“Out In Chicago:” a National Bolshevik Perspective

By way of preface let me mention that I heard an interview with Katie Stelmanis, of the band Austra, who talked about how her fellow band mates wanted her to get more “political.”  Now, by “political” they didn’t mean that she should address herself to partisan politics, nor economic policy, nor criminal justice, nor any of the myriad functions of government.  No, they meant “gay politics.”  But sexuality is not a political issue; it is a cultural issue.

This is not to say artists should not address issues of sexuality.  Far from it; culture is the exact purview of the artist.  Very few creative artists have actually addressed politics in a way that had artistic integrity.  Upton Sinclair is the past master of this, while Gore Vidal is perhaps the inverse, a political figure that has artistic achievements to his name.   Aristophanes, Franz Falada, Ernst Junger, the Marquis de Sade, Woodie Guthrie, and the poet Mayakovsky might just complete the list of those who could consistently integrate politics and art without becoming pedantic. Even Jack London and Pete Seeger are at their best when they were not being overtly political.  For that matter, authors we often think of as being political, like Sinclair Lewis or Larry Kramer, were usually dealing with cultural concerns (conformity, mass psychology, homophobia) not economics or government.  Of course, there is no shortage of dreadful political polemic masquerading as art.  Need I mention Atlas Shrugged, an immensely successful piece of libertarian agitprop that fails on every level as a work of art?

Let us contrast a work about slavery, a political issue, with one about racism, a cultural matter.  Which of these works has lasting value: the anti-slavery tract “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or the disquisition on race, “Huckleberry Finn?”  I think the question answers itself.

Again, issues of sexuality are cultural not political.  So it is entirely in keeping with the proper role of the artist in society that the members of Austra express their lesbian perspective: that’s what an artist does!  If you want cultural change, then you have to push for it through cultural modes.  When Mary Richards (i.e. Mary Tyler Moore) allowed a lover to spend the night at her apartment it probably did more for promiscuity than any governmental action ever could have.  When Murphy Brown chose to have a bastard child it simply pointed up how idiotic were the government’s efforts at “reducing teenage pregnancy” when the problem was one of blood-feeling and simply not amenable to a logic of consequences.  (Of course, this is not to say that art addressing cultural concerns is always better than political art.  Contrast, if you will, the humanity of Upton Sinclair’s stridently political “The Jungle” with the paste-board phoniness of the “Left Behind” series.)

And so, while it is not surprising that an history museum should take up a cultural topic, it is disappointing to find that it deals with it in not merely a political way, but from a stridently bourgeois political perspective.

The Exhibit

Last weekend I chanced to visit the opening of the exhibit “Out In Chicago” with a comrade.  Though she is bisexual, she is as sick of the politicization of cultural issues as I am, and the only reason I was able to persuade her to attend was that she wanted to meet Chuck Renslow, who was expected to be there.  (He wasn’t, and now my friend is mad at me for wasting her afternoon.)

Probably the first thing we noticed was the pervasive capitalist bias.  Much was made of “pioneering” nineteenth century gay and lesbian figures, yet nothing was said about how the working class homosexuals were in constant trouble with the law while the bourgeois homosexuals were not.  Clearly, sexual consumerism has always been the prerogative of the rich and the change that has come in our time is not one of “morals” but rather of our owning classes realizing that the social control of sexuality was unnecessary to their continued economic exploitation.  In fact, it could be turned into just one more consumer item.  It was probably the most profound thing that John Lenin ever said when he pointed up that:

“they keep you doped with religion and sex and TV.  And you think you’re so clever and classless and free.  But you’re still fuckin’ peasants as far as I can see.”

Was anybody else appalled when one of the taped segments commented that “in the nineteenth century capitalism allowed ever increasing numbers of people to live on their own, away from extended families?”  Capitalism?  I don’t think so.  Clearly it was industrialization that allowed people to live in ever smaller economic units.  Marx actually says it best:  

“Industrialization has allowed the mass of the population to escape the idiocy of rural life.”

And then the exhibit goes on to enthuse about how gays formed their own “families.”  But this is an abuse of language.  “Family” indicates a blood connection, either through shared ancestry or common progeny.  What these people were forming was “households,” that is, a group of people living in close if not intimate connection, regardless of blood connection.

At this point the game is up.  As we National Bolsheviks know, Blood Feeling is the exact antithesis of the mercantile spirit, and this exhibit perfectly encompasses a materialist world view.  This explains the whole world-view of the exhibit, for within a materialist perspective there can be no distinction between culture, which is spiritual, and politics, which is practical, because the spiritual has not real existence so all must be subordinated to the practical.

Of course, my friend was disgusted at the confounding of “gender issues” with sexuality.

“Gender,” in the bourgeois understanding, is how you conceive of your sex.  That is to say, regardless of whether you are a man or woman, what do you feel that you are?  In the bourgeois conception, such things are fluid.  One could conceivably be a “man trapped inside of a woman’s body” as opposed to being someone so alienated from themselves as to have failed to connect with the material reality of their existence.  What are we to make of it when someone claims to be a “lesbian trapped inside of a man’s body,” as some 25% of M2F transsexuals claim nowadays?  Or that Ernest Aron, the real life trans-sexual portrayed in Dog Day Afternoon, had surgery to become Elizabeth Debbie Eden, only to die of aids in 1987: how did that happen to a straight woman released from the trap of a man’s body?

What happened to the notion that the well adjusted person accepts and deals with the material realities of their existence?  If a working class girl were to insist that she were a “princess trapped inside of a proletarian body” we would tell her to get over it, wouldn’t we?  At best, people with “gender issues” are confused, at worst, they are delusional.

And what does this have to do with sexual attraction?  I have always been utterly at peace with being a male, comfortable in my body, vain of my appearance, never have I felt there was some sort of submerged “feminine side” struggling to make itself felt.  And yet I have, since coming to sexual awareness in my early teens, been attracted both to men and women.  In fact, just as the women I am attracted to are archetypal feminine (broad hips, round faced, nurturing), the men I favor are just as strongly masculine (lean, hard, dominant).

The problem with confounding gender issues with sexuality issues is that straights think of gays as being “faggy” already.  What I want is an exhibit where someone could come out thinking, “Gee — not all men who sleep with men are soft little fairies; some of them are really manly!”  But this exhibit does exactly the opposite, not only failing to distinguish between cross dressing and homoeroticism, but lumping profoundly confused transsexuals in with well grounded leathermen.

Finally there are the issues of Situational Sexuality and Bisexual Erasure.

Historically, a tremendous amount of homoeroticism has been situational.  Probably almost everyone is familiar with “what men do in prison” as Archie Bunker once referred to it but, before the wide-spread use of contraception (and the subsequent sexual availability of women), homoeroticism was widespread among young boys (who routinely swapped hand-jobs, the so-called “circle jerk”), while working class men knew which bars to go to if they wanted to get a quick suck from queers who were glad to perform the service.  An older friend of mine actually blames “all that political crap after Stonewall” for ruining this for, by politicizing sexuality, activists forced people to pick-sides, to declare themselves as either straight or gay, thus driving away straight and bisexual men who might otherwise have indulged in homoeroticism.

“Our In Chicago” is also bisexual free.  Aside from the “B” in the ubiquitous “LGBT” designation there is not a single reference to bisexuals, bisexuality, or anything except monoramic sexuality.  This absence thus achieves the political aim of forcing people to choose sides, when the simple fact is that our society will never come to any kind of well functioning sexual milieu until we make bisexuality the norm.

Where is Hypocrisy?

Alexandra Kollontai

Before the first meeting of the new Council of People's Commissars, Stalin had a peculiar and revealing encounter with Trotsky.  The two men were in a committee room where, behind a partition, the Bolshevik sailor Pavel Dybenko (at this point Commissar of the Navy) was having an amorous conversation with his mistress, the aristocratic free-love advocate Alexandra Kollontai (whose views on sex Lenin deplored). Stalin gesticulated towards the partition and smirked in a vulgar manner.


Trotsky drew himself up and rebuffed this hail-fellow crudity: "Stalin sensed that he had made a mistake.  His face changed and in his yellow eyes appeared the same glint of animosity that I had noticed even in Vienna. From then on he never attempted to engage me in conversation on personal matters."


—  Robert Conquest, "Stalin," p.70

This incident is interesting because it shows clearly the difference between those who profess a relaxed view of sexuality and those who are actually relaxed in their attitude.  Kollontai, the avowed free love advocate, is perfectly at ease with her sexuality.  Stalin, though accepting sexual propriety as the norm, understands that men will be men and is amused by Dybenko's windfall.  Trotsky, while rejecting bourgeois sexual attitudes, has actually internalized them and is deeply uncomfortable both with the carnality of the lovers and Stalin's vulgar amusement.

This dichotomy persists to the present day.  Though homosexuality is widely approved of in bourgeois circles, most people still find actual homoeroticism disgusting and thus see homosexuals as something of a breed apart.  This leads to a visceral acceptance of the idea that homosexuals were "born that way," as the easiest explanation of why they are so different, and a horror of bisexuals as perversely finding both normal sex and disgusting homoeroticism attractive.

The Pucci Dress

A typical Pucci Dress

In July of 1964, Esquire Magazine published an article by Robert Benton and David Newman called "The New Sentimentality," which essentially tried to portray the cool, capable, reserved style of the early 1960's as being, not cynical, but of a different type of sentimentality, as a sort of Existential Sentimentality.  This was an almost Absurdist Sentimentality, embracing emotional attachments almost randomly.  It did this in an amusing format, contrasting icons of the Old and New Sentimentalities.  A typical pairing was Arthur Miller ("Inner honor.  Suicides.  Social poetizing.  New Deal.  American tragedies.  Find yourself.") with Robert Lowel ("Beauty of destruction.  The sanitarium as a setting for a poem.  The order of chaos.").  Other pairings were Ben Hogan and Sonny Liston, Jackson Pollock and Roy Lichtenstein, Count Basie with the Modern Jazz Quartet.  This was written just on the cusp of the drastic social changes that were to come in the second half of the decade.  Rock and Roll was new, but not pervasive, Kennedy was dead, but there were still a lot of Cold Warrior Liberals around, Malcolm X was still alive and he was the only one who said "Black" instead of "Negro."  It was a curious moment, because the authors understood  the sentimentality of the previous generation, and sensed that it was slipping away, yet they hadn't any kind of grasp on what was to come.  They understand the Rat Pack, but not the Beatles.

"The Clan — They are Boys' Night Out; the gang; the Buddy System; the romance of booze; practical joking; the Playboy Philosophy; Nouveau Riche; the idea of Organized Fun; millionaires; Show Biz."

"The Beatles — They are the Put-On; the big laugh; a slap in the face; Professionalism; the new idea of the Celebrity; Ringo's looks; "We're not any good, but we're having a good time"; Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"

And here is where they really miss the mark and yet hit it at the same time: the Pucci Dress —

Women dressing for women are not in the New Sentimentality. The designer Pucci was the first to realize that what men love about women is not their chic, or their correctness, but their bodies. Men are sentimental about bodies. The Pucci dress is all about women's structure. It respects the body and makes it look female. There are cheap dresses that do this, but they can't do it for the woman you love.

Marilyn Monroe wearing a Pucci print dress.

Quite a statement, and quite prescient. The whole ethos of fashion was going to change, and change radically. And it was going to be about bodies and a more sensual way of dressing. What is simply astonishing is that none of what they say applies to the Pucci dress! It makes you realize just how out-of-touch men of that era were with sensuality. Think of the crass, scrubbed, powder-white skin of the typical Playboy "playmate" of the time. Can you imagine the shock that a young man, whose only knowledge of naked women came from Playboy, would have upon actually seeing how hairy women are? how wet and slippery the actual process of coupling is? and how very pungent a woman's arousal can smell? Look at the picture of Marilyn Monroe, certainly a woman know for her womanly form, observe how even she looks utterly de-sexed in a Pucci dress! It makes you realize just how utterly cultural sexual desire is. How Victorian men might actually have desired women in the freakish corsets of the era, how Mandarins might actually have been aroused by stunted and dwarfed feet, or perhaps even how someone might desire Helen Gurley Brown.

Do Communists Have Better Sex?

The other day I found an interesting film on YouTube, “Do Communists Have Better Sex?” It was the title that grabbed me. As an former Godless Communist, I retain a lingering pride in the achievements of Soviet Man. Sputnik, the first man in space, the first woman in space, the Super Booster, the Belomor Canal, the world’s largest bomb, weaving machines, and turbine generators (not to mention beating Hitler and saving the world.), and now we are told better sex as well!


Wow!!!
There are no inhibitions that Bolsheviks cannot conquer!
Freed from bourgeois propriety, Soviet Man achieves per capita rates of bliss to dwarf that of the hodmen of capitalism!
Scientific socialism has given proletarian lovers orgasm after orgasm, while imperialist couples jostle one another like blind puppies in a bathetic dance of frustration.
Fight today, revolutionary, at the barricades of copulation!
Kto kogo!
[Take a minute to calm down.]



DO COMMUNISTS HAVE BETTER SEX ? (2006) from ma.ja.de. on Vimeo.


Now, this was actually a serious documentary, well made, dealing with a documented phenomenon. When the Berlin wall came down in November 1989, sociologists rushed east to study the differences between capitalist and communist societies. They found that, despite the repressive nature of the regime in the DDR, the sex was better. Two key facts stand out:

• While western couples copulated on average two times a week, eastern couples averaged three times.
• Whereas western women reported achieving orgasm in 50% of their sexual encounters, eastern women hit the jack-pot fully 85% of the time.

There were other interesting statistics as well (e.g. eastern penises averaged 6 mm larger than western, 90% of Easterners had participated in nudist activities), but these two, I think, indicate a significant and undeniable phenomenon: sex was better under communism. Furthermore, by the early 2000’s, eastern statistics had fallen to western levels, indicating that this phenomenon was not geographical, but political. Anecdotally, eastern women actually complained that sex had been better under the Soviet government.


Why? Why should a régime so despised by its citizens, one that failed to produce the material abundance of its rival in the west, one that controlled speech and expression so thoroughly, have produced these high levels of sexual satisfaction? Several ideas were proposed.


• The east was secular, while the west was “oppressed” by the church: the sexuality of the west was hobbled by religiosity. Though this difference was pronounced during the 1950’s, by the 1980’s rates of church attendance were comparable, yet rates of sex satisfaction actually declined in the west during this time.


• The east offered comprehensive sex education. While the east did institute “modern” sex education much earlier than the west, by 1970 this to was comparable, so this too is a spurious variable.


• There was less fear of pregnancy in the east, since children were subsidized. This, I think does explain differing patterns of fertility. Women in the east averaged three children, as opposed to two in the west, and they had them in their early twenties while in the west women began having children about five years later. But contraception was equally available in east and west (albeit, subsidized in the east), so after the introduction of the pill in the early 1960’s this would seem to be less of a variable.


• Women in the east were economically autonomous. Due to the post-war man shortage in the east, women were brought into the work-force in the late 1940’s, becoming factory workers, bricklayers. It was ordinary and usual for an eastern woman to have her own income and not be dependent upon a man. Yet by 1980, rates of female employment in east and west were comparable, so this too would seem to be a spurious variable.


• Material affluence make people lethargic in the west. There might be something to this. Material abundance makes one materialistic, whereas privation makes one look to more spiritual satisfactions. Sexuality, reflecting the totality of the person, must inevitably be degraded by a materialist world view, so privation just might enhance sexuality.


• Prostitution and pornography were unavailable in the east. This, I think, is the key factor. Let’s take this a bit further and extrapolate about the kind and number of sexual outlets available to Easterners. Small apartments and lack of pornography made masturbation difficult. Suppression of prostitution closed this outlet. An endemic housing shortage and lack of hotels and private automobiles made trysting spots rare, so illicit affairs were probably difficult and thus fewer in number. Thus sexuality was channeled into expression within monogamous relationships.
When sex becomes a commodity (as capitalism inevitably makes everything), men can find release easily and without effort, so they undervalue their sexual partners. However, when a man can find release only with a woman he is partnered with, he takes care of that woman, makes sure she enjoys sex. The film-makers miss this, stressing in fact that the west was rife with means of sexual satisfaction (e.g. peep-shows, classes to teach women how to find their G-spot, pornography of all sorts, the widespread availability of sex toys), yet are baffled that these failed to produce the sex satisfaction that they promised. They have extensive footage of how, immediately following reunification, Easterners consumed pornography eagerly, yet fail to tie this in with the subsequent decline in sex satisfaction.


Thus, perhaps unwittingly, the communist system fostered sexual exclusivity, the key to lasting sex satisfaction. Eastern man was not troubled by the unrealistic (and fraudulent) example of pornography; having no idealized sex-goddess to compare his mate with, he was satisfied with her. Similarly too, eastern woman, having fewer lifetime sex partners, was likely to end up with one that was as good as, if not better than, her previous lovers. Faced with a paucity of sexual outlets, eastern couples made the best of each other, coming to delight in their familiarity. Variety, far from enhancing long-term sexual satisfaction, pales before the skill that comes only from truly intimate knowledge of ones partner.

What are the markers of a closeted "family values" homosexual?

Lately I've been trying to identify indicators of closet homosexuals, as so many Republicans seem to be just that.  Here's what I've come up with so far:

• Unmarried, married late in life, or (especially) suddenly married.
• Adopted children or stepchildren.
• "Family values" talk, plutocratic voting record.
• Wife is somehow not his equal (less education, from a developing nation, former employee).
• Wife gives off a "sex negative" vibe.

Poor George

When people think they are telling you something about sex they are more usually telling you something about themselves.

"Clinton Lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is."

— Former First Lady Barbara Bush

 Not true. I have forgotten a lot of oral sex.  Not that it was bad or that I didn't enjoy it, just that between men blow-jobs aren't a big deal.  

Blow-jobs are fast, and they are easy, and nowadays there is the added factor that the risk of infection is low.  There is also the fact that, unlike anal penetration where one party is definitely the Top, swapping blow-jobs can side-step the issue of dominance altogether.  Thus, they are the normal mode of sexual expression between men.

Being bisexual, I got a lot of blow-jobs and it was no big deal.  For a year I lived in a courtyard building on Surf Street that was full of gay men and, if I came home alone at night, the chances were good that one of my neighbors would offer to suck me off.  That happened at least once a week and I'll be damned if I can remember any distinguishing details for more than half-a-dozen of them.  When I was in high school I spent a whole summer pretty much doing nothing but swapping blow-jobs with my buddy Carson and then later, when we both had other lovers, I could still call him up if I was in the mood for a quick suck.  No big deal.

It has also been my experience that most sexually healthy women like sucking cock; they just don't want to be stuck doing only that.  They really like it as foreplay, and sometimes they like the feeling of power that it gives them to be able to give a guy an orgasm, or they like the idea of being able to do something for their lover, just for him, and what they don't want is for that to replace actual love-making.

Of course there are men who obsess about oral sex.   Some because they never get any, some because the passive nature of simply receiving pleasure appeals to them, some because they think it makes them more dominant, and most despicably of all, there are men who feel sucking cock is degrading and they enjoy debasing women.

Naturally, having had my fill of it in my youth, I never obsessed about oral sex.  In fact, because I had so much good oral from men, I usually find oral sex from women to be second-rate.  (The simple fact is, they don't have cocks, they never really know what they are doing.)  Ironically, the fact that I wasn't really interested in oral made women all the more eager to do that with me.  They loved the idea that they could just suck me whenever they wanted, and that I would never pressure them into doing that, nor that this would ever dampen my desire or become a substitute for actual sex.

So what Barbara Bush was really telling us is that she considers oral sex so unusual a thing as to be always memorable.

Draw your own conclusions about how much oral she's ever done.

Thougts On Pornography

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