Your body in the fight against Fascism
If you want a better future, it starts in your own body. There's a reason the right is going after the LGBTQ+ movement.
During the rise of Hitler in Germany, Wilhelm Reich, a prominent psychologist and the coiner of the phrase “sexual revolution,” hypothesized that suppressing sexuality was vital to any form of totalitarian government. His reasoning was that if people learned to trust their own bodies — their urges, their wants, their needs — then they’d also learn to trust their own sense of right and wrong. This internal confidence would make them, if not ungovernable, then at least far more difficult to control and exploit.
People who are ashamed of their bodies, on the other hand, who are raised to believe that just the basic fact of sexuality is sinful, will not trust their gut instincts, as their gut instincts might lead them to do something appalling in God’s eyes, like masturbate. Which makes it easy for a strong authority to claim that they know what’s right, and therefore their moral judgments are the ones to be trusted.
While this might not be a particularly testable hypothesis (anyone want to start a sexually liberated totalitarian dictatorship?), it is certainly a hypothesis the far right has agreed with for decades.
When Hitler first came to power, among the first books his thugs burned were the research of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Science), which was doing pioneering research on so-called “sexual minorities,” specifically gay, transgender, and intersex identities. The burnings set this field back decades.
Now you’re under control
In the 1970’s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault developed a concept he called “biopower,” which is all of the different ways in which governments, churches, or anyone with any power exerts their will upon other human bodies.
There are lots of different ways one can do this: Parents, for example, have very real physical power over their kids: if they’re running into the street, we’re expected to physically stop them. If they’re about to hurt someone, we’re expected to intervene. Speaking from personal experience, this type of control requires a lot of energy on the part of the powerful. It’s (barely) manageable for two adults covering two kids, if you’re trying to control entire populations, you’ve got to figure out a way of doing this where it doesn’t absorb every second of your life, to the point where you never get to actually enjoy your power.
This hasn’t meant that different governments and institutions haven’t attempted total physical control, though.
American slavery, for example, had a very physical violence-heavy system of control. In some counties in the south, slaves made up as much as 70% of the total population. With these demographics, the people in power had to engage in what was effectively constant terrorism of the majority population, which made up the work of huge swathes of the Southern white population. Since the recent BLM protests, for example, it has become more or less common knowledge that modern American policing descended from slave patrols. Between them, the owners, the overseers, the bureaucracy that oversaw the slave state, and the local whites who engaged in sporadic acts of terrorism against local blacks, you’ve got an entire society that is dedicated to keeping your system going. Considering that the entire society was built around this system, it is perhaps unsurprising that it’s justifying philosophy, white supremacy, has been so hard to shake even after much of the system has been dismantled.
It is much easier, from the perspective of the powerful, if you can get the people to control themselves. Christianity, and in particular the Catholic Church, are the absolute masters of this. The doctrine of “Original Sin,” which is at the core of the religion, states that sex itself, the very existence of our bodies, is shameful, and that it is only through the Church and Jesus that we can ever be free of that stain. Sex itself, the doctrine says, only exists to give God more followers.
The side effects of this, to be clear, are still catastrophic: women are expected to bear children, and are openly attacked when they choose to have sex for any other reason. They are straight-up criminalized if they get pregnant and decide not to carry the pregnancy to term. Anyone having sex that can’t result in pregnancy — sodomy, oral sex, gay sex, lesbian sex, etc. — is vilified as a freak and is attacked, often jailed or even killed. Even straight boys, who get off the easiest in this system, are still fucked, and are put into an area of intense moral hazard. If you are told that all sex that isn’t geared towards pregnancy is evil, that it is a sin to “spill your seed on the ground,” but you still have strong sexual urges, how are you going to be able to make nuanced ethical choices? Put another way, if consensual sex is the origin of all sin, then what difference does consent make?
Catastrophe aside, this is a much easier, much cheaper system of control than constant policing. It teaches kids that their bodies are shameful, their urges are shameful, and with this internalized shame, they will put their trust in someone else — namely, their priest. Who definitely doesn’t have any sexual issues of his own.
Your body, your choice
It is no mistake, during this fascist resurgence, that what we’re fighting over is almost always control over our own bodies. Pride month has become a fight because the LGBTQ+ community is on the front lines of battling for bodily autonomy, and Pride is deadly to any movement whose basis relies on Shame.
A woman’s right to choose is a battleground because it’s literally choices over her own body: neither the Christian ideology that sees humans as potential worshippers for a specific god, nor the Capitalist ideology, which sees humans as labor to be put to work in service of the machine, can possibly sustain themselves if women retain control over their bodies and choose not to have kids, or choose to have fewer.
Libraries have become a battleground because they are a place designed around the concept of self-directed learning. A librarian isn’t going to give you shit if you’re a teenager and you want to check out a book on gay, trans, or nonbinary identities. They aren’t going to tell on you if you look up “how to escape an alcoholic parent,” or “how to deal with sexual assault.” But for people who want control over you, allowing you to have access to liberative information is a disaster. If you are choosing what you’d like to read, then they can’t control the information you’re receiving, and can’t count on you to police yourself.
Policing has become a battleground because it is the front lines of where control is exerted. It is no mistake that the BLM movement emphasizes the phrase “black bodies” when they discuss the harm that the police state does in black communities. Speakers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have pointed out that this is in opposition to the earlier Christian iteration of the civil rights movement, which emphasized your soul and getting to heaven. For Coates and many others in the BLM movement, the body is what is valuable, and it is what is constantly being exploited and destroyed. Liberation from this system must be in this life, not the next, for it to truly matter.
As I mentioned on Monday in my recommendation of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, modern trauma therapies have discovered that we can’t simply talk or drug our way out of mental illness — we have to address the battle going on over and within our own bodies. Van der Kolk, while a scientist and not a political animal, comes to the conclusion that the current trauma epidemic is a direct consequence of policies that cut funding to schools and make healthcare unaffordable, and which instead throw people into prisons and thus compound their traumas.
When we discuss the mental health crisis in young people, we have to recognize — any meaningful change has to come from a revolutionary shift in the way we view the world. It has to include an emphasis on bodily autonomy, on healing instead of punishment, and on viewing the human body as something sacred, not some crass receptacle for a metaphysical soul that’s only purpose is to sing eternal praises for a Supreme Autocrat in the Afterlife, nor as something that’s only purpose is to be thrown onto the cogs of the economy’s machine.
The current popular sentiment is that humans are garbage, a disease upon the face of the earth, and that it would be better if Thanos snapped his fingers and wiped us all out. I would argue that this is the exact opposite mindset from the one we need.
Actually, you are fine the way you are. Your basic urges and desires and orientations are normal, and shouldn’t be legislated by anyone but yourself.
Actually, you and everyone around you deserves to be respected. You are not a means to an end. You don’t exist to make someone else money, to fulfill your parents wishes, to worship someone else’s god.
Actually, your body is incredible, it allows you to do all sorts of really nice things like eat nachos, listen to music, create art, give puppies belly-rubs, and fool around with someone sexy. It should be treated not as a disease to be cured, but as a frankly lovely coincidence in which the universe organized itself, for a few short decades, so that its energy and matter could be conscious of itself and could explore and enjoy the universe that it is part of.
Life, contrary to what literally everyone says, has the capacity to be incredibly fucking cool, and we might all be a bit better off if we started acting like it, and treating our bodies, the vehicles that move us through this life, as something lovely, and not something grotesque or profane.