Ira levin, The Stepford Wives (New York: Harper Torch, 1972) with Afterword by Peter Straub.
Gore Vidal, "Book Report: Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels," in Rocking the Boat: Political, Literary and Theatrical Commentary (Boston: Little & Brown, 1962), p. 190.
Introduction.
Hi! Welcome to Stepford. I am your hostess. My name is Anne. I will be discussing all of the wonderful features of our lovely community. I have baked these cookies and cheesecake just for you.
I hope that you will like our spacious home -- Arthur likes me to keep everything spotless! -- and he is always so thrilled when I wear a Laura Ashley dress and low heels, a short string of pearls, and perfect make-up as he arrives home from a hard day at work.
I always have a martini ready, the evening newspaper, his pipe and slippers, and dinner served in our new English settings with antique silverware.
Arthur spoils me so much. Any cleaning product that I need or appliance for our home -- to make Arthur more comfortable -- he is only too happy to purchase for me.
Won't you sit down? May I get you some coffee? No?
Please, relax. We're all Republicans in Stepford. This awful movie that is so unfair to our community deserves a response.
Arthur always says that I am a "ninny." But even a ninny can tell when something is unfair. Whoever made this movie really hates women. Those terrible people in the city -- you know, dark people and liberals -- envy the peace and quiet in this gorgeous community.
That's what Stepford is -- a COMMUNITY, where everyone has peace and quiet and enjoys civil rights.
I have never spoken to or really met my neighbors. They live three miles down the road. I have only seen a negro twice. One time it was an optical illusion. I saw a person who I thought might have been a black-skinned person, but it was only a Latino gardener. Mr. Rubio?
I will discuss this terrible film made by Hollywood homosexuals and Communists by summarizing the plot; then the "feminist" (what a terrible word is "feminist" which means "lesbian") subtext of this work as well as what they call "existentialist" themes will be analyzed; strange postmodernist elaborations of these so-called "phenomenological" positions will be discussed; finally, I turn to the comments of these weird people called the "humanistic psychologists" while offering some "personal" observations as conclusions.
Arthur said I shouldn't bother with opinions. He's such a dear.
The performances are only adequate and the direction is uninspired. However, the script by William Goldman ("The Princess Bride") is magnificent, filled with philosophical ideas and puzzles of identity.
Make yourself comfy.
Feminist Rage and Men's Fantasies.
The film begins with a view of the Upper East side in Manhattan. A young couple with two small daughters -- the close-up on the young girls suggests the concern for girls and women in this work -- are heading out of the city, East of Eden. We see the couple packing their station wagon and driving away from their fancy building.
Everyone had station wagons and other large vehicles during the mid-seventies when this movie was made because those terrible Arabs did what we wanted them to do at the time with oil prices, except for that awful OPEC. Today we have bigger SUVs because oil is not a problem and neither is climate warming.
An image of a man carrying a manequin sets a symbol in place for what will transpire in this "cinematic text." That's what the professors at the New School University (where I enrolled in a cooking course) call movies. Movies are "cinematic texts." ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': An Essay Review.")
Anyway, droll echoes of the early sixties t.v. sit-coms are heard in phrases like "moving is so much fun!"
Arthur says "moving is a pain in the ass" because it usually takes me a whole month to make everything perfect for him. The men and women in the movie refer to each other as "boys" and "girls" which is part of the infantilizing process encouraged by American culture reflected in sixties t.v. comedies.
Childhood, as an eternal condition for adults, is convenient for powerful forces in society which prefer a population stupefied by the mass media and women "domesticated" by the requirements of consumption, class- and status-competition, deprived of intellectual substance and genuine social connections.
The couple and their daughters are moving to what appears to be an ideal community: peaceful, lovely, overwhelmingly "white," filled with spacious homes owned by middle class families, good schools where obedience and conformity are taught -- especially to women! -- and patriotism in the form of adherence to the wishes of authority is instilled in people.
Many people living in such communities become "ninnies."
The Stepford "Men's Association" delivers the message of "separate, but equal" facilities for men and women.
This narrative appears almost exactly twenty years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ended racial segregation in schools and all public facilities in America, so that de facto segregation in places like this mythical Stepford became necessary. In fact, our town is very progressive and diverse. ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")
The young wife, Joanna, immediately experiences a sense of weirdness and dislocation. As a photographer, her creative work suffers from the fascistic and suffocating conformity absorbed in her new surroundings. Joanna's trip to a gallery in the city provides us with a second symbol in the form of the photo of Lewis Carroll in the window of the premises.
Joanna, like Alice, has fallen through a rabbit hole only to arrive in Wonderland. ("A Review of the T.V. Show 'Alice.'")
References to Disney, underline the process by which a fantasy of a Norman Rockwell-like Utopia and regained innocence in America emerges with the success of the sixties' civil rights revolution accompanied by the rise of previously excluded groups -- post-Watergate. This is the ambiguous legacy of the sixties -- Vietnam and the march on Selma as well as "Laugh-In" and "Bewitched." ("All you need is love.")
This perennial fantasy in America of a "controlled" society and rigidly enforced "niceness" combined with massive doses of hypocrisy by which we seek to convince ourselves that everyone of us is or can be utterly "normal" and that we are all really "happy" recurs every twenty years or so.
This cultural pattern may account for the election of such politicians as Reagan and G.W. to the U.S. Presidency. I am always amazed at the political lies that people need to "live" -- or that they pretend to believe -- as well as by the same people's inclination to judge the myths or imaginative needs of others. ("Good Will Humping.")
Recognition of enslavement, suffocation of women kept in golden cages, allowed for "consciousness raising" efforts in the seventies, even as the intellectual death of women devoured by alcoholism or pointless adultery -- or even more pointless "shopping" for consumer goods -- increased.
There are many kinds of prisons in America, especially for women, some of them are filled with consumer goods. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meaning(s) of Prison.")
All of these options were offered to women as tokens in compensation for the loss of humanity and freedom. So many women in the conditions seen in this movie became "robots," that is, died as persons -- deaths which may well have been a goal of the system. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "A Doll's Aria.")
This story is about the gradual loss of humanity as a result of "docility" which was deemed desirable for women or control of persons surrendering their status as moral subjects in a Faustian bargain for security -- an evil bargain which America may have accepted, once again, during the Bush/Cheney years. Arthur says we are Republicans and must support our leaders, except for Barack Obama of course. ("Cherry 2000" and "Not One More Victim.")
Isn't it wonderful how secure we all are in America and that we have brought "democracy" to Iraq and Afghanistan where people are nasty enough to resent our help? Arthur thinks so.
Joanna discovers an absurd t.v.-like perfection in the wives and women of Stepford: homes are kept immaculately clean, frilly dresses, perfect hair and make-up suggest men's fantasies of women as both decorative objects and consummer goods like fancy cars or appliances -- my television set has been rendered inoperative this morning, how strange? -- and men's need to CONTROL women, still dominating, exploiting, "training" them today into becoming robot-like slaves of power and desire. ("Master and Commander" and see the character of Lulu's/Audrey's mother, "Peaches," in "Something Wild.")
The process of transformation into a robot is an internal one that involves the surrender of one's free will. The men get off on that power-trip of domination. America is perceived by the world as "getting off" on a similar desire to dominate (really to "screw-over," as the kids say!) the rest of the planet's human population in order to make billions of persons slaves (or robots) like Stepford's women. ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review" and "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
For a discussion of the reversal of this process of "robotization" as becoming human, see "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem."
The self-presentation of women as "creampuff"-like tasty treats already conveys the message intended by power concerning female identity. Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 84-124 and The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (New York & Paris: Semiotexte, 2009), pp. 64-84.
This process of enslaving and dominating others is a very sick sexual adventure for some highly disturbed people, sadists, who see the objects of their desire as trophies to be possessed and "kept."
There is an analogy to the view of many members of America's Right-wing fascists' brigades as regards the people. The people are "children" to be ruled for "their own good" by the annointed of the Lord, politicians and corporations together with their hired "experts." ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
The Constitution of the United States of America provides a totally different picture of the appropriate relationship between citizens and government in a democratic Republic. The Constitution counters the power that comes with wealth or status with the dignity of each person before the law. I like the Constitution. Arthur says that makes me "sentimental and naive." ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
I expect more computer warfare in writing this essay. Television obstructions will be common, preventing me from seeing news programs, phone calls from marketers will be received all day. I am sure that these things are just coincidences. These tactics are used "for my own good." ("How censorship works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
Joanna seeks the assistance of a therapist, who has a conference to attend, and offers only a banal, useless, and false explanation of this poor woman's troubles. Seeing the transformations in her friends, their gradual loss of humanity and enslavement in male fantasy (this was the golden age for Playboy and Penthouse) leads Joanna to a desperate effort to overcome her social isolation and confront the monster in his lair. ("Good Will Humping" and "Genius and Lust.")
"Dale" is the man who seems to run the men's association -- a former Disney executive -- who is seeking to do to Stepford what Reagan would succeed in doing for America: providing a fantasy to be chosen over the reality of pain, human imperfection, and suffering.
Echoes of George W. Bush and his dark minions are audible to today's viewers of this disturbing satire.
Joanna enters the dark mansion which is the home of the men's association -- her husband has long ago betrayed her to sexism -- faces evil, loss of affect, death of compassion and genuineness in the form of Dale who explains: "It's all for the best. Adjust." (Again: "What is it like to be tortured?" then "'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review.")
Joanna's robot-double with enhanced breasts approaches the protagonist to kill her.
This robot identity is an externalization of what is clearly an internal process for many women in suburban communities, even today, the emergence of a middle class, perfectly normal and "nice" creature from the abyss of the subconscious -- reflecting the fantasies of the male power-structure -- allows for the slow devouring of what little personality and authenticity a woman is allowed to develop in the first place.
Compare Charles Hampden-Turner's "Anomie -- The Failure of Existence," in Radical Man (New York: Anchor, 1971), pp. 78-101 with Claudia Springer, "Techno-Eroticism," in Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in a Post-Industrial Age (Austin: University of Texas, 1996), pp. 3-16.
We cut to a scene in a grocery store where Joanna has come to resemble all of the other Disney-like robot-women -- some will run for Congress as "Soccer Moms" (Iliana?) -- and viewers experience a shudder of horror as well as compassion for Joanna's (and Iliana's) fates, a living death, no more need for creative work, reading, or thought. All questions have been answered for Joanna. Power knows best. She has been pacified by accepting the toys exchanged for freedom in consumer societies.
I hope that "Iliana's" name is not spelled correctly. This may be a good time for more inserted "errors."
When all satire is removed from this movie and all rhetorical devices are set aside, it becomes clear that this is the fate designed and intended for Joanna and all women in sexist societies and also for those who are deemed to be "like" women -- artists, homosexuals, radical intellectuals who question a society's understanding of normality and goodness, politics, or social justice. ("Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")
Maybe this paradise of conformity and niceness (feminizing?) has been prepared for you? Tea and biscuits?
Simone Weil defines power as "the capacity to transform a living person into a corpse, that is to say, into a thing." Or robot? ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body problem" and "'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")
See Eric Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York: Rinehardt & Co., Inc., 1941), and E. Fromm's "Afterword," in George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1961), pp. 262-263.
Fromm's attribution of the epistemology of Oceania to the "idealists" is mistaken, at least as regards Kant. Fromm neglects the social as well as objective components of idealism, but is accurate concerning Orwell's hatred for relativism and all denials of truth. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women" and "David Stove's Critique of Idealism.")
Evil as the Death of Affect.
This book and film are concerned with dramatizing the loss of humanity, or the paradoxical "living death" produced by out of control mechanisms of acculturation, along with systems of commercial rewards and demerits, control and regimentation. This movie version of Stepford is a women's prison. Shechem Lafayette, Women Behind Bars (Georgia: Solid Pub., 2006), pp. 51-74. ("The Beauty, Beast, and Brutality.")
Advanced or late capitalist society appears less dictatorial than Communist and Fascist societies -- and, in a way, it is -- because most of the methods of control are internalized by subjects seeking to "fit-in" with a social setting and adjust to environmental pressures that prescribe acceptable roles for every person in the "community."
Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in T. Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), at p. 62. Cornel West's discussion and analysis of Jameson's ideas is not to be missed: Cornel West, "Frederic Jameson's American Marxism," in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Perseus, 1999), pp. 231-265. (Again: "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
Much of the work of Michel Foucault is focused on the ways in which power "inscribes" itself on subjects (you and me) by making us hate all that is in us that fails to adhere to the strictures of authority in our societies. The concern of authority is with controlling you whereas your concern must be to remain free. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question.")
Manohla Dargis at The New York Times misses the Faustian analogy as well as echoes of the Charles Maturin parable in the existentialist horror flick, "The Box." That film is reviewed incoherently (and ungrammatically) by Ms. Dargis, who is incapable of explaining the Sartrean allusions not only to "No Exit" (Huis Clos), but also to the classic essay "Anti-Semite and Jew."
Richard Matheson's short story bearing the same title ("The Box") explores one of Matheson's great themes -- the corrosive power of evil and the dangers of television that may result in turning us into "robots." ("Network.")
Steven King has discussed Matheson's work and stories, such as this gem, which focus on the theme of the "evil gift." H.H. Munro's (a.k.a Saki) "The Monkey's Paw" is a classic example of the use of this device; another analogy is found in "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Steven King's Dance Macabre is the critical commentary on American literature's pop-horror phenomenon. ("Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure" and "What you will.")
Choices insinuate themselves into the psyche, altering and "deforming" both the torturer and his victim. Along with "The Stepford Wives," this new film -- "The Box" -- by the maker of "Donnie Darko" wonders how evil dehumanizes all of us as we begin to grasp the full horror of America's torture camps.
Obviously, the "The Box" engages with earlier movies like "The Third Man" and "Something Evil This Way Comes." The "button" is not only nuclear weapons, but all power over others. Manohla Dargis, "Simplifying One Life, Complicating Another," in The New York Times, November 6, 2009, at p. C10. (By the way, Manohla, "The Box" is a tribute to Stanley Kubrick's cinematic masterpieces.)
How can so-called "reviewers" miss the entire point of these movies? How is it possible for this barely literate person to write reviews in America's premier newspaper? Corruption? Payola? ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!" and "America's Nursery School Campus.")
Hannah Arendt's Eichman in Jerusalem explores the loss of humanity in the archetypal "functionary" of death in Hitler's factories of torture and murder, Adolf Eichman.
Machine-like and "impersonal" efficiency produces machine-like and impersonal "entities" that look human, but are not capable of feeling (or any affect) as healthy persons should be capable of such responses to their own situations and the plight of others.
Would you be willing to push a button in a box that kills millions in exchange for great wealth enjoyed in safety and ease? Too many of us will make that deal. ("'Invasion of the Body Snatchers': A Movie Review" and "'Holy Smoke': A Movie Review.")
Something as fundamental to societies as sexism is totally pervasive throughout a social system. In fact, sexist ideas and images will feature in the covers of cereal boxes or magazines, they will be visible in t.v. shows, movies, music, fashion, in how we have sex, even in forms of feminism that seek to combat sexism -- all of these cultural phenomena are heuristic devices revealing and serving the power-structure even as they instruct subjects in how to conform to that structure. Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self (Boston: Northeastern, 1992), pp. 83-116 and Ian Hacking, "Self-Improvement," in David Couzens Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 235-240. ("Protecting Sex Workers" and "Is clarity enough?") (See the 2015 movie "Ex Machina.")
Would you want a "Stepford Wife"?
Many men would say: "Yes."
Quite a few men would opt for more than one such concubine.
Models of women's roles and idealized forms will reflect all of the POLITICAL assumptions concerning what women are or should want to be.
What women should want to be is "nice." American "niceness" produces, if not enslavement, at least subordination. This female "niceness," politeness, concern with decor and self-presentation, where form is substance, is -- and it is intended to be -- DISEMPOWERING for women. (Compare "The Northanger Arms" with "A Doll's Aria.")
Women learn to be slaves -- nice slaves, well-dressed and bejeweled slaves, but slaves nonetheless. Dogs are domesticated through similar behaviorist techniques. These methods are common in America's prisons, as I say, including prisons that look like this mythical Stepford.
Ridgewood, New Jersey must have a "Men's Association."
The same methods of control are extended to civil society where politics, for example, has become a process of misleading sound bites and clever "commercials" -- or advertisements -- while political conventions are about nothing except balloons and flags. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison" and "Master and Commander.")
What women are taught as an ideal, still today, is a Stepford-like condition of servitude and acceptance. They are taught to be as physically attractive and inoffensive as possible. They are taught to "think" (I use the word "think" loosely) in terms of "things" -- nice things to have in a nice home with a nice husband where one is always dressed nicely and serves healthy, but tasty snacks, to nice guests.
Life must become a Kodak commercial where neighbors are always watering the lawn and there's a party next door which is never too loud. It's really "nice" in Stepford. Men become convenient accessories with "jobs downtown." (Once more: "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" and Robert Redford's "Ordinary People.")
What is not nice is the killing of 500,000 children in our Iraq adventure, consumption of 60% of the world's energy as we produce a comparable percentage of the world's garbage. Also, public displays of psychological torture techniques and censorship from people claiming to uphold values of freedom of speech and human rights or legal ethics in America.
It is reported that from 60% to 80% of the world's energy is consumed by Americans. There will never be enough oil for us in the world. ("'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
Women provide the erotic energy that fuels America's male ego on the world stage. Marilyn French, The Women's Room (New York: Jove, 1978), pp. 27-28 and Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 383-414. ("Did I shave my legs for this?")
R.D. Laing and others have argued that insanity and sanity are matters of adjustment to social settings that define these terms. What constitutes a "sane" response to an environment will depend on the environment. All environments will involve some adjustment and sacrifice of personal autonomy. However, there are situations -- a torture chamber, for example -- that make totalizing demands for adjustment from victims. There are situations to which we should never adjust even at the cost of death. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Prison, army, schools and other settings explored by Michel Foucault as well as numerous social thinkers are obvious examples of this process of absorption into social identities. You are "made into" an inmate, lawyer, judge, politician, physician, or "whore" (a category that may include all of the others).
Arthur insists that I say a "lively" woman, never a "whore." Arthur is in advertising. Arthur is very "lively." ("Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks" and, again, "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")
It is important to realize that "feminine" is an equally constructed and arbitrary label or category. Anyone can be raped, dominated, beaten or choked, stolen-from, ostracized, impoverished and otherwise placed in the "role" of a woman in sexist society. Feminizing is about disempowering. This is what we are doing to the men at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, transforming them into women -- "for their own good."
We must make "femininity" a territory of struggle. To do this, however, is also to make "masculinity" contested turf. We must see that these are entangled terms both within the psyche and socially. It is impossible to make use of either of these words -- feminine or masculine -- without entering into power-relations in America. Furthermore, this issue is independent of the question concerning the morality of homosexuality or same-sex marriage. ("Ape and Essence" then "Metaphor is Mystery.")
Stepford is a totalizing environment -- at least, as it is depicted in this "terrible" movie -- which makes absolute demands of those trapped within it.
Powerful (if subtle) sexism in societies (like ours) makes similar totalizing demands of women and, to a lesser degree, of men.
My use of the term "totalizing" is indebted to Sartre's use of the concept in his "Search For a Method" in The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Essentially, the term refers to dominance of intellectual options so as to exclude empowering and autonomous choices, in terms of identity, for women; religion can perform the same function of control -- or the opposite of control -- depending on how religion is understood by believers.
Any religious belief-system that tells you that what or who you are is "sinful" -- or that loving anyone is cause for going to hell -- is absurd and malignant. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
Women pay a heavy price in terms of sacrifice of self -- severe mental suffering at times -- including the ultimate price as millions of women are lost to alcoholism and mindless sexual encounters, or other efforts to erase themselves as persons, since equal, strong, intellectually curious and skeptical persons wielding power is the opposite of what the system desires for women. Freedom and equality are certainly what I consider to be the rights of women yet to be fully achieved in American society. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")
Torture and enslavement of women injures everyone deprived of the contributions of talented women, contributions which are desperately needed today.
Raising a daughter in such a sexist social-environment is like waltzing in a mine field.
Is the reason for the vandalizing of my work the fact that I say such things? I suspect so.
I have loved women damaged and nearly destroyed by social evils that can only be described as sexist, making genuine angry forms of feminism unavoidable for me.
A television documentary features the lives of female inmates and depicted a prison visit by one inmate's mother who is clearly trapped herself in a lower-middle class hell that must make her daughter's rebellion (after probable abuse) understandable and obvious. I could not say which woman -- mother or daughter -- was in the worse prison.
I feel great sympathy for the suffering of those women. I also feel anger at U.S. society's need to keep working class women ignorant of their plight and unaware of the political realities that keep them in the various hells found in America. Ignorance may be the ultimate mechanism of control over women. Violence, drugs, and sexual exploitation may do just as well as "prisons" for women.
Notice that the culprit is a system and not an individual or group of individuals. Those at the top of the system are also enacting roles prescribed for them. We create systems and societies that become "reified" and that then recreate us as "objects" of the machine's own systemic-values. This is to define "Structuralism." (Lukacs, Barthes and Foucault.)
Women must be persuaded NOT to desire equality with men. They must be taught not only to reflect the bars of their cages, but even to believe that their prisons are freedom and happiness or "success." ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review.") Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (New York & London: Verso, 2002), pp. 181-271. ("'The Island': A Movie Review and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
If you begin early enough -- by educating little boys and girls into these theoretical pictures of social reality -- then chances are that most women will not only accept enslavement, but that they will come to love and defend their torture chambers. This is the meaning of the final image in The Stepford Wives which makes it so powerful to viewers today. Umberto Eco, "The City of Robots," in Postmodernism: A Reader, at p. 200 and "Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power."
Fritz Lang's classic "Metropolis" is obviously a reference for the film-makers. ("Ex Machina: A Movie Review.")
In one of my favorite films -- Mr. Demme's "Something Wild" -- the viewer begins to appreciate the tragedy and heroism of Lulu/Audrey only after encountering the shell of a human being that is her mother, "Peaches," a person deprived of all humanity and authenticity by being rendered into something created in a fifties' television series. A similar living death must be what the young Audrey sought to escape, even at the risk of her life (or freedom) by becoming "Lulu." (See the film "Something Wild" then "The Art of Melanie Griffith.")
Like the gorilla who was taught to draw and sketched the bars of her cage, all of us are made by educational systems and institutions to reflect the bars of our cages.
We must internalize our prisons. If we do not, then the logic of the system will soon demand that we be destroyed as "unethical" and unadjusted "anomalies." Revolutionaries are "anomalies."
The political and humanistic-psychological ingredients in this "reading" of the film should be emphasized:
"Like you," Jean-Paul Sartre writes to R.D. Laing, "I believe that one cannot understand psychological disturbances from the outside, on the basis of a positivistic-determinism, or reconstruct them with a combination of concepts that remain outside an illness as lived and experienced. I also believe that one cannot study, let alone cure, a neurosis without a fundamental respect for the PERSON of the patient, without a constant effort to grasp the basic situation and to relive it, without an attempt to rediscover the response of the person to that situation and -- like you, I think -- I regard mental illness as the 'way out' that the free organism, in its total unity, invents in order to live through an intolerable situation. ..." (Crime? Prostitution? Drug Use?)
Jean-Paul Sartre to R.D. Laing, Letter dated November 9, 1963, quoted in D.G. Cooper & R.D. Laing, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy 1950-1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 6. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
Very often, insanity is the organism's communication that his or her situation is "intolerable."
I see African-American victims of racism, every day, enacting (like robots in Stepford) the roles assigned to them by American society. I am often driven to despair at the blindness -- also generated by the system -- blindness on the part of fellow citizens to what we, collectively, do to the least fortunate and most powerless members of our communities.
What we do today, in America, is to deny humanity to women and all dark-skinned people, to artists and radical philosophers challenging power, by making them into "unpersons."
Any more "errors" that you wish to insert in this essay?
Sartre along with Simone de Beauvoir came to understand, as revealed by their conversations with Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara, that this condition of anomaly or "weirdness" (I am also said to be very "weird" by Arthur) may be the most sane response to insane circumstances and environments, such as structurally oppressive social conditions or every day life in Union City, New Jersey.
We are all mirrors set facing each other. ("Master and Commander" and "The Allegory of the Cave.")
Get it, Marilyn? It isn't you. It is all of us placed in your life-circumstances who would act out, probably in worse ways in most cases than you can even imagine. You, Marilyn Straus, are better than most of us. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison.")
The attempt in postmodernist capitalism to deprive women, especially, of subjectivity in exchange for, say, "Palmolive" dishwashing liquid could only produce either psychological dislocation and self-destructiveness, or a surrender of women's subjectivity and acceptance of a totally acquiescent condition as an "appliance" designed for male comfort. (Last Time: "Magician's Choice" and "A Doll's Aria.")
Gizmos and gadgets, technology and science have been enlisted in the service of power by consumer societies because these societies could never satisfy women's need for authentic freedom and equality:
"Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at a fusion with the 'thing' [i.e., making persons objects or commercial goods,] but at the possibilities of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom."
Simone de Beauvoir, "Freedom and Liberation," in The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel, 1948), p. 79. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
Compare Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1974), pp. 144-145 with Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792, p. 33:
"Women are told from their infancy," Mary Wollstonecraft writes, "and taught by the examples of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, [feminine wiles,] softness of temper, 'outward' OBEDIENCE and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man ..." (discussed by Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: Ballantine, 1970), pp. 176-178 and "Why Philosophy is for Everybody" as well as "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
For Professor Davis, being sought by both Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse as dissertation advisers, finding herself utterly "safe" and "free" in Europe -- like Dietrich Bonhoeffer in New York as Nazism engulfed Germany -- there was only one choice.
Ms. Davis knew that her vocation as a revolutionary called her home to America to struggle for her people and, really, for the true meaning of the U.S. Constitution that would benefit all Americans. There would be no Obama presidency without Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, or even Mumia Abu-Jamal:
"Adorno had readily agreed to direct my work on a doctoral dissertation. But now I felt it would be impossible for me to stay in Germany any longer. Two years was enough. I arranged an appointment with Adorno at the Institute and explained to him that I had to go home. In my correspondence with Marcuse, he had already agreed to work with me at the University of California in San Diego, where he had accepted a position after having been practically pushed out of Brandeis for political reasons. I wanted to continue my academic work, but I knew I could not do it unless I was politically involved. The struggle was a life-nerve; our only hope for survival." -- As free and equal persons! -- "I made up my mind. The journey was on."
Conclusion.
Joanna's journey and struggle really began when she experienced her friend's loss of humanity. Transformations of vital, creative, intelligent women into the sub-humans they were made into by power offended Joanna as it still does many others -- men and women.
What killed Stepford's women, and what would destroy Joanna, was the totally coopted version of themselves that had been created by power to which they might surrender autonomy in a moment of weakness.
The totally adjusted self in an insane environment is necessarily crazy. The messiness and imperfection of genuine humanity is integral to human creativity and peace, passion, and intellectual achievement. These are not qualities that women will give-up ever again.
Not for all the "Palmolive" dishwashing liquid in the world will women give up freedom.
The only sane response to our asylum-like conditions in America is "struggle." Sexism requires women to become revolutionaries.
Joanna -- which is the English language, feminine version of the name "Juan/John" -- provides a cautionary tale for new arrivals in Stepford (America): There is great comfort, ease, luxury, many possessions available in this "lovely community," where it is always very "nice," but there is also a cost in terms of your identity and authenticity to pay for what you are offered. Alternatively, women can join those who are eternally unsatisfied with their still "unfinished" and imperfect selves and communities -- our national community is certainly very "nice" and much better than most other places -- but not yet fully free, equal, or good.
You should never be satisfied with anything less than freedom and equality.
We will be free and equal, or we will die fighting for that freedom:
"If we are stripped of experience, we are stripped of our deeds; and if our deeds are, so to speak, taken out of our hands like toys from the hands of children, we are bereft of our humanity. We cannot be deceived. Men can and do destroy the humanity of other men [and much more of women,] and the condition of this possibility is that we are interdependent. We are not self-contained monads producing no effects on each other except our reflections. We are both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by other men [and women]; and we are agents who act upon others to affect them in different ways. Each of us is the other to the others. Man is a patient-agent, agent-patient, interexperiencing and interacting with his fellows."
Censorship of my writings is the potential censorship of everyone in America. Here we receive a caution:
"It is quite certain that unless we can regulate our behavior much more satisfactorily than at present, then we are going to exterminate ourselves. But as we experience the world, so we act, and this principle holds even when action conceals rather than discloses our experience."
Therefore,
"We are not able even to think adequately about the behavior that is at the annihilating edge. But what we think is less than what we know; what we know is less than [what] we love; what we love is so much less than what there is [of us.] And to that precise extent we [-- all women in societies like ours --] are so much less than what we are."
Or so much less than we might be? ("Friedrich Nietzsche on Self-Realization.")
"Yet if nothing else, each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince [or princess,] a new spark of light precipitated into an outer darkness. Who are we to decide that it is hopeless?"
R.D. Laing, "Persons and Experience," in The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1971), pp. 29-30.
