I didn't mean to come back to Brave New World twice

I'm still in the process of reading Brave New World (It's been going very slowly because I can sense something portentous on the horizon of the book, and that always slows down my reading, especially if I think whatever is about to happen is bad. It's my mind's way of dealing with the possibility of negative things happening to the characters I guess). I just read a passage that absolutely destroyed me.

For this entry to make any sense, we have to first agree on the fact that when a person reads Brave New World, they are essentially entering into a contract with the book. This contract is, namely, that one should think that the "Civilization" portrayed in Brave New World is entirely negative and that the "Savages" (aka people who are not raised in test tubes) are somehow better because they retain their Christianity, religion, literature, individuality, etc. Huxley sets up a then vs now construct, and I suppose the idea is that the reader is supposed to come down on his side (then). (Btw I haven't finished the book so maybe I should save the book reports until then, but I like writing about things as I experience them, so here we go!)

From here on out: SPOILER ALERT

But here's the thesis of my post: I just don't agree with Huxley. I'm not saying everything about Brave New World's "Civilization" is what I want from my ideal society, but there are some aspects of it that are okay, or at least not unacceptable to me. And the dealbreaker for me is the scene where Lenina and the Savage (aka John) confess their love to one another. Lenina, who was socially conditioned to give her body to any man who asked for it, immediately undresses and goes to hug John. Her sudden undressing produces this result:

The Savage caught her by the wrists, tore her hands from his shoulders, thrust her roughly away at arm's length.

"Ow, you're hurting me, you're...oh!" She was suddenly silent. Terror had made her forget the pain. Opening her eyes, she had seen his face--no, not his face, a ferocious stranger's, pale, distorted, twitching with some insane, inexplicable fury. Aghast, "But what is it, John?" she whispered. He did not answer, but only stared into her face with those mad eyes. The hands that held her wrists were trembling. He breathed deeply and irregularly. Faint almost to imperceptibility, but appalling, she suddenly heard the grinding of his teeth. "What is it?" she almost screamed.

And as though awaked by her cry he caught her by the shoulders and shook her. "Whore!" he shouted. "Whore! Impudent strumpet!"

"Oh no, don't, do-on't," she protested in a voice made grotesquely tremulous by his shaking.

"Whore!"
"Ple-ease."
"Damned whore!"

So, to use the words immortalized by Kenan Thompson in his nefarious SNL skit, WHATUP WITH THAT?

Ok, so the Savage believes in choosing one woman and living with her forever. His character's motivations are complicated because he loves his mother, a woman who slept around because she believed that "everyone belongs to everyone," so he has some sort of deep oedipal resentment for the idea of sleeping with a woman and being promiscuous. But this reaction just smacks way too intensely of the madonna/whore dichotomy. Lenina was perfect to the Savage before this incident: divinely beautiful, he could barely look at her, he trembled in her presence, blah blah blah. And then she shows one sign of sexuality and she's a DAMNED JEZEBEL! Besides the fact that the poor girl has nearly no agency in deciding how to deal with her sexuality because she was being hypnotized in her sleep practically her entire life.

Madonna vs Whore is a binary used to oppress women that is practically as old as time itself, and I just don't buy the fact that having lots of sex is so bad, as Huxley makes it seem. But then again, I couldn't give a damn about most of the Bible's commandments of morality, so maybe I'm just largely missing the point.

I guess what I'm asking is--does this instance of extremely screwy sexism illuminate the fact that Brave New World is, frankly, no longer relevant?

Brave New World & Social Conditioning

EVERYBODY!! Let's explicitly return to social constructions for a post, shall we?

I've been reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley for the past few days. It's not the pinnacle in difficult literature (mainly I feel like it's something I should have read in high school) but the ideas in it are good. I agree with its place in the high school literary canon and I also think it's a good piece of literature to use to view capitalist society.

Regardless, the novel has some interesting ideas about social conditioning; namely, hypnopaedia, in which the children are taught ideas about their caste and societal functions through whispered repetitions in their sleep.

Which all brings me back to a recent post on Jezebel. The post deals with Natasha Walter's notion that sexism has gotten "worse" over the last few years (since the 1980's and the rash of the power mom). The editor who wrote the post doesn't seem to take that bait, but the commenters certainly did--by agreeing with Walter. Many of them were horrified by the notion of raising a daughter in the current cultural climate. This hypothetical daughter, they argued, would have to live in a culture that sexualizes her by age 5, that demands that she is skinny, that wants her to be hairless, tan, blonde, big-boobed, etc etc etc.

My initial reaction to the Jezebel commenter reactions was: WHAT??! Do we, as women and as mothers (or future mothers), live with absolutely NO agency when it comes to raising our daughers? It seemed preposterous to me that we couldn't prevent the perpetuation of women like Heidi Montag who, if given the resources, will plastic her body to oblivion in order to fit some vague beauty ideal. So I posted as much on Jezebel. And, to some extent, I stand by that comment because YES, I do happen to think that my mother did a good job of raising me outside of some standard idea of beauty and that my college did a good job of waking me up to all the gender problems there are in this world. However, this post posits that sexism has gotten worse in the 2000s and as I grew up in the 90s, I suppose my experience as a feminist is somewhat invalid in the argument about our daughters' futures.

The bottom line is that yes: social conditioning exists, as it does in Brave New World. We might not be whispering our children to sleep with lies about how good it feels to be an Alpha-Plus, but we're entertaining them with commercials that claim they need that new backpack or that all girls love pink. And even if I, as a mother, refuse to let my daughter watch television or look at fashion magazines, one commenter pointed out that the girls at my daughter's school won't necessarily live by such strict rules, and she will be exposed to these ideas in some way.

Backing away from the idea of future children for a minute: the bottom line is the my own experience has told me that I'm socially conditioned by my gender, for better or for worse. This fact was triggered for me while reading Brave New World: in one part, the Director talks about the fact that the lower-caste peoples were conditioned to love sports in the country. This conditioning had a two-fold effect: first, the people would consume transportation to get to the country; second, they would also need to purchase sports equipment in order to participate in these activities. This way, the demand for products is higher and society benefits from everybody's consumerism.

And yes, it seems that women are specifically targeted in this way. Growing up we are inundated with information about our beauty. We need this kind of makeup in order to cover up the circles under our eyes, or we need this kind of pore cleanser to prevent blackheads. Yes, it's true that men aren't entirely unaffected by this kind of gender-based advertising, but the advertising geared towards women typically has the kinds of products that, frankly, most men don't feel compelled to buy. I try to spend wisely because I don't make all the money in the world; however, I have noticed it is a lot easier for my brother to live a spartan lifestyle than me. Aside from our basic differences in personalities (I have an obsession with owning design and art objects that he does not necessarily share), I also find myself needing to buy makeup, clothing, hair products, and any number of basic hygenic products more often than he does. Because of my gender-based consumer conditioning, I incur more expenses than him in the month simply because I am a girl.

I will, of course, exempt all people who live outside of the traditional gender binary in this critique of society: of course men who perform as women have to buy makeup. I'm not saying we're so heavily conditioned that it's physically impossible for us to buy products that are typically intended for one gender or the other. But the point is: if a man decides he wants to buy makeup, he gets a label. And these labels are often pejorative, ranging from the mildest (metrosexual) to the most severe (she-male). One is even at peril when crossing the invisible consumer gender divide. And we have social conditioning to thank for that.