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Movies like Cast Away and I Am Legend derive most of their effective suspense from a dilemma no one would ever want to face: what it would mean to be, as far as you knew, completely alone in the world. So alone that you had to rely on dolls to preserve a thin illusion of companionship and remain invested in waking up every day.
Among elderly individuals, the medical profession has known for 150 years that the death of a spouse creates a significant mortality risk for the surviving spouse. Chances are that when most people are in their 80s or 90s, their spouse is one of only a handful of people left, if not the only person left, with whom they felt a strong peer relationship.
As I've highlighted before, and will again, solitary confinement in prison can drive people permanently insane, such that we can infer the company of other criminals and prison guards to be healthier than being alone all the time.
Yet as evidence mounts that it's our connections to other people that give our lives meaning, keep us healthy, keep us sound in mind and body, we find ourselves having to constantly struggle against institutions dedicated to the glorification of objects, abstractions and anthropomorphized Jungian archetypes over real human beings and their needs.
The ongoing pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church is merely a symptom of this collective, self-abasing masochism people seem prone to. Particularly, that seen among segments of society that enshrine pre-teen gross out reactions to sex, a very normal part of adult human life, as some sort of binding moral arbiter.
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Maureen Dowd asserted yesterday that the Catholic Church could fix what ails it by appointing a female Pope. I suppose the occasional pronouncement like this is why she's regarded in some circles as a feminist. She says:
... If the church could throw open its stained glass windows and let in some air, invite women to be priests, nuns to be more emancipated and priests to marry, if it could banish criminal priests and end the sordid culture of men protecting men who attack children, it might survive. It could be an encouraging sign of humility and repentance, a surrender of arrogance, both moving and meaningful.
Cardinal Ratzinger devoted his Vatican career to rooting out any hint of what he considered deviance. The problem is, he was obsessed with enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy and somehow missed the graver danger to the most vulnerable members of the flock.
The sin-crazed "Rottweiler" was so consumed with sexual mores - issuing constant instructions on chastity, contraception, abortion - that he didn't make time for curbing sexual abuse by priests who were supposed to pray with, not prey on, their young charges. ...
Thing is, there's no essential conflict there. Let me fix that last sentence for her:
... The [woman-fearing] "Rottweiler" was so consumed with [female] sexual mores - issuing constant instructions on chastity, contraception, abortion - that he didn't make time for curbing sexual abuse by [male] priests who were supposed to pray with, not prey on, [the children they seem to believe would stop coming if women weren't forced by men to have them.] ...
The Catholic Church is built around a cosmology that sees women as untrustworthy, permanently juvenile, unclean, more than usually prone to evil and just, at base, gross. Other Christian denominations may have moved on from this view to varying degrees, but it's a cornerstone of Catholic dogma to the point where only a man who renounces all sexual contact with women is considered pure enough to commune with God on behalf of the faithful.
Not that they approve of sexual contact with men for priests, either. But mainly, it would seem, because it makes at least one of the men have to act 'like a woman', which is degrading to the crown jewel of God's creation. Many Christian sects that have lost certainty about women being innately repulsive still haven't gotten over this one, either, because they still see women as overgrown children that it's nonetheless okay to screw, and so still can't understand why a man would want to degrade himself by taking up any part of the female sex role.
Lesbian sex is just a mystery in this worldview: if there aren't any penises involved, how can there be any sex happening? Lesbian relationships therefore seem to elicit reactions more in line with etiquette failures than sexual transgressions.
But I digress just a little.
For the statistical majority of men who are heterosexual, what does it mean to have it constantly at least implied that the people whose closest companionship they desire, women, are gross, inferior, evil and childish? I mean, what's wrong with them that they'd be interested in such people? But interested, they generally remain, even if it must be justified to themselves by acting out with expressions of disdain, mockery and contempt.
This toxic stew of inhumane attitudes is the foundation of a rape culture that demonizes companionate sexuality, explained neatly by Amanda Marcotte:
... That there's a bunch of rapist priests in the Catholic church and the Pope was involved in the cover-up should not be surprising. The Catholic church is the classic example of what feminists like me like to call "rape culture". Rape culture crops up when male power over women and children is exalted, when sexuality is demonized, and when men are encouraged to think of women (and children's) bodies as their property. All these aspects of patriarchy aren't only part of the Catholic church, they're celebrated. The exuberant love of male dominance that is the Catholic dogma is going to turn men into rapists who get a rise out of sexually dominated people they believe are lesser than them.
... In a rape culture, women are assumed to be public property. Rape culture never officially condones rape, but it condones the attitude that women exist to please men, and refusal from women to do so is bitchy. Secular rape culture is Nice [Guys]® talking about women's sexuality as something that's handed out as a reward for good behavior. Rape culture is men thinking they have a standing right to interrupt what women are doing and hit on them, and that women who reject them straightforwardly are bitches. Rape culture is men telling strange women on the street to smile.
... The Catholic church also teaches that women exist to serve men and do not have the right to say no. A sexually active woman has no right to say no to any sperm that decide to set up shop in her uterus. Catholic women are taught their bodies and their sexualities don't belong to them, but that these things exist solely to produce more and more babies. You not only are assumed to have a standing invitation to baby-making if you're sexually active, but they don't even give you the slim technical right to say no that secular rape culture gives you. But really, the main difference between the two versions of rape culture is that the secular one believes that women have to take all comers, penis-wise, and the Catholic one believes this about sperm. ...
Marcotte gives a fuller explanation in the rest of the article as to why the reaction to a rape within a rape culture is to protect the hierarchy rather than punish the rape.
Regardless of the identity of the victim, rape is an entirely predictable result of telling men that the sex impulse makes them unclean, that the adult human beings they'd like to share it with are disgusting and, simultaneously, that sexual contact can be a victory conferring the gift of 'real' womanhood and the state of motherhood that alone is capable of cleansing women's filthy souls. It's as if the Church believes that women are born possessed and their demons must be overcome through childbearing.
Most men who are fed this ridiculous nonsense, to their credit, do their best to act like decent human beings anyway. Even when they don't have very good role models. Even if they may have a distressing tendency to regard sex with a woman as some kind of humiliating defeat for her, rather than as a mutually pleasurable activity she should expect to enjoy.
The doctrinal view of women held forth by the Vatican, and increasingly by the US Council of Catholic Bishops, as political organizations, creates misery everywhere that it's held dear. And their view of women as unclean children isn't an incongruous side note to their acceptance of child rape, but the reason for it.
Often, when religious beliefs are put forward into the political realm, the expectation is that this will accord them a special, protected status out of respect for the institutions that carry them forward. Yet the well-being of people must take precedence over the well-being of beliefs and institutions if we are to have a just society. So particularly because our government has demonstrated a new interest in making these doctrines matters of law, I say the gloves must be off in talking about the effect of misogynist social rules on real people.
You're never going to meet a happy heterosexual couple where the man acts at every moment as if he believed it were literally true that his partner were a stupid, irresponsible child, whose physical body is both gross and entirely his property. Any nation where this attitude is a widespread social norm is going to be, in direct proportion to the extent that this belief is acted upon, an incredibly sh*tty place to live for the vast majority of its people.
To the extent that both partners are happy with a relationship, they've come to an agreement to treat each other with respect mutually accorded among adults. To the extent that a society is a good place to live for the greatest numbers of people, it treats women as people, as adults, as the sole proprietors of their very own bodies. Which is to say that wherever people are happiest, best off and most warmly connected to each other, they have abandoned the practice of abhorring half the human race.
Human beings, human societies, can't fully thrive under the full force of the Catholic Church's teachings about sexuality and gender, teachings that have common parallel among authoritarian societies around the world. Men, in particular, seem to be driven insane by it, tortured to the breaking point where they begin to rationalize ridiculously anti-social behavior. Child rape is, after all, even regarded as the worst possible crime among prison inmates, but somehow the broken human beings currently running and apologizing for the Catholic Church are too damaged to understand why everyone is so upset that no one called the police.
If there really is an original sin, I suspect that it was fetishizing objects and abstractions, what Robert Anton Wilson called the 'spooks in our heads', ahead of human beings, which always leads to the denigration and objectification of living people. Which objectification always decreases the quality of our relationships to each other, which is bound to make us a little more crazy, and our lives at least a little worse, every day.
And it doesn't really matter what sort of objectifying belief we're talking about. It doesn't have to be misogynist religious dogma saying that subjecting women to humiliation, discrimination and loss of authority over their own lives doesn't count. It could be free market dogma saying that illness, starvation and grinding poverty doesn't matter, maybe especially if the sick, poor people are morally suspect or ethnically distinct from you. It could be homophobic religious dogma saying that the cultivated revulsion of distant strangers is more important than the love and mutual support of people who know each other well. No ideology deserves to be upheld in the face of causing widespread human suffering.
There is no virtue, no love, to be found at the end of denying anyone's humanity for the sake of the unreal, the non-corporeal. There's only misery, spite and isolation, which are all very bad for people. |
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