Erotic Justice: Making Social Change from Love

By Nicole Daedone

Nicole Daedone's Erotic Justice, is a revolutionary work that challenges the traditional paradigms of American society, leading to a higher purpose: personal and societal transformation. At the core of Erotic Justice is the thing that can right all wrongs: Love.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Soulmaker Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781961064089

Book preview

Erotic Justice

Soulmaker Press

soulmakerpress.com

Copyright © 2023 Soulmaker Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-961064-07-2 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-961064-08-9 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

As I was writing this book, I was often interrupted by my smartphone buzzing to alert me with the latest news, a now-familiar sensation. This time, in 2021, it was the news that acclaimed author Joshua Wolf Shenk had just resigned as editor in chief of the Nevada-based literary magazine The Believer. This was after he reportedly forgot to disable his computer camera before getting out of the bath during a video meeting. (Shenk had taken the meeting in this unusual way because soaking his body helped relieve the pain caused by his fibromyalgia.) This full-Monty shot seemed to have traumatized his colleagues, who, despite being West Coast literary hipsters, had apparently never seen a naked male body. Go figure.

This case was similar to that of University of Miami Professor John Peng Zhang, who’d lost his job a few months previously (in 2020) because a student in his business analytics class noticed that a bookmark on Zhang’s shared computer screen was labeled Busty college girls. No pornographic pictures appeared. Yet those three naughty words alone were enough to seal the professor’s fate. Despite the fact that the University of Miami regularly appears on lists of America’s best party schools, its students are apparently so chaste that even a glancing, unintended allusion to cyber-smut is enough to make them recoil like nineteenth-century Victorian schoolmarms overhearing a child’s raunchy schoolyard limerick.

Meanwhile, that same year, administrators at the University of Southern California temporarily replaced Greg Patton, a professor of business communication, after he gave a lecture illustrating how different languages feature filler words such as err, um, or you know. For many Chinese speakers, Patton noted, the equivalent consists of that that that, which sounds like ne ga, ne ga, ne ga. It wasn’t the N-word. It wasn’t even English. But for true cancel-culture enthusiasts, it was close enough.

I could add many more examples of these cancel-culture tales. But I decided to prune these back because simply listing and denouncing these stories isn’t my purpose. If that’s what you’re looking for, there are plenty of other books to choose from. In fact, you don’t even need to buy any book at all: Social media is bursting with cancel-culture tales galore.

It’s important to examine the effects these stories have on our emotional state. When you read those first few paragraphs, how did they make you feel? If you’re like many people, these narratives made you angry. You identified with the victim and wondered how the detractors could be so rigid and unfeeling. Maybe you even wanted to put this book down and tweet about these cases or others like them. You became so agitated by these mobs that you wanted to organize a counter-mob to punish them.

It isn’t just that this sort of ritualized verbal combat wastes our time and makes us angry: It also creates the same sort of defensive, unyielding, tribalized frame of mind that fuels cancel culture in the first place.

Humans are at their best—their most caring, their most loving, their most satisfied—when they open their minds and hearts to others. In relationships, we often call this quality vulnerability. But even when we’re among classmates, coworkers, or even complete strangers, it’s often possible to distinguish between those who are open to the world, and those who are closed up in what I call an armored emotional state.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The metaphor I’m offering here will make a lot more sense after you’ve read something about the man who first developed it almost a century ago. He was someone who knew a lot about the way in which the human longing to connect is thwarted by our defense mechanisms. And in the end, he learned a lot about what we now call cancel culture.

• • •

The term book burning is now used mostly in its figurative sense, but it wasn’t long ago that Western governments would literally incinerate controversial texts as a matter of public policy. So it was, on August 23, 1956, that the municipal incinerator on 25th Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan (known, somewhat eerily, as the Gansevoort Destructor Plant) was fed six tons of books and journals authored by a single man: Austrian-born doctor, psychoanalyst, sex researcher, and polymath Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957). It was perhaps the most dramatic means that Reich’s enemies had employed to cancel him. But it was hardly the first.

By this period in his life, Reich had become one of those paradoxical figures who was reviled in salons, newsrooms, and legislatures, even as he remained popular and influential among many ordinary people. A brilliant theorist and researcher in his early professional years, he had, by this time, launched into far-fetched scientific projects, including, most famously, his orgone energy accumulator—a sort of telephone booth in which, Reich claimed, patients’ illnesses would be cured through the cosmic energy source he referred to as orgone radiation. (For those who’ve seen the Woody Allen movie Sleeper: Reich’s device was the inspiration for the cylindrical orgasmatron into which Diane Keaton briefly disappears for some kind of robo-enhanced sex with her boyfriend.) Reich had also become a full-fledged conspiracy theorist, sometimes using an adapted version of his orgone machine to shoot down imaginary space aliens who, he claimed, were polluting our planet’s skies with deadly orgone radiation.

Even in his prime, during the 1920s, Reich’s writings betrayed signs of megalomania and (many of his contemporaries suspected) clinical insanity. But it was this same half-mad, egomaniacal personality that allowed him to wave away the stultifying conventions surrounding early twentieth-century sex research, as well as the personality cult surrounding his mentor, Sigmund Freud. By the time he’d become a pariah among his peers in the 1930s, Reich had already created a powerful new way of understanding sex and intimacy—a vision that outlasted his life and personal reputation.

Reich was born to a Jewish farmer in what is now Ukraine. Until well into adulthood, Wilhelm’s life was a parade of tragedy. A sister died in infancy. His mother committed suicide after she was discovered having an affair with Wilhelm’s tutor. Four years later, in 1914, Wilhelm’s father died of tuberculosis, and the family property was lost amid the chaos of World War I. Reich survived his stint as an Austrian army officer on the Italian front, but then returned to civilian life just as Vienna was plagued by famine.

By Reich’s own account, his sexual fantasies were lurid from an early age, and there is evidence that he suffered sexual abuse as a young child. In his therapeutic practice, he would massage patients and encouraged children to fantasize sexually. He treated the women in his life badly.

Though he studied medicine in university, Reich wasn’t cut out for an ordinary career as a doctor, in part because he remained enraptured with a quasi-religious vitalist conception of biological existence. Instead, he became interested in sexology, and fell into the orbit of his fellow Wiener (that’s what Vienna residents call themselves), Sigmund Freud. The founder of psychoanalysis, by now well into his sixties, was so impressed with Reich that he let the then-twenty-two-year-old undergraduate student consult with analytic patients. With Freud’s stamp of approval, Reich’s star rose quickly.

The relationship between the two men would eventually fray in the 1930s, as Freud ran out of polite ways to comment upon Reich’s increasingly bizarre ideas. But even in the early 1920s, Reich felt frustrated within the Vienna psychoanalytic community that Freud then dominated. As he wrote in his 1927 book, The Function of the Orgasm, psychotherapy was a lengthy process—often lasting years—in which patients were encouraged to talk in detail about anything that popped into their head. (In some cases, these sessions included long silences, during which analyst and patient alike would literally fall asleep.) The only people who could afford such treatments tended to be wealthy individuals, a fact that offended Reich’s then-Marxist sensibilities. And even these pampered patients, Reich noted, often didn’t derive much benefit from the treatment.

The whole system of Freudian analysis was oriented toward discovering the hidden psychosexual connections within a person’s brain. Yet Freud himself was somewhat vague when it came to the question of how a person would be cured of distress or neurosis once those connections, and the associated hidden memories, were discovered.

Reich preferred instead to work at clinics that offered free or low-cost psychoanalytic treatments to poor members of the community—people who’d formerly had no treatment options whatsoever (unless you counted the option of being deposited in an insane asylum by police or family members). It was in this capacity that he was able to observe the real connection between the way ordinary working people lived and the psychological problems they developed, something Freud and his more august contemporaries had trouble observing from their book-lined offices. In some cases (especially those involving attractive women), Reich would visit patients in their homes, make notes on the difficulties they faced in day-to-day life, and draw connections between their socioeconomic circumstances, expressed forms of psychological distress, and their physical tics and movements.

While many of Reich’s suppositions were absurdly broad, he also explored ideas that still lie at the root of modern psychotherapy—such as the way childhood poverty, neglect, or abuse can express itself in predictable patterns. In many cases, he noted, an adult’s psychological pain or distress emerged from her attempts to insulate herself from a recurrence of the original suffering, a phenomenon that we now commonly call a defense mechanism, but which Reich described with the more colorful term charakterpanzer, or—and now you see why I am taking you on this digression into Reich’s life—character armor.

Reich’s writing can be hard to follow because he had a tendency to leap hyperactively from theme to theme, often making up his own specialized jargon in the process. In many cases, he simply abandoned the language of science, and instead made his case allegorically, as if he were writing a science-fiction novel or a children’s book. It can all seem ridiculous, until the aha moment when the reader realizes she’s stumbled on a genuinely penetrating insight about the human condition.

One point Reich emphasized, for instance, was the paradox of desire. Common wisdom had it that unfulfilled appetites create stress and dissatisfaction. But Reich realized that in many cases, the opposite is true. Just as a sense of hunger is experienced as pleasurable anticipation if one is at a table about to be fed, a state of sexual tension blurs into joy if it is experienced amid the expectation of fulfillment.

At the heart of Reich’s model of human behavior, in fact, was the idea that we all require a natural cycling of tension and release to live joyful, emotionally authentic lives in social and sexual harmony with the rest of society. The attempt to create a situation of perfect harmony, on the other hand, leads to boring sex lives, inauthentic social interaction, and even, as detailed in this passage from Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm, fascistic politics:

Let us imagine two spheres: one is rigid, made of metal, the other elastic, something like a living organism, an amoeba, a starfish, a heart.

The metal sphere would be hollow, whereas the organic sphere would surround a complicated system of fluids and membranes of various densities having the ability to conduct electricity. The metal sphere would receive its electrical charge from the outside. . . . But the organic sphere, e.g., a pig’s bladder, would have a charging apparatus which operates automatically in the center. Hence, it would charge itself spontaneously from the inside. . . . If the inner production of energy becomes too great, the bladder can, by contracting a number of times, discharge the energy toward the outside, in short, can regulate its energy. This energy discharge would be extremely pleasurable because it liberates the organism from dammed-up tension. In the state of extension, the bladder would be able to carry out various rhythmic movements, e.g., produce a wave of alternating expansion and contraction, as in the movement of a worm. . . .

In these movements, the charged organic bladder would display a unity. If it were capable of self-perception, it would experience the rhythmic alternation of extension, expansion, and contraction in a pleasurable way. It would feel like a small child who hops around rhythmically because he is happy. In the course of these movements, bioelectrical energy would continually oscillate between tension-charge and discharge-relaxation. . . . Such a bladder would feel at one with its surroundings. There would be direct contact with other organic spheres, for they would identify with one another on the basis of the sensations of movement and rhythm. . . .

[But if] one were to exert and maintain continuous pressure over the entire surface, i.e., prevent it from expanding . . . it would be in a perpetual state of anxiety; that is to say, it would feel constricted and confined. Were it able to speak, it would beg for release from this tormenting condition. . . . A society consisting of such bladders would create the most idealistic philosophies about the condition of non-suffering. Since any stretching out toward pleasure, or motivated by pleasure, could be experienced only as painful, the bladder would develop a fear of pleasurable excitation (pleasure anxiety) and create theories on the wickedness, sinfulness, and destructiveness of pleasure. In short, it would be a twentieth-century ascetic. Eventually, it would be afraid of any reminder of the possibility of the so ardently desired relaxation; then it would hate such a reminder, and finally it would prosecute and murder anyone who spoke about it. It would join together with similarly constituted, peculiarly stiff beings and concoct rigid rules of life. These rules would have the sole function of guaranteeing the smallest possible production of inner energy, i.e., of guaranteeing quietness, conformity, and the continuance of accustomed reactions. It would make inexpedient attempts to master surpluses of internal energy which could not be disposed of through natural pleasure or movement. For instance, it would introduce senseless sadistic actions or ceremonies which would be of an essentially automatic nature and have little purpose (compulsive religious behavior). . . .

This bladder would always be plagued by anxiety. Everything else follows inevitably from this anxiety, e.g., religious mysticism, belief in a Führer, meaningless martyrdom. Since everything in nature moves, changes, develops, expands, and contracts, the armored bladder would have an alien and hostile attitude toward nature. It would conceive of itself as something very special, belonging to a superior race because it is dressed in a stiff collar or uniform. . . . To associate nature with bodily convulsions would be a blasphemy.

As scientific literature goes, this is a hot mess—a fever dream presented as argument. How else to describe a text that goes, in the space of just a few paragraphs, from an electrified sphere to a break-dancing pig bladder—which then somehow attains consciousness and a sense of community with other undulating spheres, while its hollow metallic counterpart goes on to a spherical life of murder, totalitarian political cultism, and goose-stepping parades conducted in well-starched collars? (The question of why a metal sphere would require clothing of any kind is not explained.)

And yet one doesn’t have to pop LSD or take a whirl in the orgasmatron to recognize the powerful grain of truth that Reich is herein describing. True harmony among human beings doesn’t emerge when emotionally flatlined control freaks rigorously police their behavior so as to avoid interpersonal conflict or upset the status quo. In a truly healthy, unarmored state, we allow our moods and energies to wax and wane naturally, while trusting that others will do so as well.

The most obvious metaphor here is sexual: Our passions build until they produce an exquisite sense of release. But the metaphor also works on an emotional level: The defining quality of Reich’s unarmored organic sphere is that it exists in a vulnerable state—a precondition for all forms of true human connection, including romantic love.

Reich personally consulted with plenty of patients who masturbated compulsively or had joyless sex with armies of anonymous strangers—emotionally destitute specimens whose hunger for connection caused them to endlessly repeat the rituals of physical release without ever experiencing the expected benefits. In these cases, he used some of the same tools as his more traditional psychoanalytic contemporaries to unlock the source of his patients’ charakterpanzer. But where possible, he also tried to simply get them physically active through sex, athletic exercise, or purposeful work, as opposed to simply sitting them on a couch week after week so they could let their mind drift through years of half-remembered childhood traumas.

As for the imaginary sphere’s adoption of rigid rules of life that ensure quietness, conformity, and the continuance of accustomed reactions enforced through senseless sadistic actions or ceremonies, it’s hard not to read into this a prophetic description of not only totalitarian movements, but all forms of modern dogmas and cults.

Good-faith politics, like unbiased, scientific truth-seeking and productive ideological debate, requires a spirit of give-and-take between different individuals and constituencies. By contrast, a system modeled after Reich’s image of the brittle, armored sphere—willfully disconnected from its environment and bristling with hostility at those who approach—is one that many of us will recognize from the world of cancel culture.

• • •

Reich’s own cancellation began two decades before his books were burned. At the 1934 International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Lucerne, he was asked to resign from the International Psychoanalytical Association, proceedings that ended with the somewhat pathetic sight of Reich literally camped outside the central meeting hall in a tent. By this time, he’d alienated the bourgeois, upper-middle class of Central Europe with his straight talk about sexual pleasure (the word fucking actually appears in the English translation of his texts). Nor did it help that a lot of his ideas—especially in regard to incest and childhood sexuality—really were genuinely unsettling, and that his habit of having sex with fellow researchers had left a trail of bad blood everywhere he’d worked.

Around the same time, the Nazis passed a special edict banning his work, as they imagined that the purpose of sex should be to populate the fatherland with healthy Aryans, not to yield pleasure or satisfaction. Communists, too, attacked Reich (and, in several parts of Europe, banned him from membership in national parties) because he rejected the Marxist dogma that all of society’s ills can be traced to economic inequality. In sum, Reich was ideologically friendless.

This was a time when many of Freud’s followers were doing their best to keep their movement apolitical—a stance that Reich denounced as incoherent and even cowardly. How could people be happy if their poverty prevented them from having any free time or privacy, he asked. At the time The Function of the Orgasm was published, the average Vienna resident slept four to a room. And family life was still governed by rigid Catholic moralism, a phenomenon that Reich analogized to the creeping fascistic movements that were ascendant globally. He had no patience for old men who ignored all this while puffing on pipes and opining about Oedipus. And they, increasingly, had no patience for Wilhelm Reich.

The sad irony of Reich’s life is that his own psychological state came to resemble that rigid, inorganic sphere he’d warned about in The Function of the Orgasm. Scarred by years of rejection, immersed in conspiracism, and isolated from old friends and supporters, Reich succumbed to a fatal heart attack on November 3, 1957, while serving time in a Pennsylvania prison after he’d been caught peddling pseudoscientific medical equipment. The extent of the cancellation he’d endured came in the months that followed, when the journals that had once published his articles with great fanfare now failed to even note the man’s passing. Whatever his sins, he deserved better. Ultimately, so do we all.

Yet history was kinder to Reich than his contemporaries. When the conservative 1950s gave way to the liberal counterculture of the 1960s, Reich’s work was rediscovered by a new generation of activists who didn’t particularly care about the judgments of greybeards in Lucerne. In a spectacle that Reich would have loved, members of Europe’s free-love communes even bombarded police with copies of his famous work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

These days, we’ve become accustomed to seeing giants of the past posthumously canceled because of their personal sins. But with Reich, it was the opposite: With the passage of time, his character flaws and professional failures were forgotten while his original insights were rediscovered and celebrated.

As Reich himself wrote, everything in nature moves, changes, develops, expands, and contracts—including ideological movements that sweep up millions of people. We have all witnessed cancel culture’s expansion. Now let us think about how we can make it contract.

• • •

One of the first well-publicized cases of cancel culture (even if the term didn’t exist back then) featured then-thirty-year-old communications executive Justine Sacco, who blew up her career in 2013 for tweeting a single dumb AIDS joke before getting on a plane to Africa. Her story was featured in a widely read 2015 book by Jon Ronson (So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed), who presented it as a cautionary tale.

Ronson’s book offered an important warning of all that was to come. In particular, he interviewed Sacco and other cancel-culture victims in detail about what they’d endured. By putting us in their shoes, Ronson made us realize that behind every mob frenzy is a real human being enduring real anxiety and pain.

The damage from cancel culture extends well beyond the individual victims we hear about. This is important, because there are those who might believe, in good faith, that broad movements such as social justice, anti-racism, and #MeToo are so important that they trump the pain experienced by a group of canceled individuals. In fact, cancel culture hurts everyone—because the atmosphere of fear and risk-aversion these mobs create inevitably leads to a blander, dumber, more socially sterile cultural and intellectual landscape.

At The Believer magazine, the lesson of Shenk’s ouster as editor in chief is that you must constantly be on guard among colleagues, because even a momentary mistake can cost you your job. Zhang’s students learned that even the occasional consumption of pornography—something almost every adult below the age of sixty has done at least once—is a source of shame. Sacco’s case teaches us never to make jokes.

There was once a day when young thinkers were taught to follow their individual instincts. Now, they’re rewarded for schooling like ocean fish. Despite the conceit that cancel-culture mobs are enforcing progressive values such as female empowerment and anti-racism, the reflexes being encoded in young minds are deeply reactionary in nature—a reversion to nineteenth-century pedagogical techniques in which children were required to stare glassy-eyed at a teacher while they rattled off memorized texts.

And this may help explain why some of the people who get canceled actually end up happier (in the long run) than they were before the mob came for them. Reich wrote of those armored souls who join together with similarly constituted, peculiarly stiff beings and concoct rigid rules of life. The experience of being cast out is painful and humiliating at first. But it is only when you are cast out that you realize how much you were sacrificing by desperately trying to stay in—which helps explain why many canceled people end up forming deep, high-trust friendships with one another. They are, in Reich’s metaphorical fever dream, like organic spheres that