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.
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer
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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?
The science of magnetism
It all feels so simple yet the forces that draw women and men together have been subjected to rigorous scientific analysis. Cathy Holding explores the rules of attraction
Friday, 12 September 2008
We all think we know instinctively what we find attractive in other people. Off the top of our heads, we will probably mention attributes such as facial appearance, physical build, mannerisms and behaviours. But how do we define physical appeal and attraction? What, precisely, makes an attractive woman or man?
The idea of applying scientific analytical methods to such questions may seem about as appropriate as analysing Shakespeare's love sonnets through the mathematics of rhythm and the structure of language and vocabulary to better understand their seductive effects. Nevertheless, breaking down the aspects of attractiveness into their component parts and then subjecting them to rigorous scientific testing has provided answers to many of the basic questions about the judgements we make in the first few moments of meeting a potential partner.
The psychological mechanisms underlying these judgements of attractiveness in humans have evolved with the primary purpose of finding a high quality mate. Animals display traits and receive multiple signals related to some basic physical quality or attribute and science shows we are not very far removed from animals in these respects. It might be interesting to take a moment and consider the things you would look for if you were, for example, about to embark on a speed dating mission to find the partner of your dreams. In a BBC internet survey of the top three most desirable traits in a potential partner, after breaking down the results according to gender, men ranked good looks and facial attractiveness higher than women, while women preferred honesty, humour, kindness and dependability in their men. However, the latest research suggests men and women are completely unaware at a conscious level of what truly attracts them to another person. When a group of young people were asked about their preferences before a speed dating session, the usual gender difference was found, in that men said they would prefer good looking women while women would seek men with good earning potential and nurturing capabilities. However, as these people made their choices during the speed dating session, it became apparent that the gender divide had disappeared, and there was no difference in the number of men and women who were attracted to a partner through looks. Women were also much more choosey about the type of man they were attracted to, while men were far less discriminating. This is in line with the Darwinian theory of mate selection, with choosey females and competitive males. It seems that people are closer to animals than they might care to admit, and they are also intrinsically unaware of what they actually find attractive in a partner.
WHAT MEN FIND ATTRACTIVE ABOUT WOMEN
A pretty face
What makes a pretty face? Studies have found that average, symmetrical faces are attractive and it is thought they honestly signal good traits such as healthiness, including how well a person has adapted to the stresses of genetic and environmental development. Hence facial symmetry suggests "good genes". In a recent survey, women with symmetrical faces were considered to have more feminine facial proportions and such feminine features are considered to be more attractive.
This attractiveness is not just about looks though, because a study has found that feminine features are empirically linked to higher levels of oestrogen in women.
However, familiar or typical faces are also viewed as more attractive, while more unusual and distinctive faces are rated less attractive. Furthermore, seeing faces more often increases their attractiveness rating. Hence facial appearance is a cue to hormone levels in women but presumably only at the first meeting and providing the woman is not too distant, ethnically or genetically.
While facial symmetry is regarded as an attractive quality, most people don't actually realise they are looking for symmetry. Once again, unconscious mechanisms come into play in determining face preferences. This may help explain why the reasons behind attraction are often so difficult to describe.
The question of make-up
The link between attractiveness and hormone levels is lost when women wear make-up. However, both men and women judge full facial make-up to be more attractive than wearing no facial makeup. Men prefer women with full eye make-up and foundation, but lipstick is not necessarily considered an enhancement to beauty. Men find a greater contrast between the darkness of the eyes and lips and the lightness of the surrounding skin to be most beautiful.
Voice pitch
Men prefer women with higher pitched voices, even when artificially manipulated. A more recent report, however, indicates that men perceive raised pitch more attractive only if the women are demonstrating an interest in them. Breathiness when speaking is also considered to be a feminine characteristic women might therefore wish to consider cultivating a "Nicole Kidman" approach to speech.
Body shape
The question of body shape is a contentious issue. Studies have broken down the analysis of what makes a perfectly shaped body into body mass index (BMI), waist:hip ratio (WHR) (the circumference of the waist compared to the circumference of the hip), waist:bust ratio (WBR) and body weight. Curvaceousness, the hourglass shape, has also been found to be a factor.
There are many aspects involved in the perception and judgement of body shape that clearly cannot be measured in isolation. Motion and three-dimensional presentation affect the attractiveness of shape and weight, and provoke basic social perceptions of biological gender and health, and of fitness for particular environments. Hence measures of a woman's attractiveness vary depending on whether the she is in motion or is posing. Using the frequencies with which female celebrities star in film or in magazines as a measure for attractiveness, women with low BMI are more likely to be seen in film (and, therefore, in motion) but women with low WHR or WBR are more likely to be seen posing in magazines. A study examined the changes in idealised female body images in the media (such as Playboy magazine Playmates of the Year, Miss America Pageant winners, and fashion models) and young women in general over a period of eight decades. In the early and latter parts of the 20th century the ideal was for less curvaceous women, while during the middle decades the ideal was for very curvaceous women. Over the period studied, models tended to have smaller bosoms and hips, but Playmates had larger bosoms and smaller waists, indicating a difference between the media's ideal woman and that of men in the real world.
Bosom
Bigger bosoms are more attractive to men. We are probably all aware of that, but just to prove it, in one study a female member of a research team, wearing a bra that permitted her to vary her bust size, sat in a nightclub and on the pavement area of a bar for an hour at each location. She was approached by men more often while exhibiting the bigger bust. A similarly equipped female researcher was offered more hitch-hiking lifts from thumbing when she had a larger bosom, which may reinforce the idea that men do not offer lifts just to be kind and sociable.
WHAT WOMEN FIND ATTRACTIVE ABOUT MEN
As most men would agree, and most women would deny, hormones play a major role in female attraction to males. However, the degree to which hormones (and pheromones) play a role in attraction is much greater than women would perhaps care to discover.
Nesting instincts and hormones
Facial attractiveness in men signals better genetic stock, greater genetic variability and higher testosterone levels. However, men who are genetically good stock make poorer partners and parents than men of genetically lower quality. Very masculine facial characteristics larger jawbones and more prominent cheekbones suggest to women negative attributes relevant to relationships and paternal investment. The more masculine a face, the more the perceived dominance and negative behaviour aspects (such as coldness or dishonesty). Therefore women often prefer men with slightly more feminine faces. Men who possess the childlike features of large eyes, the mature features of prominent cheekbones and a large chin, the expressive feature of a big smile, and high-status clothing are seen as the most highly attractive.
So women in stable relationships are therefore with men of poorer genetic stock. Hence a woman might theoretically invest in a stable relationship but obtain high quality genetic stock by straying outside the partnership, most logically at her most fertile period. Most women (and men) would be shocked at such an inference, but the science points in that direction. In a study of partnered women, most found single men were most attractive only when they were briefly in their fertile phase; otherwise they were not attracted to them.
Women's preference for men who display more masculine traits varies with the menstrual cycle. Women prefer the odour of dominant men, and prefer men who act in a dominant fashion and who have more masculine faces, at the peak fertility time of their menstrual cycle, particularly at the follicular phase. It may be shocking, but women fancy men with the most masculine traits when they are most likely to conceive. One study found that this is linked to oestradiol levels, which track with a woman's preference for testosterone levels in men over the menstrual cycle. A group of genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) influence individual odours in men. If women prefer the odour of MHC-dissimilar males it is perhaps to increase genetic diversity in their offspring or to reduce inbreeding. Women prefer the odour of men who are more dissimilar in MHC when they are approaching the most fertile part of their menstrual cycle. Women on the pill, however, do not demonstrate this preference, suggesting that the contraceptive pill might affect the choices made by women and hence fertility of the human species as a whole except of course that women come off the pill in order to conceive.
All this suggests that women may be driven to seek less attractive partners in order to provide a stable and nurturing environment for their children, but may secretly improve the genetic quality of their offspring through extra-pair matings with the most masculine and attractive men while at their most fertile. Either way, as with partner selection, and with how we define facial beauty, it appears that powerful forces are at work behind the scenes in our reproductive strategies, of which we are oblivious.
VIVE LA DIFFERENCE
So what can we do to make ourselves more attractive to the opposite sex? The simplest answer for women is to reinforce the gender difference. Everything men are attracted to in women points towards an emphasis on femininity. Therefore a woman should dress herself as femininely as possible, emphasise her feminine features and wear make up. In this day and age, that sounds almost sexist! Does it just come down to clothes? Science also tells us that smiling and eye contact make people significantly more attractive, to both sexes. As for men, if looking for a stable relationship, the opposite advice applies: reduce the gender difference both in looks and behaviour, and emphasise the loving and caring partner aspects. Both sexes should try to remember, though: it's the men who compete and the women who choose. If it's something else, you're doing it wrong.
Friday, 12 September 2008
We all think we know instinctively what we find attractive in other people. Off the top of our heads, we will probably mention attributes such as facial appearance, physical build, mannerisms and behaviours. But how do we define physical appeal and attraction? What, precisely, makes an attractive woman or man?
The idea of applying scientific analytical methods to such questions may seem about as appropriate as analysing Shakespeare's love sonnets through the mathematics of rhythm and the structure of language and vocabulary to better understand their seductive effects. Nevertheless, breaking down the aspects of attractiveness into their component parts and then subjecting them to rigorous scientific testing has provided answers to many of the basic questions about the judgements we make in the first few moments of meeting a potential partner.
The psychological mechanisms underlying these judgements of attractiveness in humans have evolved with the primary purpose of finding a high quality mate. Animals display traits and receive multiple signals related to some basic physical quality or attribute and science shows we are not very far removed from animals in these respects. It might be interesting to take a moment and consider the things you would look for if you were, for example, about to embark on a speed dating mission to find the partner of your dreams. In a BBC internet survey of the top three most desirable traits in a potential partner, after breaking down the results according to gender, men ranked good looks and facial attractiveness higher than women, while women preferred honesty, humour, kindness and dependability in their men. However, the latest research suggests men and women are completely unaware at a conscious level of what truly attracts them to another person. When a group of young people were asked about their preferences before a speed dating session, the usual gender difference was found, in that men said they would prefer good looking women while women would seek men with good earning potential and nurturing capabilities. However, as these people made their choices during the speed dating session, it became apparent that the gender divide had disappeared, and there was no difference in the number of men and women who were attracted to a partner through looks. Women were also much more choosey about the type of man they were attracted to, while men were far less discriminating. This is in line with the Darwinian theory of mate selection, with choosey females and competitive males. It seems that people are closer to animals than they might care to admit, and they are also intrinsically unaware of what they actually find attractive in a partner.
WHAT MEN FIND ATTRACTIVE ABOUT WOMEN
A pretty face
What makes a pretty face? Studies have found that average, symmetrical faces are attractive and it is thought they honestly signal good traits such as healthiness, including how well a person has adapted to the stresses of genetic and environmental development. Hence facial symmetry suggests "good genes". In a recent survey, women with symmetrical faces were considered to have more feminine facial proportions and such feminine features are considered to be more attractive.
This attractiveness is not just about looks though, because a study has found that feminine features are empirically linked to higher levels of oestrogen in women.
However, familiar or typical faces are also viewed as more attractive, while more unusual and distinctive faces are rated less attractive. Furthermore, seeing faces more often increases their attractiveness rating. Hence facial appearance is a cue to hormone levels in women but presumably only at the first meeting and providing the woman is not too distant, ethnically or genetically.
While facial symmetry is regarded as an attractive quality, most people don't actually realise they are looking for symmetry. Once again, unconscious mechanisms come into play in determining face preferences. This may help explain why the reasons behind attraction are often so difficult to describe.
The question of make-up
The link between attractiveness and hormone levels is lost when women wear make-up. However, both men and women judge full facial make-up to be more attractive than wearing no facial makeup. Men prefer women with full eye make-up and foundation, but lipstick is not necessarily considered an enhancement to beauty. Men find a greater contrast between the darkness of the eyes and lips and the lightness of the surrounding skin to be most beautiful.
Voice pitch
Men prefer women with higher pitched voices, even when artificially manipulated. A more recent report, however, indicates that men perceive raised pitch more attractive only if the women are demonstrating an interest in them. Breathiness when speaking is also considered to be a feminine characteristic women might therefore wish to consider cultivating a "Nicole Kidman" approach to speech.
Body shape
The question of body shape is a contentious issue. Studies have broken down the analysis of what makes a perfectly shaped body into body mass index (BMI), waist:hip ratio (WHR) (the circumference of the waist compared to the circumference of the hip), waist:bust ratio (WBR) and body weight. Curvaceousness, the hourglass shape, has also been found to be a factor.
There are many aspects involved in the perception and judgement of body shape that clearly cannot be measured in isolation. Motion and three-dimensional presentation affect the attractiveness of shape and weight, and provoke basic social perceptions of biological gender and health, and of fitness for particular environments. Hence measures of a woman's attractiveness vary depending on whether the she is in motion or is posing. Using the frequencies with which female celebrities star in film or in magazines as a measure for attractiveness, women with low BMI are more likely to be seen in film (and, therefore, in motion) but women with low WHR or WBR are more likely to be seen posing in magazines. A study examined the changes in idealised female body images in the media (such as Playboy magazine Playmates of the Year, Miss America Pageant winners, and fashion models) and young women in general over a period of eight decades. In the early and latter parts of the 20th century the ideal was for less curvaceous women, while during the middle decades the ideal was for very curvaceous women. Over the period studied, models tended to have smaller bosoms and hips, but Playmates had larger bosoms and smaller waists, indicating a difference between the media's ideal woman and that of men in the real world.
Bosom
Bigger bosoms are more attractive to men. We are probably all aware of that, but just to prove it, in one study a female member of a research team, wearing a bra that permitted her to vary her bust size, sat in a nightclub and on the pavement area of a bar for an hour at each location. She was approached by men more often while exhibiting the bigger bust. A similarly equipped female researcher was offered more hitch-hiking lifts from thumbing when she had a larger bosom, which may reinforce the idea that men do not offer lifts just to be kind and sociable.
WHAT WOMEN FIND ATTRACTIVE ABOUT MEN
As most men would agree, and most women would deny, hormones play a major role in female attraction to males. However, the degree to which hormones (and pheromones) play a role in attraction is much greater than women would perhaps care to discover.
Nesting instincts and hormones
Facial attractiveness in men signals better genetic stock, greater genetic variability and higher testosterone levels. However, men who are genetically good stock make poorer partners and parents than men of genetically lower quality. Very masculine facial characteristics larger jawbones and more prominent cheekbones suggest to women negative attributes relevant to relationships and paternal investment. The more masculine a face, the more the perceived dominance and negative behaviour aspects (such as coldness or dishonesty). Therefore women often prefer men with slightly more feminine faces. Men who possess the childlike features of large eyes, the mature features of prominent cheekbones and a large chin, the expressive feature of a big smile, and high-status clothing are seen as the most highly attractive.
So women in stable relationships are therefore with men of poorer genetic stock. Hence a woman might theoretically invest in a stable relationship but obtain high quality genetic stock by straying outside the partnership, most logically at her most fertile period. Most women (and men) would be shocked at such an inference, but the science points in that direction. In a study of partnered women, most found single men were most attractive only when they were briefly in their fertile phase; otherwise they were not attracted to them.
Women's preference for men who display more masculine traits varies with the menstrual cycle. Women prefer the odour of dominant men, and prefer men who act in a dominant fashion and who have more masculine faces, at the peak fertility time of their menstrual cycle, particularly at the follicular phase. It may be shocking, but women fancy men with the most masculine traits when they are most likely to conceive. One study found that this is linked to oestradiol levels, which track with a woman's preference for testosterone levels in men over the menstrual cycle. A group of genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) influence individual odours in men. If women prefer the odour of MHC-dissimilar males it is perhaps to increase genetic diversity in their offspring or to reduce inbreeding. Women prefer the odour of men who are more dissimilar in MHC when they are approaching the most fertile part of their menstrual cycle. Women on the pill, however, do not demonstrate this preference, suggesting that the contraceptive pill might affect the choices made by women and hence fertility of the human species as a whole except of course that women come off the pill in order to conceive.
All this suggests that women may be driven to seek less attractive partners in order to provide a stable and nurturing environment for their children, but may secretly improve the genetic quality of their offspring through extra-pair matings with the most masculine and attractive men while at their most fertile. Either way, as with partner selection, and with how we define facial beauty, it appears that powerful forces are at work behind the scenes in our reproductive strategies, of which we are oblivious.
VIVE LA DIFFERENCE
So what can we do to make ourselves more attractive to the opposite sex? The simplest answer for women is to reinforce the gender difference. Everything men are attracted to in women points towards an emphasis on femininity. Therefore a woman should dress herself as femininely as possible, emphasise her feminine features and wear make up. In this day and age, that sounds almost sexist! Does it just come down to clothes? Science also tells us that smiling and eye contact make people significantly more attractive, to both sexes. As for men, if looking for a stable relationship, the opposite advice applies: reduce the gender difference both in looks and behaviour, and emphasise the loving and caring partner aspects. Both sexes should try to remember, though: it's the men who compete and the women who choose. If it's something else, you're doing it wrong.
Thursday 11 September 2008
If 12 ordinary citizens were not convinced of an airline bomb plot.....
Terrorists win if we lose faith in trial by jury
If 12 ordinary citizens were not convinced of an airline bomb plot, police and politicians have no right to contradict them
Alice Miles
They have been convicted by everybody except a jury. The men on trial for their involvement in an airline bomb plot, four of whom the jury felt unable to convict of murder conspiracy this week, had been condemned as soon as they were arrested two summers ago.
Then, the Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner Paul Stephenson told us publicly that there had been a plot to bomb airliners that "was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale". A "security source" told the Daily Mirror: "Make no mistake - if this plot had succeeded it would have been bigger than 9/11 in terms of body count. This is very, very significant." A "British government source" excitedly told The Guardian of an "intercepted message from Pakistan telling the bombers to 'go now'" - a message we have never heard of again.
John Reid, the Home Secretary at the time, added that if the bombers had been successful, it would have caused death on an "unprecedented scale". The police were confident, he added, "that the main players have been accounted for".
Then the newspapers piled in, warning that "but for the grace of God and a truly remarkable performance by police and the security services, the destruction could have been unimaginable: an act of indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of Britons in the skies above America" (Daily Mail); "The al-Qaeda fanatics planned to board the planes at UK airports then blow them up three at a time as they flew over eight US cities" (Mirror); "Muslims in plot to bomb jets" (Daily Telegraph). "Had the terrorist plan to blow up five American airliners succeeded...", began a leading article in The Times.
Eventually the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, let it be known that he was afraid that such rash public comments were in danger of prejudicing a fair trial, and everyone shut up. But not before Mr Reid had said in a speech that some people "just don't get it... Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world."
No hyperbole there, then.
Well, I "just don't get it". I just don't get it that it was OK then for ministers, police officers and the media publicly to label as guilty men who had not been formally charged with anything (there were 24 people arrested at the time, by the way.) And I don't "get it" that it was OK this week for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to indicate immediately after the verdicts - and in terms that might prejudice the retrial they are now seeking - that they considered the defendants guilty of plotting to blow up aircraft, regardless of the verdicts of the jury.
I don't get it that it was OK for Panorama on Tuesday night to continue to refer to "the airlines plot", despite the jury's failure to reach a verdict on whether aircraft were, in fact, involved.
The jury rightly found three men guilty of conspiracy to murder, which carries a life sentence, but that isn't enough for the authorities - the men must be convicted of a plot actually to blow aircraft out of the sky, because that is what police and politicians told everyone was being planned, and every air passenger's life was greatly disrupted as a result. This is about pride and pique, not justice. Mr Reid told Panorama: "We would have sustained the worst terrorist attack in the UK's history." He still doesn't know that.
If the evidence were there for certain, the jury would have convicted all the men for all the offences. But that's not straight enough for those who have been widely briefing the newspapers this week about a stroppy, divided jury who may not have been paying attention and were distracted by details such as family sickness, holidays and hospital appointments.
The implication is that they reached the wrong conclusions - yet there seems to be no clear evidence that the defendants definitely intended to blow up multiple aircraft. There was nothing "wrong" in the jury's verdicts. Those involved with the prosecution appear to have been so certain of their case that they forgot that the jury also had to be persuaded beyond all reasonable doubt.
To seek to blame the jury and overturn its judgment about the evidence is to seek to overturn one of the fundamental principles of British justice. Perhaps this is one of the freedoms that we need to "modify", as Mr Reid said back in that overheated summer; the freedom to be tried by 12 objective fellow citizens, not by the police and media.
And if the jury was stroppy and confused, it only reflected, as a jury is supposed to reflect, the public. Perhaps the jurors included some who mirrored the way that many citizens feel about the War on Terror and the hyperbole used to prosecute it, about the manipulation of information by politicians pursuing a "tough on terror" image, the irritation and confusion about public relations posturing by the police, and anger at the abuse of authority rammed home every time people have to strip off their belts and be photographed in British airports for a flight to Scotland.
The only winners in this are the terrorists. If some very dangerous people were let off the hook this week, so was a very dangerous animal unleashed. The Daily Mail asked yesterday: "Are our standards of proof too high to protect the public from terrorists? There is something wrong with a society that cannot successfully prosecute and punish those it accuses of seeking to destroy it."
We can successfully prosecute and punish - we just have to have sufficient evidence to persuade a jury of 12 ordinary men and women.
It's called the law. Or perhaps that's another freedom requiring modification in the face of those who oppose our fundamental values. What a terrible legacy of the events of seven years ago today that would be.
Then, the Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner Paul Stephenson told us publicly that there had been a plot to bomb airliners that "was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale". A "security source" told the Daily Mirror: "Make no mistake - if this plot had succeeded it would have been bigger than 9/11 in terms of body count. This is very, very significant." A "British government source" excitedly told The Guardian of an "intercepted message from Pakistan telling the bombers to 'go now'" - a message we have never heard of again.
John Reid, the Home Secretary at the time, added that if the bombers had been successful, it would have caused death on an "unprecedented scale". The police were confident, he added, "that the main players have been accounted for".
Then the newspapers piled in, warning that "but for the grace of God and a truly remarkable performance by police and the security services, the destruction could have been unimaginable: an act of indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of Britons in the skies above America" (Daily Mail); "The al-Qaeda fanatics planned to board the planes at UK airports then blow them up three at a time as they flew over eight US cities" (Mirror); "Muslims in plot to bomb jets" (Daily Telegraph). "Had the terrorist plan to blow up five American airliners succeeded...", began a leading article in The Times.
Eventually the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, let it be known that he was afraid that such rash public comments were in danger of prejudicing a fair trial, and everyone shut up. But not before Mr Reid had said in a speech that some people "just don't get it... Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world."
No hyperbole there, then.
Well, I "just don't get it". I just don't get it that it was OK then for ministers, police officers and the media publicly to label as guilty men who had not been formally charged with anything (there were 24 people arrested at the time, by the way.) And I don't "get it" that it was OK this week for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to indicate immediately after the verdicts - and in terms that might prejudice the retrial they are now seeking - that they considered the defendants guilty of plotting to blow up aircraft, regardless of the verdicts of the jury.
I don't get it that it was OK for Panorama on Tuesday night to continue to refer to "the airlines plot", despite the jury's failure to reach a verdict on whether aircraft were, in fact, involved.
The jury rightly found three men guilty of conspiracy to murder, which carries a life sentence, but that isn't enough for the authorities - the men must be convicted of a plot actually to blow aircraft out of the sky, because that is what police and politicians told everyone was being planned, and every air passenger's life was greatly disrupted as a result. This is about pride and pique, not justice. Mr Reid told Panorama: "We would have sustained the worst terrorist attack in the UK's history." He still doesn't know that.
If the evidence were there for certain, the jury would have convicted all the men for all the offences. But that's not straight enough for those who have been widely briefing the newspapers this week about a stroppy, divided jury who may not have been paying attention and were distracted by details such as family sickness, holidays and hospital appointments.
The implication is that they reached the wrong conclusions - yet there seems to be no clear evidence that the defendants definitely intended to blow up multiple aircraft. There was nothing "wrong" in the jury's verdicts. Those involved with the prosecution appear to have been so certain of their case that they forgot that the jury also had to be persuaded beyond all reasonable doubt.
To seek to blame the jury and overturn its judgment about the evidence is to seek to overturn one of the fundamental principles of British justice. Perhaps this is one of the freedoms that we need to "modify", as Mr Reid said back in that overheated summer; the freedom to be tried by 12 objective fellow citizens, not by the police and media.
And if the jury was stroppy and confused, it only reflected, as a jury is supposed to reflect, the public. Perhaps the jurors included some who mirrored the way that many citizens feel about the War on Terror and the hyperbole used to prosecute it, about the manipulation of information by politicians pursuing a "tough on terror" image, the irritation and confusion about public relations posturing by the police, and anger at the abuse of authority rammed home every time people have to strip off their belts and be photographed in British airports for a flight to Scotland.
The only winners in this are the terrorists. If some very dangerous people were let off the hook this week, so was a very dangerous animal unleashed. The Daily Mail asked yesterday: "Are our standards of proof too high to protect the public from terrorists? There is something wrong with a society that cannot successfully prosecute and punish those it accuses of seeking to destroy it."
We can successfully prosecute and punish - we just have to have sufficient evidence to persuade a jury of 12 ordinary men and women.
It's called the law. Or perhaps that's another freedom requiring modification in the face of those who oppose our fundamental values. What a terrible legacy of the events of seven years ago today that would be.
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Wednesday 10 September 2008
Pakistan's Westward Drift
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
08 September 2008
Himal South Asian
‘Alif’ is for Allah
‘Bay’ is for bundooq (gun)
‘Hay’ is for hijab
‘Jeem’ is for jihad
‘Tay’ is for takrao (collision)
‘Zal’ is for zunoob (sin)
For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian Peninsula. This continental drift is not geophysical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its Southasian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the alluvium that had nurtured Muslim culture in the Indian Subcontinent for over a thousand years. A stern, unyielding version of Islam – Wahhabism – is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints.
This drift is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state pushed Islam onto its people. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory; floggings were carried out publicly; punishments were meted out to those who did not fast during Ramadan; selection for academic posts required that the candidates demonstrate knowledge of Islamic teachings, and the jihad was emphasised as essential for every Muslim. Today, such government intervention is no longer needed due to the spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – as yet in some amorphous and diffused form – is more popular than ever before, as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state. Across the country, there has been a spectacular increase in the power and prestige of the clerics, attendance in mosques, home prayer meetings (dars and zikr), observance of special religious festivals, and fasting during Ramadan.
Villages have changed drastically, driven in part by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other Muslims who they do not consider to be Muslims. Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than were the Pashtuns, are now beginning to embrace the line of thought resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law (from one of the four schools of thought or jurisprudence within Sunni Islam) has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law.
Among the Pakistani lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement (which can be called ‘Saudi-isation’) that frowns upon every form of joyous expression. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate ‘corruption’ by strictly regulating cultural life and seizing absolute control of the education system. “Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichtarveena are completely dead,” laments Mohammad Shehzad, a student of music. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is vehemently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba, religious fundamentalists who consider music haram. Kathak dancing, once popular among the Muslim elite of India, has no teachers left in Pakistan, and the feature films produced in the country are of next to no consequence. Meanwhile the Pakistani elites, disconnected from the rest of the
population, comfortably live their lives through their vicarious proximity to the West.
School militarism
More than a quarter-century after the state-sponsored Islamisation of the country, the state in Pakistan is itself under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal, and is targeted by Islamist suicide bombers on an almost daily basis. The militancy that bedevils Pakistan is by no means confined to the tribal areas; it breeds feverishly in the cities as well. Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that propagates the jihad culture, which ceaselessly demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, designed to create in the minds of the school child a sense of siege and embattlement.
The process begins early. For example, the government-approved curriculum of a Class V Social Studies textbook prescribes that the child should be able to “Make speeches on Jehad and Shahadat”, and “Understand Hindu-Muslim differences and the resultant need for Pakistan.” The material placed before the Pakistani schoolchild has remained largely unchanged even after the attacks of 11 September 2001, which led to Pakistan’s abrupt desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all the talk of ‘enlightened moderation’, then-General Pervez Musharraf’s educational curriculum, passed down with some dilution from the time of Zia ul- Haq, was far from enlightening. Fearful of taking on powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum. Thus, successive administrations have quietly allowed the young minds to be moulded by fanatics.
As such, the promotion of militarism in Pakistan’s schools, colleges and universities has had a profound effect on young people. Militant jihad has become a part of the culture in college and university campuses, with armed groups inviting students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan. The primary vehicle for ‘Saudi-ising’ Pakistan’s education has been the madrassa. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistan alliance that recruits needed for fighting a ‘holy’ war. Earlier on, this role had been limited to turning out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum dating back to the 11th century with minor subsequent revisions. The principal function of the madrassas had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques.
The Afghan jihad changed everything. Under Zia, with active assistance from Saudi Arabia, madrassas sprang up across the length and breadth of Pakistan, and now number about 22,000. The free room, board and supplies provided to students has always constituted a key part of the appeal to join these madrassas. But the desire of parents across the country for their children to be ‘disciplined’, and to be given a thorough ‘Islamic’ education, is also a major contributing factor.
One of the chief goals of the Islamists is to bring about a complete separation of the sexes, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. Take the tragic example of the stampede in a madrassa in Karachi in April 2006, in which 21 women and eight children were crushed to death, and scores more injured; all the while, male rescuers were prevented from assisting. Likewise, after the October 2005 earthquake, as this writer walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girls from under the rubble of their school building.
The drive to segregate the sexes is now also influencing educated women. Vigorous proselytisers of this message, such as Farhat Hashmi – one of the most influential contemporary Muslim scholars, or ulema, particularly in Pakistan, the UK and the US – have become massively successful, and have been catapulted to heights of fame and fortune. Two decades ago, the fully veiled student was a rarity on any university or college campus in Pakistan. Abaya was once an unknown word in Urdu, but today many shops in Islamabad specialise in these dreary robes, which cover the entire body except the face, feet and hands. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, female students are today seeking the anonymity of the burqa, outnumbering their sisters who still dare to show their faces.
The immediate future of Pakistan looks grim, as increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control over the minds of their worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged – Baituallah Mehsud, Fazlullah, Mangal Bagh and Haji Namdar among others – feeding on the environment of poverty, deprivation, lack of justice, and extreme
disparities in wealth.
In the long term, Pakistan’s future will be determined by the ideological and political battle between citizens who want an Islamist theocratic state, and citizens who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back the Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years, and defeat the ‘holy’ warriors. However, this can only happen if Pakistan’s elected leaders acquire the trust of the citizens. To do this, political parties, government officials and, yes, even generals will have to embrace democracy, in both word and deed.
Pervez Hoodbhoy is a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
08 September 2008
Himal South Asian
‘Alif’ is for Allah
‘Bay’ is for bundooq (gun)
‘Hay’ is for hijab
‘Jeem’ is for jihad
‘Tay’ is for takrao (collision)
‘Zal’ is for zunoob (sin)
For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian Peninsula. This continental drift is not geophysical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its Southasian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the alluvium that had nurtured Muslim culture in the Indian Subcontinent for over a thousand years. A stern, unyielding version of Islam – Wahhabism – is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints.
This drift is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state pushed Islam onto its people. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory; floggings were carried out publicly; punishments were meted out to those who did not fast during Ramadan; selection for academic posts required that the candidates demonstrate knowledge of Islamic teachings, and the jihad was emphasised as essential for every Muslim. Today, such government intervention is no longer needed due to the spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – as yet in some amorphous and diffused form – is more popular than ever before, as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state. Across the country, there has been a spectacular increase in the power and prestige of the clerics, attendance in mosques, home prayer meetings (dars and zikr), observance of special religious festivals, and fasting during Ramadan.
Villages have changed drastically, driven in part by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other Muslims who they do not consider to be Muslims. Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than were the Pashtuns, are now beginning to embrace the line of thought resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law (from one of the four schools of thought or jurisprudence within Sunni Islam) has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law.
Among the Pakistani lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement (which can be called ‘Saudi-isation’) that frowns upon every form of joyous expression. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate ‘corruption’ by strictly regulating cultural life and seizing absolute control of the education system. “Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichtarveena are completely dead,” laments Mohammad Shehzad, a student of music. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is vehemently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba, religious fundamentalists who consider music haram. Kathak dancing, once popular among the Muslim elite of India, has no teachers left in Pakistan, and the feature films produced in the country are of next to no consequence. Meanwhile the Pakistani elites, disconnected from the rest of the
population, comfortably live their lives through their vicarious proximity to the West.
School militarism
More than a quarter-century after the state-sponsored Islamisation of the country, the state in Pakistan is itself under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal, and is targeted by Islamist suicide bombers on an almost daily basis. The militancy that bedevils Pakistan is by no means confined to the tribal areas; it breeds feverishly in the cities as well. Pakistan’s self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that propagates the jihad culture, which ceaselessly demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, designed to create in the minds of the school child a sense of siege and embattlement.
The process begins early. For example, the government-approved curriculum of a Class V Social Studies textbook prescribes that the child should be able to “Make speeches on Jehad and Shahadat”, and “Understand Hindu-Muslim differences and the resultant need for Pakistan.” The material placed before the Pakistani schoolchild has remained largely unchanged even after the attacks of 11 September 2001, which led to Pakistan’s abrupt desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all the talk of ‘enlightened moderation’, then-General Pervez Musharraf’s educational curriculum, passed down with some dilution from the time of Zia ul- Haq, was far from enlightening. Fearful of taking on powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum. Thus, successive administrations have quietly allowed the young minds to be moulded by fanatics.
As such, the promotion of militarism in Pakistan’s schools, colleges and universities has had a profound effect on young people. Militant jihad has become a part of the culture in college and university campuses, with armed groups inviting students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan. The primary vehicle for ‘Saudi-ising’ Pakistan’s education has been the madrassa. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistan alliance that recruits needed for fighting a ‘holy’ war. Earlier on, this role had been limited to turning out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum dating back to the 11th century with minor subsequent revisions. The principal function of the madrassas had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques.
The Afghan jihad changed everything. Under Zia, with active assistance from Saudi Arabia, madrassas sprang up across the length and breadth of Pakistan, and now number about 22,000. The free room, board and supplies provided to students has always constituted a key part of the appeal to join these madrassas. But the desire of parents across the country for their children to be ‘disciplined’, and to be given a thorough ‘Islamic’ education, is also a major contributing factor.
One of the chief goals of the Islamists is to bring about a complete separation of the sexes, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. Take the tragic example of the stampede in a madrassa in Karachi in April 2006, in which 21 women and eight children were crushed to death, and scores more injured; all the while, male rescuers were prevented from assisting. Likewise, after the October 2005 earthquake, as this writer walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girls from under the rubble of their school building.
The drive to segregate the sexes is now also influencing educated women. Vigorous proselytisers of this message, such as Farhat Hashmi – one of the most influential contemporary Muslim scholars, or ulema, particularly in Pakistan, the UK and the US – have become massively successful, and have been catapulted to heights of fame and fortune. Two decades ago, the fully veiled student was a rarity on any university or college campus in Pakistan. Abaya was once an unknown word in Urdu, but today many shops in Islamabad specialise in these dreary robes, which cover the entire body except the face, feet and hands. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, female students are today seeking the anonymity of the burqa, outnumbering their sisters who still dare to show their faces.
The immediate future of Pakistan looks grim, as increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control over the minds of their worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged – Baituallah Mehsud, Fazlullah, Mangal Bagh and Haji Namdar among others – feeding on the environment of poverty, deprivation, lack of justice, and extreme
disparities in wealth.
In the long term, Pakistan’s future will be determined by the ideological and political battle between citizens who want an Islamist theocratic state, and citizens who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back the Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years, and defeat the ‘holy’ warriors. However, this can only happen if Pakistan’s elected leaders acquire the trust of the citizens. To do this, political parties, government officials and, yes, even generals will have to embrace democracy, in both word and deed.
Pervez Hoodbhoy is a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
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