love5 quotes

“Today, we are to believe that the love of humanity is normal (in both senses of the term), while the love of the particular is ignoble. But both are human. Love of the particular is natural, and the natural cannot be denigrated: it exists, and it belongs to life.”

“The industrial era raised new questions about how the economics of life in common could and should mesh with sexuality and the asymmetric material realities of child-rearing. Over the first two centuries of industrial-era life, men and women re-negotiated those parameters, co-constructing twin spheres of emotional sensibility and market competition: spheres that articulated via the axis of romance. But with the advent of the sexual revolution those spheres began to dissolve into one another. And as we’ll see, the romantic vision of marriage has shed the crucial role it played in balancing relations between the sexes, becoming instead an active impediment to those relations.

Underwritten by economic and technological changes that freed wives from financial dependence, and sexual intercourse from pregnancy risk, feminist advocates for that dissolution envisaged a utopia of joy and pleasure. Liberated from the burden of social constraint heaped for millennia on women, as a means of discouraging unplanned pregnancy, women could at last explore their sexuality untrammelled. They succeeded.

Accelerated by the pervasive metaphor of the virtual ‘marketplace’, in which individual men and women are packaged as products to browse, select and enjoy, casual sexual encounters are normalised today. Now, in a world where romance has lost its function as the connective tissue between desire and material reality, and the Hayekian marketplace serves as governing metaphor even for our most intimate encounters, the prospect of making, or trusting another to make a binding promise of mutual commitment seems ever more remote. Instead, the ‘human’ dream of radically malleable sexual and reproductive identities envisioned variously by Kollontai, de Beauvoir and Firestone has set the stage for a new, nominally feminist vision, foundationally premised on the power of reproductive technologies to eliminate or at least de-nature every embodied limit experienced by men and women.

Under the sign of this bio-libertarianism, governed by the ‘spontaneous order’ of digital markets, relationships are formed and dissolved in an unbounded space marked by what one millennial man of my acquaintance describes as a ‘general film of impermanence. And the radical pursuit of unattached individual freedom this both presumes and legitimises comes at considerable, if asymmetrical, cost to both men and women.

For the price of transition first into an industrial-era marriage marketplace, and now from that into a cyborg-era sexual marketplace, has been the steady dwindling of any space for solidarity - not just between men and women, but between individuals of any kind. As I’ll show, it has instead set off an all-out war on relationships.”

“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”

“Alas, we have not too little intimacy, but too much. Once there was the world of men and the world of women. Now the sexes, freely mingling, know each other too well, and both have lost their allure.”

“Loyalty is something you need for things you don’t love enough.”