 The Idea: Author
Laura Kipnis argues that monogamy is unnatural and unhealthy, and
possibly complicit in our emotional detachment from political life and
our ecosystem as well.
Laura Kipnis, despite the title of of her 200-page "polemic", is not Against Love. Rather,
she's against the trappings, the rules, the rituals that our culture
imposes on love relationships. She goes even further -- she sees
marriage, the institution, as every bit as repressive, suffocating and
unnatural as our mind-numbing employment in modern hierarchical
organizations, and draws strong parallels between the slavery of the
workplace and the slavery of the matrimonial home. These two canons of
civilization: our need and responsibility to devote our daytime hours
to meaningless subordinate labour, and our need and responsibility to
devote the rest of our hours to boring, stifling and unsatisfying
monogamy, work together diabolically to keep us suppressed, and in our
'place' in society. Small wonder, she says, that one of our most
enduring conventional wisdoms is that "a good marriage takes work".
If this protestation against the rigours of monogamy, fidelity and
marriage-slavery as the complement to wage-slavery sounds familiar,
it's because it's very similar to the argument that Glenn Parton made
in his essay posted first on these pages last year entitled "Love Politics".
Glenn's argument is that we have become so emotionally numbed by our
twin bondage to job and marriage that it has made our hearts cold and
hard, uncaring of the plight of our planet and of others, and that this
is a direct cause of the destruction of our world. "If I'm miserable,
why should I care about anyone else?" Dare to love more than one
person, he suggests, and the shackles of this self-imposed imprisonment
are broken, and the inrush of emotion will shock us into awareness of,
and eagerness to heal, the massive emotional and physical illness of
our entire planet.
Why should we, why do we
subject ourselves to this one-love-partner-slavery as easily and as
passively as we do to wage-slavery? This is the subject of much of Ms.
Kipnis' book. Her prose is so adept and so powerful I won't attempt to
paraphrase her arguments. Here are a few teasers:
Is it the persistence of the work
ethic that ties us to the compassionate couple and its workaday
regimes, or is it the ethos of compassionate coupledom that ties us to
sould-deadening work regimes...Resenting the boss? Feeling bored or
overworked or dissatisfied? Getting complaints about your attitude?
Whether it's "on the relationship" or "on the job" get yourself right
to the therapist's office, pronto. There are only two possible
diagnoses for all such modern ailments: it's going to be either
"intimacy issues" or "authority issues". You'll soon discover that the
disease doubles as the prescription at this clinic: You're just going
to have to "work harder on yourself"...
Take the modern consumer. Clearly, routing desire into consumption
would be necessary to sustain a consumer society -- a citizenry who
fucked in lieu of shopping would soon bring the entire economy grinding
to a standstill. Or better still, take the modern depressive. What a
boon to both the modern pharmaceutical and the social-harmony
industries that such a social type would be. These are merely
hypotheticals of course, since it's not as if we live in a society of
consumers and depressives, or as if the best strategy for the latter
weren't widely held to be strategically indulging in the former --
"retail therapy"...Love's proper denouement, matrimony, is also of
course the social form regulated by the state, which refashions itself
as a benevolent pharmacist, doling out the addictive substance in
licensed doses...What about re-envisioning [marriage] or... insisting
that social resources and privileges not be allocated on the basis of
marital status? No. let's demand regulation! Not that it's easy to
re-envision anything when these intersections of love and acquiescence
are the very backbone of the modern self, when every iota of self-worth
and identity hinge on them...Domestic coupledom is the boot camp for compliant citizenship, a training ground for gluey resignation and immobility...
Ms. Kipnis suggests the same lack of innovation that permeates the
workplace in the 21st century also permeates domestic institutions:
Different social norms could
entail something entirely different: yearly renewable contracts for
example. And if we weren't so emotionally yoked to the social forms
we've inherited that trying to envision different ways of having a love
life seems intellectually impossible and even absurd, who knows what
other options might present themselves?...It behooves [our] society to
convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure,
starting over is shameful, and wanting more satisfaction than you have
is illegitimate...As love has increasingly become the center of all
emotional expression in the modern imagination -- the quantity without
which life seems forlorn -- anxiety about obtaining it in sufficient
quantities and for sufficient duration has increased to the point that
that anxiety suffuses the population, and most of our cultural
forms...Uncoupling [then] can only be experienced as ego-crushing
crisis and inadequacy...[and] the grief of failed love is exacerbated
by inevitable feelings of personal failure...
Much of the latter part of the book is focused on the psychological
gymnastics of all three (or more) parties in the polygon of adultery,
from the rationalization that hiding the affair is to protect the
feelings of the cuckold, to the feelings of self-hatred and
self-flagellation of the 'sinner(s)'. She also discusses the awkward
mechanics of the ultimate break-up of either the marriage or the affair
(or both), and the degree to which children of the relationship become
hostages, or excuses for deception, or excuses for the boredom that
gave rise to the deception. Of course the book also talks about famous
infidelities in high political circles, and the twisted hypocrisy of
conservatives' opposition to same-sex marriage, as well as the
equal-opportunity-for-misery desire of lesbians and gays to gain access
to the sad and repressive regulation of 'official' marriage rather than
'settling for' merely the legal and resource rights that come with
equivalent-to-married status. And there's also a discussion of the
pragmatic phenomenon of "serial monogamy" -- the fall-back that there's
nothing wrong with marriage per se, it's just that we were all married to the wrong person.
All of this is complicated (even more) by the emergence of the Two-Income Trap, which imposes a financial prison on top of the emotional one in marriage. We have to stay together because we can't afford to live apart.
I am convinced that this one factor is overwhelmingly responsible for
keeping the rate of divorce from reaching astronomical levels. It is
also probably helpful in keeping birth rates in the West below
replacement levels -- Not only can we not afford children, we certainly
don't want any (or any more) with the spouse we're economically
shackled to. And having one with the secret love is just too messy. In
my recent article predicting a baby boom, perhaps I underestimated the
sheer perverseness of a socioeconomic system that not only makes
parenthood financially reckless, it also suppresses fertility rates by
its expressed moral repugnance for having a child by someone other than
your boring spouse.
A lot of people, some of their own free will, and many more who have
been pushed, have recently broken free of wage slavery and are now
working, mostly for much less income, for themselves. That's probably a
good thing in many ways -- it reduces the supply of the remaining wage
slaves, which might actually, in time, allow them to bargain from a
position of at least a bit of power. It increases self-sufficiency. It
reduces excessive consumption. What if there were a similar revolution
against marriage slavery?
What if a whole generation just refused to define themselves (in more
ways than one) as married, or to live with the constraints of monogamy,
and instead opted for a polyamory life-style?
Paternity 'rights' and responsibilities would both probably suffer, as
the new family unit would be a woman (or possibly, and more logically,
a group of women, in self-selected community) and their children. They would have the power, and could strike whatever contract they chose with males who wanted
the responsibilities and privileges of fatherhood. The nuclear family
and the 'single-family dwelling' would disappear. Conjugal relations
would not attach to parental responsibility, and could be negotiated
between any two people as individuals on a one-shot basis, with no
responsibility other than the responsibility to prevent unwanted
pregnancy and disease. This would probably be bad for the oldest
profession, as the supply/demand ratio for quick couplings would soar.
Jealousy and the consequent domestic violence that is the scourge of
our nuclear spouse-as-property society would, slowly (old habits die
hard), disappear. I think the vast majority of men, driven by
million-year-old biological imperatives, once they reached a certain
age, would choose to attach themselves to one of the matriarchal
communities (if so invited), and would do their share to provide for
its well-being, in return for the company and sense of purpose that
would bring.
We are told it takes a village, a community, to raise a child. Perhaps
the community is necessary, and sufficient, for far more: To break us
all free from both the emotionally numbing subjugation of wage-slavery
and the misery and boredom of marriage-slavery. The community would
then become truly self-sufficient in every respect, and we would be
happier and freer than we can, or dare, imagine.
Cartoon: By Peter Steiner from The New Yorker, in the Cartoon Bank
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
