LOVE AMERICAN STYLE
Mikhail Epstein
To write about the sexual life of an entire nation would seem to require the imagination of a Rabelais. However, in America this subject does not so much require the services of a Rabelais as those of a conscientious scientist, since the atmosphere of this country contains very little of the poetry or ecstasies of love. Indeed it is not the works of Goethe or Maupassant, nor even of Dreiser and Hemingway, that are considered the classics in this field; rather it is the statistical studies of sexuality carried out by Alfred Kinsey and the laboratory studies, accompanied by diagrams and tables, of Masters and Johnson. These works, fated to become bestsellers, were the ones that fashioned American concepts of love and marriage.
In America love is a somewhat marginalized subject, as if it were an external addition to the stock of general human values. Apparently, Americans feel so good about themselves that they simply don't experience that sharp and burning need to penetrate another's body and soul. To cling to and lose oneself in an other, to forget the entire world and all its vanity, to listen only to a lover's sweet nothings, just as Pushkin dreamed of doing in some Russian backwater . . . but no, not in America: for in America there is no such backwater, no such longing for frenzied and boundless intimacy.
A caveat is in order here: the "American" I have in mind is of the same order of reality as the "bourgeois" who appears in the works of proletarian thinkers. Indeed America, more so than any other nation, is a land of exceptions, which means that any rigid generalization is especially prone to error. And yet this very potential for error in my approach may be an accurate gauge, if not of America itself, then of the different experience that Americans and Russians have of this humanly universal question.
From the Russian point of view, the average American is overly concerned with his or her health, defining personal life in terms of a body that must be honed through sport and medicine. The American is self-contained, having none of those gaping orifices which, according to Bakhtin, form the grotesque Rabelaisian body, with its sweating, shitting, and copulating.
In my opinion, the very idea of such a body, such as is found in Bakhtin's work on Rabelais, could have arisen only in Russia, where each individual remains attached to the national body by all its decent and indecent orifices, which is a condition that leads to a state of constant disorganization in individual social existence. Having not yet been separated from this primordial body, having not yet become a free and self-regulating organism, it is no wonder that the mouth of one is filled with another's shit, and everyone drags someone else behind him by the pants pocket or sometimes by the zipper.
The unrestrained character of Soviet erotic life—the seven million annual abortions being one side-effect—is another aspect of social barbarism. People drift in and through the flesh, they hide inside each other, as if their bodies were tiny little oases in the midst of a vast desert; and yet they don't know even know whether these are really oases or but mirages of a fading consciousness.
The Soviet experience suggests the following law: the immense amount of a sexual energy released by a society in the process of decay is used by a healthy society for purposes of demographic expansion. Individuals, dislodged from their position in the social hierarchy, bombard each other with superactive rays of male and female sexual charm, producing a kind of alpha, beta, and gamma decay, although this decay can even reach the human individual, the "I," which happens to be the last letter of the Russian alphabet.
It is significant that in Russian the terms "male" and "female" have replaced all previous linguistic terms used to define the sexes in a social context, such as sir, madam, comrade, etc. Where has the human person gone? Back to where it was in the beginning: "So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27) Once again males and females stand face to face, although no longer in the Garden of Eden but in the ruins of the final utopia — an abstract gender, imperceptibly hatched from the chimera of class struggle.
The American social universe has been constructed over a long period of time and is programmed down to the smallest details. Individuals revolve within defined social orbits. When changing orbits a person must observe strict rules of passage in order to avoid crashing into another individual and perishing in delicious torments. And if anyone imagines that American life is just as it is depicted in "Playboy" or John Updike's novel "Couples," then he or she is confusing a magazine or novel with an altogether different genre, which in everyday speech is called "real life" and in the language of social science "social etiquette."
In this well-respected, prosaic genre there's not a single episode in which male and female actants initially meet on the street, subway, or store. Public areas are not places for flirting or coquettishness, for pick-ups or unwanted advances: at least I, in the year that I have been thumbing through the pages of this morally-edifying tale, have never observed any thing of the kind. Moreover, there is a complete absence of anything resembling a consciously male or female facial expression, no elusively bewitching play of the eyes, fascinating vessels of light. There is no enveloping moisture, no velvety splendor or bashful film to coat seductive eyes. There is neither boldness nor timidity: as a rule, beautiful women are not ogled, they have no need to turn away from unwanted stares — there simply isn't any of that sweaty, slimy effervescence in the relationship of the sexes.
In Russian the word used to describe the act of picking up a girl is "to stick to" (kleit'sya). But it has nothing to do with the way in which an individual male approaches a female — the air itself is smeared with this sticky substance, pinching the skin and darkening the eyes. In the States this kind of stickiness is totally absent — indeed the air is so dry and translucent that even the crazed sparks of wantonness fail to blaze up in the lecture hall or university library. Male and female students like to loll about the floors with their books — stretched out comfortably they read without manifesting the slightest corporeal interest in each other.
Sexual life begins early in the United States. Not long ago, in New York, school authorities began to distribute condoms free of charge to high school students. However, these experiments in youthful cohabitation are oddly similar to schooling for a future marriage: having chosen each other, a girl and boy usually engage in a steady, or at least monogamous, relationship. From time to time partners change but almost never do several relationship go on simultaneously. Bifurcation and dissembling are not looked upon kindly. Moreover, instead of taking up as lovers, Americans prefer to terminate one marriage and enter into another, which in part accounts for the large number of divorces in America. While some Russian critics of American life have made a point of denouncing the high divorce rate as a symptom of "bourgeois" or "hedonistic" morality, they fail to mention that the American divorce rate represents an almost transparent picture of actual sexual relations. This is not the case in many other countries, including the former Soviet Union. Here the divorce rate is but the tip of the iceberg, disguising an endless series of couplings and uncouplings. Thus in the Soviet Union polygamy exists along the horizontal axis, in the form of multiple lovers; in America it exists on the vertical axis, in the form of replacing one spouse with another; and of course in both countries the two lines intersect, forming a mighty cross that embodies the traditional monogamous family.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of American sexual life is the way in which individual sexual rights are juridically protected. Before taking a job at a college or university all teachers receive formal warning, both in writing and verbally, concerning what is called "sexual harassment". This term, it turns out, covers not only direct physical coercion but any kind of contact that a member of the opposite sex finds inappropriate; it also includes statements, gestures, and facial expressions that might be interpreted as an attempt to draw a given person into a sexual relationship against his or her will. A look or smile can thus be taken as a form of harassment.
Any attempt by an instructor to enter into this kind of relationship with a student (whether graduate or undergraduate), treating him or her as a dependent being, is treated with special severity; a simple complaint about this kind of behavior can result in the instructor's immediate dismissal. It is of course impossible to know beforehand how a particular colleague or student might react to a shyly sweet or thoughtfully attentive facial expression. Thus it is best to suppress all facial expressions whatsoever, limiting oneself to that blinding—in the manner of the sun—and so cosmically distant American smile.
The American press and judicial system has recently devoted a lot of time and attention to the problem of rape. However, the act under consideration here is not the kind of brutal rape carried out by a band of armed criminals or a single roving rapist — in America this type of crime is rare. What I am speaking of is the kind of rape that in Russian is described in the following strange expression: "the lovers are quarreling — but they're having a good time at it," and which in English is called date rape.
For example, a young man is wooing a girl, his affection is requited, but at a particular moment he gets ahead of himself, deciding that her averted glance or defensive hand gesture does not signal resistance but rather the desire to entice . . . And it may even be that the girl herself does not understand the meaning of her gesture. Afterwards, however, when it's all over and done, she decides that she did mean to restrain him with her hands. Now the boy is sitting in jail, serving a long sentence meted out by the criminal justice system, even though the newspapers have commented that one can't help but feel sorry for him: he could have made an excellent employee and been a real success.
In another case, there wasn't even an unwanted caress; indeed it didn't even include a meeting between criminal and victim. A young man simply wrote love letters to a former co-worker, asking her to go out with him to the movies and dinner, and confessing that he could think only of her, that such things happen only once in a lifetime, etc. . . . But she didn't want to receive these missives. This case, which is currently being tried, could result in a prison sentence of several years for this American Werther — sentenced to a prison term for sending unwanted, unanswered letters. Imagine, Onegin could have brought suit on Tatyana for the same crime; for he, to use judicial language, in no way provoked her confessions of love.
Even the ties of marriage do not preclude the possibility of being brought up on charges for engaging in overly intimate sexual activity. For instance, Playboy magazine, whose pages are often devoted to open discussion of the delights and techniques of oral sex, recently published a despondent letter from one of its readers, a certain James Mosley, who was serving a five year sentence in a Georgia prison after having been convicted of sodomy.[1] Apparently, during a particularly passionate episode of sexual intercourse with his wife, Mr. Mosley had the imprudence to let his mouth come in contact with his wife's genitalia, which in Georgia is a crime punishable with even longer sentences, up to twenty years. His wife, it turned out, had intentionally enticed him into this act so that she could bring him up on charges. This was because, having not long before been caught in the arms of a lover, she was facing divorce proceedings from her husband and, due to the circumstances of the case, would in all likelihood have lost custody of the children. Now, convicted of a sex crime, Mr. Mosley was deprived of the right even to see them. It was only thanks to the help of several high-powered attorneys that this passionate spouse and Navy veteran was released from prison nineteen months into his sentence.
How is it that the freest nation in the free world has such a strict moral code? One of the reasons is fairly obvious: the Puritan heritage, brought to America by its first immigrants. These pilgrims combined an inexhaustible hunger for adventure with an uncompromising severity in regard to the sins of the flesh. This attitude was perhaps strengthened by the subsequent arrival of a multiplicity of other cultures, requiring that each group exercise a measure of self-control so that all could get along. For example, when a city bus is filled with passengers representing a multitude of races and nationalities, how is a young man to know the appropriate way to come on to a girl, how to master the social etiquette of a cultural system whose rules are foreign to you? How should a Peruvian beauty respond to the advances of a Chinese student? There's always one solution: stay within the narrow, seemly, and neutral framework of American national correctness.
Although there are many other historical and cultural reasons for this strictness, I believe that the most important is the logic of freedom itself. If you are free to do what you want, then another is equally free not to do what you want. Complete freedom includes even the freedom from freedom itself.
This is why America has gone so far in protecting the rights of sexual minorities. In most localities, homosexuals and lesbians are free to acknowledge their sexual orientation without fear of damage to their career or social standing. For instance, I recently saw, in the middle of Washington's National Gallery, a poster announcing a party for the homosexual employees of the museum: this announcement was phrased in the humdrum manner of an invitation to a meeting of a professional association. In some cities, homosexual marriages are already legally recognized; thus the offspring of a previous marriage would have to introduce this new member of the family as "my father's husband" or "my mother's wife." This is the freedom of mutual consent, and nothing can limit it.
By this same logic, freedom can suddenly become unlawful when it infringes on the freedom of another individual. This is true no matter how slight the infringement, whether it be a soft touch, an impertinent smile, or an importuning letter. And as love is, by its very nature, dangerous, unpredictable, and daring, then anything or almost anything about it can turn criminal. This is even true of that spiritual love which, according to the Apostle Paul, is "patient, kind, and envies no one; is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offense. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over other men's sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothing that love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance" (1 Corinthians 13: 4-7): even this meek love is difficult to keep within the bounds of the permissible and acceptable. As for passionate love, lustful love, the love that is fundamentally criminal because its form is transgression . . . Has not psychoanalysis become the American national religion because the other's freedom costs one's own soul so dearly? Does it not require an enormous amount of repression of one's self? And leads to the psychoanalyst's couch where, for eighty dollars an hour, you have the right to express yourself freely?
Life in America, with the possible exceptions of parts of California and New York City, is too restrictive for lady-killers and seducers. Not without reason did America's most famous literary playboy, the indefatigable Henry Miller, choose to spend the best years of his life in Paris.
Gazing at the languid, available beauties of Playboy, one is reminded of the fact that in its Russian edition Playboy is called "The Lecher", or literally "the hanger-on" (povesa). This word suggests a whole series of related ones: to hang (povesit'), the gallows (visel'nitsa), the hanged man (visel'nik). Although there is no similar linguistic connotation in English, the Playboy mentality has nevertheless given rise to a system of legally-regulated activities. As for the protagonists of Maupassant and Rabelais—not to mention Petrarch, doggedly penning love sonnets to his placid and married Laura—a trip to America is not recommended.
January 1991
Trans. Thomas Epstein