Essay Ares and Aphrodite Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

Essay                                  Ares and Aphrodite

                                                                   On the disparity of the sexes

Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

In society in general, one mirrors the image that one stares into, to replicate the basic or supposed elevations of social order and necessity.

The male and the female, those two central elements to the human myth, the human legend, the concept, the whole, the unity and the spirit, all so different, diverting like poles apart, they drive each other away with tactics and the subtle nuances of sex, psychology and social position. So many gravitate towards loneliness and greater gender affiliation, in this modern age of ours, culture has to a greater proportion than before, forged the disparity, the alienating factors, the animosity, the silent resentment and the entire “pop” culture of apparent beauty and decadence in the myth of the sexes.

The history of the sexes has been filled with the potency of attraction and diversion, magnetism and oppression, the accentuation and permeation of social roles, natural identity norms and religious austerity.

Why does such a question bare religious ramifications and solutions, on the question of the innateness of the sexes? It is because the tribe in its ethnic root, its anthropology, its basic necessity, bare a minimalist philosophy on the “order of all things within the world” and such things include the role and identity of both man and woman.

Often man has tried to capture the essence of what it is to be human. A popular question tried and tested over a famous televised debate through cunning and tacit duels of language and confidence, came between Chomsky and Foucault on the question of whether there is any fundamental human nature. What is it indeed to be human? Likewise as man is a creature of habit and thought, he has spent the entire course of history, through the dead ends and back streets of time, conquest, quarrel and art to find out what the essence of man is. Plato for example rarely included women in the philosophical mesh, on the questions of citizens rights, justice, metaphysics and social order. Philosophy originates in the mind of the man for the consideration of the society of men. This has been the case in the history of philosophy. In Plato’s day women had little appeal to be special or even to bare any important significance in the established order or even in the early formation of established art, music, philosophy, poetry and literature, women appear to have been for the greater part left out. In the Archaic, the Classical and the Hellenistic order, men are romanticised to the point of Homo-eroticism and legend. Achilles and Patroclus bare a romantic love that is heroic, male, and almost divine and Socrates for instance holds male love to be the highest form of love to be expressed in human form, akin to something divine, as is explored in the symposium.

Even male slaves too have their respect in the simple beautified love of an older master and his young servant boy –seen as the epitome of erotic of love.

Youth and manliness, life, death and philosophy are all pursued and explored in the Socratic philosophy that is engendered to and from the Greek society of the day.

History for example, given its name suggests that it is his story and not hers- showing the archaic, the cultural, the philosophical, the religious and the political struggles of men for the rights and advancement of individual male rights and freedoms- it alludes to the fact that male culture has thrived through its identity of gender and innate essence. The male body encapsulates the existence of warfare, conquest, initiation, science, artistic endeavour, social activity and metaphysical discovery as the world of women has been kept beneath a thumb of oppression, male domination and equally enough, through a state of stagnation and passivity on the part of the tribe’s women.

The spirit of the male gender has always been more fulfilled than that of the female and even the female gender has only just touched on some of these freedoms and still it has never reached the scale, size and experience of such identity and achievement granted to men. The advanced arts and sciences known to the public, developed through form, concept and structure for men and by men, such education on each level has been denied for women, but of course base experience of human existence and the natural world have been the only vestiges of enlightenment reserved or preserved in women. Society for women has been the emphasis or adhesive for women to learn and to appropriate themselves in the image and identity of their gender to the desires of both men and the collective desires of society on a whole. Women mirror social activity and will always be on the greater scale of facts, a more aptly social and extroverted creature than the common man. Introversion, social anxiety, eccentricity and individuality have always been for the greater part been reserved within the nature of men and are likewise explored and carved out in the culture of men.

The promotion of male society, male culture and the psychology of the masculine identity, reached its zenith in the times of the Greek and Roman civilisations, with the appropriation and formation of an ascendancy of art created for and by men, on the celebration of manhood and the essence of manhood. Never again, not in the times of Shakespeare, Goethe, Wordsworth or Wilde would the essence of manhood be captured in the Greco-Roman architecture, sculpture, story telling, philosophy and warfare, within the perennially turbulent conquests of the warring state. Such masculine romanticism has been embodied in the boy warriors of Sparta, the athletes of the Delphic and Olympic games –where the male body is put on show to compete for its grandeur, agility and capacity to perform.

The female form- in passivity- lurks at the side or the back of the Grecian stele and sculpture form, to wait until a later age when the beauty of women –the ideal of the feminine would be promoted and revered in the renaissance art revival- would be given credence, placed on a pedestal through art and the birth of the Romantic novel, made divine. The colonisation of the “European tribes” to the discipline of Roman form and the furtherance of the Greco-Roman artistic mode came with the conquests of Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire and the Christian religion were the politico-religious movements and ideals that changed the structure of such scattered peripheries to allow for the slow concepts of art, salvation and beauty to grow in the consciousness of medieval art. The austerity of old classical art –in its old limited concept of art- matched the austerity of the belief system of medieval Europe.

From the birth of Dante’s unrequited love for Beatrice in both the heavenly and the Earthly realms, the short, sonnets of Petrarch for Laura- his livelong muse and subject of adoration- show the idealisation for romanticism between the sexes, in both cases the male adorer- spectator- watches from a fine distance on the ideal of his ambitions which both art and literature gave religious connotations to for the divinity of beauty in both the natural and feminine sphere of human existence. Each man mounts the summits of ecstasy and must be careful not to plummet to the lows of loss and despair.

From Botticelli’s birth of Venus we see the fleshy exuberance of physical beauty summed up in the person of Venus that symbolically stands for the ideal of beauty, human eroticism and the human form in all its candid glory. Female beauty still, did not surpass the celebration of masculinity in the art form –as was seen in the continuity of such subjects as male mythological figures, warfare, justice and religious chastity and piety- but it did grow in the fields of literature and art. Shakespeare’s body of work touches on forbidden love between man and woman, the nature of love in the ephemeral world of time and space and the exploits of the characters for the conquest of their idealised love. Women in such forms appear as vulnerable, easily dominated, girlish creatures that rely and cherish the heroism and the name of their own lover. It took an age of radicalism and revolution to produce the mother of feminine revolt herself, namely Mary Wollstonecraft. The call for equality in education and profession between the sexes adopts a rather rational, logical and reasonable position in the vindication on women’s rights, a far cry from the cynically academic writing of future twentieth century feminists. But I shall address the feminist movement in a later stage of this essay in further detail.

The fully blown idealisation of conceptual and artistic unity between the sexes can be said to have found a voice in the romanticism of the late 18th century carried from the birth of the romantic novel in Germany –as was found in the tragic and unrequited love of Werther in the Sorrows of young Werther- by the impassioned Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. The appreciation for Italian art, the growing interest in the philosophy of aesthetics through the works of poetry, plays, art and philosophy. The philosopher Hegel himself held art in such high esteem in the human creative process, as to declare it “divine.” Nature itself for its symmetrical value in beauty and pleasure granted man a new muse and women too were held in high esteem for their beauty, in the growing high tastes of fashion and decorum. With fine art, fine garments and fine architecture came the dawning of artistic eroticism –both in literature and in art- as men and women began to fit the part for the courting of their “ideal husband” and dashingly handsome suitor. The frivolity and vanity of these excesses of hedonism brought the naive notion of romanticism into the foray of public taste and imagination and the romantic poets were the champions of this aspiration to seek pleasure, beauty –in both nature and in women- and liberality against the conservatism and traditionalism of their time.

Byron and Shelley were probably some of the first literary advocates of free love before the advent of LSD in western civilisation and of course the rise of hippie culture through the past few decades. Although, Byron’s notorious taste for promiscuity, scandalised and outraged the British Aristocracy from which he was born put of, his misdemeanours were a continuation of the crimes and passions of such men like the Marquis De Sade, who was known publicly for his perverse taste in being beaten by women before intercourse and his promulgation of sex without limitation, as he once said “lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.” The eroticism of the late 18th century was a condemnation brought about by a bunch of rebellious, avant-garde, misfits –perhaps men too who were a little bit mentally and emotionally unstable- and the condemnation was brought by the rulers, kings, judges and common folk of western Europe that still hid behind their clothing, their hypocritical morals and their traditionalism. The human body was hidden behind layers and layers of taut, rigid clothing-behind bodice, suit, corset and gown- the appreciation for the human body and the erotic art form had not taken its hold to sway the general populous away from the tastes of a few daring radicals and social deviants. While Stendhal wrote on the “crystallisation of love” between a man and woman, Goethe wrote of the tragic quest of an unobtainable love in such work like Faust and the Sorrows of young Werther, all these representations were to later influence the art world and works of writers like Flaubert –in Madame Bovary for instance we look at sex and seduction in a romantic and wholly unconventional manner. The future preoccupation with eroticism in the arts went far beyond the Hellenistic concept and form of eroticism, for eroticism had its roots in naturalism, religion and folk-lore, but now its new focus was to remove the corsets and clothing of the sexes, the censorship, the sentiments of the church. One would have to forgo on the sackcloth and ashes for some bedroom fantasies to be fulfilled. Such eroticism was condemned in the time of Giaccoma Casanova as it was in the bluntly obvious eroticism of Gustav Klimt, for fear of social corruption, the destruction of the old ideal in art- the classicist art movement that was preoccupied with the old order of militarism, male-based mythology and religious themes. Klimt’s art could have been seen to be the first example of any artist or any painting –in many instances- as the changed perception of both public eye and critic, that art could be pornographic, that the female genitalia, the female body in such candidness was not to be perceived as art but as pornography. Klimts’ exposés in art were later further developed and explored in the art of Schiele, Modigliani and Picasso. The innuendo’s and the connotations of Klimt’s art bordered on dangerous new exposés for the public eye to gaze on and such innovations and sensations in the art world came about in the highly coital and explicit promulgations of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis that would place sex on par with religion –to place the human essence solely in the sexual drive- and would shift western civilisation’s underground realm of eroticism into the open street and open mind of a changing society. It could be said that such changes allowed for the birth of pornography in is most primitive formation, to evolve into the porn mad society of today.

As traditionalism, political conservatism, religious dogma and the general censorship of the arts had forged and sustained the separation of the sexes –on a political, religious, social, academic and artistic sense- the art of eroticism, sought to whisk man away from the piety and austerity of another realm, to return man to the body and to the earth, to portray man in essence as vulnerable, tragic, passionate and sensual against the censorship of state and church. Women were soon inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric and spirit of change in both the arts and in the world of politics –as the women of Paris rallied to their country’s rebellion against the monarchy- as the entire essence of man had been analysed through political and social upheaval, through constitutional and religious reform. The brilliant writer, polemicist and feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft advocated the ratification of women’s rights to seek a rational education, to escape the duties of courtship, the heavily unequal and hypocritical demands of marriage, the bonds of traditionalism, the limitations which religion had placed on women and the unfair –or non-existent- representation of women in the political and social environment. Thus The vindication for the rights of women was written by Wollstonecraft in the age of radicalism and revolution, in the spirit of Sappho’s ancient defiance of male dominated society and culture, she called for women to represent themselves politically and socially, for female role models, for women to seek education, to emulate rationality with man and seek to represent the female society in greater control and capacity than before.

The writers’ George Elliot, George Sand –both taking male pseudonyms as mandatory measures to get their book published- Jane Austin, the Bronte’s and later Kate Chopin emerged as a new class of female writers that wrote of the superficial dilettantisms of Victorian era marriage, courtship, customs, traditions and these women tried to emulate the structure and form of culture and artistic privilege which men had been guaranteed for so long - so long as they had an education- and which women had largely and grossly been denied.

The separation of the sexes was more apparent and more obvious in the days and eras gone by and it was nonetheless fully existent when you compare the equalities and integration with which both men and women have achieved and sustained. In the Georgian and Victorian era’s in Britain, men had their own private societies, clubs and associations and of course women were still exempt from voting –from the political life in general- and girls were separated from boys in school and college when boys had free reign –depending on the affluence of the household- to go on and study the humanities and sciences in colleges and universities and could work for a respectable education. The doors of the universities did not open to women until the middle to late 19th century through vigorous reform and it still took another hundred years for the “professional woman” to emerge in western Europe and seek emulation in profession, education and employment with her male peers and fellow citizens.

The philosopher Frederich Nietzsche would later savagely criticise such feminism, for its unnatural expositions –as Nietzsche argued that the early feminists were unnaturally trying to emulate and copy the male society and its entire corpus of artistic and scientific achievement- and of course Nietzsche attacked the scholarly inclinations of women –to even mock the efforts of the 19th century women writers- to jeer and state that “Through bad female cooks--through the entire lack of reason in the kitchen--the development of mankind has been longest retarded and most interfered with.” Of course such a statement is merely a humorous quip from Nietzsche’s wry taste in humour- to laugh at the political issues of the time where they seem ridiculous.

If we turn to the middle of the twentieth century we have Betty Freidan’s housewife rebellion of 1950’s America, spurred on by the publication of her seminal masterpiece and controversial book, The feminine mystique and secondly we have Simeon de Beauvoir’s The second sex, published during the height of the existentialist movement in post-war France. The former is a sociological and domestic as a political survey and treatise on the role of mothers, housewife’s and young women’s rights, the latter is a philosophical, cultural and historical analysis written in two parts, that could be said to examine the essence of woman, the separation of gender and biology- “as one is not born a woman, but becomes one”, as De Beauvoir herself put it. Women’s rights had reached a new zenith through the second wave of Feminism of the early Twentieth Century. The suffragettes and the liberals had fought for the political emancipation of women, but now women like De Beauvoir fought for the intellectual and philosophical freedom of women, for women to create their own culture within the male society and to emulate the status of the male legacy –for as we know and as I have said the arts and sciences are dominated by men for the society of men.

The real sexual revolution itself with all its feminist connotations and presumptions spelled out several societal changes in big bold type. Firstly women, for the first time had the unanimity and availability of sex on a scale like never before, as contraception became more widely used –promoted through society- and procured by women as casual sex became a thing for which women could for the first time in history enjoy without necessarily becoming pregnant or without necessarily receiving the condemnation and harassment of either their family or society at large. Secondly the separation of men and women had ended; women had new opportunities for employment, equal opportunities for education and finally saw themselves in a different light as equals amongst their male counterparts. The female emphasis also went towards the modern obsession with consumerised, cosmetic beauty. Girls of all ages could appear to be sexual more so than beautiful in the age where Freud’s legacy of sexual freedom –or sexual hyperactivity- reached a religious state of frenzy.

Of course there was no sexual revolution or feminist’s revolution in the Islamic world, or in the Indian subcontinent, or in the Orient, for male domination –the dominion of the masculine society presided in tightly knit religious doctrine, social rite and ritual or through the presence of all powerful army. The ethos of science and art allowed a spirit of inquiry, change and growth to manifest in the west –so society could examine itself and citizens could claim rights over established rules- and in contrast such a change or shattering of dogma and limitation has not fostered for the intellectual and artistic evolution of man and woman’s essence has not truly come to examination in these regions of the world. Nothing has been spawned from this exemption, as man and woman is tied in archaic and medieval law.

The erotic became superimposed on television, on billboards, through models, through Hollywood culture and certainly the diminishing imagery of what art had finally became before it had deceased in the eyes of public interest. Art had no longer any part in the interplay or male and female relations, or in the display of erotic and controversial ideals.

When I speak of art I speak of the horror of modernism, that free for all, that hideous effort for money called art, that talentless and formless genre of mock art that received its progenitors through the maddening horrors of Picasso’s Cubism, Pollock’s drip paint massacre, Warhol’s tacky pop, wallpaper art, all in all were the final death blows to art as it became formless, without the idealism and vision that drove the artist to their creation. Art no longer represents any basic idealism, nor does it represent the old over indulging eroticism of Klimts’ flowing oeuvre, instead art has lost its public and superimposed idea and impression of what we once thought it to be. The idea that art evolves in time, through each school and form of construction, is sheer nonsense, it is the ability to recognise beautiful and to derive pleasure from form or from the idea of from. Formless art is hideous and that is why art slowly deceased to a nullity of expression in the middle of the twentieth century. Art returns once again to the individual where it belongs perhaps more aesthetically and truly to the natural world over the arts themselves. One no longer needs to see gender based beauty in the modern world, for there is nothing artistic –but there is something nauseously over erotic and sexual- in the modern world, we have pop art for promotion, we have no originality but mass production, singularity, routine and concordance of living in the world of fashion. There seems to be nothing beautiful in the flaunting of physical attraction, for the ideal loses its truth, where carnal attraction is promoted against the soulless state of an erotic era that openly has pornographic overtones and innuendos to it. Pornography itself represents the extinguished ability of a male or female to express the sex drive in its fully satisfying potential, there is mere utility in pornography to the mechanisms of objectified lust to mere imagery and over-sexed industry. The morbid, the nauseous, over indulgent, attention to sex these days has spawned more revenue through a bogus image or myth of man is meant to be and woman is meant to be, these sort of conventional, superficial, subliminal messages of culture and fashion superimposed on us by daily life –advertised nearly in our own dreams- have left us as unthinking stereotypes and unfulfilled clones of segregation. These are the boundaries of modern culture that run deeper than mere appearance, beyond and bellow the beautiful visage of the integration of the sexes there is a segregation- a polarisation- of true understanding and intimacy between the sexes and that is perhaps why certain minorities in society face greater alienation and anxiety than ever before. The fashion code is utterly primitive and cruel, the notion of greatness and popularity in the crowd, needs to readdressed that greatness is self-addressed and self-directed, as everything in life is understood in a single individual and not in the straightjacket mentality of the crowd. The integrations of the genders have become mere utility and engagement in a further drama of utility as the romanticism and idealism of past centuries has ceased and the nullity of modernity has come into reality.

It is no longer a rite to flaunt the single bogus taboo on men that they are the sole contributing factor to the advancement of a predominantly male repertoire of education and order in history, that it is only the exorcism of power that puts the capabilities of men and women in a sole infallible order. The nature of men and women has so far shown us that men bare a greater capacity towards introversion for the world of facts and philosophy. Through Greek society the passive nature of women was then as it is now socially orientated and socially bound in the fashionable rights and taboos of the day. A sort of perverse materialism has been thorough in woman’s education of both her gender and her priorities within the world, this is not just due to the natural female capacity to replicate the ability to attract but equally it has also been to project the idea or the notion of the feminine. Culture offers ideological garments to both men and women to make convoluted notions into hysterical fashions and mythologies against the simplicity of animal urges and desires. For example the human who is raised by apes in the heart of the jungle, cut off from the community of even the most basic human initiation, bares an animal instinct to follow the impulses of the apes and likewise mirror what he or she is taught, to project and act on what mental capacity one has, to project the simplest functions of the biological male or female.

Both men and women need to be examined on their personality type, not solely on basis of the gender associations but on the personality and its capacity within the environment to a greater proportion. Each gender in each society acclimatizes to its own environment, the environment has its own values, virtues and mechanisms and by these mechanisms we find the general orientation of the tribe.

Woman’s modern choice is unfair, she can either become a stereotype of beauty, oozing sex appeal and motherhood or try as best as possible to become a man –as the feminists tried themselves and failed in their steamrolled rebellion of dead end productivity and rancour- to be an intellect and seek the male society’s entourage, culture and heritage of scientific and artistic legacies. To be honest it is hard for women to be free in either side of the cultural border, both east and west, for the confusion of identity, association and aspiration are tied down to both religious and philosophical dogma –whether it be Marxist or Freudian or part of an old political system that still separates the sexes ideologically, physically and puts undue emphasis on the sexes. All the trouble and the suffering that has been made and placed on women has been made through the hands of men to exalt the culture of men, made worse by the mucky and angry texts of the Marxist-anarchistic feminists of the later twentieth century. Today women are just as bound to Islam in the east as they are to fashion in the west to be subtlety, powerfully and sublimely bound. The consumer culture successfully keeps women in their place, does not allow for them to rise beyond the everyday reality. Men too like women have the conscious knowledge- unlike the Greek, Roman and inferior civilisations of the past- that individuality between the “cultural myths” of our time, need to be weaved and charted through the madness of disparity and hype that make it so nauseous to be a man or indeed for a woman as weary as myself to be a woman, all in all it is better to be a person and not a myth or label that reduces freedom, limits experience and creates the unholy in mankind as each civilisation does in the corpus of the tribe!