I Hate It When I Have to Agree with Freud

I think of myself as Jungian. Freud frustrates the heck out of me, because I will be reading along and thinking "gee, he has a point, here" and then we will come up with some incredibly misogynous statement about women and piss me off so bad I can't hear another thing he says. Freud, for some reason, is one of those people who really know how to push my buttons. However, today, in class, we were discussing "Society and Its Discontents" and I have to admit, he got me.

Freud doesn't like the idea of Utopias. His thought is that our Ids are in constant battle with our Egos and our Super-Egos in a constant struggle to sublimate our feelings of sexuality and aggression into socially acceptable channels. Freud thought that Utopia was an unattainable ideal based on unrealistic expectations on the sublimation of those desires, and thus, instead of creating a "good life", Utopia would, instead, create a group of highly neurotic frustrated individuals whose Super-Egos are punishing them constantly for their failed enterprise.

That last part is not the part that I agree with, but, I have to say, I think he did have something. I think he may have been ALMOST there, but too Victorian to go the rest of the way.

In the 1844, John Humphrey Noyes started a religious utopia not too far from here called the Oneida Community. The group stayed together for about 30 years, making it incredibly successful by Utopian standards. One of the things that the Oneida Community had going for it was something called "Complex Marriage". They had this system where no members of the Community would couple with any other member. Each member had their own bedroom, but these folks were far from celibate. If some member was attracted to another member, (presumably of the opposite sex), they would go up to them and ask them if they wanted to have sex. If they said “yes”, then the two would go to one of the women there who were in charge of these things. If they met all the criteria based on age and the how many times they had been together in the past, then they would go to one of the special rooms set up in the house expressly for that purpose and consummate the act. Both men and women could ask, as men and women were completely equal. However, there was something called an Ascending/Descending system. Young men would have sex with post menopausal women while young women would have sex with middle-aged men. The reason for this was that they used male continence as birth control. Young men couldn’t control themselves, so they were put with older women that couldn’t get pregnant. Young women had sex with older men that could control themselves and therefore not get them pregnant.

Now, here is the thing... John Humphrey Noyes eventually got into trouble because he set up a system where he could sleep with as many 16 year old virgins as he wanted to! As soon as the authorities figured this out, he ran off to Canada, where he eventually died.

HOWEVER, before that, no one person was allowed to have sex with any other one person too many times because it was thought that coupling would create a situation where people thought of each other as property. Oneida was a religious commune. It practiced something called “Bible Communism”. All resources were held in common, including each other. Marriage, as is commonly practiced now, was considered an ownership relationship, and the Oneida Community believed that no person had the right to own another.

So, was Noyes a social visionary? Or was he just a man trying to figure a way to not have to sublimate his sexual desire to sleep with as many young, pretty women as he could? The Shakers made their Utopia celibate. Personally, if I can’t have sex in your Utopia, I don’t want to dance. Celibacy and Utopia do not go together in my personal worldview, although for a lot of people they do.

In the 1980s, many feminists (now called Second Wave feminists in academic circles), challenged the notion that marriage was good for women. For the radical thinkers at the time, monogamous relationships were nothing short of property ownership (sound familiar?), and people, women in particular, because there was an implication that this right had always been there for men, had a right to fulfill their sexuality with as many partners as they desired. This was particularly prevalent in the Lesbian Feminist Community of the time, and it was not common for women to ask other women “So… are you monogamous, or non-manogamous”. It was also fairly common for some of these women to attempt various experiments in non-traditional relationships. So, the question on the table is, again, this, were WE social visionaries? Or Lesbians who just really, really wanted to be able to sleep with as many other women as we could?

And, why does it matter? Why DOES a couple have to own each other, if there is no shared property, no diseases being passed, and there are no children involved? Maybe Freud was right… the unnecessary sublimation of sexual desire leads to neurotic obsessive/compulsive discontent. If that is so, then any attempt at Utopia should be engaged in the active pursuit of the elimination of that unnecessary sublimation.