow depth. Such interactions appear quintessentially self-satisfying, both in relation to the basic sexual motivation of achieving orgasm and, more generally, in self-gratification from receiving attention from the opposite sex. Likewise, the central role of alcohol and other intoxicating substances in the reduction of sexual inhibitions implies that the hook up, at least partly, relies on a sort of chemically hindered process of appraisal. Reinterpreting Singer's distinction of appraisal and bestowal in more thoroughly economic terms, the implication is that the hook up represents a process of consumption of the potential of another to confer sexual gratification/orgasm that never realizes the production of the potential for gratification of less physically centered psychological needs (again, the idea of inscribing Singer's terms with an economic reinterpretation certainly has the additional effect of making everything sound unavoidably self-centered/utilitarian!).
Evaluated against the larger history of loving relationships charted by Singer, it remains to be seen whether the particular development of the hook up implies a lasting transformation, but it does pose at least some pertinent reflections. If Nineteenth century romanticism produced a democratization of love in relation to preceding institutions of medieval "courtly" love, then the hook up may constitute a Twenty-first century effect of the banalization of romantic love. To the extent that romantic love, as an ideal, has, thus, presumed a simultaneity of emotional committedness/nuturing and sexual arousal, the hook up may represent a breakdown of this simultaneity, at least in the formative stages of sexual maturity. Such a breakdown might be more thoroughly institutionalized if it came with a full-fledged recognition of gender equality in the realization of promiscuous sexual pleasure, something that, according to England's research, is indisputably not taking place. It does not imply that a need for emotional committedness is going away, but, perhaps, we are getting closer to a cultural context in which individuals can diversify the satisfaction of emotional and physical needs between multiple relationships. Considered in tandem with the contemporary dismal state of the marriage contract as a state-political institution structuring families, parenthood, and the sexual exclusivity of "mature" adults, hook up culture at least poses the necessity of a larger debate about how love and sex, conjointly, are evolving in contemporary Western contexts.
Moving to the seemingly diametrically opposed end from Singer's position regarding love, the insights gleaned from evaluating hook up culture against Wilhelm Reich's theories of sexuality appear more complex than could be expressed through a simple opposition to any sort of emotionally committed relationship. In these terms, Reich, as one of the theoretic fathers of free love, conceives of the goals of psychoanalysis in reference to the restoration of individual capacities to achieve robust, expressive orgasmic reactions from sexual activity. Emphatically, Reich (in his early works (late 1920s to late 1930s)) breaks away from other Viennese psychoanalysts through his over-exhuberant emphasis on orgasm as the expression of individual, psycho-somatic release of repressed sexual energies. No doubt, there is something to this. However, reading Reichean psychoanalysis against the hook up culture, something is still opposed to Reich's focus. Notably, with his focus on orgasmic response, Reich strongly emphasizes monogamous heterosexual couplings, to the detriment of either homosexual or promiscuous heterosexual or bisexual behavior. Reading back onto England's research, very little of college aged heterosexual hook up sexuality corresponds to the kinds of behaviors prescribed by Reich, insofar as the latter do tend to express a preference for basic heterosexual pair-bonding (whether or not such pair bonds demonstrate exclusively monogamous sexual activities, and Reich appears to have ambivalent on this point) as the prefered mechanism to realize a robust orgasmic reaction by both sexual partners.
With this in mind, a potentiality evidently exists for Reich to stand as a significant theoretic precursor of the hook up culture. On the other hand, such an interpretation would mix into the hook up motivations shared both by Reich and Singer. Reich manifestly advances a connection between love and sexuality more comparable to Singer's theories than those advanced on sexuality by Freud, even if Reich reduces the exclusive signature of a such a connection in robust orgasmic response. Hence, I read a dichotomization between Reichean psychoanalytic theory (i.e. "character analysis") and the sexual practices of contemporary American youths around college age. The behavior of the latter seems to be focused more crudely on quantitative sexual experimentation rather than a Reichean emphasis on the quality of orgasm as a defining focus at least in Reich's early extensions from psychoanalysis.
Before I get back to Freud, certain alternate perspectives have yet to be considered, in reference to a generalized opposition to monogamous pair-bonding, as a characteristic feature of hook up culture. The first concerns the theories of American pschoanalyst Stephen Mitchell, who opened the doors in 1997 (see Mitchell (1997), "Pyschoanalysis and the Degradation of Romance," Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 7, 23-41) to a reconsideration of committed, life-long monogamous relationships within the framework psychoanalytic therapy. If I understand the underlying message in Mitchell's final works, including the posthumous Can Love Last? (New York: Norton Books, 2001), romantic love and sexual passion undergo a conscious and mutually consented process of deadening within marital relationships for the simple reason that such relational characteristics would introduce unmanageable risks within a relationships oriented toward everyday domestic living and upbringing of children. An implicit (or explicit, I have not actually sat down to fully interrogate Mitchell's case studies first hand - most of what I have read on his work has been via secondary comments. See, for example: Blechner, Mark J., "Love, Sex, Romance, and Psychoanalytic Goals," Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 16, 779-791) corollary of this insight is that the striving of married individuals for romantic love and/or sexual passion must seek sources outside of the marital union. Hence, if we regard love and sexual stimulation as basic human needs, then monogamy, enforced through the marital contract, is doomed either to produce emotionally and physically/sexually stultified human beings or an ocean of failed marriages, with ex-partners wisely realizing that happiness lies precisely in the quest for what they do not have!
Mitchell's therapeutic solution to this quandry apparently lay in the practice of uncovering the emotional unknown between partners seeking help to revive love and mutual sexual arousal, as a process of reestablishing the "riskiness" of becoming emotionally intimate with one's partner, the capacity to be mutually hurt, and, thus, a radical departure from the mundane existence of marital boredom. At some point, I might want to venture back here to reconsider my objections to the marital contract per se, but the corollary to Mitchell's research most interests me here, especially insofar as it seemed to generate a significant quantity of debate among American psychoanalysts at the time "Psychoanalysis and the Degradation of Romance" was published. I list it as a generalized argument against monogamy, rather than simply marital monogamy, because, from my highly amateur position on the subject, I simply do not consider any palpable difference between a long run non-marital interpersonal erotic relationship and a married one (one involves a civil contract, one doesn't). There are certainly important criticism that can be leveled against my argument here, but I intend to run with it anyway and see where it leads, relative to Mitchell's ideas and my above elaborations on hook up culture.
First, Mitchell's research appears to advance a critical point with regard to the relationship between romantic love, sexuality, and feelings of safety/risk. Specifically, some gradation of romantic imagination, fueled by interpersonal communication and emotional risk taking, must be a precursor to sexual satisfaction. Following this interpretation of Mitchell, there seems to be an underlying vein of commonality here between what recent American psychoanalysts have been discovering about love and sex and what Reich suggested about the capacity for individuals to realize fulfilling orgasms in the early 1930s. Second, fundamentally, if sexual activity is not necessarily physically safe, then the pursuit of romantic love is necessarily emotionally unsafe. Moreover, if romantic love was not unsafe, then it would fail to arouse either sexual desire or an emotional need for interpersonal attachment as a perception of safety. Taking these insights as a baseline, the hook up culture seems to involve a reorganization of emotional and physical riskiness in the behaviors of young Americans, trading more of the physical riskiness of sexual activity in place of the riskiness of romantic love under more highly constraining norms of sexual behavior. Such a pattern seems to have evolved over the course of the Twentieth century, with transformation of older forms of courtship into conventional dating and conventional dating into the hook up. Recognizing this pattern, and the potentiality for such a pattern to promote polygamous sexual styles, it merits asking how far a transition prioritizing the physical riskiness of sexuality might have to go to pluralize ventures by individuals at the emotional riskiness of romantic love? If such a pluralization were to occur, moreover, would it undermine the vitality of romantic love per se, as an argument for attachment and as an argument in sexual arousal/orgasmic potency? I can only leave these questions open.
In concluding this post, I want to a return to a reference that I have previously used on this blog in considering the functionality of the marriage contract, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá's Sex at Dawn (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011). The conclusion offered by these authors, following an extensive (and persuasive) bio-anthropological story about the polygamous development of the human species until the dawn of sedentary agriculture, is that the expectation of life-long monogamous pair-bonding is unrealistic and may even contradict the evolutionary course of the species. On the contrary, Ryan and Jethá offer as an alternative the possibility of the open marriage, configured with at least one stable, emotionally-connected pair-bonding and the liberty of each member to experiment with alternative sexual relationships, each with its own possible mix of emotional connections, risks, etc. If the explanatory emphasis and the ultimate solution here seem to be profoundly different from those advanced in Mitchell's psychoanalytic work, Ryan and Jethá appear to come to largely the same conclusion regarding the long term viability of marital monogamy.
Evaluating, thus, the hook up culture against the eventual necessity of a monogamous pair-bonding, sanctified by the state through the marriage contract, young, sexually promiscuous Americans seem to just be following a logical physical imperative, inscribed in the particular anitomical form of the human body (e.g. testicles designed to produce and store quantities of sperm far, far in excess of what would be needed to reliably achieve reproduction with a single female mate given a nine month gestation period). On the other hand, like contemporary American psychoanalysts, Ryan and Jethá are compelled to acknowledge that sex is certainly not everything. Rather, a point of their account is to argue that only by undoing the restraints of morally-induced repressive monogamy can human beings reconnect with the larger importance of emotional connectedness in loving relations. To some degree, Ryan and Jethá invert the relationship between love and sex that Singer attributes to Freud and Schopenhauer (i.e. sex is just a process functional to inducing individuals to come together and love each other!). Again, in spirit of extracting the notion of hook up culture from the dead end of emotionally barren, crude, animalistic human sexuality, Ryan and Jethá's conclusion appears to conform to an appraisal that the formative, youthful bases of sexual experience here might convey themselves toward a reevaluation of marriage and long term interpersonal erotic relationships in general favoring openness and a willingness to experiment with polygamous forms.
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