(Warning: graphic and sensitive material.) From First Things:
Another thing worth noticing is how many suppressions are demanded by what are advertised as projects of liberation. These may be actual physical suppressions, such as the suppression of ovulation by the Pill, which in turn suppresses the libidos of many of the women who take it and leads to lower rates of female satisfaction overall. But the psychological suppressions are often even more striking. How many young women, beginning in the 1960s, forcibly suppressed their instinctive modesty, not to mention their natural desires for commitment, marriage, children, and even love itself, in order to play a part in the new world? In the same way, now that masturbation is de rigueur, film actresses submit to mandated rituals of humiliation, overriding their embarrassment and suppressing their distaste, in order to crush a taboo Lawrence rightly identified as primal.
Liberation of the flesh, as its consequences unspool, turns out to be liberation from the flesh: from its natural desires and instinctive aversions both. Across the board, in a technology-infatuated world, we are witnessing a dramatic rise in disassociated, body-rejecting behaviors. Reproductive technologies originally developed for the infertile—ever more sophisticated procedures that outsource ever more personal bodily functions to machines and the bodies of strangers—increasingly attract individuals who choose not to have children the natural way, and have the resources to attain their ends by other means. It is worth remembering, in this connection, that in the Baby M case, which first brought the phenomenon of surrogacy to the attention of the average American, the wife of the sperm donor was not actually infertile. She was a pediatrician who, having diagnosed herself with a possible case of MS, and wishing to avoid the risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth (“nobody could give you any guarantees”), joined her husband in passing the work of gestation to a working-class housewife. (Read more.)
From Tatler:
A few weeks ago I rashly bid for an old Penguin paperback. Few sane people would bid their life savings on a tatty paperback full of underlining. But this was no ordinary paperback. The book in question was Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. More thrillingly, it had belonged to the judge who famously presided over the 1960 obscenity trial that was to overturn 30 years of censorship. Lawrence privately published the novel 90 years ago in Italy. But within months it was banned almost everywhere. The story of an aristocratic woman who has a torrid affair with her husband’s gamekeeper, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the first literary novel to write explicitly about sex and to use four-letter expletives. The copy at auction included a list of the scenes deemed – by the judge’s wife, Lady Dorothy Byrne, who was tasked with reading it – to be the most offensive. Also included was the original silk bag – stitched by the diligent Lady Byrne – enabling the banned book to be swiftly concealed from prying eyes.
I was bidding because I’d spent the previous three years researching the original Lady Chatterley, the woman who’d inspired Lawrence’s story. She was Baroness Frieda von Richthofen, a German aristocrat who sparked one of the biggest scandals of pre-war England by abandoning her husband and three young children to live a nomadic, impoverished life with the son of a coal miner, six years her junior. To add insult to injury, Frieda and her lover – the not-yet-famous author DH Lawrence – barely knew each other, having met only six weeks earlier. In one fell swoop Frieda broke several of Edwardian England’s unspoken rules: married women weren’t supposed to leave their husbands and children; aristocratic women weren’t supposed to ‘mix’ with the working classes, let alone sleep with them or – God forbid – elope with them. (Read more.)
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