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The Extension of the Struggle in China
The Extension of the Struggle is the title of a novel by Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French writer (now expatriated to Ireland) who garnered some deal of infamy for his comments on Islam just before September 11th. The narrator of The Extension of the Struggle espouses a sort of Marxist analysis of post-modern sexuality: “In a perfectly liberal economic system, some people accumulate considerable fortunes; others molder in unemployment and poverty. In a perfectly liberal sexual system, some people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.” In Houellebecq’s novels with this extension of the struggle into the realm of sexuality has disturbing and pathological results, with his characters resorting to serial murder, pornography, cloning and so-called ‘sexual tourism.’ The strength of this analysis is its attention to the zero-sum nature of sexual relations. In ordinary circumstances, monogamous marriage is an egalitarian institution, in so far as it implies that there will be a man for every women and vice-versa. In a non-monogamous society, high-status males will tend to have multiple mates and lower-status mates will be sexual losers. All sorts of social pathologies can be expected to result from the creation of sexual overclasses and underclasses. In fact, polygamy in the Islamic world no doubt contributes to terrorism. Guess how many of the September 11th highjackers were married. How many of the Palestinian bombers? What’s more, it isn’t just the abandonment of monogamy that can create sexual underclasses and overclasses. The First World War decimated the male populations in the West, sharpening the competition among women for available men. This scarcity of men was one of the reasons the twenties roared, and it also rendered the traditional roles of women increasingly inadequate. Women could no longer count on finding a husband. We call the ideology that attempts to rationalize these circumstances feminism. As a result of its population control policies, China is about to undergo the opposite of what happened to the West. Over the next twenty-years, China will suffer a scarcity of women, USA Today reports. Needless to say, the presence of forty-million strong Chinese sexual-underclass composed of men unable to marry, settle down or have families is not a recipe for democracy or stability in China. And it probably doesn’t bode well for the rest of the world either. In the nightmarish future of Houellebecq’s novel Elementary Particles, the “sacrificial generation”—the children of the sexual revolution—gives birth to a race of androgynous, sexually-selfsatisfying clones. Is it really too much to imagine that China’s lack of women will push us toward this Brave New World? Posted by at June 20, 2002 05:13 PM | Send Comments
I think you’re right to suggest that social pathologies result when the opportunity to marry is unavailable to large numbers of men or women. I’m not sure, though, that feminism arose as a rationalization of existing circumstances. I expect that it was the working through of liberal principles in the direction of feminism which ultimately changed society, rather than changes in society producing feminism. What did the early opponents of feminism believe? One of the most staunch anti-feminists, Eliza Lynn Linton, defended herself in 1883 by asserting that “the sphere of human action is determined by the fact of sex, and that there does exist both natural limitation and natural direction.” For Eliza Linton the key thing was to refute basic liberal ideas, such as the notion that we are autonomous individuals who are (or ought to be) free to create ourselves in any direction. If intellectual opinion in Britain in 1883 held that gender did not give a “natural direction” to our lives, then it was inevitable that some version of feminism would result, even if an overwhelming majority were happily married. As a student at Girton College, an early female university college, boasted in 1889, “We are no longer mere parts, excresences so to speak, of a family … one may develop as an individual and independent unit.” About 50% of her generation of female college students never married, due less I imagine to a sudden shortfall of men, than to the individualistic liberal philosophy in vogue amongst these women. |