The Transformation of Intimacy

Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

Anthony Giddens

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does 'sexuality' come into being and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life on a more general plane? In answering these questions, Anthony Giddens disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture. The emergence of what the author calls plastic sexuality - sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction - is analysed in terms of the long-term development of the modern social order and social influences of the last few decades. Giddens argues that the transformation of intimacy, in which women have played the major part, holds out the possibility of a radical democratization of the personal sphere.

This book will appeal to a large general audience as well as being essential reading for students and professionals.

1

EVERYDAY EXPERIMENTS, RELATIONSHIPS, SEXUALITY

In his novel Before She Met Me, Julian Barnes discusses the fate of one Graham Hendrick, an academic historian, who has left his wife and begun a relationship with another woman. When the novel opens, Graham is in his late thirties, has been married fifteen years and, ‘halfway through life’, he can ‘feel the downhill slope already’. At an otherwise run-of-the-mill party he meets Ann, who once was a small-time film actress and has since become a fashion buyer. For some reason their encounter stirs in him barely remembered feelings of hope and excitement. He feels ‘as if some long-broken line of communication to a self of twenty years ago had suddenly been restored’ and is ‘once more capable of folly and idealism’.

After a series of clandestine meetings, which turn into a full-blown affair, Graham leaves his wife and child and sets up house with Ann. Once his divorce comes through the two marry. The core of the novel concerns Graham’s progressive discovery of the lovers in Ann’s life before he entered it. She hides little, but volunteers no information unless he asks for it directly. Graham gradually becomes obsessed with a need to uncover the sexual details of Ann’s past. He watches and rewatches the cameo parts Ann has played on the screen, trying to glimpse an exchange of glances, or other signs, that would indicate that she and a particular man with whom she appeared had been lovers. Sometimes she admits there have been sexual liaisons, mostly she insists not.

The ultimate development of the story is savage, its conclusion almost completely subverting the style of deadpan humour in which most of the book is written. By dint of assiduous research, Graham discovers that his best friend, Jack – to whom he had been confiding his problems about Ann’s life ‘before she met me’ – himself had a sexual involvement with Ann several years before. Graham arranges to see his friend as if to continue his discussions. But he takes with him a knife, a ‘six-inch blade tapering from a breadth of an inch to a sharp point’. When Jack turns his back on him at one point, to busy himself with a minor task, Graham stabs him. As Jack turns round in bewilderment, Graham slips the knife in repeatedly, ‘between the heart and the genitals’. After putting a plaster on his finger where he has cut it during the course of the murder, he settles down in a chair with the remnants of a cup of coffee that Jack had made for him.

In the meantime, increasingly worried by Graham’s absence, which has stretched across the night, and having telephoned the police and local hospitals in a fruitless endeavour to discover his whereabouts, Ann starts searching through Graham’s desk. There she unearths documents bearing witness to Graham’s compulsive enquiries into her past – and finds that he knows of her affair with Jack (the one sexual encounter which she has actively concealed from Graham). She goes over to Jack’s flat and finds Graham there, together with Jack’s bloodstained body. Without understanding why, she lets Graham calm her down and tie her arms together with a few yards of washing-line. Graham calculates that this procedure will give him enough time to accomplish his objective, before she can dash to the phone to get help. ‘No curtain lines; no melodrama’: picking up the knife, Graham cuts deeply into each side of his throat. About Ann – ‘he loved Ann, there wasn’t any doubt about that’ – he has miscalculated. Ann dives headfirst through the glass of a window, screaming loudly. By the time the police arrive, the armchair is irretrievably soaked with blood and Graham is dead. The implication of the concluding paragraphs of the novel is that Ann has killed herself also – inadvertently or otherwise we do not know.

Before She Met Me is not primarily a novel about jealousy. While reading through the materials that Graham has accumulated about her, Ann recognises that jealous ‘was a word she wouldn’t use of him’. The important thing was that ‘he couldn’t handle her past’.¹ The ending is violent – incongruously so given the half-comic tone of the rest of the book – but cool. Graham’s violence is a frustrated attempt at mastery. Its origins are left quite opaque by the novelist, something which reflects their obscurity to Graham himself. The secrets Graham seeks to discover in Ann’s sexual history are bound up with her non-conformity to what he expects of a woman – her past is incompatible with his ideals. The problem is an emotional one; he recognises how absurd it is to suppose that Ann should have organised her former life in anticipation of meeting him. Yet her sexual independence, even when he did not ‘exist’ for her, is unacceptable, to such a degree that the end-result is a violent destructiveness. To his credit, Graham tries to shield Ann from the violence she has provoked in him; but of course she becomes caught up in it anyhow.

The events described in the novel are distinctly contemporary; as a discussion of the lives of ordinary people, the novel could not have been set, say, a century ago. For it presumes a significant degree of sexual equality and, specifically, depends upon the fact that today it is commonplace for a woman to have multiple lovers prior to entering (and even during, as well as after leaving) a ‘serious’ sexual involvement. Of course, there have always been a minority of women for whom sexual variety, and also a measure of equality, were possible. But for the most part women have been divided into the virtuous and the loose, and ‘loose women’ have existed only on the margins of respectable society. ‘Virtue’ has long been defined in terms of a woman’s refusal to succumb to sexual temptation, a refusal bolstered by various institutional protections, such as chaperoned courting, shotgun marriages and so forth.

Men, on the other hand, have traditionally been regarded – and not only by themselves – as requiring sexual variety for their physical health. It has generally been thought acceptable for men to engage in multiple sexual encounters before marriage, and the double standard after marriage was a very real phenomenon. As Lawrence Stone says in his study of the history of divorce in England, until quite recently a rigid dual standard existed about the sexual experience of men and women. A single act of adultery by a wife was ‘an unpardonable breach of the law of property and the idea of hereditary descent’ and discovery brought into play highly punitive measures. Adultery on the part of husbands, by contrast, was widely ‘regarded as a regrettable but understandable foible’.²

In a world of increasing sexual equality – even if such equality is far from complete – both sexes are called upon to make fundamental changes in their outlooks on, and behaviour towards, one another. The adjustments demanded of women are considerable but, perhaps because the novelist is male, these are neither fully represented, nor portrayed with much sympathy, in the book. Barbara, Graham’s first wife, is depicted as a shrill, demanding creature, whose attitudes he finds baffling; while he feels a consistent love for Ann, his understanding of her views and actions is hardly any deeper. One could even say that, in spite of the intensive research work which he carries out on Ann’s prior life, he does not really come to know her at all.

Graham tends to dismiss the behaviour of Barbara and Ann in a traditional way: women are emotional, whimsical beings, whose thought-processes do not move along rational lines. Yet he has compassion for both of them, particularly, at the time of the story, Ann. His new wife is not a ‘loose woman’, nor has he any right to treat her as such. When she goes to see Jack, after having married Graham, she firmly rejects the advances Jack makes to her. Yet Graham cannot shake from his mind the threat he feels from activities which occurred before he was ‘in control’ of her.

The novelist conveys very well the tentative, open-ended nature of Graham’s second marriage, which differs substantially from his first. Graham’s earlier marriage, it is made clear, was more of a ‘naturally given’ phenomenon, based on the conventional division between housewife and male breadwinner. With Barbara, marriage was a state of affairs, a not particularly rewarding part of life, like having a job that one does not especially appreciate, but dutifully carries on. Marriage to Ann, by contrast, is a complex series of interactions that have to be constantly negotiated and ‘worked through’.³ In his second marriage, Graham has entered a new world that was only barely emerging at the time of his youth. It is a world of sexual negotiation, of ‘relationships’, in which new terminologies of ‘commitment’ and ‘intimacy’ have come to the fore.

Before She Met Me is a novel about male disquiet, and male violence, in a social world undergoing profound transformations. Women no longer go along with male sexual dominance, and both sexes must deal with the implications of this phenomenon. Personal life has become an open project, creating new demands and anxieties. Our interpersonal existence is being thoroughly transfigured, involving us all in what I shall call everyday social experiments, with which wider social changes more or less oblige us to engage. Let us give some more sociological flesh to these changes, which are to do with marriage and the family as well as with sexuality directly.

Social change and sexual behaviour

Lillian Rubin studied the sexual histories of almost a thousand heterosexual people in the US aged between eighteen and forty-eight in 1989. In so doing, she produced evidence revealing ‘a tale of change of almost staggering proportions in relations between men and women’ over the past few decades.⁴ The early sexual lives of respondents over forty contrasted dramatically with those reported by younger age-groups. The author prefaces her report on what things were like for the older generation with her own testimony, as a member of that generation herself. She was a virgin at the time of her marriage during World War II, a girl who ‘followed all the rules of her day’, and would never have ‘gone all the way’. She wasn’t alone in drawing clear boundaries to mark out the limits of sexual exploration, but shared codes of conduct common to her friends. Her prospective husband was an active participant in ensuring that those codes were complied with; his sense of sexual ‘rights and wrongs’ matched her own.

Virginity on the part of girls prior to marriage was prized by both sexes. Few girls disclosed the fact if they allowed a boyfriend to have full sexual intercourse – and many were only likely to permit such an act to happen once formally engaged to the boy in question. More sexually active girls were disparaged by the others, as well as by the very males who sought to ‘take advantage’ of them. Just as the social reputation of the girls rested upon their ability to resist, or contain, sexual advances, that of the boys depended upon the sexual conquests they could achieve. Most boys gained such conquests only by, as one 45-year-old respondent put it, ‘fooling around with one of those girls, the sluts’.

When we look at teenage sexual activity today, the good girl/bad girl distinction still applies to some degree, as does the ethic of male conquest. But other attitudes, on the part of many teenage girls in particular, have changed quite radically. Girls feel they have an entitlement to engage in sexual activity, including sexual intercourse, at whatever age seems appropriate to them. In Rubin’s survey, virtually no teenage girls talk of ‘saving themselves’ for an anticipated engagement and marriage. Instead, they speak a language of romance and commitment which acknowledges the potentially finite nature of their early sexual involvements. Thus, in response to a question from Rubin about her sexual activities with her boyfriend, one sixteen-year-old interviewee remarked, ‘We love each other, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be making love.’ Rubin then asked to what extent she envisaged a long-term tie with her partner. Her reply was: ‘Do you mean are we going to get married? The answer is no. Or will we be together next year? I don’t know about that; that’s a long time from now. Most kids don’t stay together for such a long time. But we won’t date anybody else as long as we’re together. That’s a commitment, isn’t it?’⁵

In previous generations, the conventional practice was for the sexually active teenage girl to play the part of innocent. This relation is today usually reversed: innocence, where necessary, plays the role of sophisticate. According to Rubin’s findings, changes in the sexual behaviour and attitudes of girls have been much more pronounced than among boys. She did talk to some boys who were sensitive about connections between sex and commitment, and who resisted the equation of sexual success and male prowess. Most, however, spoke admiringly of male friends who went with lots of girls, while condemning girls who did the same. A few girls in Rubin’s sample emulated traditional male sexual behaviour, did so openly and with some defiance; faced with such actions, the majority of boys responded with a sense of outrage. They still wanted innocence, at least of a sort. Several young women whom Rubin interviewed, on the point of getting married, found it necessary to lie to their future spouses about the range of their earlier sexual experiences.

One of the most striking findings of Rubin’s research, which is echoed by other surveys and applies across all age-groups, is the expanded variety of sexual activities in which most people either engage or deem it appropriate for others to participate in if they so wish. Thus among the women and men over forty, fewer than one in ten had engaged in oral sex during adolescence; for each successive generation, the proportion increases. Among the current generation of teenagers, although not universally practised, oral sex is regarded as a normal part of sexual behaviour. Every adult Rubin interviewed now had at least some experience with it – this in a society where oral sex is still described as ‘sodomy’ in statute books and is actually illegal in twenty-four states.

Men mostly welcome the fact that women have become more sexually available, and claim that in any longer-term sexual tie they want a partner who is intellectually and economically their equal. Yet, according to Rubin’s findings, they show obvious and deep-seated unease when faced with the implications of such preferences. They say that women have ‘lost the capacity for kindness’, that they ‘don’t know how to compromise any more’ and that ‘women today don’t want to be wives, they want wives’. Men declare they want equality, but many also make statements suggesting that they either reject, or are nervous about, what it means for them. ‘How would you contribute to raising the children?’ Rubin asked Jason, a man who, in his own words, has ‘no problem with strong aggressive women’. His answer: ‘I’m certainly willing to do all I can. I don’t expect to be an absent father, but someone has to take the larger share of responsibility … And I won’t say I can do that, because I can’t. I have my career, and it’s very important to me, what I’ve worked for all my life.’⁶

Most people, women and men, now come to marriage bringing with them a substantial fund of sexual experience and knowledge. Not for them the abrupt transition between furtive fumblings or illicit encounters and the more secure, yet also often more demanding, sexuality of the marriage bed. Newly wed marriage partners today are for the most part sexually experienced, and there is no period of sexual apprenticeship in the early stages of the marriage, even when the individuals involved have not lived with one another previously.

Yet far more is anticipated sexually of marriage, Rubin shows, by both women and men, than was normally the case in earlier generations. Women expect to receive, as well as provide, sexual pleasure, and many have come to see a rewarding sex life as a key requirement for a satisfactory marriage. The proportion of women married for more than five years who have had extramarital sexual encounters is today virtually the same as that of men. The double standard still exists, but women are no longer tolerant of the view that, while men need variety and can be expected to engage in extramarital adventures, they should not behave likewise.

How much can we glean about generic social changes from such a piece of research, carried out with limited numbers of people, in a single country? We can learn, I think, essentially what we need to know for the pu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Everyday Experiments, Relationships, Sexuality
• 2 Foucault on Sexuality
• 3 Romantic Love and Other Attachments
• 4 Love, Commitment and the Pure Relationship
• 5 Love, Sex and Other Addictions
• 6 The Sociological Meaning of Codependence
• 7 Personal Turbulence, Sexual Troubles
• 8 Contradictions of the Pure Relationship
• 9 Sexuality, Repression, Civilisation
• 10 Intimacy as Democracy
• Index