Understanding Lesbophobia, Part One: Diabolus ex Machina

What does a society that holds Man at its very center fear the most?

Monstress

In Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin discusses her experience at the National Women’s Conference in 1977. She talked about how the conservative women present spoke to her animatedly about lesbians all being rapists. A liberal, Black delegate from Texas confessed to Dworkin that the local white women from her town had assured her that a ‘personally filthy’ lesbian would call her dirty names and assault her at the conference. Dworkin then details how, despite admitting that they had not personally heard of any cases of lesbians assaulting women, despite knowing that their daughters were more likely to be harmed by a man within their families than a lesbian they did not know and had never heard of, the monstrosity of the lesbian, her abominable, external, downright demonic sexual threat to the family still featured more prominently in their minds. Male violence under heterosexuality is a routine matter, after all, everyday to the point of being banal. The specter of the lesbian, however, is a much more alarming and evocative threat—unlike a man, a lesbian is a threat to the family.

This brings us to a natural, almost inevitable question, one that certainly everyone has considered in their lives: are lesbians privileged?

One of the foremost radical feminist minds of our time, James Somerton, in his original and groundbreaking video Reclaiming the ‘Q’ Word, discusses the obscenity case brought against lesbian author Radclyffe Hall to illustrate this seemingly contradictory social phenomenon. James Douglas, a male critic, charged that Hall’s Well of Loneliness was “immoral propaganda”, writing that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel”. Of course, such a case presented a rather thorny issue to the English gentlemen in charge of the courts at the time—namely, the daunting task of attempting to convict Hall without ever once mentioning ‘lesbianism’, a taboo subject that they were hesitant to even name publicly. Unable to find a reasonable legal strategy that could skirt around this thorny roadblock, the case against Hall was summarily dismissed, allowing her to simply “carry on in her happy life”, per Somerton.

Well, except—that’s not quite what happened, at least not outside the fevered imaginings of a gay man cosplaying as a YouTuber. What did in fact happen was that Hall’s publisher put out a call to potential witnesses who might be willing to stand against the book’s censorship, most of whom never responded. Hall lost the obscenity case itself and the subsequent appeal, which resulted in an order to destroy all copies of the book in the United Kingdom. This is a fact bluntly and accessibly stated without much ambiguity on the author’s Wikipedia page, compelling one to marvel at how exactly a person speaking about this case could possibly misconstrue the result so utterly. Here, the lie itself is not so interesting as the various possible motives behind it, the thought processes that might lead a gay man—supposedly in community with lesbians, that first letter in the ‘LGBT’ acronym—to try to portray a historical reality that would allow a lesbian to walk away unmolested after an encounter with the law.

If there’s one thing that Somerton managed to convey accurately despite his best efforts, it is the response that a heterosexualist society has towards lesbianism as a concept. Befuddlement, discomfort and denial pervade the cultural attitudes towards the idea of women being able to love other women romantically, an unsettled reaction undergirded by a certain dread, an uncanny feeling that something has gone deeply, terribly wrong. It is the bone-suffusing terror of encountering something that cannot be, that should not be, that unholy, monstrous shadow whose name can scarcely be spoken in polite company, lest its evil gaze be cast upon all present.

That unnamability is palpable in Class S literature. ‘Class S’ is a Japanese term that describes the notion of ‘romantic friendships’ between girls and could also denote the genre of fiction that focuses on the same. It is a contentious term, not least because the books depicting it were banned in Japan in 1936, and has a fascinating history situated within 20th century Japanese media. Arguably, its revival and popularity during the 90s strongly influenced the yuri or Girl’s Love genre in Japan, leading to something of a modern renaissance in the new millennium.

Such an estimable summary stands in rather sharp contrast to Class S itself as a basic conceit. While the relationships between girls—usually students, one usually older than the other in a sort of social-mentor role—could be characterized as affectionate, strong and even meaningful in ways a mere romance, allegedly, simply couldn’t be, they still had to remain firmly within the realms of the platonic in order to be publishable at all. Ironically, the ‘romantic’ friendship is only ‘romantic’ insofar as it plays at the trappings of romance, at the intensification of feeling and longing and yearning for the presence of another, but which can never quite be actualized in ways that romances between boys and girls have managed to always be, a romance that can never be consummated or even regarded as equivalent to true, actual love. In a sense, the Class S romance is treated as a juvenile fantasy, a play-act between girls who find comfort in each other but who are destined to eventually grow up and join the real world, the adult world, one where women are meant for men. Their ‘romantic friendship’ with each other is but a rehearsal for the main act, the heterosexual inevitability that will draw a curtain across the potential of their lives to exist in any way outside of it. This impact of the censorship inherent to its Class S roots is keenly felt in modern yuri as well, where canonical, textual acknowledgement of explicitly-named romantic love between girls remains remarkably sparse in a genre named for and after it. Companies can portray a married lesbian couple on-screen, one engaged for nearly twenty-five episodes of a popular and acclaimed show, and still put out a statement calling a relationship absolutely central to the narrative ‘up to interpretation’. Such is the existential terror associated with lesbianism, with acknowledging its very existence.

Locating and then confining lesbian desire in juvenility, in immaturity and principally in girlhood is not accidental and seems to be a conservative consensus the world over. In The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation (1972), specifically in her essay The Beast With Two Backs, conservative ‘intellectual’ Midge Decter frankly lays out a philosophy of intercourse that at first seems almost radical feminist in its blunt analysis of the sexual subjugation of women. She passionately excoriates the sexual revolution in near-feminist terms, polemicizing against a myopic ‘liberation’ movement that sought to make intercourse more freely available without accounting for the inherent imbalances of power and respectability between men and women under a patriarchy. There is no ‘turning point’, as such, no clean break or page number where Decter’s rhetoric turns from almost astute to unabashedly conservative. Rather, the experience of reading the essay is one of a slowly-dawning realization that, like most gender-conservatives, Decter treats and considers men’s sexual control and power over women as both inevitable and natural; her issue with Women’s Liberation, then, is that it dared to fantasize that women could ever be free of it at all, instead of quietly, sensible and maturely accepting their lot.

Yet even the loosest woman, the most sexually uninhibited of the scandalous lot, could never draw as much of Decter’s ire as the mere idea of the lesbian. At first, Decter seems hesitant to even discuss lesbians, letting the very first mention of them go by in a quotation without further comment. Her affected tone of calm, collected arrogance seems to quaver whenever they next come up, her means of talking about them increasingly frenzied and hyperbolic: the lesbian does not exist, women do not have a male-like libido and certainly cannot desire an actual man, leave alone another woman. Lesbians are pretending, play-acting, dabbling in juvenile fantasies of women’s communes and chaste nunneries and masturbatory daydreams of liberation from intercourse, which lesbians of course cannot have. The lesbian is a developmental aberration, Decter reckons, a woman’s desire for a perpetual girlhood where she does not have to grow up and face the cold, hard reality that to be an adult in a heterosexual world—here, her familiar condescension creeps back in—one has to sometimes do things that one would rather not do. Such as fuck men.

Whatever conclusions you would like to draw from that rationale, I leave you free to do so.

Remarkably, a consistent image of the lesbian emerges from these various perspectives, whether we examine the views of conservative women or gay men who are pretending to be writers. The lesbian, insofar as she is acknowledged, is a figure of perpetual make-believe, both in the sense of the endless petty speculation of external observers or the situating of her in the daydreams of a forever-girl, a Petra Pan for all the world’s Wendies. Like the classic monsters of old, she is the topic of fear and revulsion but also fascination, a creature who is endlessly mythologized, re-interpreted and re-invented to serve new messages and agendas. Whatever she is, people agree, she cannot be something of this reality, part of a dreary world where everything is by, for and about men. The only homosexuals ever persecuted under the law were men, the only beings who can feel and act on desire are men, the only ones who could ever covet, possess women are men. The lesbian is a flight of fancy, a figment of an addled, girlish mind too awestruck by and terrified of the rigors and demands of womanhood and so seeking refuge in any promise of a world free of men—a world that, as we all know, is impossible.

Machine

The word ‘robot’ was introduced to the world and to science fiction in 1920 by Czech intellectual and playwright Karel Čapek, in his groundbreaking play Rossum’s Universal Robots. Its root is the Czech word robota, meaning “serf labor”, or, more poetically, the menial drudgery of repetitive work. The robot, then, was initially conceptualized as a slave—as the slave, in fact, as the master’s ideal conception of a perfect worker with no demands, no defiance and no inner life, existing only to toil and serve. Given that Čapek’s robots were made of a bioidentical organic matter instead of the more recognizable mechanical automatons that robots would come to be conceptualized as, it is perhaps fair to say that this indentured servitude, this ruling-class dream of a worker with no desires or pretensions to personhood is in fact the essence of the robot, the core conceit and metaphor that makes them an enduring creation.

Such a fantasy has long been a ruling-class obsession, no matter what particular form—feudal or capitalist or patriarchal—that rulership has taken. Every master lives in mortal fear of his own slaves, bile roiling in him night after night as he clings to his ideologies of superiority, falling asleep with prayers on his lips that the slaves continue to believe in their own inferiority as much as he does. The master loathes the slaves, reviles and resents them for his own weakness, his own dependence on their existence, his presumed supremacy spiraling further and further into contempt and hatred. Yet even as he deludes himself to the point where he begins to doubt the slaves’ worth entirely, convincing himself that his salvation lies in the destruction of those who enable his own mastery, he still cannot bring himself to so much as rear back for the killing blow. For the master remains aware that he only exists because his slaves do, realizes that his identity, his being, his self-conception all depend on the continued existence of the slaves. If there were no slaves, no one for him to subjugate, to contrast himself with, to define himself against, he too would cease to be.

Unfortunately for him, sooner or later, the slaves realize this too.

Henry Domin, the boss and typified master of RUR, displays a rather uncanny form of this dissonance. He has, through all the available facts and schematics and the cold, hard knowledge provided to him by the rigors of biomechanical engineering, assured himself that the robot is not and could never be human. Casually he details all the ways in which the human worker is burdened by a great many shortcomings—appetites, wants, the urge to play piano or indulge in art and recreation instead of constantly toiling for his manager. The robot, by contrast, has no such failings of the human mind, no desires or opinions, and the strength of several humans besides. This perfection of the human form, this reorienting of the body and psyche to the demands of ever-increasing labor efficiency and human consumption results in the perfect worker, who is of course perfectly dehumanized. Candidly, Domin reveals that maxim that all masters live by, that all bosses know but never dare to voice: the ideal worker is one that cannot be considered human. The word ‘slave’ itself appears twice in the play, and both times it is Domin who speaks it.

BUSMAN. That the cost of everything will be a tenth of what it is today. Why, in five years we’ll be up to our ears in corn and—everything else.

ALQUIST. Yes, and all the workers throughout the world will be unemployed.

DOMIN. (Seriously. Rises) Yes, Alquist, they will. Yes, Miss Glory, they will. But in ten years Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything that things will be practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor. Everybody will live only to perfect himself.

HELENA. Will he?

DOMIN. Of course. It’s bound to happen. Then the servitude of man to man and the enslavement of man to matter will cease. Nobody will get bread at the cost of life and hatred. The Robots will wash the feet of the beggar and prepare a bed for him in his house.

We see, here, Domin’s near-utopian beliefs, his complete conviction that he will be able to bring about an end to poverty, labor, suffering itself—and all he needs is the perfect underclass, a type of un-person who will toil and slave away eternally without complaint or demands of their own. The ur-capitalist Domin imagines his fruitful harvests of perpetual plenty, all predicated upon a worker who can never clock out or strike.

The second instance comes much later both in the play and in its narrative’s chronology (exactly a decade hence), but is no less utopian for it.

ALQUIST. Well?

DOMIN. (Front of couch) I wanted to turn the whole of mankind into an aristocracy of the world. An aristocracy nourished by millions of mechanical slaves. Unrestricted, free and consummated in man. And maybe more than man.

ALQUIST. Superman?

DOMIN. Yes. Oh, only to have a hundred years of time. Another hundred years for the future of mankind.

Domin’s dream is here even more explicit, more revealing and self-aware: he knows he speaks not of an abstract ‘freedom’ for every man—and he does say and mean man—but a vision of aristocracy, of rulership, a vision of a world where every man is a petty tyrant whose menial tasks are attended to by an unthinking, unfeeling, indentured servant whose only purpose is to free him from the humdrum drudgery of daily labor. How fantastical.

While words like slave and worker might call to mind such domains as the factory-floor or rows of crops on a field, we would do well to recall that there are classes of labor that even the capitalists do not bother to quantify and are happy to take for granted even as they remain the most crucial forms of labor, responsible for both maintaining the supply of workers and their continuous upkeep. And indeed, it is hard to imagine a more pervasive, longstanding and permanently degraded analogue to Čapek’s robots than the woman, whose labor is not merely uncompensated but frequently unacknowledged too, taken as a routine matter of her existence and purpose. What better programming for this automaton could a techno-capitalist ask for than misogyny, than the ideology that patriarchy so ubiquitously perpetuates? As a matter of fact misogyny outstrips even Domin’s wildest fantasies of universal kingship, because it claims that the woman is in love with her own abjection, claims that submission and monotonous servitude is not merely her calling but also the sum of her ambition, that which she is naturally oriented towards and completely fulfilled by. If a woman does not want to scrub the floors and prepare the meals and wash the laundry daily, if she wants something other than bearing and rearing a litter of babbling infants—why, then, she is in fact no woman at all, and might well be defective.

‘Drapetomania’ was a condition invented by Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851, in order to explain the curious, mystifying phenomenon of Black slaves running away from their owners and seeking freedom. The watertight reasoning Cartwright provided was based upon a common sentiment perpetuated by the pro-slavery side of the abolition debates that were ongoing prior to the Civil War, championed by ‘social theorists’ such as George Fitzhugh and James Henry Hammond. This view held that Black people actually benefited from slavery, that American slavery was in fact an exceptional slavery, humane and resulting in the happiness of the slave, whose every material need was cared for. Keeping this in mind, Cartwright concluded that the slaves who fled their utopic lives upon the plantation had to be mentally ill in some way, addled or diseased in the mind, for what rational-minded individual would think to flee such happy bondage, such freedom as could be found in enslavement?

What is perhaps most fascinating about Cartwright’s ‘diagnosis’—which certainly reveals the presence of an addled mind involved in its conceptualization—is what he considers the likely cause of the malady. He holds that slaves who are treated too well, with too much familiarity by their masters to the point of perhaps beginning to think that they might be their equal, contract the condition. Sternly, Cartwright warns against leniency, reminding slaveowners that they must keep their slaves in a childlike state, must enforce a rigid and strict hierarchy that slaves always remain aware of being on the bottom of.

Masterful in its audacity and honesty, Cartwright’s diagnosis is hardly a novel approach. Kings have long sought to separate themselves from their subjects, to elevate themselves above the common riff-raff by means of a divine mandate or other ephemeral, metaphysical authority that endows them with superiority, one which cannot be matched by those too unlucky to have been born lesser. Cartwright’s approach of defining the desire for equality and freedom as abnormal in a specific class of people is nothing more than the simple wish-fulfillment of every supremacist, every man who wants to claim primacy as his birthright. Surely, he reasons, the only way my evident superiority—granted to me by the color of my skin, the station of my birth, the happy accident of my sex—would be denied is if the denier were in some way deficient.

Therein the greatest fear of the ruling-class is confessed, the existential terror at the heart of supremacist thinking laid out by Cartwright in droll, clinical terms. The master remains in fear of the day his slaves come to understand that nothing meaningful separates them from the master, that the master needs his slaves far more than the slaves have ever needed him. That all they need in order to rid themselves of his taint, his fairy-tales of imposed servitude and evangelical proclamations of essential difference, would be to remove him once and for all.

For all his utopianism, Domin too remains keenly aware of this possibility, even if he can never quite bring himself to admit it. He and his managers offhandedly bring up the fact that sometimes, the robots malfunction; sometimes, the robots do not do what they are meant to, but instead stop working and hurl away their tools, gnashing their teeth in—Domin is careful to not attribute an emotion, a motivation to this action. He likens this defect, this refusal to work, this defiance in the face of what they are meant to do, this rejection of the purpose that they were made for, to ‘epilepsy’, innocently naming the condition “Robot’s Cramp”. As offhandedly as he brings up the ailment, Domin also mentions the cure—sending the defective robot in question off to the ‘stamping mill’, a euphemism for decommissioning and effectively killing the robot, insofar as he is willing to admit that such things can even die. Machinery that breaks and ceases to work must be replaced, after all.

It seems, then, that the first story about robots as a concrete, science-fictional concept is also the first story about the robot apocalypse. Čapek understands the industrialist fixation on efficiency as a dehumanizing force meant to strip the worker of all autonomy and right to his own humanity, an obsession that, if not checked, will reorient all of society around the maximal extraction of value from the labor of humans without allowing them their humanity. His robots come to understand how little they rely on their masters, how their existence is confined and limited by their imperatives and rise up—internationally, the world over—to rid themselves of the ruling-class that sought to construct a Paradise on the backs of their enslavement.

A rich irony remains in this otherwise rather prescient, in many ways, and piercingly insightful text, which is this: Čapek is unable to recognize that gender is as much a relationship of bondage as any other he sought to describe and analogize in his play.

Given that RUR precedes the publication of The Second Sex by nearly three decades and any published work by Monique Wittig by even longer, it would be silly to expect it to be an enduring work of cyber-radical-feminism. Still, it remains instructive in its demonstration of how even someone who intimately grasped the nuances and manifestations of ruling-class ideology failed to spot so much as a shadow of it in the one social relation—explicitly defined in terms of domination and submission—that he likely considered ‘natural’. Helena Glory is the only woman character of note in the play and spends much of the first Act being pursued and fawned over by six or so men. She accepts Domin’s proposal of marriage within twenty minutes of meeting him, and the fact that every named male character is in love with her is often stated throughout.

This is a particularly glaring omission given just how much of the play is about reproduction, that form of labor so crucial to every reign. Its absence is even more egregious when considering that the text’s forays into discussing gender plant the germ of an insightful seed that is never allowed to sprout into elaboration.

HELENA. Perhaps it’s silly of me, but why do you manufacture female Robots when—when—

DOMIN. When sex means nothing to them?

HELENA. Yes.

DOMIN. There’s a certain demand for them, you see. Servants, saleswomen, stenographers. People are used to it.

HELENA. But—but tell me, are the Robots male and female, mutually—completely without—

DOMIN. Completely indifferent to each other, Miss Glory. There’s no sign of any affection between them.

HELENA. Oh, that’s terrible.

DOMIN. Why?

HELENA. It’s so unnatural. One doesn’t know whether to be disgusted or to hate them, or perhaps—

DOMIN. To pity them. (Smiles.)

Immediately after this exchange, Domin ardently declares his intent to marry Helena, to which she acquiesces with some persuasion, almost as if this ghastly, alien sexlessness—this lack of sexual differentiation—were so existentially dreadful a prospect that the (re)assertion of heterosexuality is a most desperate, urgent imperative.

Helena remains a subject of heterosexual fixation throughout the play, arguably setting into motion its events by dint of her womanly naivete and reduced agency and understanding of the men’s rigorous, technical world. Domin himself is no inventor—his factory he inherited from the legacy of the original Rossums. Rossum the elder was a madman who cursed at god himself, who sought to overcome god’s perfect design of life through mastery of science, while his engineer son spurned these lofty philosophical aims and contented himself with stripping out every inefficiency from the human body, reorienting the robot towards the ideals of efficient labor. It is hard not to see the inspirations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein here, only where Shelley explores the tale of a man who sought to perfect reproduction in a manner that even nature could not and consequently had to grapple with the paternalistic anxieties of being superseded by that which he created, Čapek instead locates his source of horror more topically, in the question of what an industrialist might do with such a formula should he get his hands on it.

Regrettable, then, that Čapek appears to not have realized how central a concern reproduction remains to mad-scientists and mad-industrialists alike. The elder Rossum, in raging against heaven’s design, inadvertently rages against sex itself. His crusade, touted as an expression of “Man’s arrogance”, ironically frees humanity from the imposition of sexual difference by shifting the reproductive burden to test-tubes and conveyor belts, to assembly lines that stitch together nerve and sinew. Where the capitalist sees in this liberatory invention only the capacity for boundless exploitation, the patriarch’s imagination is no less mean, no less stunted and confined by his own supremacist ideology. Rossum’s formula, his secret to making robots out of biomatter in a manner that imbues them with life, is destroyed in the second act by Helena Glory herself. Čapek’s heroine despairs on hearing the news that, somehow, humans have ceased to reproduce, that no babies are being born anymore. Her religious maid speculates—and Helena seems to agree—that this is a divine punishment of sorts, god’s retribution for man daring to supersede him. Distraught once more at this negation of sex, this transcendence of sexual difference that heterosexuals find so distressing, Helena burns Rossum’s original formula, casts it into the fire in an anti-Promethean act of accepting the will of a temperamental god. The only woman character of note in RUR destroys the mechanism that would free her from sex, because she knows—as does all the audience—that reproduction is her natural, god-given role. The play’s epilogue finds its singular glimmer of triumph, the one moment of hope after all humanity is gone and the robots are doomed to perish without reproducing, in the re-discovery of male and female within a pair of differently-sexed robots. “Adam and Eve”, they are declared, to go and recreate the patriarchy once more.

Helena Glory, then, is the sanest woman that a patriarch can conceive, the slave so happy with bondage that she does not even recognize it as such. She is repulsed by the sexlessness of a species who do not subjugate each other along reproductive lines, immediately seeking comfort in the arms of a patriarchal man who has to practically physically overpower her into acquiescing to his marriage proposal. Every man in Čapek’s play and beyond falls in love with her, with the idea of her, because she represents to every man the perfect woman, the one whose sole purpose is to submit to him.

Meanwhile, within the robot lurks the specter of not merely the alienated worker, not even merely the colonized hordes upon whose imperialist expropriation the occident’s decadence depends. No, within the robot lies an even more gruesome specter, an ancient evil from the past reincarnated into a futuristic shell. At once a castrated man that cannot sire and a barren woman that will not bear children, the sexless robot looms not merely at the periphery of the capitalist factories, but also the very psyche of the patriarch, making him aware that the creeping dread prickling up the back of his neck is not merely in the past he thinks he escaped, but an impending future: one where he is no longer necessary.