Sexualizing Everyday Life

From Mann and Nabokov to Sheik al-Hilaly

By Roger Sandall
Quadrant, January-February 2007
 

Edited by Andy Ross
 

Where are the sheiks of yesteryear? Not in Australia. Here a burly Egyptian with an ugly turn of phrase recently set new records for ungallantry. Scantily clad Australian women, complained Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, go around like "exposed meat" inviting rape.

To be honest, it seems to me that what the sheik was complaining about is a process that has gone on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from most normal human cultures in the past, where once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires, along with grossly exhibitionistic behaviour, are now increasingly treated as routine.

What has happened? What has made us this way?

A hundred years ago the German author Thomas Mann made an interesting comment. Thinking about morality and its relation to the world of art, he wrote in his novella Tonio Kröger that "as the kingdom of art increases, that of health and innocence declines." Many artists are estranged from life, he said, pursue goals hostile to life, and work continually to destroy the bourgeois world.

The so-called artist's 'gift', wrote Thomas Mann in 1903, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. "It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations." The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen are reliable friends. But artists are not.

If art increases as innocence declines, is it a matter of cause and effect?

Thomas Mann was a towering figure. His diaries for 1933 and 1934 reveal an observer whose understanding of European realities was second to none. Under the Nazis, he wrote, the Germans were becoming a "wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild, stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes."

Stephen Spender wrote of the diaries that "Thomas Mann is a monumental figure of our time. Reading these journals one feels that this monument is made of very hard, resistant, almost cruel material: but under the surface there is a human being who, together with Freud, was the greatest human being this century."

Vladimir Nabokov once joked that if Lolita had been about a man and a boy he would have had no American publishing problems — and that this was considered a joking matter is almost as revealing as anything else to do with the book. It would of course be ludicrous to suggest a direct connection between the works of these authors and what is now going on in the media and the streets.

Still, there it is, an unbudgeable fact of literary history: two of the most distinguished writers of the 20th century, the most relentlessly cerebral and self-conscious writers, and the most academically admired and studied writers with whole shelves of earnest research devoted to their books, gave what I shall call "paederaesthetics" — the world of belief and feeling embodied in erotically idealised juveniles frankly treated as sexual prey — an important place.

Lionel Trilling discussed Lolita in Encounter in 1958. A critic of high moral seriousness, Trilling found that Lolita belonged to a tradition of tales about hopeless erotic infatuations going back to medieval times.

But let an adult male seriously think about the girl as a sexual object and all our sensibility is revolted. The response is not reasoned but visceral.

Not any more — or not in certain circles. Trilling's is plainly a voice from the past. Today the debate is more likely to concern the acceptability of public copulation or pubic display. If it's okay for Paris Hilton to make a video of herself having sex and to share it about in cyberspace, why shouldn't Susie and Jim make one too? A glance at any newspaper shows how each libertine advance ratchets up another without anyone knowing where to stop.

Put yourself in the position of conventionally respectable immigrants from some traditional culture — Sri Lankan Buddhists, Colombian Catholics, Eastern Orthodox from the Ukraine — who are used to certain standards of dress and appearance, who go to buy a weekend newspaper, and who are confronted with this sort of thing.

What conclusion can they possibly draw from the daughters of billionaires fornicating on the web, cries for more noise in bed, oral sex? Sheik al-Hilaly is a boor and a pest. He undeniably has a wider political agenda. But if these are not examples of white western women calling for action, what exactly are they?

Getting the balance right between the animal and the civil has been a problem since civilization began. It hasn't been easy. There has been a perpetual strain between the puritan tendency and the libertine, in China, in Japan, in India, and in the West as well. Some cultures and some eras veered to the voluptuary; some to the ascetic.

Be that as it may, the usual way of dealing with this matter involved a common sense separation of realms.

That's where we seem to have gone wrong. An abandonment of the common sense rules to be found in hundreds of traditional cultures, and a foolish refusal to confine the sexual world to where it belongs, has led to its being indiscriminately mingled with everything else, 24/7. A burly Middle Eastern peasant in a nightshirt may seem an improbable source of moral guidance, yet he's calling the shots as he sees them. Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly and his followers are what they are. We are what we have fatefully become.
 

AR  Good work, Roger.