Kissing in public
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr. KISSING IN PUBLIC DECORUM VS. LIBERATION k ewspaper and TV reports have told us recently that Chinese authorities are cracking down on public displays...
...But no one in the West, not even in the best-mannered periods of our history, ever believed that propriety would put us in touch with God...
...Decorum was not just decorum...
...The Puritans had a strict sexual code, true...
...In such societies it is felt that social interests are at stake in all areas of life, even the most intimate...
...but so does virtually every society with a strong sense of community...
...I doubt the Chinese are puritans...
...The difference between the Puritans and us is not that we feel comfortable with sexuality and they did not...
...When the American press goes beyond mere reporting of this fact and attempts analysis, it usually explains that the ban is the result of "puritanical" attitudes that prevail in the Communist party of China...
...In the West we have had certain social classes in certain eras with a special attachment to the idea of good manners--the upper middle class in Victorian England, for instance...
...they can prove that they are not puritans...
...And they were heroic characters in many ways, as when 30,000 of them crossed the ocean and tried to create Utopia in Massachusetts...
...True enough, he urged us not to overdo repression...
...It is eighty years now since the revolution commenced in China and more than forty since the Communists came to power, and in that time many things have changed, changed utterly...
...They were objectionable characters in many ways, as when they cut the head off the well-mannered King Charles, who was such a model of decorum that the Chinese themselves might have admired him...
...Anyone who imagines that contemporary Americans feel comfortable with sexuality has been living on the moon for the last twenty-five years...
...Sorry, kids: you can hug your books but not your girlfriends and boyfriends...
...it was never an aspect of religion...
...This popular sexual psychology of the pseudo-Freud has its merits, of course...
...There is no aspect of conduct which is a matter of indifference to the community...
...But a mere century is too little time to destroy the fundamental orientation of a civilization...
...we despise artificiality...
...The Chinese have always preferred social convention to human nature, propriety to spontaneity...
...The danger too is that we are unable to understand what the original Puritans were up to...
...I even doubt that the Chinese Communists are puritans...
...This explanation always causes visions of puritans, Communists, and Sigmund Freud to dance in my head...
...It is true, Victorian gardens are making something of a comeback, but on the whole "Victorian" remains a dirty word...
...Confucianism even gave propriety a religious dimension...
...In short, the ban on kissing on campus has little to do with puritanism and much to do with propriety...
...but in the last analysis (excuse the pun) he was the twentieth century's most eloquent apologist for sexual repression...
...It is bad form to be a Freudian nowadays, since feminists have declared Freud to be a misogynist and gays and lesbians have declared him to be a homophobe...
...Like Annie Oakley in the old Irving Berlin musical, we believe in "doin' a-what comes natcherly...
...The bad press the Victorians have received for the better part of the twentieth century gives some evidence of the low esteem in which we hold the culture of decorum...
...it was a way of aligning oneself with the divine, a way of putting oneself in touch with ultimate reality...
...It was Freud's misfortune that he had a very complicated theory--too complicated to be understood by the average nonprofessional reader...
...But it was his good fortune (measured in terms of fame and publishing royalties) that this complicated theory lent itself to gross but popular oversimplification...
...The sexual emancipation of the contemporary era is an index of community disintegration...
...Remember, for the last few millennia China has had a culture which placed an extraordinary emphasis on decorum and good manners...
...Ironically, many who denounce Freud as a misogynist and homophobe nonetheless endorse what they imagine to have been his sexual liberationism...
...By jumping into the sack with you they can demonstrate the soundness of their mental health...
...The danger of the pseudo-Freud is that he makes it difficult for us to understand what the Chinese are up to when they tell their students not to kiss in public...
...hence the community creates rules that govern even one's sexual conduct...
...LIBERATION k ewspaper and TV reports have told us recently that Chinese authorities are cracking down on public displays of affection on university campuses...
...Not so...
...No, the difference is that they had a strong sense of community and we do not...
...It has long been widely believed that Freud was a sexual liberationist, that he urged us to free ourselves from sexual inhibitions...
...We children of the modem West-that is to say, we children of Rousseau-value spontaneity, sincerity, authenticity...
...they must be puritans...
...t_ 6 December 1991:711...
...At its best, decorum was nothing but decorum...
...But if Freud is dead, a kind of pseudo-Freud lingers on...
...If you are a young man intent on getting a series of women into bed, for instance, it is well that these young women should be disciples of the pseudo-Freud...
...In a way, sexuality is the test case: if society can regulate so naturally private a sphere as sexual conduct, then the principle has been established that society can regulate anything...
...We conclude they must have sexual hang-ups...
...But to imagine that any light can be thrown on either their obnoxious or their heroic qualities by thinking of them in terms of categories provided by the pseudo-Freud is absurd...
...Perhaps he didn't understand gays and women," they say, "but at least he understood the psychological danger of having sexual hang-ups...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 21
