Report: Sexuality
Journal of the Sciences,
Philosophy, and Theology
Part
I. Our Radically Changed and Changing World
Part
II: An Apocalypse, or Second Major Transition
in Noogenesis?
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The Future of Sexuality
Issue #10 of DIALOGOS :
An Interactive Journal of the
Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology
First posting of this issue, Aug. 17, 1998
To see the most recent comments on this issue, go to comments (current up-date Dec. 31, 1998)
Richard W. Kropf, Editor
Editor’s Introduction: In this issue of DIALOGOS, we are presenting, with the permission of its author, a paper delivered at the 14th World Congress of THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION which met in Montreal, Quebec on July 26-August 1, 1998. A biologist, as well as a past-president of the American Teilhard Association, Robert T. Francoeur, Ph.D., is a Professor of Human Sexuality and Embryology at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ. He is also editor of the newly published International Encyclopedia of Sexuality. In this paper, which we have divided into two sections to facilitate easy down-loading, Dr. Francoeur first (in Part I) explores the combined results of the sexual revolution, along with many other demographic phenomena, such as improved health care, on the whole area of human behaviour, and then (Part II) prognosticates from a futurist’s perspective what he believes will be the coming patterns of and roles played by sexuaity in the next millenium. As usual, we will be looking for readers’ comments and reflections.
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Human Relationships in the
21st Century: Labor Pains of a New Integration
By Robert T. Francoeur, Ph.D.
Back in 1972, when I started teaching a college course in human sexuality, we were still experiencing the aftershock of the 60s sexual revolution. I wanted to make my class on lifestyles and relationships personal and real for these 20 year-olds. So I invited some friends who were living a variety of alternative lifestyles to share their stories. The students listened politely, hid their smirks, and muttered “WEIRD RADICALS” (definitely sick perverts).
The implications of what these older adults were going through, and how they were adapting their marriages and relationships to life in the 1970s were too frightening for my students to hear or think about in their own lives. I had to switch my educational strategy. Forget the direct confrontation with their personal daily lives. I would try a more philosophical, indirect questions.
“What happened to the dinosaurs?”
“They died out.”
“Why?”
“Ah, I guess they couldn’t adapt to their changing environment.”
“Good. Now, I want you to help me list all the many changes that have radically altered intimate relationships, courtship, marriage, and sex in this century. Tell me what has changed since 1900, when your great-grandparents were teenagers, dating, getting married, and raising a family. You have grown up in a different world, with the birth control pill, AIDS, MTV, gay liberation, and the like. I want you to help me list all these changes, and then I want to talk about Deeper Questions, like the evolution and future of intimate relations, sex, marriage, and family. I want to talk about the Deeper Question of how you will have to adapt to all the changes we have made in our ecosystem in this century, the radical changes you will be forced to make in your sexual lives and relationships if you want to survive and thrive in this brave new world.”
My new approach seemed to work, but I wonder. Older, non-traditional students definitely get the point about how male-female relationships, marriage, and family have, and are, changing because of our radically changed environment. For the 20 year-olds the issue is sex and long-term intimacy in our radically changed world because they were born after the pill, after the sixties, after Ozzie and Harriet Nelson left television. They know the sex and marriage stuff. And because they see sex as perfectly natural, it isn’t really much of a big deal for them, what with contra-ceptives and the freedom of college dorms and living away from home. They want to find someone to love, a dependable, stable, mature partner, with a pleasing personality. In the American spirit of tolerance, alternative patterns of marriage, creative singlehood, open or closed marriages, divorce and remarriage, step-parents and step-families, comarital relations, swingers, man-sharing, gay couples, “un hombre completo” and “la casa chica” are okay for others, if that’s what they want. But when I get married, it will be forever, and no affairs or divorce. They are more concerned about finding a good paying, interesting job. For women, sex and gender may enter the job concern as they become aware of the “glass ceiling” and the murky domain of sexual harassment. But, in general, it takes some years of personally experiencing the social changes around before they will start asking Deeper Questions about the future of sex, marriage, and family.
Having recently edited a three-volume International Encyclopedia of Sexuality with in-depth reports on sexual attitudes and behavior in 32 countries on six continents, I would like to speculate about the extent to which the Daily Concerns and Deeper Questions of Americans about the future of sex, marriage and family and the changes we have experienced this century may echo around the world.
Before I sketch out what I believe is a fair prognosis for the future, let me share with you the world my American students desribe every semester.
1. AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY
Americans came close to doubling our average human life expectancy in this century. In the Middle Ages, the average life expectancy was 30 something. In 1900, 47 years; 1920, 53 to 54 years; in 1995, 73 for men and 79 years for women. An infant born today has an estimated average life expectancy of 90 to 110 years. My students immediately gasp, when they think about the impact of this change on “until death do us part.” Modern medicine has been a major factor in similar dramatic increases in average life expectancies around the world. In more developed regions, the average life expectancy at birth in 1993 was 77 years; in less developed regions, 63 years, and the least developed countries, 51 years. Of course, the AIDS epidemic is having a serious negative impact on life expectancy in Africa and Southeast Asian countries.
2. INFANT AND MATERNAL MORTALITY
In the 1800s, one in five infants died in its first year. In 1940, one in 20 infants died. Black infant mortality was twice that of whites. In 1995, only one in 200 newborns did not survive its first year. Maternal mortality rates have also plummeted from the 1850s when one in five women died of puerperal fever.
3. NUMBER OF CHILDREN
The colonial American Family had 8, 10, or more children. The Victorian family averaged between 6 to 8 children. In 1970, one in ten American families had four or more children. In 1996, only 3 percent of our families had 4 or more children while 51.2 percent had no children. In colonial America, women spent most of their adult life rearing children. Not so today!
Worldwide, fertility rates have dropped significantly since the 1970s. The Dutch total fertility rate dropped from 3.2 children per woman in 1962 to a stable 1.5 rate since 1976. The former East Germany birth and marriage rates dropped 60 percent in the four years following the collapse of Communism. Between 1978 and 1992, the Czech and Slovak birthrates dropped by 50 percent. Brazil’s birthrate went from 6.3 in the 1960s to a current 2.2, and Ireland from 7.4 in 1973 to 1.8 in 1995. China went from 5.68 in the 1960s to 1.8 in 1995. Italy recently became the first nation in history with more people over age 60 than under the age of 20; Italy’s total fertility rate is 1.1, and in the city of Bologna a stunning 0.8 children per woman. Spanish women are having an average of 1.2 children, while the fertility rates for Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Russia, Ukraine, Rumania, Japan, Hungary, Hong Kong, Austria, the Baltic states, and Greece are all under 1.5. Today, the populations of Africa and Europe (including Russia) are about equal. If the present trends hold for the next fifty years, Africans will outnumber their northern neighbors three to one. And while half of all Italians will be over the age of 50, half of the residents of Iraq will be under age 25 (Specter 1998).
4. CONTRACEPTION
In a brief 150 years, Euro-Americans have gone from ineffective and inconvenient contraceptives that were generally available only to the affluent to effective, inexpensive, and fairly convenient long-term contraceptives. The time table:
Antiquity-1850s Crocodile dung, lemon halves, and sheep intestines
1850s Latex condoms
1880s The cervical diaphragm becomes popular
1882 The first birth control clinic (Dutch) opens.
1890s Male surgical sterilization
1909 IUDs developed
1962 The PILL
1966 U.S. Supreme Court declares unconstitutional all state laws limiting the right of married women to purchase contraceptives
1972 State laws limiting contraceptive sales to single women declared unconstitutional
1985 Long-term contraceptive implants.
The effects of modern contraception are obvious in many countries where the total fertility rate has dropped significantly in recent years, even though the affordability of contraception is a major problem in countries racked by HIV and negligible per capital monies for health care and disease prevention.
5. MEDICAL ADVANCES
In addition to increasing our life expectancy, reducing infant and maternal mortality with the 1864 discovery of antiseptics, improving the effectiveness and variety of contraceptives, and increasing the safety of abortion, medical research has made other contributions to our rapidly and radically changing social environment. These include advent of Planned Parenthood clinics starting in 1916, the use of surplus World War I cellulose wadding in menstrual padding in 1920, the discovery of penicillin which provided an effective cure for bacterial sexually transmissible diseases during World War II, and, of course, the pill. And yet, despite it medical prowess, puritanic Americans have refused to deal with sexually related diseases. The U.S. has the highest rates of sexually transmissible diseases in the developed world, rates 50 to 100 times higher than in other industrialized nations (Eng and Butler 1997). The U.S. also has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and abortion in the developed world.
Since the world’s first test-tube baby in 1978, there has been an explosion in new infertility treatments, which create new forms of parenthood, and new treatments for all kinds of sexual dysfunctions, including Viagra and other medications for male erectile problems. Even as worldwide television coverage of Viagra led to black markets in many countries, public pressure, stirred by European and North American television documentaries on female genital mutilation, have produced serious efforts by the World Health Organization, United Nations, and international physicians’ groups to eliminate this dangerous practice (Francoeur and Taverner 1998:134-153).
6. PUBERTY AND ADOLESCENCE
Between the Middle Ages and today, the age of menarche has remained fairly stable between age 12 and 14 years, depending of food supply. What has changed is that stage of life we call adolescence. In the Middle Ages and Shakespeare’s time children were considered immature adults when they attained the use of reason about age 7. Like Juliet they married about age 14. “Childhood,” as we know it, did not exist until the Victorian period, while “adolescence” did not exist until the 1950s or thereabouts. The emergence of childhood and adolescence, combined with increasing later age of first marriage, has given us a new species of human, sexually mature single young adults! While the age of menarche has remained stable, a puzzling phenomenon has recently been documented. A nationwide study by Hermans-Giddens (1997) found that 50 percent of African-American girls and 15 percent of White girls in the U.S. begin puberty by the age of 8. This major drop in the onset of puberty has thus far only been reported among American girls, suggesting a possible environmental estrogen causation.
In the least developed nations where urban migration deprives adolescents of traditional sex education by their elders, there is a frightening rise in teen pregnancies and disease. In cultures where the prevailing philosophy holds that parents should be the primary source of sexual information, today’s teenagers obtain most of their sexuality information from peers and the media, not from their parents. In most cultures, from the least developed to the most industrialized, there is little effective formal education and social support to help children and adolescents deal with their sexuality.
7. THE ECONOMIC AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN
A hundred twenty-five years after the first women’s rights meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. With the near simultaneous advent of the hormonal birth control pill, for the first time in millions of years of human history, women could now eliminate unwanted pregnancies. We could now separate sex for making babies from sex for pleasure, friendship, fun, exploration, love.... Women increasingly entered the work force, politics, the military, and other “male professions” in mass. Women also begin redefining sexual satisfaction in their own terms, challenging the traditional male phallic coital paradigm. Women in many countries are increasingly challenging the inability or unwillingness of males to accommodate more gender equal roles. Many Thai women today, especially those who have attained some socioeconomic status on their own, are choosing to live alone rather than try to cope with the domination of a traditional Thai male partner. The popularity of “Narita divorces” among Japanese brides returning from a disastrous honeymoon is another example of women taking control of their own lives once they are educated and can support themselves (Francoeur 1997:788-789; for a similar phenomenon in Russia, see page 1050). In many European and other countries, non-marital cohabitation is increasingly popular and common. With the growing emphasis on individual expectations and needs, I wonder whether the new phenomenon of Dutch couples “living apart together” (LAT) will be adopted in other developed countries as an adaptation to the social ecosystem of the new millennium (Francoeur, 1997:912).
8. RELIGION
From colonial America through the 1800s, our religious institutions exercised a strong control over our sexual attitudes and behavior. By the 1990s, that influence had definitely weakened; the percentage of Catholics ignoring the Pope’s condemnation of artificial contraceptives exceeds the percentage of other Americans using birth control. Even as the mainline American churches debate whether or not to openly accept premarital sex, to recognize gay marriages and ordain gay clergy, many local congregations and church members find their official church teachings on sexual morality out of touch with their real lives and go their own way. At the same time, they search for the connection between sexuality and spirituality in natural and Eastern religions.
Around the world, in Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, Poland, and Puerto Rico, mainstream church authorities tend to avoid preaching on sexual morality or are widely ignored when they do.
9. LEGAL CHANGES
As mentioned above, the right of American women to purchase contraceptives was recognized in 1966 and 1972 Supreme Court decisions. Abortion was made legal by Roe v. Wade in 1973. The repressive Comstock laws were gradually rescinded, with the first Consenting Adult Laws adopted by Illinois in 1961. In the years that followed, premarital sex with affection became a quietly accepted if not endorsed social standard. With divorce socially, economically, and legally more available, half of American marriages end in divorce. Serial polygamy is easily our dominant form of marriage. Major changes in our definitions of pornography and obscenity came with Roth v. U.S. in 1957 and Miller v. U.S. in 1973. The 1960s civil rights movement inspired a few gays and lesbians to rebel against police harassment in the 1969 Stonewall Inn Riot, bringing their culture to the attention of the heterosexual majority. Thirty years later Americans are still counterpointing gay rights parades, the ordination of gay/lesbian ministers, and adoption of domestic partnership laws, with conservative churches boycotting Disney and leading politicians condemning homosexuality as the mortal enemy of heterosexual marriage and the family. Other changes have come with our recognition, prevention, and treatment of child sexual abuse, incest, sexual harassment, and marital and date rape.
Around the world, the availability of sexual materials on cheap videocassettes, satellite-access television, and the internet has greatly reduced the control and censorship governments were able to maintain in the past with print media. Although the concept of sexual harassment is scarcely acknowledged outside northern Europe, the U.S., and Canada, awareness of women’s rights in this regard is spreading, mainly because of media coverage and emerging women’s rights movements in the less and least developed countries including Eastern Europe (Francoeur 1997:974, 1065, 1158-1159).
10. INCREASING SOCIAL MOBILITY AND ANONYMITY
Everywhere in American rural villages and farm lands of the 1800s, social conformity was expected and unavoidable. Then mobility by foot and horse was augmented by urban mass transit, trains, and steamships. In the 1870s, human-powered bicycles and tricycles were challenged,Ôrite de passage for teenage boys in the 1960s and beyond (Bailey, 1988). For the youth of the 1960s, the Vietnam war marked a generation split by rebellion that quickly spread into the courtship and dating rituals of young Americans. The generations have become increasingly split ever since. As the car became ubiquitous, mobile middle class Americans demanded lodgings away from home. As simple roadside cabins of the 1930s evolved into ubiquitous posh motels for traveling businessmen and vacationing families, they also quietly became convenient places for adult affairs, In more recent years, small privately owned motels have struggled to survive the competition of nationwide motel chains often by offering reduced hourly rates many adolescents can afford. Many major motels also offer hourly and day rates.
How might this increasing mobility affect the lives and relationships of men and women in other nations outside the Euro-American sphere? In India and African where most goods are moved by truck, wives are often at high risk of HIV infection because their husbands frequently have sex with prostitutes and what are called minor or traveling wives while on the road. In many areas African and Indian wives are pressing for regulation of prostitution and changes in the social acceptance of minor/traveling wives (Francoeur 1997: 596-597).
11. LEISURE AND AFFLUENCE
Colonial Americans were burdened by hard manual labor, from sun-up-to-sun-down, 6 or 7 days a week, as long they had the strength. There was no retirement or pensions plans. In 1935, Social Security gave some support for the 95 percent of elderly Americans who then lived in poverty. With increasing mechanization, unionization, and an expanding economy, half of the U.S. work force adopted a 40 hour work week in the late 1940s. The number of DINKS, couples with double income and no kids, continues to increase significantly. While older American men may enjoy increased leisure, their wives frequently cannot escape their dual commitment to home and workplace. The younger generation, on the other hand, appears to be more flexible and sensitive to balancing home and work commitments for both husbands and wives, and parenting for both sexes.
12. SEA CHANGES IN THE VISUAL ARTS
(The following technological developments were quickly adapted to satisfy the age-old male interest in pornography.)
1276 - First European paper mill;
1455 - Guttenberg’s Bible;
1477 - William Claxton prints the first books of popular literature;
1837 - Practical photography;
1903 - First full-length movie;
1906 - First radio program broadcast;
1927 - First talking movie;
1940s, 1950s - Television full-time broadcasting;
1953 - Playboy and Penthouse magazines;
1970s to present - Cable TV, videocassettes and cam corders allow convenient and private viewing of sexually explicit material in home.
In the past 50 years, print media, radio, and television have responded to the growing public interest in sexual titillation and information. Since the 1960s, unconventional lifestyles have provided grist of the tabloids and talk shows, but there is also an educational function. Media presentations of the sex research of Kinsey (1948, 1953) and Masters and Johnson (1960s) increasingly legitimized public discussion of previously taboo sexual topics and issues. In recent months, media treatment of the White House sex allegations and Viagra have also increased public discussion of oral sex, impotence, and extramarital and comarital affairs at the family dinner table and the work place. American day-time soaps, Jerry Springer, and others present a constant diet of sex and infidelity. In advertising, the breakthrough was probably Proscar, with its actual PICTURE of where the prostate gland is in relation to the penis and testes. Cornog and Perper (1996) have documented a sharp increase in all forms of sexuality publications, but especially in mass market trade books designed for audiences ranging from conservative Christian to radical New Age readers. They propose that diversity of viewpoint and opinion, NOT uniformity, is the hallmark of this increase. Although conservative institutions, such as many public libraries, have been slow to recognize this upsurge in publication of books about sexuality, the large chain bookstores, and, more recently, the web bookstores, have been very quick to recognize that “the self-help sex book” is a hot-selling genre in publishing.
And then there is the WWW, the World Wide Web, and CyberSex on the Net. In Iran, Islamic fundamentalists have tried to limit access to cable television. But Baywatch, Wrestlemania, Dynasty, Moonlighting, American and European talk shows dealing with sex, soft pornography from Turkey, and an Asian version of MTV still reach many Iranian homes via Hong-Kong-based Star TV satellite broadcasts (Francoeur 1997, 633-634). In India, traditionalists denounce romantic films, which promote new male/female gender roles and marriages based on love rather than parental arrangements (Francoeur 1997, 580). In Afghanistan, the Taliban militia smash television sets. Meanwhile American Southern Baptists boycott Disney productions for promoting homosexuality and anti-family values, But how effective are these reactionary campaigns in this age of satellite communication, faxes, e-mails, and the WWW?
13. MUSIC AND DANCE
For centuries, traveling and local actors and musicians, religious rituals, community festivals, and amateur artists in the family.
14. CONSERVATIVE COUNTER TRENDS
Along with these many ecosystem changes and the adaptations they are triggering, there are several realities that work against any change. First and foremost are the epidemics of AIDS and hepatitis C. And, on the religious side, the Moral Majority in the 1970s and more recently, the Christian Coalition, Promise Keepers, and other religious conservatives who opt for literal interpretations of St. Paul’s two-thousand year old teaching on the wife’s servant submission to her husband. And a religious and social backlash against feminism and homosexuals driven by fears that all these social changes are the warning of the Second Coming, the Apocalyptic End of this World, and the impending Rapture of a chosen few. These counter-trends have had to adopt modern techniques to reach their audiences -- especially televangelism. By doing so, they have entered a television marketplace as one more channel, one more talk show, one more item in the massive variety of voices that besiege us all. The religious conservatives no longer have a special pulpit, which used to be the Sunday preacher entertaining all and sundry in a farm-town with apocalyptic prophecies. Now the televangelist has to compete with World Cup Soccer, Jerry Springer, the RuPaul show, the Weather Channel, and whatever your local news channel is. In this, the religious voice has been displaced from a Sacred Place to being only one more television show. The voice of God is no longer special, nor, for many people, very entertaining. The love story in “Titanic” may have more appeal than the Sermon on the Mount. THAT is what the new media have done.
(End of Part I)
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In Part II of his paper, Dr. Francoeur recasts his observations (Part I) in terms of a question based on the concept of “noogensis” -- a term coined by the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin to describe the evolution of human consciousness, within which the first major transition would have come about when humans became sufficiently concentrated in certain localities that became the so-called “cradles of civilization”, most of them arising at what others have called “the First Axial Period” in human history. Are we at the threshold of a new axial period? And if so, why? And what is the changing role of sexuality in this period? Is it a major cause of or is a result of this transition -- or is it both?
These historical changes surround us all, sometimes rather too noisily. They contain both Daily Concerns and Deeper Questions. So let me ask one of those deeper questions. Is it possible that the changes we have seen, and will continue to see, are merely minor shifts and readjustments of an essentially stable system? In this view, little is genuinely new in television, birth control, the world wide web, Princess Diana’s affair, or even international corporate mergers. On the other hand, it is possible that these changes represent a truly “radical” shift in the history and future of human life and society?
In the remainder of my talk, I will argue for the second view -- that we are in the midst of genuinely deep shifts in human society. Such things have occurred before. The agricultural revolution comes to mind immediately, as does the birth of the town and city. Abbreviating a long and complex history, we see that the birth of agriculture and urban centers five-thousand years ago -- the First Axial Period -- marked a pivotal revolution in the structure of societies, reflected in new patriarchal hierarchies in civil and religious life, as well as marriage and family, that have endured to the present century. Today these patriarchal hierarchies are being challenged everywhere, in the family, in politics, and religious institutions. The Second Axial Transition is well underway. The changes I described above, the changes our grandparents, parents, we and our children have experienced in this century are not only well under way, but are, barring a nuclear holocaust, irreversible. I suggest that the changes described above are just as radical as those symbolized in the earliest myth of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Holy Whore, the Priestess of Ishtar (Rojcewicz 1993; Rosten 1993) and documented by many archeologists, most notably the controversial Marija Gimbutas (1= 989) and futurist Riane Eisler (1988).
The First Axial Transition, from what historian Karl Jaspers (1953) calls the “Pre-axial Era” to the early Axial Period urban cultures, was centered in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, in Central America, the Niger River valley of Africa, the Indus River valley, and China’s Yellow River valley. It took a couple of thousand years to flower into urban civilizations of ancient Sumer, Ur, Babylon, and Assyria. Our current Second Axial Transition is off to a very fast, exponential start that is taking us into a new orbit within a couple of generations.
The First Axial Transition was powered by analog alphabets and words inscribed on clay tablets. Our Second Axial Transition is being powered by the visual images of television, the computer’s binary digital alphabet sent into cyberspace, and decoding the four-letter DNA language written in our genes.
Are we in the midst of a Second Axial Transition, similar in magnitude to the First Axial Transition five thousand years ago? Or can we continue “business as usual” in the brave new world described above?
The answer is No, and it’s a clear No.
Remember female controlled birth control, which makes it impossible to return to a life style in which the wife is pregnant every second year. Remember that religious institutions, once unchallenged in their control over sexual morality, no longer have a privileged pulpit, but must now compete on television for audiences. What we see among the affluent, in the “developed world” is spreading through television itself, as hundreds of millions of women in the “developing world” see, literally see, a way to live that they desire for themselves.
But what about HIV/AIDS? The latest United Nations report tells us that HIV/AIDS now equals the greatest plagues in human history, the Black Death and the 1918 influenza epidemic. Two-thirds of the 30 million persons living with the HIV virus are in Sub-Saharan Africa where one in four adults is affected. How will this affect our views of sexual intimacy in the next century? Most likely, the outcome will be massive deaths. No mechanism is now in place worldwide that can deal with AIDS. So we have our next major dimension of collapse vs. cohesion. The issue of medical care will prove crucial. In the “developed countries,” the issue is how to allocate medical care to a population that wants and can pay for some care, but not all. Triage is inevitable, and with it comes a demand for a decent way to die, not in the county old-folks’ home, but with dignity and in peace.
For “developing countries,” the issue is not terminal care for the elderly, but care for women, for children, and for men and women in the work force.That in turn requires more medical personal, more equipment, more pharmaceuticals, and social policies about payment. Basically, the only two choices are forms of socialized medicine or forms of privatized health insurance. But no country can choose one or the other in isolation: medical information comes to Mozambique from the outside, and so Mozambique is connected to the rest of the world. We are facing “international medicalization” -- and it too acts for cohesion of the world’s nations, not their splintering apart. The spur to medicalization will be fear, plain old fear. Most nations, developed or developing, are experimenting with medicalization -- and no one knows the right answers. Yet. it will cost millions of lives before we do figure it out. But the more people die, the greater the fear and urgency.
Will the flood of environmental changes in our Axial Transition make it easier or harder for men and women to find financial and emotional security in a world that otherwise seems to be going berserk? One key factor in determining this outcome will be the still evolving relation-ship between the multicultural mega-corporations, individuals, and their families. A second factor will be the way we deal with our changing awareness of our sexuality. Life in a world of impersonal mega-corporations is very different from life on the rural frontier farm. A lot more is demanded of men and women in a prefigurative society with considerable gender role fluidity than in the Victorian age where limited alternatives left most people locked in clear, rigid gender roles and limited sexual expectations.
In the United States, gender role fluidity is associated with being straight or gay. In other countries, it is associated with women working, women being educated, women taking positions of greater power in political systems. We can see the world too easily through American eyes, and imagine that everyone is worked up about homosexuality or cross-dressers and transsexuals. After all, WE are. But that’s because we have settled some more basic issues of day-to-day concern, like where the next meal is coming from. The major issues of gender in the world center on women’s status not in bed, but in the world of politics and finance. As long as women have babies, and men don’t, there will be irresistible forces behind women seeking access to the economic system. Individual women may trust to being sexy or seductive to obtain the wherewithal of life (this is David Buss’s alleged “evolutionary” claim about women), but as a group, women will try to obtain direct access to finances. The reason is that they must do so; their own lives and the lives of their children depend on doing so. As a group, women cannot rely solely on men to get money. In some societies, this will mean that women will hold onto land for farming and horticulture, and hang on to it for dear life. In other societies, it will mean that women form women’s cooperatives for making trade goods -- anything from baskets to clothing. In other societies, it will mean education for women, because education is the only way into the security that employment in the world corporations offers. In still other societies, it will mean changing the nature of the family, about which more below. But in all cases, women must enter the domains of men, because that is where the money is, not for luxury items, but for food, medical care, and child support.
A Cautious Prognosis for an Evolving, Converging World
Based on my study of sexual attitudes and behavior in 32 nations on six continents as compiled by 135 experts for The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (Francoeur 1997), I anticipate the following developments in the next century. No one can say for sure whether Euro-American moral-erotic issues are of cutting edge significance to the rest of the world. So my my projections are limited. My projections are also fragile because I must frame them within the dual dimension of the future of the family and marriage and the future of sexual-erotic feelings and behavior.
Families, especially outside the Euro-American world, are basically economic arrangements, or, more accurately, have powerful economic roles. This refocuses our attention not so much on women’s (or men’s) sexual feelings and disappointments, but on women’s financial expectations and needs. The family, as an institution, is stable only as long as it functions economically -- otherwise, people quickly invent other forms of relationship that do function economically. To be sure, families are supported by a superstructure of religious and traditional belief -- supernatural sanctions and so on -- but those can change very quickly if money and food aren’t coming in. So I see a gradient of concerns here -- some active in North America and Europe and others active elsewhere in the world.
For centuries, the family has been both an economic institution and a pair-bonded erotic unit, like two sides of the same coin. During most of our evolutionary history, these functions were identical, because we lived in hunter-gatherer systems. But in the modern world, economics and erotics have been sundered. All other things being equal, as economic stress increases, the erotic components of the family dwindle and become less significant, and as economic stresses decrease, the erotic component becomes more important.
Furthermore, the modern world has taken economic decision-making power away from the family, as an inevitable result of corporatization. But corporatization has not thereby made the economic problems of the family any easier -- the family still bears the brunt of economic necessity. For example, when land is taken up with cash-cropping, the family loses its family plot and the labor they once devoted to growing their own food. Yet they still must eat -- and so the economic issues grow more and more important at the day-in, day-out level.
Can marriage and the family -- however defined -- survive such a challenge? My argument basically says No. It will change towards becoming increasingly eroticized, together with various polyamourous supplements. But my argument also needs to incorporate the “intervening variable” of economic stress.
For example, one of the major issues confronting women moving into the corporate world outside of the U.S.is sexual harassment. For the corporation, the most functional solution is to deprive women of access to the corporation, thereby creating all-male economic enclaves. But, if women’s economic status worsens -- as it must if they depend solely or primarily on men for money -- then women must, and will, try to enter the corporate world. The result is inevitable -- the assumption that such women are sexually available to the higher-echelon males. But even in a polygynous society, such alleged availability puts splinteringly great stress on the family -- the man who treats the women employees as his own private harem does not “respect the sanctity” of the family, in whatever way “respect” and “sanctity” may be defined in his culture. The women, we may assume, would be much happier to work in their homes and on the land, where they have networks of female relatives and friends, but they need to work in this damned job. That situation is not stable, not in Iran, Iraq, Sub-Saharan Africa, China, Japan, India, or Indonesia, in brief, for 75 percent of the world’s population.
Once upon a time, maybe men could work on the land and make their craft things like farm tools and the women could raise the children and harvest the fruit and grain and milk the goats. But that world has vanished or is vanishing, thanks to industrialization, international development agencies, and corporatization.
So where are the major social changes described above taking us?
As a “prefigurative culture,” a culture whose patriarchal myths and archetypes handed down from ancient times are no longer meaningful or supportive of the male-defined sexual codes of the Axial period, we are being forced to create new myths, new superstories to inspire us in coping with the changes that bombard us from all sides. The power of our traditional myths and archetypes has faded because Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein have pushed us out of the ancient fixed world view with its unchanging hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being into a world of process and evolution. Fears of the ever-accelerating, radical changes in our social environment have in this century made it possible to argue that we are self-destructing. A careful reading of the ecosystem, and my optimistic bias, suggest that we are in fact moving into a new global culture that will require a radically new awareness and consciousness of self and the individual facilitated by the instant communications of our electronic world. Our relationship with ourselves, with others, with society, and with the world that is our nurturing womb are all affected by this new ecosystem (Abraham 1994; Eisler 1988; Ehrenreich 1987; Francoeur 1973, 1996; Groff 1996; Jaspers 1953; LaChapelle 1988, Teilhard de Chardin, 1959, 1964, 1970).
1. Our new myths will have to deal with the fact that women have sexual rights and needs equal to the male. And that they are increasingly entering men’s domains, the salaried work force, dealing with men on their own level, and regaining some of the power they enjoyed in the pre-axial era.
2. Our new myths, religious and civil, will have to deal with new challenges to the phallocentric, coital male model of sex and a growing shift to a holistic model, described by women, that emphasizes sensual pleasure, ecstasy, and transcendence as well as orgasm, with orgasm not limited to coital penetration (Ehrenreich 1987; Ogden 1994).
3. The value of pair-bonding, often long-term despite the availability of divorce and our increasing life expectancy, will continue to be important in our emotions and sexual codes. Will our pair-bonding be dominated by nuclear marital couples, by divorce and remarriage, by adults cohabiting, living alone together (LAT) and maintaining two households while in a long-term intimate relationship, or other dyadic arrangements? More likely, as blood kinships shrink in the nomadic life of the 1990s and beyond, their role in supporting a stable and dynamic society will be increasingly replaced by intentional families and intimate networks created by pair-bonding individuals who openly or quietly accept and include emotional and sexual intimacies within a fluid matrix or network of more or less intimate friendships that increasingly cut across the spectra of married and single, ages, and gender orientations. The monogamous pair-bonding expectation may remain for some generations as a fading but still powerful, guilt-producing myth, but that will not stop men and women from quietly exercising their polyamorous nature, especially in a world of increasing life expectancies, mobility, contraception, etc. The developed nations already have a rich mosaic of different lifestyles, and individuals choosing this or that style at different periods of their lives. The common response of the British people, Americans, and Frenchmen to media reports of Princess Diana’s extramarital quests for love, President Clinton’s alleged philanderings with a variety of young women, and the presence of the wife, daughter, and mistress and her daughter at the state funeral of President Mitterand suggests this more flexible view of marriage. “We understand. And we and the world love her.” “More power to him. Besides, who cares; he’s doing a good job.” And as for Mitterand, “What’s new? We French are realistic and mature when it comes to love and marriage.” (Koch and Weis, 1998:3-5).
4. Sexual morality will increasingly be based on qualities like mutual responsibility, growth, love, joy, and transcendence developed in the relationships whatever the gender of the parties involved rather than on the nature of genital acts motivated by procreation and licensed by marriage. (Koch and Weiss 1998:18-29; Kosnick et al. 1977; United Presbyterian Church, 1970).
5. The sexual codes of the future are already breaking out of the clear gender dichotomy that has dominated our axial cultures. The rigidity of the male/female sexual dichotomy, in which physicians routinely performed surgery to assign the roughly 4 percent of babies born in the developed countries with hermaphrodite and pseudohermaphrodite status to either the male or female sex, is being challenged by the affected individuals and their advocates who increasingly demand to be left in their intersex status and accepted as such (Fausto-Sterling, 1993; Lebacqz 1997). Here Euro-American can learn some reality from the recognition of “third-gendered persons” have in many non-Euro-American cultures, the hijra in India, xanith and kaneeth in the Middle East, berdach among Native Americans, kathoey in Thailand, and mahu and shark women in Hawaii and Polynesia, among others.
6. More obvious in recent decades has been the social, legal, and religious recognition of the gender orientation spectrum or rainbow of flavors in homosexualities, heterosexualities, and bisexualities, including the civil rights and legal recognition of domestic partnerships and gay unions. Similarly, we are experiencing an increasing fluidity in our gender role behaviors, the near infinite varied spectrum of masculine, androgynous, and feminine, which exists in each of us, no matter where we find ourselves on the sexual orientation and gender identity scales. At the same time, recent research suggests ever more evidence will be uncovered for biological tendencies behind our gender identities, roles, and orientations originating in our genes, chromosomes, hormones, family pedigrees, and neural anatomy. This knowledge will in the end overthrow the male-female dichotomous thinking that has dominated Western culture from the days of Socrates and Plato.
7. One final prognosis, based on cultural multiplicity. The face of any large country today has been shaped by large and varied waves of immigration. The 1991 Canadian census, for instance, describes the face of Canada as follows:
British (UK) = 28 percent
French or Quebecois = 23 percent
British and French = 4 percent
British, French and other = 14 percent
Other European = 15 percent
Asian = 6 percent
First Nation (aboriginal) =4 percent
Other = 6 percent.
Overall, close to a third of all Canadians reported ethnic origins other than French or British (Francoeur 1997: 226). This diversity holds true for the faces of most nations today. Yet, we are only beginning to recognize and appreciate the cultural multiplicity of our nations. And we know even less and appreciate even less the diversity of sexual attitudes and behaviors that are part of and enrich the many ethnic traditions that are the faces of our nations. So the new millennium will likely bring even greater diversity in our sexual attitudes and behavior.
At this point in human history, we have only faint hints of how our consciousness of our sexuality and our individuality, our experience of marriage and family, will change in the next decade or two. We can hope, and work to preserve the best of what has been achieved in the pre-axial and axial periods the benefits those cultures have brought us and incorporate these into our new world.
To sum up my exploration of sexuality in the twenty-first century let me quote two aphorisms from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. First, “Tout ce qui monte’ converge.” --Everything that rises [to higher levels of complexity in the process of evolution] converges [in a new level of consciousness]. And “Union differentiates” --The true union of individuals promotes diversity, not uniformity (Francoeur 1973).**
** Readers can find a detailed analysis of the evolutionary premises underlying this paper, as originally articulated by Teilhard de Chardin early in this century along with my critique of what I believe is his faulty and contradictory projection of a future virginal universe in R.T. Francoeur (1973). “Conflict, Cooperation, and the Collectivization of Man.” In: G.O.Browning, J.L. Alioto, and S.M. Farber, eds. Teilhard de Chardin: In Quest of the Perfection of Man, Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp.226-244.
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