They are like a fire that cannot be extinguished: there are always small active outbreaks and, from time to time, the intensity of the flames increases until it forms a cloud of smoke visible from any corner of the Internet. They are discussions that never end, that at any moment go viral again and that reappear with any excuse: a youtuber has been unfaithful to another (“Is it right to cuckold?”), a bullfighter has not shown up to his own wedding (“Marriage: prison or blessing?”), a contestant on Triumph operation explains to his colleagues that “we no longer strive to have human relationships” (“Are we consuming bodies?”) or an anonymous user writes a well-intentioned post that borders on cliché and, precisely for that reason, reaches hundreds of thousands of people but it also provokes criticism (“At this point with romantic love?”). Often they are nothing more than the old fast-paced gossip, but on many other occasions these discussions show that when we talk about love we are still talking about conflicts, insecurities and contradictions.
When an issue arouses such fiery passions and provokes so many unusual alliances and unexpected enmities, it ceases to be a private matter and its elaboration becomes part of the collective, that is, of the political. Or, as Eva Illouz defends throughout her work: emotions no longer concern only the psychologist and his patient, but have become the material with which sociologists work and the fuel of our economic system. . According to the author, we live in times of affective capitalism, which means that we are applying the same consumption patterns to our personal relationships as to any other product within an overwhelming, presumably free and potentially infinite market. Our emotional life, like so many other aspects of our experience, Illouz maintains, has been dominated by uncertainty for years.
“These questions generate so much discussion because they appeal to something very deep-rooted,” philosopher Leo Espluga, someone capable of explaining Hegel to more than 30,000 subscribers on YouTube, explains to EL PAÍS. “People see that they question precisely what there is no doubt about: you can be left-wing or right-wing, but if someone appeals to models of affectivity, everything becomes more problematic. What raises so many acrimonies is the accusation that a way of being in the world, which may be yours, is reproducing violence.”
Apocalyptic vs. built-in applications
The central thesis of The end of love (Katz Editores, 2018), Illouz's essay that collects and organizes all these concerns, is that the “negative choice” is today as important for the construction of our identity as the generalization of the “positive choice” was among the 16th and 20th centuries. “Marriage for love, selfless friendship, compassionate relationship with the stranger and national solidarity, among many others” would be examples of those social relations and novel institutions that the sociologist identifies as “autonomous and relatively stable social forms” based on the idea (and practice) of freedom that emerged a few centuries ago with the modern subject. In contrast, the phenomenon of our time would be the renunciation of forming bonds or the formation of negative bonds “characterized by their ephemeral duration, devoid of emotions and based on a kind of hedonism that revolves around the sexual act.” As Zygmunt Bauman, author of liquid love Among many other essays that insist on the same metaphor, Illouz maintains that the most significant moment for contemporary relationships is the one in which “they end, they break, they fade and evaporate.”
Illouz's critique opposes “sexual libertarians who consider that sexuality mediated by the consumer market liberates desire, creativity, and sexual energies” and starts from the premise that “contemporary sexuality—and the deceptive form of freedom that sustains it—is contrary to the values that promoted the fight against sexual emancipation.” Illouz and those who follow her would not want to fall into the old forms of repression and modesty, related to religion and patriarchy, but rather confront what, in their opinion, is one of the most perverse traps of capitalism: excess supply Paradoxically, it reduces alternatives and produces anomie. However, there are also those who, even from close economic positions (they agree in the rejection of neoliberalism), detect in these ideas the old ghosts of surveillance and control. This is how the first of the great discussions arises: Are we enjoying freedom or are we using it to treat others as objects?
Christo Casas is the author of bad faggots (Paidós, 2023), an essay that according to what he tells this newspaper is about “being a faggot which, like being heterosexual, is something that is practiced daily, that is perceived without naming it and that designates a specific way of relating to others and to occupy public space.” Regarding the recurring controversy about freedom and consumption, or about the effects of sex without commitment and dating applications, Casas denies the major one and comments that “underlying the story of the consumption of bodies is the classic criticism, loaded with lgbtiphobia and misogyny, to promiscuity; which is not a quantitative observation (how many people you fuck) but qualitative (under what circumstances you fuck).” “A faggot, a woman proud of her sexuality or a Latin migrant will always be consuming bodies even if she has had sex twice in a year, while a stable and traditional couple who goes out to fuck every week does not consume the other's body. Because? Because the definition here is the commitment to a couple-company project that runs parallel to the State-nation project: if the objective of so much sex is to reproduce, buy a townhouse and for the children to inherit the shed, then it is no longer consumerist degeneration, it is true love”, considers the writer.
Leo Espluga also warns that certain positions regarding contemporary practices (fundamentally, that of channeling desire through applications) form “a clearly essentialist morality. I think that these criticisms made of a movement that could be liberating, such as free love, can lead us in a very problematic way to naturalize and idealize previous harmful and oppressive relationships.” Yesi Illouz recalls a famous passage by the French sociologist Durkheim in which, At the end of the 19th century, he maintained that the single person who does not set limits on himself “aspires for everything and nothing satisfies him and is condemned to a state of disturbance, agitation and dissatisfaction.” It seems that many young thinkers want to escape from that framework. that condemns promiscuity. The controversy is once again served.
Monogamy or bullet
In her diary from 1945, the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño, who then felt romantically linked to two men, wrote: “If it is established that each woman must belong to only one man, I cannot, I cannot. And, if I am often ashamed; It is from lies, from disloyalty. But not from the fact of being both. “I could never leave one for the other.” Twenty years later Agnès Varda recorded The happiness, in which the protagonist, a carpenter, escapes from the model of a married man who keeps lovers or affairs outside of marriage—always tolerated by the patriarchy—because he is sincerely in love with two women and tries to face it responsibly. Thus, passing through Sartre and Beauvoir, one can explore the 20th century through suc
cessive testimonies of multiple loves. The writer Brigitte Vasallo explored the phenomenon in Monogamous thinking, polyamorous horror (La Oveja Roja, 2018), a book that has served almost as an instruction manual for defenders of polyamory eager for a theoretical framework beyond their own or other people's experience.
On the other hand, “monogamy or bullet” is an expression that during 2023 has spread at the speed of memes. “Monogamy or bullet” is something that no one writes completely seriously, but not completely jokingly and that many young people who pursue or are in a traditional relationship adjusted to the limits of so-called “romantic love” use as a motto. Through this ambiguous phrase—who is the bullet for?—one accesses an entire virtual universe in which, beyond the traditional narrative around the heterosexual and faithful couple, the usual misogyny is mixed with the viral content of every moment. It is easy for someone who writes “monogamy or bala” to also apply statistics to the sexual life of their potential partners or classify women among “wife material” (valuable people to marry) or “one night stands.” Faced with examples like this, Casas defends that romantic love is always a myth, “a construct for the working class to believe that they can also form a family, accumulate capital and generate an inheritance, the aspirational promise that in Spain has crystallized in a townhouse with swimming pool on the outskirts of the big city.” But, when so many young people continue to build the story of their lives or their identity around it, the discussion is again inevitable.
New media, identical confusion
María Ángeles Hernández is a psychologist and organizes emotional-sexual education workshops in schools and institutes with the Edisex Association. As he explains, the concerns of ESO students are not so different from those of adults who discuss on social networks, although they have not had time to elaborate on them as much: “Promiscuity and enjoyment are still judged and it is easy for kids to say that there are 'women looser than others'. The man has to be the macho who accumulates experiences while women are still expected to have to conquer them.” So what later becomes that body count or “roll counter” is the usual machismo, which already appears in the classrooms. “Although at these levels teenagers still do not use Tinder or other apps that obsess us adults, I notice that they spend many hours on the Internet because, year after year, the doubts related to pornography are more. Reproducing what they see in porn is making many of their first sexual relationships violent,” continues the psychologist.
Regarding their emotional relationships, there are still frequent myths related to jealousy (“if he is not jealous he does not love you enough”) or harmful practices related to the idea that “love hurts.” Of course, although Hernández continues to encounter a lot of homophobia among students, he believes that it is becoming less and that in schools and institutes there is more and more space for what queer. It is there where he finds reasons for hope, and year after year he finds more and more adolescents who consider themselves bisexual and express it in front of their classmates.
“Much more education is needed from childhood so that relationships, whether there is falling in love or not, are guided by the affection and enjoyment of both parties,” says Hernández. That, regarding the individual. Returning to those fiery virtual brawls that become debates about morality and politics, Espluga indicates: “The romantic is problematic at a political level and our response must judge the relational model, rather than particular relationships, and does not have to pass through a moral criterion.” of good/bad, but of activation regarding the possibility of building something else.” Building something else: that is the —very difficult— task that sometimes makes us so angry.
#Monogamy #bullet #angry #argue #love
