love is what we have decided that we value in life

Love is all its various forms is ultimately about caring--caring so deeply about another person, group, idea, or place that we would be willing to sacrifice our own health, comfort, and even life for it. One hallmark of great art is the amount of care that we sense has gone into it. When people scoff at modern painting, their typical objection is that it looks as though the painter simply threw paint on the canvas with no care. We find ourselves drawn to art that looks as though the artist struggled with it, put a great deal of thought into it--cared about it.

Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy.

- Daniel Levitin

unrequited love

J'ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.


I've dreamed of you so much that you're losing your reality.

Pornography

Men watch pornography. It's a fact. Men get horny and they need something to satisfy it. Often pornography is the easiest and most convenient way to do it, regardless of whether one is in a relationship or not. Women have a hard time understanding that men can often separate sex from love--for example, men can have sex with a woman they clearly don't love. Women have a harder time doing this because of biological and cultural reasons (hormones, risks of getting pregnant).

Is pornography a problem? I don't think so, because most if not all men watch pornography regularly. It's been around for a while and I don't see a social breakdown in society or men increasingly treating their women in a negative way. Pornography is to men what chocolate and sweets are to a woman. Biological desire. Nothing more, nothing less.

But, feminists argue that pornography is bad because it objectifies women and treats them as sexual commodities. It treats a relationship between a man and woman on purely sexual terms. If that were true, why would a man stick around if all he cared about was sex. What about love, marriage, raising kids? Yeah pornography often demeans women, encourages not-normal sexual practices, and show things that don't happen or should not happen in real life, but movies do the same thing. They are in the business of unreality. Do you think after I watch Terminator 2, I'm going to run around shooting at people? Do you think after I watch the Matrix, I'm going to jump off a building thinking I can fly? People like escapism sometimes.That's what pornography is. Fantasy on video.

The trouble with this wide-open pornography is not that it corrupts, but that it de­sensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions, but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude, but that it is a reversion to infantile obses­sions; not that it removes the blinders, but that it distorts the view. Prowess is pro­claimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation, but dehumanization.

A recent issue of Sky, a magazine targeting young people, contained the fol­lowing letter in the advice column: "My problem is that I don't enjoy sex anymore. I'm a virile 22-year-old. I regularly have sex with my girlfriend, but I have no pleasure anymore.... Is there something that I'm doing wrong?" The advisor replied, "Shootin' air, eh, babe? You've caught the sex problem of the 90's: pelvic apathy...Actually all that's happening to you and your bald best mate of 22 years is that you've both managed to forget there's another human being slaving away at the far end of your plank. Remember that person with the high voice and the lipstick?" This exchange was an unwittingly ironic counterpart to all the "sexy" ads throughout the issue. And how dehumanizing to refer to a woman, someone's lover, as "that person with the high voice and the lipstick."

Meanwhile, Mademoiselle offered this advice to young women whose arms start to ache while pleasuring their partners: "Your best bet—short of looking meaningfully at the bedside clock or developing the forearms of Martina Navratilova—is to get him to give you a hand."

In 1997 NBC featured a story about some college students—men and women—who regularly make a practice of getting drunk together and then hav­ing sex with whomever happens to be nearest at hand. According to one student, it is a great way to get his sexual needs met quickly without the "time-consum­ing" hassle of actually dating and getting to know somebody.

In a world filled with fast-food chains and junk-food advertising, many peo­ple are deliberately starving themselves or gorging themselves into oblivion. Consuming food for which we have no real appetite, we are never satisfied and lose our ability to gauge our own hunger. In a similar way, the barrage of constant sexual images and perfect bodies being offered up to us like delectable pastries (or perhaps popsicles) leave us sexually numb and out of touch with our own de­sire. We can get almost any kind of ethnic food in our own hometowns these days, and we also have more sexual choices than ever before in terms of partners and techniques. But when eating is divorced from hunger and appetite and sex is divorced from desire and relationships, both experiences become onanistic, soli­tary, unfulfilling.

- Jean Kilbourne

'the problem that has no name'

As a magazine writer in 1950s America, Betty Friedan interviewed many women who were living the classic American dream: they were young and healthy, they lived in fine suburban homes, their husbands had well-paid jobs, their children went to school, their housework was made easier by many labour-saving appliances and (we can add with the benefit of hindsight) no one worried about drugs or AIDS. This was the Good Life, in the most prosperous country in the world, and these women should surely have been the envy of anyone who has ever lacked comfort, leisure and financial security. Yet when Friedan talked to them, she found that they had a problem. They didn’t have a name for it, and nor did Friedan, so she called it ‘the problem that has no name’. The problem formed the core of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the book that more than any other single work triggered the modem feminist movement. In it women describe the problem in their own words. Here is a 23-year-old mother:

I ask myself why I am so dissatisfied. I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money... It’s as if ever since you were a little girl, there’s always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward to.

The magazines and television soaps of the time tried to tell women that the role of wife and mother was the most fulfilling there can be. After all, compared to women in earlier periods, or in other countries today the American housewife of the fifties had it easy. ‘Having it easy’, however, was little consolation; in reality it was precisely the problem. This kind of life was supposed to be all that a woman needed for fulfillment, but when she had achieved everything she was supposed to want, her life plan came to a dead stop. The suburban housewife lives an isolated existence in her comfortable home, equipped with labour-saving devices that allow her to complete her daily chores in an hour or two. In another hour at the supermarket she can gather the week’s food supply for the entire family. Her only role is to bring up a family, and her children soon spend all day at school, and much of the rest of their time watching television. Nothing else seems worth achieving.

Consider a quite different way of living. Over the past forty years, several groups of Australian Aboriginals who subsisted by hunting and gathering in remote desert areas have come into contact with Western civilization. Through this contact they have access to reliable supplies of food, steel axes, clothes, and many other goods. If quality of life depended on quantity of material possessions, this contact would be bound to improve the quality of life of the Aboriginal groups. Yet observers are agreed that it has had exactly the opposite effect. We do not have to idealize the nomadic Aboriginal life in order to recognize that it provides many opportunities for finding satisfaction in the tasks of obtaining the necessities of life. Richard Gould, an American anthropologist who lived with an Australian Aboriginal hunter-gatherer group, found that:

the daily lives of the nomadic Aborigines are essentially harmonious and rewarding. An individual grows up realizing what is expected of him. By acquiring and developing practical knowledge and skill he learns to fulfill these expectations and is rewarded immediately by his own satisfaction in achievement and in the long run by the esteem of his kin. When food comes from a shop, bought with a government welfare check provided by a well-meaning social worker eager to see that all Australians get what they are legally entitled to receive, the skills and knowledge acquired over a lifetime are immediately devalued. The result is deeply demoralizing. Almost everything that the members of the nomadic group used to spend their days doing has lost its point. It is no wonder that alcohol often becomes a major problem, and even when it does not, these formerly nomadic Aboriginals appear to be at a loss for anything to do.

The modern housewife in her tidy household and the Aboriginal Australian sitting on the dusty ground outside the store are suffering from the same malaise: the elimination of purpose from their lives. The need for purpose lies deep in our nature. We can observe it in other animals, especially those who, like us, are social mammals. The tiger, restlessly pacing back and forth behind the bars of a small concrete cell, is fortunately becoming a less common sight at the zoo. But the monkeys still kept in barren metal cages in laboratories, or the pigs confined for months on factory farms in stalls too small to allow them even to pace back and forth, are suffering from the same problem. When you provide a sow with food and a warm dry place to lie down, you have not provided her with everything she needs. Such animals exhibit what ethologists call ‘stereotypical behaviour’ — they restlessly gnaw at the bars of their pen, or stand rocking their heads back and forth. They are trying to make up for the absence of purposive activity in their lives. Even the caged factory farm hen devours her daily nutritional needs a few minutes pecking at the feed with which she is supplied and then is left with nothing at all to do. As a result she will restlessly peck at her companions and all factory farm hens are now ‘debeaked’ to stop them killing each other. Some relatively more enlightened keepers of animals now mix the day’s food with straw or other inedible material and scatter it across the floor of the cage, so that the animal must work to find it. Hens kept indoors can be given food that is very finely ground; then instead of getting their daily food intake in a few minutes, it may take them several hours.

On the modern view of work and leisure, as we apply it to humans, these devices make the animals work harder, reduce their leisure time, and so should make them worse off; but observation shows that the animals’ welfare is improved. Of course, such strategems are at best a poor imitation of the wide variety of activities that animals have available to them in their natural conditions. They do not make it acceptable to keep animals in barren cages; but their relative success should make us re-examine our attitude to work and leisure. It is clear that our quest for a purpose to our lives has its roots a long way back in our evolutionary history, and will not easily be eliminated.

There is one short cut to overcoming the need for purpose. For the pharmaceutical industry, an existential void is a marketing opportunity. In the sixties, suburban doctors started prescribing tranquillizers in increasing quantities to housewives who came to them feeling depressed. As the Rolling Stones sang in ‘Mother’s Little Helper’:

Kids are different today, I hear every mother say

Mother needs something today to calm her down

And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill

She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper

And it helps her on her way

Gets her through her busy day

Doctor please, some more of these

Outside the door she took four more

What a drag it is getting old.

That is one way of ‘solving’ the dissatisfaction caused by a loss of purpose: turn the dissatisfied housewife into a contented zombie. It solves the problem only in the sense that alcohol solves the problems Australian Aboriginals have in adjusting to Western civilization, and crack and other drugs that solve the problems of unemployed Americans living in urban slums.

Not quite as addictive as heroin, less harmful than alcohol, but still problematic from an environmental perspective, is that other great modern tranquillizer, going shopping. Many people readily admit that shopping is not so much a means to obtain goods that they need, but rather their major recreational activity. A large dose of it seems to help overcome depression. Shopping is a modem substitute for more traditional hunter-gatherer activities. The shopping mall has replaced the old hunting grounds. Like gathering roots, seeds and berries in an arid environment, shopping can take a large portion of the day. It allows for the development of specialized forms of knowledge and skill. (How do you select the right items to gather? Where and when are the genuine bargains to be found?) Shopping can even pass as purposeful activity; its leisure component can be disguised or denied, in a way that it cannot if one spends the day playing golf.

Why was it mostly women who experienced such a loss of purpose in the fifties? At that time most men, but relatively few women, worked in jobs that held out the prospect of a promotion, an increase in responsibility and power. This is still often the case, if not quite to the same extent. So when one morning a man wakes up and asks himself, ‘Is this all there is to my life?’ he can quieten the doubts by thinking about that coming glorious day when he gets to move up to a more important position, with higher pay and more responsibility. That is why, as both employers and unions have found, a career structure, a ladder leading upwards, is often more crucial for job satisfaction than actual rates of pay. In contrast, for a housewife there is no promotion. Romance will fade, and the children will need their mother less and less. No wonder that many American housewives, once they had everything they were supposed to want, felt the meaningless of their existence more acutely than their husbands did.

- Peter Singer