By Tracey Cox
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
You can make love to the same person for the rest of your life in a million different ways, places and situations. Here are some foreplay tips for familiar lovers and some great ideas for just about anyone.
*Combine romance with eroticism. You feel great when he sends you flowers, so why not return the favour? Try sending a bottle of expensive vintage champagne, red wine or port. Now turn that loving gesture into a sexy one. Enclose a note explaining in great detail exactly what he did to deserve such luxurious spoils.
*Become a bookworm. Invest 50 in your love life by walking into any good bookshop and walking out with your arms full of sex books. You don't have to read them cover to cover, just dip inside once in a while to keep things fresh. While you're there, splash out on a racy novel too. Find the good bits and read them out to each other as a form of foreplay.
*Have a bed picnic. Set up chilled wine and an ice-bucket in your bedroom, foods you can eat with your fingers (fresh fruit, chocolates); have an erotic movie playing in the background on the bedroom DVD player.
*Once isn't always enough. There's a lot of hype about women having more than one orgasm, but he likes double helpings too. Have sex in the morning on the weekend, then drag him back to bed an hour later.
*Be her sex slave for a day. An especially good idea if you're broke and her birthday is looming. All you need to do is offer to devote one entire day to pleasuring her.
*Flirt with each other even if you've been together years. Experts say flirting sends natural stimulants surging through the body, creating an instant emotional "high" not unlike orgasm. Pretend you've just met him and act as you did at the beginning. Be aware of your body when you move in front of him and chances are he'll sit up and take notice too.
*Send sexy notes. The written word is extremely powerful. In the fridge stuck to the juice, in her briefcase and make-up bag. Each one describes bits of her you find so sexy. Or you could make them 10 things you'd love to do to her right that second.
*Be his mistress. If he's going to have an affair, make sure it's with you. Arrange to meet him at lunchtime in the bar of a plain but presentable hotel. Book a room, buy a bottle of champagne and have forbidden, illicit, wild sex.
*Remember kissing? It's what you used to do when you first met. Many couples find that kissing stops once the relationship gets going or dwindles to a quick snog before getting down to business. A long, passionate kiss can do more to turn both of you on than putting your hands straight down the front of his trousers.
*Keep your clothes on. Feel each other through your clothing, put your leg in between her thighs and let her gyrate against it.
*Be pushy. Bearing down with your vaginal muscles during sex seems to trigger orgasm for many women.
*Keep your eyes open. Watch what's going on when you have sex: look into their face, watch your genitals moving in and out. Stimulate the sense of sight, not just touch.
*Be unpredictable. You're not going to surprise him if you suggest having sex on a Saturday night as you both climb into bed. But you will catch him unawares if you cuddle him from behind when he's cleaning the car, washing up or reading a book.
*Make the move. If your partner is always the one to initiate sex, the message you're sending is: I do it to please you, not because I want to. This leaves both of you feeling cheated. The person initiating sex feels sexier because they're taking control and giving themselves power. Be the boss by taking the lead role during lovemaking as well.
*Lie a little. He's away on business? The next time he calls you late at night, skip the usual stuff and tell him, in intimate detail, what you're wearing. Move on to what you're going to do to him when you get your hands on him. The juicier the better.
*Try one new thing each fortnight. Start off simple. Have a bath together, give each other a foot massage, take off her top or his shirt without using your hands. Then move into things like making love to them with their hands tied behind their back and masturbating in front of each other.
*If you're excited, show it. The biggest turn-on of all is seeing how much you're exciting your partner. If he's driving you wild, show him better still, say so.
Adapted from 'Hot Sex', by Tracey Cox (Transworld, 8.99)
'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
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Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
Hank Paulson has turned a drama into a crisis
By punishing shareholders, the US Treasury Secretary had made the rescue of other troubled banks almost impossible
Anatole Kaletsky
It looks as if the prophets of doom may have been right after all. With the demise of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch - and the threatened collapse of the world's largest insurance company, American International Group - we are now unquestionably in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
But does this mean that the “real” economy of non-financial jobs, investment, consumer spending and housing also faces its greatest disaster in 60 years, as Alistair Darling has said?
Probably not. The real economy and the world of finance can easily move in opposite directions. Most of the truly imprudent borrowing and lending of the past few years has occurred within the financial sector, with one bank or hedge fund lending insane amounts of money to another. Much of this debt could, in principle, be wiped away without affecting anybody apart from the financiers who were riding this crazy merry-go-round - and that has been pretty much the story of the past 12 months. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost in Wall Street and the City, but the impact beyond that has been quite modest, except on property values and some of the luxury goods and services previously bought by these millionaires.
The past few days' events, however, have raised two alarming qualifications to this generally reassuring story. The first is that the decoupling between financial and economic conditions that I have been expecting - and which has broadly happened - can only be a matter of degree. The non-financial economy can shrug off a certain amount of bloodletting in the City and Wall Street, but if the turmoil escalates to the point where a country's entire financial structure starts collapsing, the consequences are bound to be dire for non-financial businesses and jobs.
This tipping point has not yet been reached in America or Britain. But it suddenly seems perilously close - with stock market prices plunging on Monday to the point where serious questions could be raised for the first time about the viability of key financial institutions such as AIG, Citibank and Bank of America, or of UBS in Switzerland or of Halifax, Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays in the UK.
Why are these banks suddenly in such deep trouble? This brings us to the second alarming qualification to my optimism about economic and financial decoupling.
It could be that the divergence between the financial and real economies, instead of resulting in a better-than-expected performance of the real economy, will take the form of a much more catastrophic financial crisis than the economic fundamentals seem to justify. Such a financial catastrophe could then turn what would have been just a modest economic slowdown or mild recession into a genuine disaster.
The risk of such a disastrous divergence between the worlds of finance and economics, with the financial system spinning completely out of control despite an otherwise decent outlook for the US and world economies, is much greater today than two weeks ago. And the reason can be reduced to one name - Henry Paulson, the Secretary of the US Treasury.
By deciding essentially to wipe out shareholders in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and acting even more harshly to the shareholders of Lehman Brothers this weekend, Mr Paulson has sent the clearest possible message to investors around the world: do not buy shares in any bank or insurance company that could, under any conceivable circumstances, run short of capital and need to ask for government help; if this happens, the shareholders will be obliterated and will not be allowed to participate in any potential gains should the bank later recover.
This punitive policy towards the shareholders in Fannie, Freddie and Lehman, who had put more than $20billion of capital into these companies in the hope of keeping them alive, means that no US bank or insurance company can hope to raise any extra capital in the foreseeable future.
This is true of both domestic investors and the Middle Eastern and Asian sovereign wealth funds, whose trillions of dollars of assets were, until a month ago, viewed as an ultimate safety net for the Western financial system.
Both groups have been so badly burnt by Mr Paulson that they are unlikely to support any refinancing by an American bank. And because governments and central bankers elesewhere, particularly in Britain, have loudly praised Mr Paulson's punitive treatment of shareholders, investors would presumably reach similar conclusions about the folly of helping any British bank.
The upshot is that any US or British bank that suffers unexpected losses or is subject to a powerful speculative attack by stock market short-sellers has nowhere to turn. And that in turn means that the total liquidation of a large financial institution in America, Britain or Europe is now seriously conceivable for the first time.
What makes the situation even more alarming is the perversity of the hardline approach taken by the US and British authorities. The investors who were “punished” by the loss of shareholder wealth in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman were not the speculators who encouraged and financed their reckless lending in 2004-06. They were value-orientated investors betting on a long-term recovery in the US economy and whose willingness to invest on the basis of such recovery could have prevented these companies' collapse.
By wiping out these investors - and instead rewarding the speculators who were trying to drive the share prices of these companies down to zero and thereby put them out of business - Mr Paulson has tilted the balance of power in the financial markets to a point where it is impossible to say for certain that any financial institution will survive.
In short, Mr Paulson has created an open season for speculators to attack financial companies around the world. These attacks are likely to continue and grow in ferocity until the point when governments start supporting not just the deposits and bonds, but also the shares of financial institutions whose survival is essential to keeping their economies running.
But surely it is impossible to suggest such a misunderstanding of basic finance from Mr Paulson, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs? Perhaps.
But then it is worth recalling that Andrew Mellon, the US Treasury Secretary under Herbert Hoover in 1929, was also considered the leading financier of his generation, It is also worth recalling that Donald Rumsfeld was supposed to know something about military strategy and President Bush, a former governor of Texas, about emergency flood control.
Anatole Kaletsky
It looks as if the prophets of doom may have been right after all. With the demise of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch - and the threatened collapse of the world's largest insurance company, American International Group - we are now unquestionably in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
But does this mean that the “real” economy of non-financial jobs, investment, consumer spending and housing also faces its greatest disaster in 60 years, as Alistair Darling has said?
Probably not. The real economy and the world of finance can easily move in opposite directions. Most of the truly imprudent borrowing and lending of the past few years has occurred within the financial sector, with one bank or hedge fund lending insane amounts of money to another. Much of this debt could, in principle, be wiped away without affecting anybody apart from the financiers who were riding this crazy merry-go-round - and that has been pretty much the story of the past 12 months. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost in Wall Street and the City, but the impact beyond that has been quite modest, except on property values and some of the luxury goods and services previously bought by these millionaires.
The past few days' events, however, have raised two alarming qualifications to this generally reassuring story. The first is that the decoupling between financial and economic conditions that I have been expecting - and which has broadly happened - can only be a matter of degree. The non-financial economy can shrug off a certain amount of bloodletting in the City and Wall Street, but if the turmoil escalates to the point where a country's entire financial structure starts collapsing, the consequences are bound to be dire for non-financial businesses and jobs.
This tipping point has not yet been reached in America or Britain. But it suddenly seems perilously close - with stock market prices plunging on Monday to the point where serious questions could be raised for the first time about the viability of key financial institutions such as AIG, Citibank and Bank of America, or of UBS in Switzerland or of Halifax, Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays in the UK.
Why are these banks suddenly in such deep trouble? This brings us to the second alarming qualification to my optimism about economic and financial decoupling.
It could be that the divergence between the financial and real economies, instead of resulting in a better-than-expected performance of the real economy, will take the form of a much more catastrophic financial crisis than the economic fundamentals seem to justify. Such a financial catastrophe could then turn what would have been just a modest economic slowdown or mild recession into a genuine disaster.
The risk of such a disastrous divergence between the worlds of finance and economics, with the financial system spinning completely out of control despite an otherwise decent outlook for the US and world economies, is much greater today than two weeks ago. And the reason can be reduced to one name - Henry Paulson, the Secretary of the US Treasury.
By deciding essentially to wipe out shareholders in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and acting even more harshly to the shareholders of Lehman Brothers this weekend, Mr Paulson has sent the clearest possible message to investors around the world: do not buy shares in any bank or insurance company that could, under any conceivable circumstances, run short of capital and need to ask for government help; if this happens, the shareholders will be obliterated and will not be allowed to participate in any potential gains should the bank later recover.
This punitive policy towards the shareholders in Fannie, Freddie and Lehman, who had put more than $20billion of capital into these companies in the hope of keeping them alive, means that no US bank or insurance company can hope to raise any extra capital in the foreseeable future.
This is true of both domestic investors and the Middle Eastern and Asian sovereign wealth funds, whose trillions of dollars of assets were, until a month ago, viewed as an ultimate safety net for the Western financial system.
Both groups have been so badly burnt by Mr Paulson that they are unlikely to support any refinancing by an American bank. And because governments and central bankers elesewhere, particularly in Britain, have loudly praised Mr Paulson's punitive treatment of shareholders, investors would presumably reach similar conclusions about the folly of helping any British bank.
The upshot is that any US or British bank that suffers unexpected losses or is subject to a powerful speculative attack by stock market short-sellers has nowhere to turn. And that in turn means that the total liquidation of a large financial institution in America, Britain or Europe is now seriously conceivable for the first time.
What makes the situation even more alarming is the perversity of the hardline approach taken by the US and British authorities. The investors who were “punished” by the loss of shareholder wealth in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman were not the speculators who encouraged and financed their reckless lending in 2004-06. They were value-orientated investors betting on a long-term recovery in the US economy and whose willingness to invest on the basis of such recovery could have prevented these companies' collapse.
By wiping out these investors - and instead rewarding the speculators who were trying to drive the share prices of these companies down to zero and thereby put them out of business - Mr Paulson has tilted the balance of power in the financial markets to a point where it is impossible to say for certain that any financial institution will survive.
In short, Mr Paulson has created an open season for speculators to attack financial companies around the world. These attacks are likely to continue and grow in ferocity until the point when governments start supporting not just the deposits and bonds, but also the shares of financial institutions whose survival is essential to keeping their economies running.
But surely it is impossible to suggest such a misunderstanding of basic finance from Mr Paulson, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs? Perhaps.
But then it is worth recalling that Andrew Mellon, the US Treasury Secretary under Herbert Hoover in 1929, was also considered the leading financier of his generation, It is also worth recalling that Donald Rumsfeld was supposed to know something about military strategy and President Bush, a former governor of Texas, about emergency flood control.
The fruit of hypocrisy - Dishonesty in the finance sector dragged us here, and Washington looks ill-equipped to guide us out.
The fruit of hypocrisyDishonesty in the finance sector dragged us here, and Washington looks ill-equipped to guide us out
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Joseph Stiglitz The Guardian, Tuesday September 16 2008 Article historyHouses of cards, chickens coming home to roost - pick your cliche. The new low in the financial crisis, which has prompted comparisons with the 1929 Wall Street crash, is the fruit of a pattern of dishonesty on the part of financial institutions, and incompetence on the part of policymakers.
We had become accustomed to the hypocrisy. The banks reject any suggestion they should face regulation, rebuff any move towards anti-trust measures - yet when trouble strikes, all of a sudden they demand state intervention: they must be bailed out; they are too big, too important to be allowed to fail.
Eventually, however, we were always going to learn how big the safety net was. And a sign of the limits of the US Federal Reserve and treasury's willingness to rescue comes with the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, one of the most famous Wall Street names.
The big question always centres on systemic risk: to what extent does the collapse of an institution imperil the financial system as a whole? Wall Street has always been quick to overstate systemic risk - take, for example, the 1994 Mexican financial crisis - but loth to allow examination of their own dealings. Last week the US treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, judged there was sufficient systemic risk to warrant a government rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; but there was not sufficient systemic risk seen in Lehman.
The present financial crisis springs from a catastrophic collapse in confidence. The banks were laying huge bets with each other over loans and assets. Complex transactions were designed to move risk and disguise the sliding value of assets. In this game there are winners and losers. And it's not a zero-sum game, it's a negative-sum game: as people wake up to the smoke and mirrors in the financial system, as people grow averse to risk, losses occur; the market as a whole plummets and everyone loses.
Financial markets hinge on trust, and that trust has eroded. Lehman's collapse marks at the very least a powerful symbol of a new low in confidence, and the reverberations will continue.
The crisis in trust extends beyond banks. In the global context, there is dwindling confidence in US policymakers. At July's G8 meeting in Hokkaido the US delivered assurances that things were turning around at last. The weeks since have done nothing but confirm any global mistrust of government experts.
How seriously, then, should we take comparisons with the crash of 1929? Most economists believe we have the monetary and fiscal instruments and understanding to avoid collapse on that scale. And yet the IMF and the US treasury, together with central banks and finance ministers from many other countries, are capable of supporting the sort of "rescue" policies that led Indonesia to economic disaster in 1998. Moreover, it is difficult to have faith in the policy wherewithal of a government that oversaw the utter mismanagement of the war in Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. If any administration can turn this crisis into another depression, it is the Bush administration.
America's financial system failed in its two crucial responsibilities: managing risk and allocating capital. The industry as a whole has not been doing what it should be doing - for instance creating products that help Americans manage critical risks, such as staying in their homes when interest rates rise or house prices fall - and it must now face change in its regulatory structures. Regrettably, many of the worst elements of the US financial system - toxic mortgages and the practices that led to them - were exported to the rest of the world.
It was all done in the name of innovation, and any regulatory initiative was fought away with claims that it would suppress that innovation. They were innovating, all right, but not in ways that made the economy stronger. Some of America's best and brightest were devoting their talents to getting around standards and regulations designed to ensure the efficiency of the economy and the safety of the banking system. Unfortunately, they were far too successful, and we are all - homeowners, workers, investors, taxpayers - paying the price.
· Joseph E Stiglitz is university professor at Columbia University and recipient of the 2001 Nobel prize in economics josephstiglitz.com
All comments ()
Joseph Stiglitz The Guardian, Tuesday September 16 2008 Article historyHouses of cards, chickens coming home to roost - pick your cliche. The new low in the financial crisis, which has prompted comparisons with the 1929 Wall Street crash, is the fruit of a pattern of dishonesty on the part of financial institutions, and incompetence on the part of policymakers.
We had become accustomed to the hypocrisy. The banks reject any suggestion they should face regulation, rebuff any move towards anti-trust measures - yet when trouble strikes, all of a sudden they demand state intervention: they must be bailed out; they are too big, too important to be allowed to fail.
Eventually, however, we were always going to learn how big the safety net was. And a sign of the limits of the US Federal Reserve and treasury's willingness to rescue comes with the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, one of the most famous Wall Street names.
The big question always centres on systemic risk: to what extent does the collapse of an institution imperil the financial system as a whole? Wall Street has always been quick to overstate systemic risk - take, for example, the 1994 Mexican financial crisis - but loth to allow examination of their own dealings. Last week the US treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, judged there was sufficient systemic risk to warrant a government rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; but there was not sufficient systemic risk seen in Lehman.
The present financial crisis springs from a catastrophic collapse in confidence. The banks were laying huge bets with each other over loans and assets. Complex transactions were designed to move risk and disguise the sliding value of assets. In this game there are winners and losers. And it's not a zero-sum game, it's a negative-sum game: as people wake up to the smoke and mirrors in the financial system, as people grow averse to risk, losses occur; the market as a whole plummets and everyone loses.
Financial markets hinge on trust, and that trust has eroded. Lehman's collapse marks at the very least a powerful symbol of a new low in confidence, and the reverberations will continue.
The crisis in trust extends beyond banks. In the global context, there is dwindling confidence in US policymakers. At July's G8 meeting in Hokkaido the US delivered assurances that things were turning around at last. The weeks since have done nothing but confirm any global mistrust of government experts.
How seriously, then, should we take comparisons with the crash of 1929? Most economists believe we have the monetary and fiscal instruments and understanding to avoid collapse on that scale. And yet the IMF and the US treasury, together with central banks and finance ministers from many other countries, are capable of supporting the sort of "rescue" policies that led Indonesia to economic disaster in 1998. Moreover, it is difficult to have faith in the policy wherewithal of a government that oversaw the utter mismanagement of the war in Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. If any administration can turn this crisis into another depression, it is the Bush administration.
America's financial system failed in its two crucial responsibilities: managing risk and allocating capital. The industry as a whole has not been doing what it should be doing - for instance creating products that help Americans manage critical risks, such as staying in their homes when interest rates rise or house prices fall - and it must now face change in its regulatory structures. Regrettably, many of the worst elements of the US financial system - toxic mortgages and the practices that led to them - were exported to the rest of the world.
It was all done in the name of innovation, and any regulatory initiative was fought away with claims that it would suppress that innovation. They were innovating, all right, but not in ways that made the economy stronger. Some of America's best and brightest were devoting their talents to getting around standards and regulations designed to ensure the efficiency of the economy and the safety of the banking system. Unfortunately, they were far too successful, and we are all - homeowners, workers, investors, taxpayers - paying the price.
· Joseph E Stiglitz is university professor at Columbia University and recipient of the 2001 Nobel prize in economics josephstiglitz.com
Till death do us part: why marriage remains popular
Paul Vallely ponders the surprising resilience of institutionalised monogamy
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
How very modern we are. There is a temptation to think that with fewer people getting married, more divorces, more cohabitation and now civil partnerships for gays we have, in recent decades, overturned a traditional view of marriage that goes back thousands of years. But history tells another tale.
It is true that throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the population of Great Britain grew, the number of marriages rose steadily, reaching a peak around 1970 as the bulge of babies born after World War II reached child-rearing age. Since then the overall number of people marrying has been declining. Moreover, close to two in five marriages in the UK now ends in divorce one of the highest rates in Europe. Yet what we regard as the traditional institution of marriage may merely be a Victorian middle-class invention and all we're doing now is reverting to an even more traditional pattern of behaviour.
Men and women have always paired off. After the Enlightenment there was a school of anthropology suggesting that humankind's natural state was one of tribal promiscuity, but this was always an ideological standpoint rather than one rooted in empirical evidence. There were cultures in which polygamy (many marriages) or, more correctly, polygyny (many wives) was common. In some societies, particularly after war had wiped out large numbers of men, this practice was at times commonplace but often it was restricted to the kings, chiefs and strong men of the community. Even more rare was polyandry, the union of several husbands with one wife.
History, boringly, shows that monogamy has been the norm; indeed, the numerical balance of the sexes, the overpowering force of human jealousy, and the welfare of children would seem to suggest that monogamy is not just normal, but dictated by evolution. "Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature," as Aristotle put it in his Nicomachean Ethics, "for man is naturally disposed to pairing."
The institution through which human society has regulated sexual activity, and minimised the social conflicts that can arise from it, is marriage. That is what turns sex from a carnal indulgence into a form of social cement that brings legal, social, and economic stability to the pleasures of procreation.
Throughout the ages, there have been people who sought to express this in mystical terms. Marriage was considered to be woven deeply into the human spirit. The complementarity of sexual difference goes beyond legal contract or social institution to become, through the business of love, a binding covenant of mutual faithfulness. In Christian metaphor this is expressed as "one flesh" the notion that the couple no longer own their own body; that their body belongs to the other spouse, and to them both jointly. Eastern Orthodoxy even speaks of marriage as a martyrdom in which husband and wife learn to die to themselves for the sake of the other.
And yet for all that theological extravagance it has not been religion contrary to what many might suppose that has been the chief regulator of marriage. It is the state that has taken the leading role.
Four thousand years ago in Babylon, the king enacted a law decreeing that adulterers should be bound together and drowned. In more civilised Ancient Greece, despite Plato's perverse philosophical recommendation that the family should be abolished, a hierarchy of sexual regulation was in place that Demosthenes summarised with the epigram: "We have mistresses for pleasure, concubines to care for our daily body's needs and wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households."
So it continued in Rome, which became the source for many of our own marriage traditions the wedding ring on the third finger of the left hand, the bride in white and veiled, the hand-clasp of the married couple. The Romans too had various degrees of marriage: in one a woman lost the rights of inheritance from her father and gained them from her husband; in another the woman retained control of her own money, making divorce easier for her; in a third less binding form, a man could dispose of his wife by sending her a note saying "take your things away" as one Roman famously did, just because his wife went to the games without telling him.
It is hardly surprising then that serial monogamy which many assume we invented after the swinging Sixties was rife in the latter days of the Roman Republic and throughout the Empire. So much so that the Emperor Augustus tightened up the divorce laws fearing that the new trend would lead to low birth-rates and a population crisis.
Religion, surprisingly, kept a low profile in all this. The Jewish scriptures were full of stories of sexual liaisons which were, shall we say, unorthodox from the father of the faith, Abraham, having a child outside wedlock, to the great king Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines. These were far from simple tales of ordinary family life, though in later Judaism monogamy came to be the ideal.
Christianity for centuries took its lead from St Paul's back-handed recommendation that it was "better to marry than to burn". The gospels were ambiguous on marriage; the first recorded miracle of Jesus was at a wedding, but St Luke's genealogy of Christ included only four women, all of whom had irregular sexual relationships. The early church fathers took the view that since the end of the world was looming, the faithful really had no time for sex, but should get on with preparing for Christ's imminent second coming.
The idea that celibacy, to allow a more single-minded devotion to God and his people, was the preferable option persisted within the church for centuries. The Romans saw early Christianity as decidedly not pro-marriage. And for hundreds of years thereafter the church did not concern itself overmuch with marriage, largely just accepting the marital practices of the societies into which it expanded.
It was not for a thousand years that the church began to claim exclusive jurisdiction over matrimonial cases. Even in the Middle Ages couples were betrothed not at the altar but merely in the porch of the church. It was only in the 1540s that Catholics were required to get married before a priest. And it was the 1750s before British Protestants had to wed in church, Luther having decreed that marriage was not a sacrament but a "worldly thing... subject to worldly authority".
It was only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution that marriage began to be legally codified. It was the Marriage Act of 1753 that demanded a formal ceremony of marriage, with the publishing of banns, and parental consent for minors. It outlawed common-law marriage (the notion that a couple living together were subject to the rights and obligations of a legal marriage). Within 80 years, civil marriages had been recognised as a legal alternative to church marriages under the Marriage Act 1836.
But what persisted through all this and where real change has since come in the modern era was the status of marriage as a social institution. Throughout the centuries, marriage had crucially been an economic arrangement between two families, though among poorer classes it was governed by social form and class more than financial advantage. This reached its high point in the Victorian era. As Charles Pickstone, whose book For Fear of the Angels is an intriguing study of shifting attitudes to sex and marriage, puts it: "The Victorian era, with its high moral standards, was, able to buttress the difficulties of marriage with a scaffolding of public blame and private licence (at least for men)." It was when that scaffolding gave way that marriage shifted from being a social institution to a vehicle for personal fulfilment.
Economics consolidated the shift. Life became more comfortable as the Industrial Revolution continued. The affluent began to have more time on their hands for "relationships". Individuals who in previous centuries would have been content to settle for second best now developed much higher demands of what marriage should deliver emotionally. As the younger generation moved away from home to go to college, and broke links with their extended family, they began to invest more emotionally in marriage and the bond of sexual fidelity.
Women going out to work provided another gear change in the process. A century earlier, John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women had pointed out that women's decisions to marry could scarcely be called "free" given their low wages, precarious employment situation and poor educational prospects. The choice to marry, he said, was a Hobson's choice. When women began to go out and earn decent money, things changed again.
Feminist critiques of marriage followed. In The Feminine Mystique in 1963, Betty Friedan criticised the idea that women could only find fulfillment through child rearing and home making. In Feminism: An Agenda, 20 years later, Andrea Dworkin likened marriage to prostitution. Sheila Cronan took the view that marriage constitutes slavery for women, and that liberation meant the abolition of marriage. There followed gender feminism, equity feminism and post-feminism with suggestions that "marriages" should be replaced by five-year rolling contracts or that domestic responsibilities should be set down in legally binding documents.
Most of the world could not quite come round to applying doctrines of jurisprudence to dishwashing and continued to see marriage as rooted in ties of love and affection rather than the principles of justice. But expectations of marriage continued to rise and with it rates of divorce as those elevated expectations were dashed. "If love goes, the marriage goes" became the new orthodoxy. In the past, divorce had been a luxury for the rich, but almost everyone in the West was rich by the end of the 20th century.
Even so, Aristotle's truth still obtains. Marriage remains the commonest form of partnership between men and women. In 2006, of the 17 million families in the UK, 70 per cent were headed by a married couple. And though the number of cohabiting couples has doubled in two decades to around 2.2 million couples in the UK more than half of those will go on to marry.
Wedding ceremonies that a generation earlier had marked the start of a new household within the community now were seen as consolidations of an established relationship. The children of the couple became the bridesmaids and pages. And since cohabiting couples are statistically twice as likely to split up as married ones the wedding ritual has become an expression of stability.
There are new variations on the old theme, with solid second marriages after the failure of a "starter marriage" earlier on. But still today 95 per cent of women and 91 per cent of men in the UK have been married by the age of 50. And divorces have fallen for the past three years.
If the external pressures to marry have declined, the inner ones remain strong. Marriage still has an enduring magic. Even in recessions a high proportion of income continues to be spent on weddings, and the fairytale elements of the veil and white dress persist across the social scale; indeed there is very little difference in how different classes celebrate their weddings, apart from in scale and cost. Four Weddings and a Funeral remains one of the most successful British films ever made.
The fact that a third of marriages now end in divorce seems to make little difference. Couples queue to make vows that are splendidly extravagant. "Love seeks not a promise of affection," as the philosopher Roger Scruton has noted, "but a vow of loyalty" unconditional, lifelong and extraordinarily ambitious.
"The marriage contract is unlike most contracts," writes the academic L J Weitzman in that most unromantic of titles, The Economic Consequences of Divorce. "Its provisions are unwritten, its penalties are unspecified, and the terms of the contract are typically unknown to the contracting parties... No one would sign it if they had read it first."
But we do. And we continue to.
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
How very modern we are. There is a temptation to think that with fewer people getting married, more divorces, more cohabitation and now civil partnerships for gays we have, in recent decades, overturned a traditional view of marriage that goes back thousands of years. But history tells another tale.
It is true that throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the population of Great Britain grew, the number of marriages rose steadily, reaching a peak around 1970 as the bulge of babies born after World War II reached child-rearing age. Since then the overall number of people marrying has been declining. Moreover, close to two in five marriages in the UK now ends in divorce one of the highest rates in Europe. Yet what we regard as the traditional institution of marriage may merely be a Victorian middle-class invention and all we're doing now is reverting to an even more traditional pattern of behaviour.
Men and women have always paired off. After the Enlightenment there was a school of anthropology suggesting that humankind's natural state was one of tribal promiscuity, but this was always an ideological standpoint rather than one rooted in empirical evidence. There were cultures in which polygamy (many marriages) or, more correctly, polygyny (many wives) was common. In some societies, particularly after war had wiped out large numbers of men, this practice was at times commonplace but often it was restricted to the kings, chiefs and strong men of the community. Even more rare was polyandry, the union of several husbands with one wife.
History, boringly, shows that monogamy has been the norm; indeed, the numerical balance of the sexes, the overpowering force of human jealousy, and the welfare of children would seem to suggest that monogamy is not just normal, but dictated by evolution. "Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature," as Aristotle put it in his Nicomachean Ethics, "for man is naturally disposed to pairing."
The institution through which human society has regulated sexual activity, and minimised the social conflicts that can arise from it, is marriage. That is what turns sex from a carnal indulgence into a form of social cement that brings legal, social, and economic stability to the pleasures of procreation.
Throughout the ages, there have been people who sought to express this in mystical terms. Marriage was considered to be woven deeply into the human spirit. The complementarity of sexual difference goes beyond legal contract or social institution to become, through the business of love, a binding covenant of mutual faithfulness. In Christian metaphor this is expressed as "one flesh" the notion that the couple no longer own their own body; that their body belongs to the other spouse, and to them both jointly. Eastern Orthodoxy even speaks of marriage as a martyrdom in which husband and wife learn to die to themselves for the sake of the other.
And yet for all that theological extravagance it has not been religion contrary to what many might suppose that has been the chief regulator of marriage. It is the state that has taken the leading role.
Four thousand years ago in Babylon, the king enacted a law decreeing that adulterers should be bound together and drowned. In more civilised Ancient Greece, despite Plato's perverse philosophical recommendation that the family should be abolished, a hierarchy of sexual regulation was in place that Demosthenes summarised with the epigram: "We have mistresses for pleasure, concubines to care for our daily body's needs and wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households."
So it continued in Rome, which became the source for many of our own marriage traditions the wedding ring on the third finger of the left hand, the bride in white and veiled, the hand-clasp of the married couple. The Romans too had various degrees of marriage: in one a woman lost the rights of inheritance from her father and gained them from her husband; in another the woman retained control of her own money, making divorce easier for her; in a third less binding form, a man could dispose of his wife by sending her a note saying "take your things away" as one Roman famously did, just because his wife went to the games without telling him.
It is hardly surprising then that serial monogamy which many assume we invented after the swinging Sixties was rife in the latter days of the Roman Republic and throughout the Empire. So much so that the Emperor Augustus tightened up the divorce laws fearing that the new trend would lead to low birth-rates and a population crisis.
Religion, surprisingly, kept a low profile in all this. The Jewish scriptures were full of stories of sexual liaisons which were, shall we say, unorthodox from the father of the faith, Abraham, having a child outside wedlock, to the great king Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines. These were far from simple tales of ordinary family life, though in later Judaism monogamy came to be the ideal.
Christianity for centuries took its lead from St Paul's back-handed recommendation that it was "better to marry than to burn". The gospels were ambiguous on marriage; the first recorded miracle of Jesus was at a wedding, but St Luke's genealogy of Christ included only four women, all of whom had irregular sexual relationships. The early church fathers took the view that since the end of the world was looming, the faithful really had no time for sex, but should get on with preparing for Christ's imminent second coming.
The idea that celibacy, to allow a more single-minded devotion to God and his people, was the preferable option persisted within the church for centuries. The Romans saw early Christianity as decidedly not pro-marriage. And for hundreds of years thereafter the church did not concern itself overmuch with marriage, largely just accepting the marital practices of the societies into which it expanded.
It was not for a thousand years that the church began to claim exclusive jurisdiction over matrimonial cases. Even in the Middle Ages couples were betrothed not at the altar but merely in the porch of the church. It was only in the 1540s that Catholics were required to get married before a priest. And it was the 1750s before British Protestants had to wed in church, Luther having decreed that marriage was not a sacrament but a "worldly thing... subject to worldly authority".
It was only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution that marriage began to be legally codified. It was the Marriage Act of 1753 that demanded a formal ceremony of marriage, with the publishing of banns, and parental consent for minors. It outlawed common-law marriage (the notion that a couple living together were subject to the rights and obligations of a legal marriage). Within 80 years, civil marriages had been recognised as a legal alternative to church marriages under the Marriage Act 1836.
But what persisted through all this and where real change has since come in the modern era was the status of marriage as a social institution. Throughout the centuries, marriage had crucially been an economic arrangement between two families, though among poorer classes it was governed by social form and class more than financial advantage. This reached its high point in the Victorian era. As Charles Pickstone, whose book For Fear of the Angels is an intriguing study of shifting attitudes to sex and marriage, puts it: "The Victorian era, with its high moral standards, was, able to buttress the difficulties of marriage with a scaffolding of public blame and private licence (at least for men)." It was when that scaffolding gave way that marriage shifted from being a social institution to a vehicle for personal fulfilment.
Economics consolidated the shift. Life became more comfortable as the Industrial Revolution continued. The affluent began to have more time on their hands for "relationships". Individuals who in previous centuries would have been content to settle for second best now developed much higher demands of what marriage should deliver emotionally. As the younger generation moved away from home to go to college, and broke links with their extended family, they began to invest more emotionally in marriage and the bond of sexual fidelity.
Women going out to work provided another gear change in the process. A century earlier, John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women had pointed out that women's decisions to marry could scarcely be called "free" given their low wages, precarious employment situation and poor educational prospects. The choice to marry, he said, was a Hobson's choice. When women began to go out and earn decent money, things changed again.
Feminist critiques of marriage followed. In The Feminine Mystique in 1963, Betty Friedan criticised the idea that women could only find fulfillment through child rearing and home making. In Feminism: An Agenda, 20 years later, Andrea Dworkin likened marriage to prostitution. Sheila Cronan took the view that marriage constitutes slavery for women, and that liberation meant the abolition of marriage. There followed gender feminism, equity feminism and post-feminism with suggestions that "marriages" should be replaced by five-year rolling contracts or that domestic responsibilities should be set down in legally binding documents.
Most of the world could not quite come round to applying doctrines of jurisprudence to dishwashing and continued to see marriage as rooted in ties of love and affection rather than the principles of justice. But expectations of marriage continued to rise and with it rates of divorce as those elevated expectations were dashed. "If love goes, the marriage goes" became the new orthodoxy. In the past, divorce had been a luxury for the rich, but almost everyone in the West was rich by the end of the 20th century.
Even so, Aristotle's truth still obtains. Marriage remains the commonest form of partnership between men and women. In 2006, of the 17 million families in the UK, 70 per cent were headed by a married couple. And though the number of cohabiting couples has doubled in two decades to around 2.2 million couples in the UK more than half of those will go on to marry.
Wedding ceremonies that a generation earlier had marked the start of a new household within the community now were seen as consolidations of an established relationship. The children of the couple became the bridesmaids and pages. And since cohabiting couples are statistically twice as likely to split up as married ones the wedding ritual has become an expression of stability.
There are new variations on the old theme, with solid second marriages after the failure of a "starter marriage" earlier on. But still today 95 per cent of women and 91 per cent of men in the UK have been married by the age of 50. And divorces have fallen for the past three years.
If the external pressures to marry have declined, the inner ones remain strong. Marriage still has an enduring magic. Even in recessions a high proportion of income continues to be spent on weddings, and the fairytale elements of the veil and white dress persist across the social scale; indeed there is very little difference in how different classes celebrate their weddings, apart from in scale and cost. Four Weddings and a Funeral remains one of the most successful British films ever made.
The fact that a third of marriages now end in divorce seems to make little difference. Couples queue to make vows that are splendidly extravagant. "Love seeks not a promise of affection," as the philosopher Roger Scruton has noted, "but a vow of loyalty" unconditional, lifelong and extraordinarily ambitious.
"The marriage contract is unlike most contracts," writes the academic L J Weitzman in that most unromantic of titles, The Economic Consequences of Divorce. "Its provisions are unwritten, its penalties are unspecified, and the terms of the contract are typically unknown to the contracting parties... No one would sign it if they had read it first."
But we do. And we continue to.
Monday, 15 September 2008
Consummation: A very peculiar practice
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Sunday, 14 September 2008
Go on, you know you want to really...
It's the epitome of wickedness, but also the ultimate affirmation of life. Continuing our two-week series, John Walsh celebrates the joy of seduction and the cads and temptresses who practise it
Sunday, 14 September 2008
Eve was the first seducer. Not because she was naked and slinky and (as it turned out) fatale, but because she led Adam astray. That is unless you agree with Milton that Satan was the seducer in the Garden of Eden, steering Eve away from the straight and narrow. But that's the point of seduction. It's not about having casual sex with lots of people; it's about leading people astray (from the Latin, se- meaning aside, and duco meaning lead) and enticing them into doing something they weren't planning to do, and will probably live to regret.
Seduction is more than an action, it's an exulting in transgression, a promise of corruption. It's an attitude. It's the Compte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, taking the married-but-still-virtuous Madame de Tourvel to bed against her better judgement and murmuring: "Tonight, it is time to acquaint you with some Latin terminology." It's the moment in Joyce's Ulysses when Gerty McDowell, a young nanny sitting on Sandymount Beach, is attracted by the dark, buttoned-up figure of Leopold Bloom standing nearby and, linking both hands around her knee, leans back to watch the fireworks overhead in order to give him a flash of her silk knickers. It's the smirk on the face of the leather-trousered Lothario Michael Hutchence, as he posed beside his latest conquest, Kylie Minogue who seemed transformed by him from a bright-eyed Pollyanna-next-door into a dark-eyed vamp steeped in bedroom lore. It's that smirk on the face of Joey Tribbiani in Friends when he asks every new girl, "How you doin'?" with its unspoken secondary question: "How long will you pretend to hold out against my irresistible sex appeal?"
It's Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, disturbing Benjamin Braddock's 21-year-old self-absorption by throwing her car keys into his fish tank. It's Sergeant Troy in Far From the Madding Crowd performing the sword exercise upon Bathsheba Everdene, and finally slicing off a lock of her hair.
And could there be a more tempting image to lead impressionable Edwardian men astray than the sight of Margarethe Gertrude Zelle photographed in her finery her head, neck, breasts and upper arms festooned with Eastern diadems, in contrast to her white, naked rump? She led so many men to their peril and doom under her assumed name of Mata Hari, she had to be stopped by a French firing squad in 1917.
Seduction is courtship without the promise of marriage at the end. Seduction's only end is conquest, mainly sexual conquest, although for some seducers it's enough to have the victim in their power, enraptured and enslaved by love.
When Keats's haggard knight-at-arms describes how his wild-eyed fairy girlfriend sang to him on a horse, and fetched him roots and honey and manna dew, he seems to evoke a charming scene of innocent romance; but in a dream he learns that he's been seduced and is now, frankly, done for: "I saw pale kings and princes too, / Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; / They cried "La Belle Dame Sans Merci / Hath thee in thrall!"
It's an extraordinary image of love as imprisonment, as a fate from which you'll never be wakened or freed. But the knight is, of course, an exceptional figure: the victims of seductions are almost always women. They suffer "a fate worse than death" in agreeing to have ill-advised sex not because a law has been broken, but because their innocence or credulity has been exploited and betrayed.
Seduction actually was a crime in the middle ages. English common law defined it as "when a male person induced an unmarried female of previously chaste character to engage in an act of sexual intercourse on a promise of marriage". A father was permitted to bring an action for the seduction of his daughter because it deprived him of her "services or earnings", but that seems to take an excessively mercenary view of the value of a daughter.
Down the centuries, many people especially outraged fathers have confused seduction with rape, arguing that a woman who is naturally virtuous and true could not possibly be persuaded to have sex with a scoundrel. If it's impossible for her to have succumbed of her own volition, it follows that she must have been forced or so the thinking goes. But the possibility that the woman was a willing partner in the event, that she was actually a co-conspirator in the whole seduction process, fuelled a hundred plays in the Restoration era and beyond.
There's a wonderful scene in William Congreve's Love for Love, in which the effete townie Tattle is left alone with Mrs Foresight's young ward, Miss Prue. She appears to be a simple country girl, virginal and endangered by this silver-tongued fop, but the truth is quite different. When Tattle proposes making love to her, she readily agrees, saying: "Come, I long to have you begin. Must I make love too? You must tell me how." He, the supposedly vile seducer, is confounded by her directness and has to explain the rules by which men demand sex and women deny them, while gradually being persuaded and eventually complying. She picks up the rules very quickly, as demonstrated when Tattle says: "And won't you shew me, pretty Miss, where your bedchamber is?" To which she replies: "No indeed won't I. But I'll run there and hide myself from you behind the curtains."
The country girl, the maidservant, the innocent seamstress, the trusting pupil they've been the archetypal prey of seducers from time immemorial, the raw material of a thousand vivid dispatches from the sex war in poems, dramas and novels. They became known generically as Fallen Women girls who had dashed their chances of marriage and a happy life by having an inconvenient baby out of wedlock (something that seldom seemed to happen to the upper classes) or becoming the mistress of a blackguard.
The downfall of Tess in Tess of the d'Urbervilles is signalled by the chapter headings: chapter one is "The Maid", chapter two is "Maiden No More". Her fate is not just to be seduced by the bullying Alec d'Urberville, and abandoned by the moralistic Angel Clare, but to become the plaything of Fate.
Yet Thomas Hardy could also see the comic possibilities in a fallen woman becoming the plaything of a particular sort of man. His delicious poem, "The Ruined Maid" tells the story of a rough country girl meeting a former associate on the farm and learning about the better quality of life she led in her disgrace: "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak / But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, / And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" / "We never do work when we're ruined," said she."
So is seduction a matter of laughter or tears? Jenny Newman, the editor of The Faber Book of Seductions, writes in her introduction: "Traditionally there are two main ways of writing about the seduction scene. The first is comic in method. Its entertainment value springs from a display of tactics. Whether or not the seducer gets his or her own way, some kind of happy ending confirms a generally optimistic view of sex. This kind of seduction can be seen as a more adventurous counterpart to what happens in marriage, reaffirming the accepted order of society.
"The other view is tragic. People get hurt and, instead of being allowed to choose, they are drawn inevitably to betrayal. To succumb means the downfall of both seducer and seduced, and perhaps the whole of society too. Instead of co-existing with marriage, this sort of seduction tends to undermine it."
How strange, then, that fictional seducers tend to get a bad press, while real-life triflers with the innocent and virginal tend to win public approval. In his day, Lord Byron was reviled by high society after his divorce, but these days we regard him as a romantic hero. His casual swiving of chambermaids and servant girls all over Europe doesn't sound all that romantic, but still.
Possibly through some atavistic forelock-tugging, when confronted by upper-class misbehaviour, we greet stories of more modern seducers, such as Lord Snowdon and Lord Lichfield, as mere confirmation of their laddish incorrigibility.
Cleopatra's perfumed seductions of both Caesar and Mark Antony (and the spurious detail about her rolling herself in a carpet, to be unrolled before the former) strike us as winningly, charmingly exotic. Frank Sinatra was one of Hollywood's greatest seducers, but his sins of sexual corruption are mostly forgiven him, as they're forgiven those of his successor, Warren Beatty.
As for Alan Clark, the drawling aristocratic English lizard of love, who, over a period of years, gradually seduced a South African judge's wife and both of his daughters, we merely tut-tut at his disrespect for the venerable cuckolded judge, and murmur, "nice grouping".
Their fictional counterparts, however, rarely convince us of their appeal. Volpone, pretending to be mortally ill, so that he can inveigle Celia into his chamber, is a revolting old lecher. Humbert Humbert, the enraptured connoisseur of nymphet love in Lolita, makes us squirm with distaste. Porphyro in Keats's "The Eve of St Agnes," who sneakily watches the gorgeous Madeleine preparing to dream of her lover, then "melts into her dream," is the kind of chap who has sex with a woman while she's unconscious. Lady Booby, in Tom Jones, who tries to seduce Tom away from Sophie Weston, comes across as a disagreeable old boot. Eve and Satan have never had large fan clubs. The Sirens, the great seductresses from Greek mythology who lured sailors to their doom, have never seemed attractive figures. Even James Bond, debonair hero of 80-odd seductions on screen and page, became considered a boorish sexist dinosaur.
Nowadays, we tend to regard it as rather quaint that men and women once pursued and fled from each other, fenced and parried, told wicked lies and promised marriage, rather than talked to each other and explained their desires and intentions out in the open. We may be shocked that, throughout Restoration comedy, women who say "no" seldom mean it. We may think it quaint that men in previous centuries seemed to think women would have sex with them, provided they were sufficiently persuasive and vehement, and went on about it for long enough; not a word was said about whether the women fancied them or not.
But the idea of seduction remains itself rather seductive: the pursuit of love as a thrilling chase, a hunt, a push-me-pull-you quadrille of rejection and acceptance, scheming and flirting and (best-case scenario) a final, sweet acquiescence from the gracious lady.
Behind the best seduction poems and scenes in plays and novels lies a certain tone of voice. It's knowing and funny, logical and persuasive, and, in trying to persuade a woman to come across, it pays her the compliment of constructing fantastical reasoning. John Donne does this in "The Exstasie", where he explains that spiritual soul-mating is all very well, but at some point it must be expressed in physical terms or "else a great prince in prison lies". Very convincing, I'm sure you'll agree.
But the finest example of the seduction poem remains Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," in which the poet explains to his girlfriend that their time for loving is short, when it is compared to the wastes of eternity: "Thy beauty shall no more be found / Nor in thy marble vault shall sound / My echoing song; then worms shall try / That long-preserv'd virginity, / And thy quaint honour turn to dust, / And into ashes all my lust. / The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace."
Would any sensible woman be seduced by it for a moment? Probably not. But its tone of rational urgency, its playfulness and barefaced cheek, must have loosened a few corset hooks-and-eyes over the years. "Let's get it on," is the message. It's the message that seducers have been trying to insert, subliminally, in their victims' ears for centuries.
Sunday, 14 September 2008
Eve was the first seducer. Not because she was naked and slinky and (as it turned out) fatale, but because she led Adam astray. That is unless you agree with Milton that Satan was the seducer in the Garden of Eden, steering Eve away from the straight and narrow. But that's the point of seduction. It's not about having casual sex with lots of people; it's about leading people astray (from the Latin, se- meaning aside, and duco meaning lead) and enticing them into doing something they weren't planning to do, and will probably live to regret.
Seduction is more than an action, it's an exulting in transgression, a promise of corruption. It's an attitude. It's the Compte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, taking the married-but-still-virtuous Madame de Tourvel to bed against her better judgement and murmuring: "Tonight, it is time to acquaint you with some Latin terminology." It's the moment in Joyce's Ulysses when Gerty McDowell, a young nanny sitting on Sandymount Beach, is attracted by the dark, buttoned-up figure of Leopold Bloom standing nearby and, linking both hands around her knee, leans back to watch the fireworks overhead in order to give him a flash of her silk knickers. It's the smirk on the face of the leather-trousered Lothario Michael Hutchence, as he posed beside his latest conquest, Kylie Minogue who seemed transformed by him from a bright-eyed Pollyanna-next-door into a dark-eyed vamp steeped in bedroom lore. It's that smirk on the face of Joey Tribbiani in Friends when he asks every new girl, "How you doin'?" with its unspoken secondary question: "How long will you pretend to hold out against my irresistible sex appeal?"
It's Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, disturbing Benjamin Braddock's 21-year-old self-absorption by throwing her car keys into his fish tank. It's Sergeant Troy in Far From the Madding Crowd performing the sword exercise upon Bathsheba Everdene, and finally slicing off a lock of her hair.
And could there be a more tempting image to lead impressionable Edwardian men astray than the sight of Margarethe Gertrude Zelle photographed in her finery her head, neck, breasts and upper arms festooned with Eastern diadems, in contrast to her white, naked rump? She led so many men to their peril and doom under her assumed name of Mata Hari, she had to be stopped by a French firing squad in 1917.
Seduction is courtship without the promise of marriage at the end. Seduction's only end is conquest, mainly sexual conquest, although for some seducers it's enough to have the victim in their power, enraptured and enslaved by love.
When Keats's haggard knight-at-arms describes how his wild-eyed fairy girlfriend sang to him on a horse, and fetched him roots and honey and manna dew, he seems to evoke a charming scene of innocent romance; but in a dream he learns that he's been seduced and is now, frankly, done for: "I saw pale kings and princes too, / Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; / They cried "La Belle Dame Sans Merci / Hath thee in thrall!"
It's an extraordinary image of love as imprisonment, as a fate from which you'll never be wakened or freed. But the knight is, of course, an exceptional figure: the victims of seductions are almost always women. They suffer "a fate worse than death" in agreeing to have ill-advised sex not because a law has been broken, but because their innocence or credulity has been exploited and betrayed.
Seduction actually was a crime in the middle ages. English common law defined it as "when a male person induced an unmarried female of previously chaste character to engage in an act of sexual intercourse on a promise of marriage". A father was permitted to bring an action for the seduction of his daughter because it deprived him of her "services or earnings", but that seems to take an excessively mercenary view of the value of a daughter.
Down the centuries, many people especially outraged fathers have confused seduction with rape, arguing that a woman who is naturally virtuous and true could not possibly be persuaded to have sex with a scoundrel. If it's impossible for her to have succumbed of her own volition, it follows that she must have been forced or so the thinking goes. But the possibility that the woman was a willing partner in the event, that she was actually a co-conspirator in the whole seduction process, fuelled a hundred plays in the Restoration era and beyond.
There's a wonderful scene in William Congreve's Love for Love, in which the effete townie Tattle is left alone with Mrs Foresight's young ward, Miss Prue. She appears to be a simple country girl, virginal and endangered by this silver-tongued fop, but the truth is quite different. When Tattle proposes making love to her, she readily agrees, saying: "Come, I long to have you begin. Must I make love too? You must tell me how." He, the supposedly vile seducer, is confounded by her directness and has to explain the rules by which men demand sex and women deny them, while gradually being persuaded and eventually complying. She picks up the rules very quickly, as demonstrated when Tattle says: "And won't you shew me, pretty Miss, where your bedchamber is?" To which she replies: "No indeed won't I. But I'll run there and hide myself from you behind the curtains."
The country girl, the maidservant, the innocent seamstress, the trusting pupil they've been the archetypal prey of seducers from time immemorial, the raw material of a thousand vivid dispatches from the sex war in poems, dramas and novels. They became known generically as Fallen Women girls who had dashed their chances of marriage and a happy life by having an inconvenient baby out of wedlock (something that seldom seemed to happen to the upper classes) or becoming the mistress of a blackguard.
The downfall of Tess in Tess of the d'Urbervilles is signalled by the chapter headings: chapter one is "The Maid", chapter two is "Maiden No More". Her fate is not just to be seduced by the bullying Alec d'Urberville, and abandoned by the moralistic Angel Clare, but to become the plaything of Fate.
Yet Thomas Hardy could also see the comic possibilities in a fallen woman becoming the plaything of a particular sort of man. His delicious poem, "The Ruined Maid" tells the story of a rough country girl meeting a former associate on the farm and learning about the better quality of life she led in her disgrace: "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak / But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, / And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" / "We never do work when we're ruined," said she."
So is seduction a matter of laughter or tears? Jenny Newman, the editor of The Faber Book of Seductions, writes in her introduction: "Traditionally there are two main ways of writing about the seduction scene. The first is comic in method. Its entertainment value springs from a display of tactics. Whether or not the seducer gets his or her own way, some kind of happy ending confirms a generally optimistic view of sex. This kind of seduction can be seen as a more adventurous counterpart to what happens in marriage, reaffirming the accepted order of society.
"The other view is tragic. People get hurt and, instead of being allowed to choose, they are drawn inevitably to betrayal. To succumb means the downfall of both seducer and seduced, and perhaps the whole of society too. Instead of co-existing with marriage, this sort of seduction tends to undermine it."
How strange, then, that fictional seducers tend to get a bad press, while real-life triflers with the innocent and virginal tend to win public approval. In his day, Lord Byron was reviled by high society after his divorce, but these days we regard him as a romantic hero. His casual swiving of chambermaids and servant girls all over Europe doesn't sound all that romantic, but still.
Possibly through some atavistic forelock-tugging, when confronted by upper-class misbehaviour, we greet stories of more modern seducers, such as Lord Snowdon and Lord Lichfield, as mere confirmation of their laddish incorrigibility.
Cleopatra's perfumed seductions of both Caesar and Mark Antony (and the spurious detail about her rolling herself in a carpet, to be unrolled before the former) strike us as winningly, charmingly exotic. Frank Sinatra was one of Hollywood's greatest seducers, but his sins of sexual corruption are mostly forgiven him, as they're forgiven those of his successor, Warren Beatty.
As for Alan Clark, the drawling aristocratic English lizard of love, who, over a period of years, gradually seduced a South African judge's wife and both of his daughters, we merely tut-tut at his disrespect for the venerable cuckolded judge, and murmur, "nice grouping".
Their fictional counterparts, however, rarely convince us of their appeal. Volpone, pretending to be mortally ill, so that he can inveigle Celia into his chamber, is a revolting old lecher. Humbert Humbert, the enraptured connoisseur of nymphet love in Lolita, makes us squirm with distaste. Porphyro in Keats's "The Eve of St Agnes," who sneakily watches the gorgeous Madeleine preparing to dream of her lover, then "melts into her dream," is the kind of chap who has sex with a woman while she's unconscious. Lady Booby, in Tom Jones, who tries to seduce Tom away from Sophie Weston, comes across as a disagreeable old boot. Eve and Satan have never had large fan clubs. The Sirens, the great seductresses from Greek mythology who lured sailors to their doom, have never seemed attractive figures. Even James Bond, debonair hero of 80-odd seductions on screen and page, became considered a boorish sexist dinosaur.
Nowadays, we tend to regard it as rather quaint that men and women once pursued and fled from each other, fenced and parried, told wicked lies and promised marriage, rather than talked to each other and explained their desires and intentions out in the open. We may be shocked that, throughout Restoration comedy, women who say "no" seldom mean it. We may think it quaint that men in previous centuries seemed to think women would have sex with them, provided they were sufficiently persuasive and vehement, and went on about it for long enough; not a word was said about whether the women fancied them or not.
But the idea of seduction remains itself rather seductive: the pursuit of love as a thrilling chase, a hunt, a push-me-pull-you quadrille of rejection and acceptance, scheming and flirting and (best-case scenario) a final, sweet acquiescence from the gracious lady.
Behind the best seduction poems and scenes in plays and novels lies a certain tone of voice. It's knowing and funny, logical and persuasive, and, in trying to persuade a woman to come across, it pays her the compliment of constructing fantastical reasoning. John Donne does this in "The Exstasie", where he explains that spiritual soul-mating is all very well, but at some point it must be expressed in physical terms or "else a great prince in prison lies". Very convincing, I'm sure you'll agree.
But the finest example of the seduction poem remains Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," in which the poet explains to his girlfriend that their time for loving is short, when it is compared to the wastes of eternity: "Thy beauty shall no more be found / Nor in thy marble vault shall sound / My echoing song; then worms shall try / That long-preserv'd virginity, / And thy quaint honour turn to dust, / And into ashes all my lust. / The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace."
Would any sensible woman be seduced by it for a moment? Probably not. But its tone of rational urgency, its playfulness and barefaced cheek, must have loosened a few corset hooks-and-eyes over the years. "Let's get it on," is the message. It's the message that seducers have been trying to insert, subliminally, in their victims' ears for centuries.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
The mysterious power of attraction
The mysterious power of attraction
Sex and love are the great driving forces of human affairs: the source of our deepest feelings and the inspiration for much of our culture. Yet how much do we actually understand them? Introducing a major two-week series, Deborah Orr considers the enigma of sexual and romantic magnetism
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Attraction. The very word attracts. Why should it not? Attraction is fantastically attractive. Especially when it is powerful and mutual. Attraction can provide a link to another human so irresistible that it feels like an enchantment, one that renders all other needs and duties oddly meaningless, tiresome and irrelevant.
Away from the object of desire, one is fretful and distracted, unable to eat, unable to sleep, unable to concentrate. All that matters is the next encounter, for with its consummation one will feel euphoric, blissful, thrumming with life and with tenderness. With that other person, one will feel that nothing is missing any more. Couples so drawn, talk of being two halves, complete only when they are together.
Who would refuse such luxury, such security and such communion? Who would not want to be so lucky? Anyway, isn't that passionate compulsion practically useful? Doesn't it encourage exclusive pair-bonding in humans, and foster the lovely notion that there's a perfect soul mate somewhere in the world for everyone? Or is that feeling so preposterously wonderful that, really, there has to be a catch somewhere?
Attraction, after all, can be so overwhelming of the individual, and of the individual's other necessary duties and relationships, that during most of Western history it has been considered dangerous and destabilising enough to be constrained as much as celebrated. The Greeks portrayed sexual attraction as a weapon, a dart that might pierce the flesh and possess a soul, causing chaos among humans and gods alike.
For Dante or Petrarch, courtly love was a kind of divine torture, with young men pining and fading for years at the sight of a chaperoned maiden who besotted them. The great literature of love Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary warns of the dangers of being driven by desire.
Even in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, forbidden love leads to disaster and death. Except in this work, though, there is a sense that it was splendid, even sacred, nonetheless. Wagner contended that it was wrong, not right, to fight or fear erotic longing. His idea caught on, and plenty of people now subscribe to the belief that a truly significant passion should be gleefully accommodated, not resisted. Wagner's vision can credibly be argued as one which helped to dismantle views about attraction, desire and love that had for thousands of years been forged in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
That, sensibility, warned against being carried away by sexual passion, and portrayed such unbiddable emotions as an unreliable foundation on which to build anything as fragile as love, or nurture any creatures as vulnerable as children. By the second half of the 20th century, though, this culture of restraint had been jettisoned, and replaced by the idea that self-denial was self-abnegation.
Now, in its general thrust, our culture is in love with the idea of love, awash with cock-eyed romanticism and unable to tell any more what's attraction, what's lust and what's love. Puberty, and even childhood is suffused with a popular music soundtrack that peddles endless trite paeans to the central importance of modern romance. The most surprising of people want naff anthems celebrating some songwriter's long-since ruined "true love" at their weddings. At some point, most teenage girls at least flirt with the idea of giving attraction a dry run by developing a crush on a pop star. Heaven knows what Wagner would make of it all.
On the whole, people don't really like it when scientists tell them that attraction is all down to pheromones, or waist-to-hip proportion, or instinctive recognition of genetic differentiation. There's disgruntlement as well, when churchmen tell us that togetherness is tough work involving ceaseless dollops of selflessness and commitment to the needs of others. We don't like it when our mums tell us that it is not "real" because we have never met Frankie from Look We're Boys. It's love we want, because we want to believe that love conquers all.
It is considered a measure of the depth and the wonder of attraction, when a couple recognise a special bond from their first glance. Their eyes met across a crowded room. They fell in love at first sight. They knew they had found their soul mate. And so on. But really, it is not in the least surprising that many couples lay claim to such a moment of revelation.
The great thing about "love at first sight" is that it is retrospective. The exchange of a special look can be forgotten within moments if a seemingly perfect potential partner is exposed in a minute of conversation as a humourless bore, or a sleazy vulgarian, or merely myopic. But if the exchange of looks that register mutual interest is followed up by the discovery of easy conversation, shared humour, fascinating opinions, common enthusiasms, and a yearning to touch and be touched, then that first glance is remembered and treasured.
Even if the encounter goes nowhere even if one of the amazing things the two of you discover you have in common is a spouse at home looking after the children then that short time of togetherness can still be filed away as a beguiling monument to what might have been. And if the encounter does develop if sexual pairing is as intimate and intense as it promised to be, if care, commitment and domestic compatibility lead inexorably to the creation of one big happy family, then that first meeting becomes a talismanic opening to a family's narrative of perfect togetherness.
But social science does, in its controlled experiments and clinical assessments, offer an alternative story of love. Humans, like all other animals, tend at times to be in search of a mate. At such times, each encounter, with anyone who might possibly be considered a candidate, is an audition. Without even being particularly aware of it, people tend to size up potential partners and even just potential friends all the time. Research has shown that people make complex judgements about others based on age, physical appearance, sartorial presentation, deportment, demeanour and social context in a matter of seconds rather than minutes after seeing or meeting them. Our own observation of the world around us confirms that such triage can be ruthless.
People who are physically beautiful tend immediately to dismiss those they consider less beautiful than they are. People who reckon themselves stylish are repelled by a fashion faux-pas. People who set store by their social standing will, at a glance, decide whether a person is likely to be as privileged as them, and edit out those who don't measure up (so much so that they may find themselves unable to recall the colour of the hair of the waiter who served them all night, or notice that the same mini-cab driver picks them up all the time). When we are looking for a partner, we are auditing all the time. Once a target is so selected, the chances are that further investigation will indeed elicit mutual interest.
Despite all the myth and mystery the romance, if you will - that surrounds the process of human pairing, this, at bottom, is the essence of the matter. People tend to be attracted by people who find them or seem likely to find them attractive. The faces we like best are the faces that are looking our way. The eyes that we are mesmerised by are the eyes that are looking into ours.
The banal truth, around the world, is that couples tend to be homogeneous they choose (or in some cultures, have chosen for them) people who are at a similar level to them of attractiveness, or intelligence, or background, or economic power. When people step outside that convention, others are often distrustful of the couple in question and their motives.
A beautiful young woman, for example, may decide that she is not going to barter her beauty and youth in the sexual marketplace in order to snare someone who is as young and beautiful as she is. She may decide instead that she'll cash in nature's chips for old and rich. It's a fair exchange between consenting adults, but one that's seen as pretty risible.
We may be fascinated when people make truly surprising or weird love matches like the upper-class Englishwoman who marries a traditional Inuit and lives happily ever after. But mostly we are fairly disapproving when people break the unwritten rules of the mating game and use the advantage of their sexual attractiveness, or their money and power, to pull someone who is, in that telling phrase, "out of their league".
So, can the ghastly truth be that those treasured coups de foudre - those towering edifices built on the magnetic rock of primal, perfect love, occur when a person instantly identifies, or thinks they identify, nothing more or less than a suitably flattering reflection of themselves? Can overwhelming attraction, whether or not it develops into anything that endures, actually be at root narcissistic?
Anecdotal reference to that heady feeling of novel attraction, enthusiastically returned, will confirm that along with the weak knees, fluttery tummies and bonkers attachment to the essential truth of the silliest song lyrics, a keenly enjoyable aspect of the matter is the bolstering of one's own ego. Part of the joy of having that other person so intimately present in one's life is firmly connected to the undeniable fact that they also make you feel just great about yourself.
The ruminations on attraction that have been offered since Wagner's day by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists are often little more welcome than those of the scientists who say that your partner is not perfect for you because you mutually deserve such a marvellous mate, but because you just have smells that trigger each other's hormones.
Freud placed the ability to form meaningful relationships with the opposite sex as the result of good parenting, and the inability to do so as a consequence of dysfunctional relationships between girls and their fathers or boys and their mothers. He also suggested that while a degree of narcissism was present in all humans, it was important to release self-love by giving love to another person, or else narcissism would grow unchecked and become destructive.
Jung went further, and suggested that what seemed like "love at first sight" was merely projection. People see their masculine animus or their feminine anima in a member of the opposite sex, and are attracted by what they recognise as the unconscious and hidden part of themselves. For Jung, it was important to understand that aspect of one's psyche, so that one could stop projecting, grow up (or as he called it, individuate) and learn to engage with one's anima or animus so that one could choose wisely and start forming adult relationships.
The inability to "individuate" was for Jung the reason why people sometimes found themselves trapped in a romantic groundhog day, choosing again and again similarly unsuitable or abusive partners, and falling into unreasoning obsessions ending in hurt and tears. Again, such an analysis is not always entirely welcome, and it does indeed seem like rather a con the idea that the "unlucky in love" ought to sign up with a Jungian analyst and work on getting to know and understand their hidden sexual archetype. Yet like many of Jung's ideas and many of Freud's it is hard to dismiss completely.
Anthony Storr, a renowned psychiatrist of a more practical bent, once remarked that if people could get a grip on their tendency to form neurotic attachments to those who displayed the most destructive traits of a parent, then his consulting rooms would be empty. Which, in the end, is another way of saying that whatever we might tell ourselves about coups de foudres and love at first sight and irresistible passion we fancy the people that our genes and our upbringing tell us to.
But where's the romance in that?
Sex and love are the great driving forces of human affairs: the source of our deepest feelings and the inspiration for much of our culture. Yet how much do we actually understand them? Introducing a major two-week series, Deborah Orr considers the enigma of sexual and romantic magnetism
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Attraction. The very word attracts. Why should it not? Attraction is fantastically attractive. Especially when it is powerful and mutual. Attraction can provide a link to another human so irresistible that it feels like an enchantment, one that renders all other needs and duties oddly meaningless, tiresome and irrelevant.
Away from the object of desire, one is fretful and distracted, unable to eat, unable to sleep, unable to concentrate. All that matters is the next encounter, for with its consummation one will feel euphoric, blissful, thrumming with life and with tenderness. With that other person, one will feel that nothing is missing any more. Couples so drawn, talk of being two halves, complete only when they are together.
Who would refuse such luxury, such security and such communion? Who would not want to be so lucky? Anyway, isn't that passionate compulsion practically useful? Doesn't it encourage exclusive pair-bonding in humans, and foster the lovely notion that there's a perfect soul mate somewhere in the world for everyone? Or is that feeling so preposterously wonderful that, really, there has to be a catch somewhere?
Attraction, after all, can be so overwhelming of the individual, and of the individual's other necessary duties and relationships, that during most of Western history it has been considered dangerous and destabilising enough to be constrained as much as celebrated. The Greeks portrayed sexual attraction as a weapon, a dart that might pierce the flesh and possess a soul, causing chaos among humans and gods alike.
For Dante or Petrarch, courtly love was a kind of divine torture, with young men pining and fading for years at the sight of a chaperoned maiden who besotted them. The great literature of love Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary warns of the dangers of being driven by desire.
Even in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, forbidden love leads to disaster and death. Except in this work, though, there is a sense that it was splendid, even sacred, nonetheless. Wagner contended that it was wrong, not right, to fight or fear erotic longing. His idea caught on, and plenty of people now subscribe to the belief that a truly significant passion should be gleefully accommodated, not resisted. Wagner's vision can credibly be argued as one which helped to dismantle views about attraction, desire and love that had for thousands of years been forged in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
That, sensibility, warned against being carried away by sexual passion, and portrayed such unbiddable emotions as an unreliable foundation on which to build anything as fragile as love, or nurture any creatures as vulnerable as children. By the second half of the 20th century, though, this culture of restraint had been jettisoned, and replaced by the idea that self-denial was self-abnegation.
Now, in its general thrust, our culture is in love with the idea of love, awash with cock-eyed romanticism and unable to tell any more what's attraction, what's lust and what's love. Puberty, and even childhood is suffused with a popular music soundtrack that peddles endless trite paeans to the central importance of modern romance. The most surprising of people want naff anthems celebrating some songwriter's long-since ruined "true love" at their weddings. At some point, most teenage girls at least flirt with the idea of giving attraction a dry run by developing a crush on a pop star. Heaven knows what Wagner would make of it all.
On the whole, people don't really like it when scientists tell them that attraction is all down to pheromones, or waist-to-hip proportion, or instinctive recognition of genetic differentiation. There's disgruntlement as well, when churchmen tell us that togetherness is tough work involving ceaseless dollops of selflessness and commitment to the needs of others. We don't like it when our mums tell us that it is not "real" because we have never met Frankie from Look We're Boys. It's love we want, because we want to believe that love conquers all.
It is considered a measure of the depth and the wonder of attraction, when a couple recognise a special bond from their first glance. Their eyes met across a crowded room. They fell in love at first sight. They knew they had found their soul mate. And so on. But really, it is not in the least surprising that many couples lay claim to such a moment of revelation.
The great thing about "love at first sight" is that it is retrospective. The exchange of a special look can be forgotten within moments if a seemingly perfect potential partner is exposed in a minute of conversation as a humourless bore, or a sleazy vulgarian, or merely myopic. But if the exchange of looks that register mutual interest is followed up by the discovery of easy conversation, shared humour, fascinating opinions, common enthusiasms, and a yearning to touch and be touched, then that first glance is remembered and treasured.
Even if the encounter goes nowhere even if one of the amazing things the two of you discover you have in common is a spouse at home looking after the children then that short time of togetherness can still be filed away as a beguiling monument to what might have been. And if the encounter does develop if sexual pairing is as intimate and intense as it promised to be, if care, commitment and domestic compatibility lead inexorably to the creation of one big happy family, then that first meeting becomes a talismanic opening to a family's narrative of perfect togetherness.
But social science does, in its controlled experiments and clinical assessments, offer an alternative story of love. Humans, like all other animals, tend at times to be in search of a mate. At such times, each encounter, with anyone who might possibly be considered a candidate, is an audition. Without even being particularly aware of it, people tend to size up potential partners and even just potential friends all the time. Research has shown that people make complex judgements about others based on age, physical appearance, sartorial presentation, deportment, demeanour and social context in a matter of seconds rather than minutes after seeing or meeting them. Our own observation of the world around us confirms that such triage can be ruthless.
People who are physically beautiful tend immediately to dismiss those they consider less beautiful than they are. People who reckon themselves stylish are repelled by a fashion faux-pas. People who set store by their social standing will, at a glance, decide whether a person is likely to be as privileged as them, and edit out those who don't measure up (so much so that they may find themselves unable to recall the colour of the hair of the waiter who served them all night, or notice that the same mini-cab driver picks them up all the time). When we are looking for a partner, we are auditing all the time. Once a target is so selected, the chances are that further investigation will indeed elicit mutual interest.
Despite all the myth and mystery the romance, if you will - that surrounds the process of human pairing, this, at bottom, is the essence of the matter. People tend to be attracted by people who find them or seem likely to find them attractive. The faces we like best are the faces that are looking our way. The eyes that we are mesmerised by are the eyes that are looking into ours.
The banal truth, around the world, is that couples tend to be homogeneous they choose (or in some cultures, have chosen for them) people who are at a similar level to them of attractiveness, or intelligence, or background, or economic power. When people step outside that convention, others are often distrustful of the couple in question and their motives.
A beautiful young woman, for example, may decide that she is not going to barter her beauty and youth in the sexual marketplace in order to snare someone who is as young and beautiful as she is. She may decide instead that she'll cash in nature's chips for old and rich. It's a fair exchange between consenting adults, but one that's seen as pretty risible.
We may be fascinated when people make truly surprising or weird love matches like the upper-class Englishwoman who marries a traditional Inuit and lives happily ever after. But mostly we are fairly disapproving when people break the unwritten rules of the mating game and use the advantage of their sexual attractiveness, or their money and power, to pull someone who is, in that telling phrase, "out of their league".
So, can the ghastly truth be that those treasured coups de foudre - those towering edifices built on the magnetic rock of primal, perfect love, occur when a person instantly identifies, or thinks they identify, nothing more or less than a suitably flattering reflection of themselves? Can overwhelming attraction, whether or not it develops into anything that endures, actually be at root narcissistic?
Anecdotal reference to that heady feeling of novel attraction, enthusiastically returned, will confirm that along with the weak knees, fluttery tummies and bonkers attachment to the essential truth of the silliest song lyrics, a keenly enjoyable aspect of the matter is the bolstering of one's own ego. Part of the joy of having that other person so intimately present in one's life is firmly connected to the undeniable fact that they also make you feel just great about yourself.
The ruminations on attraction that have been offered since Wagner's day by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists are often little more welcome than those of the scientists who say that your partner is not perfect for you because you mutually deserve such a marvellous mate, but because you just have smells that trigger each other's hormones.
Freud placed the ability to form meaningful relationships with the opposite sex as the result of good parenting, and the inability to do so as a consequence of dysfunctional relationships between girls and their fathers or boys and their mothers. He also suggested that while a degree of narcissism was present in all humans, it was important to release self-love by giving love to another person, or else narcissism would grow unchecked and become destructive.
Jung went further, and suggested that what seemed like "love at first sight" was merely projection. People see their masculine animus or their feminine anima in a member of the opposite sex, and are attracted by what they recognise as the unconscious and hidden part of themselves. For Jung, it was important to understand that aspect of one's psyche, so that one could stop projecting, grow up (or as he called it, individuate) and learn to engage with one's anima or animus so that one could choose wisely and start forming adult relationships.
The inability to "individuate" was for Jung the reason why people sometimes found themselves trapped in a romantic groundhog day, choosing again and again similarly unsuitable or abusive partners, and falling into unreasoning obsessions ending in hurt and tears. Again, such an analysis is not always entirely welcome, and it does indeed seem like rather a con the idea that the "unlucky in love" ought to sign up with a Jungian analyst and work on getting to know and understand their hidden sexual archetype. Yet like many of Jung's ideas and many of Freud's it is hard to dismiss completely.
Anthony Storr, a renowned psychiatrist of a more practical bent, once remarked that if people could get a grip on their tendency to form neurotic attachments to those who displayed the most destructive traits of a parent, then his consulting rooms would be empty. Which, in the end, is another way of saying that whatever we might tell ourselves about coups de foudres and love at first sight and irresistible passion we fancy the people that our genes and our upbringing tell us to.
But where's the romance in that?
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