Militant Modernism (Zero Books) by Hatherley Owen

Author:Hatherley, Owen [Hatherley, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780997353
Publisher: NBN_Mobi_Kindle
Published: 2012-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

One that impressed Reich, who wrote, in The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (1931) of this peculiar pragmatic utopianism; ‘the moral atmosphere seemed, at first, ascetic: no sexual importuning in the street; reserve and seriousness everywhere…at social gatherings the absence of the sexual allusions and smutty conversation characteristic of our circles. If a man dared slap a woman’s backside he might well be prosecuted before the party tribunal. But the question whether one wanted to become a sexual partner was being asked more and more openly and unhesitatingly: sexual companionship without any under-handedness, women’s genitality a matter of course.’128 What seems utopian about both what Reich describes and what Zamyatin rather mischievously elucidates, is the possibility of sexual freedom without an attendant hypersexualisation, a direct inverse of a the puritan prurience of contemporary society. Reich saw a partial fulfilment of his idea that sexual irrationalism was directly correlative to the economic irrationalism of capital. He writes for instance of an acquaintance who was eight months pregnant, with no-one knowing or asking who the father was, or of two men in a commune agreeing to jointly support the child of a lover they both shared, as they didn’t care to argue which was the father (this is similar to a scenario in the 1927 film Bed and Sofa). Reich claimed that he saw ‘the economic outlines of a future sex hygiene of the masses in impressive efforts to raise all members of society to a high cultural level through higher wages and shorter working hours, as well as cultural mass education and a stand against religion.’129 But by 1934 the psychoanalyst felt that he had to add a footnote to this, retracting his earlier praise of the USSR, whose reactionary turn he analysed in The Sexual Revolution a year later. The actual achievement of industrial and technological modernity through the Five Year Plans had coincided with a clampdown on this new sexual morality. Utopia abandoned at the point of its possible realisation.

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