Mind Fuck: The Science in Sexism
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.” — Francis Bacon
“Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.” — Groucho Marx
“Perhaps that is what love is — the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.” — Phyllis Rose
Sex and Violence
According to the book English Through the Ages the word ‘screw’ was in use by 1725 as a reference to sex. Similarly, the word ‘pump’ was in use with the same sense by 1730. (William Brohaugh, English through the Ages, 185) That these metaphors are so “old-fashioned” may come as a surprise. At first glance they don’t seem to fit the 18th century character as remembered by standard history. But that character is, of course, an idealization from the perspective of a particular social class. It is a figure enlightened by the use of reason and the methodology of science to liberate humanity from the superstitious falsehoods of religion and other such things. And there is certainly much more to the 18th century soul than that.
As animated anatomical drawings, ‘screw’ and ‘pump’ are exemplary images for understanding the time period they were illustrated from. They psychologically record an awareness of social conditions and power dynamics in the late 17th and early 18th century. They are undocumented migrants from the past, a part of the English speaking oral tradition. As the shortest of short stories, they were handed down to future generations, not by scholars or aristocrats, but more likely by the artisan class instead.
The early 18th century was a time when imagining nature as a machine was fashionable. The influence of a rediscovered Aristotle guided intellectual attention toward motion and change. Celestial bodies were seen to move across the sky like parts inside a watch. The processes were synchronized and the parts were connected in a special way. Nature was in a state of constant change while retaining a recognizable form of regularity. It was beautiful to behold, worthy of poetic/artistic inspiration, and capable of being understood with rational naturalism.
Clockwork technology was on the cutting edge of manufacturing capabilities. In the same way that computer technology has been miniaturized to fit inside of a so-called “smart” watch, clockwork technology had been scaled down from its predecessors. The technology was so significant and revolutionary that God was imagined as a Divine Watchmaker (a career change from His previous duties as a Divine Architect and the sculptor imagined by Aristotle in the Physics). His creation was, after all, the ultimate machine, and comparing it with the most admired technology of the time was the best one could do to make sense of it.
Acquiring knowledge of the world, and understanding how it “works,” wasn’t just a matter of explaining it in naturalistic terms. It was also a matter of describing it in human terms. By this I mean that nature had to be imagined as something artificial—as an artifact — the kind of thing a craftsman could make. If we truly understood the effects of nature, we could reproduce and modify those effects in testable and predictable ways, but only so long as we first imagine nature as the kind of thing that is both understandable and malleable to begin with, like the things we make — like a watch. Consequently, if we had enough knowledge in our possession, together with the technological means, we could transform nature to better serve our species, or we could even make a nature of our own — a world designed to our own specifications and exchangeable for the suffering and corruption inherent in the one we have now.
Learning how nature operates was simultaneously a study of its design by God, or whatever force was the agency of its creation, because it had to be created by something or someone since nothing can be created without some source of energy to do the creating. Knowledge of nature, therefore, achieves a closeness with God and renders those who “cracked the code” of its architecture more God-like. But in the 17th and 18th centuries this wasn’t solely for the purpose of attaining a state of omnipotence over nature in order to control it. It was also an aesthetic appreciation. After all, like an artisan who makes a watch both functional and beautiful, if there was a God who created the universe, why would He bother to spend all that time and energy if He didn’t think it was beautiful and worth loving? This is where secularism and atheism, coupled with industrialization, has a tendency to go awry. Once God is dead, all too often, Beauty and Love are buried with Him as “collateral damage.” Due in part to the specialization of Science, which created a false separation from philosophy and other disciplines, instead of a world to appreciate, we have a world whose value is determined by how useful it is to the species. Socially, instead of a world inhabited by people worth appreciation as other people we have a world where one’s value is measured in terms of occupation and economic power as a member of the true “me” generation.
The body, of course, is located between nature and society. Since it was considered an extension of nature, bound to it by change and mortality, it was perceived through the machine image as well. The most elaborate examples are the automata of the 18th century. Beautifully crafted by hand and exquisitely engineered, automata were automatic puppets built with clockwork technology. Some were made in human form and essentially “programmed” to write words and draw pictures. They are kinetic sculptures that reveal the amount of time and energy spent imagining the body as a beautiful and autonomous mechanical device that could set itself in motion. By recreating the body’s movements so precisely, the art of making automata expressed in physical form the perception that we, too, were just machines.
It is no surprise, then, that in addition to everything else, the mechanical fantasy was impressed upon human behavior, the motions made by the body, to forge new metaphorical images. But instead of mapping out a high fashion baroque blueprint for nature in order to use it for the common good, as the educated elite scholars had done with clockwork imagery, words like ‘screw’ and ‘pump’ have stories of a different nature to tell — a vulgar and more naturalistic narrative on social manipulation and exploitation that had nothing to do with liberation and the common good: the oppression of the artisan class who also participated in the society-wide oppression of women.
Before entering a relationship with sex, ‘screw’ and ‘pump’ had other connotations. Half a century earlier, by 1770, ‘screw’ had already been used to mean a “torture device,” in addition to “fleecing” or “robbing,” (William Brohaugh, English through the Ages, 175) while ‘pump’ had been used in the sense shown in the phrase “pumped for information.” (William Brohaugh, English through the Ages, 115) In all cases, each ‘screw’ and ‘pump’ was a ‘fuck’ that violated a boundary of one kind or another.
The poetic license to modify ‘screw’ and ‘pump’ in these ways would appear to have been exercised from a male perspective. Further support for this comes by way of the word ‘machine’ itself, which was in use by 1770 as a noun for “penis.” (William Brohaugh, English through the Ages, 204) As images of body and behavioral mechanization, all three metaphors function to project and reinforce male dominance while further evaporating women from social relevance. In spite of its banter about equality and so on, the 18th century shows a strengthening oppression of women (and the artisan class) rather than a growing liberation.
If these vulgar usages were crafted by men, it was most likely craftsmen in particular. After all, they were the ones “pumped of information” and “robbed” of knowledge by the intellectual elite during the Scientific Revolution. People like Robert Boyle and Francis Bacon assumed an arbitrary authority to make craft secrets essentially “open source.” They “freely shared the results of their investigations by publishing them [and] have been hailed almost universally for their unselfish contributions to human enlightenment and progress.” (Clifford D. Conner, A People’s History of Science, 20) But for the artisans craft secrecy was
a necessary condition for their economic survival… When well-off gentlemen who could afford to be magnanimous exposed the lore of the craftsmen to public view, it was, from the standpoint of the artisans’ interests, an act of robbery…
There is no reason to doubt [Robert] Boyle’s sincerity in assuming that “improvement of the trades” would result in bettering the tradesman’s condition, but that was not what happened. In the context of a nascent capitalist economy, the benefits of increased productivity went not to the producers but to a privileged few whose access to capital allowed them to gain control of the productive process. The artisans who forfeited their knowledge were for the most part eventually forced into dependency as wageworkers. (Clifford D. Conner, A People’s History of Science, 20–22)
Western science did not develop inside of an intellectual bubble made from thin air. It came about from the time and effort spent by the artisan class who had very practical problems to solve. Their practice depended on their ability to predict how various materials behave under various conditions. People like Leonardo da Vinci expose the way in which science and engineering was inseparable from the arts, but his interdisciplinary approach to the world is often represented as an exception when, in context, it was not so unusual at all.
‘Screw’ and ‘pump’ were adapted to new usages at a time when the Scientific Revolution was beginning to join forces with the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The Scientific Revolution is situated within the Age of Discovery and European Colonialism, beginning not long after Columbus set sail on that infamous westbound course. Consequently, the narrative of science has a lot in common with imperialism and industrialization. They all tell the same heroic story: journey into unknown territory, discover new things, assert authority and supremacy, extract whatever resources are available by whatever means necessary, return home and consume those resources to develop wealth and power.
For science, knowledge is the resource that comes from a conquest of nature while the wealth it generates is derived from improvements in medicine and agriculture, among other things. However, in an industrial/colonial context the narrative takes a different tone. The resource becomes laborers, slaves, animals, precious metals or oils, and the wealth is literal financial wealth, not for the common good but for those who already had the necessary financial power to capitalize on the circumstances of the time.
Members of the artisan/working class had firsthand awareness of what was going on — they were “fucked over” and treated like the instruments they built to serve the ambitions of those from a higher rank. From their point of view they were treated like women, because that was the image they had of women at the time. In response to the socio-economic pressures of a changing European society where the balance of financial power was shifting away from Churches and Monarchies to secular entities, the mechanical metaphors left buried in the English language for later archeological excavation were powerful and potent devices in their own right — permanent language graffiti that framed oppression and arbitrary superiority in both directions.
The Invisible Woman
The images of a ‘screw’ and ‘pump’ are not of intercourse between the sexes. Instead, they constitute a diagram of the penis. The vagina is left invisible. It is that which is ‘screwed’ or ‘pumped’ and is not part of the device itself. It is the counterpart the apparatus acts upon and has no distinct form. It is an intellectual displacement and pick-pocketing of credit for sexual action. The power to create life becomes an attribute of male anatomy while female anatomy becomes passive material that provides little more than shelter for the incubation of the man’s seed.
However, it could be that these modern usages of ‘screw’ and ‘pump’ were coined by women rather than men. Instead of creating a poetic device of ignorance and exclusion, women may have designed them to illustrate their invisibility within a male-dominated society while incidentally indicating what was happening to the artisan class in general. Either way, regardless whether they were authored my men, women or a combination of the two, the story remains one of oppression. And whoever the people were that came up with such mechanical poetics, they must have been familiar with the Archimedean Screw.
The Archimedean Screw has been used since ancient times to pump water. It is a large screw inserted into a body of water at an angle. As it rotates, the threads that spiral around the shaft lifts water upward, creating the essential in-out function of a pump: to move a substance from one place to another. It is simultaneously both a screw and a pump. Not only is its structure phallic, its function is phallic as well.
“Screwing” is all about what the masculine operator “gets out of it.” It’s his objective at the expense of the other half. The water that is pumped, or the “bitch” that is “fucked,” is used for some other purpose. She is a means to an end — to irrigate fields, drain wetlands or to serve as a vehicle for satisfaction (not necessarily sexual) and/or the production of an heir (a reproduction of himself).
The Archimedean Screw is an emblem for heroic sex. Heroic fantasy isn’t the only style that guides our understanding of sex, and nor is it performed by men exclusively, but it is the type reflected when sex is imagined as a “screw” or “pump.” Conquest, victory, another notch in the bedpost, first base, second base, third base, score! Who’s the man!? Catcalls, harassment, abuse, assault, molestation, rape and murder. Heroic sex is sex that doesn’t have anything to do with sex. It is not role-play nor a playful exercise of the heroic fantasy. Performance in heroic sex sets out to obtain a false sense of power, a sense of domination, superiority and control over the other. It creates a delusional mirror through which the heroic figure, by way of conquest, achieves the satisfaction of creating a copy of himself that resonates with a glow of greatness and omnipotence.
Heroic fantasy is expressed in many behaviors in many situations and contexts. The common narrative between European colonialism, science, enlightenment and industrialization, for instance, reek with heroism like too much cologne or body spray. Figures that embody heroic fantasy are often positioned within the Western tradition as role-models to direct the imagination toward a notion of the good life and how to get it. However, manifestations of the heroic good life always come at the expense of another entity or object. It is always dependent on the conquest and sacrifice of a defined other that resists the hero’s ambitions in addition to a defined other that needs to be saved.
Take, for example, the industrial variation of a Damsel in Distress. The villain, who desires to be like the hero in one way or another, binds the damsel to the tracks of an oncoming train. The hero, of course, rescues her before the train arrives, winning her hand in marriage while the villain must sulk away in defeat.
The hero is aligned with capitalist technology as a force for good, but that technology is simultaneously a weapon that threatens the damsel with destruction. Furthermore, the hero’s status as a heroic figure depends on being victorious over the villain who put the damsel in restraints and in harm’s way. Consequently, the hero’s identity is bound to her imprisonment, torture and endangerment while the villain buffers the hero from guilt and responsibility. This makes the villain a shadow of both the hero and the damsel, since the villain’s threat creates the excuse, or necessity, for a hero while his defeat creates the appearance of the liberated damsel. But instead of freedom, she becomes the wife of an industrialized, capitalist man out of gratitude or a sense of obligation. He “won her over.” She was defeated as well. No longer a damsel in distress, she is now a damsel to possess.
To become a hero by means of manipulation, deception, confinement and the infliction of suffering is to enact a fantasy in the predator/prey motif. The formation and assertion of the predator’s superiority over its prey, which puts the prey into the predator’s service, and is reflected in the oppression of men over women and civilization over nature, among other things, is an attribute of the psychopath. It is behavior where the ends always justify the means, where the other is nothing more than a stepping-stone toward the attainment of a goal.
Descriptions of psychopathy, or sociopathic personalities, speak of their inability to imagine the other. Psychopaths are well able to size up situations and charm people. They perceive, assess, and relate, making use of any opportunity. Hence their successful manipulations of others. But the psychopath is far less able to imagine the other beyond a fantasy of usefulness, the other as a true interiority with his or her own needs, intentions, and feelings. (James Hillman, A Blue Fire, 170–171)
Further, psychopathic heroism is also narcissistic heroism, which is clearly embedded in the Archimedean Screw. The masculine operator is on top probing the feminine water below. She is clear — invisible, but reflective. As he looks down, he sees a mirror image of himself in action upon her, which seduces his ego through masturbatory stimulation (the screw is concurrently a downward penetrating phallus and an upward ejaculating phallus). The power that emerges from an assertion of dominance over the other — nature and/or women — overwhelms him with infatuation. He becomes blind to that which he is engaged, in denial of the feminine counterpart and her experience of the world; what she thinks, feels, dreams and desires. All he sees are shining reflections that catch the glare of the sun, and all he hears are echoes (Echo) of his imagined magnificence remarkably reminiscent of God Himself.
Narcissistic heroism must control the feminine in order to avoid the realization of impotence. Without the ability to create life in the way that female bodies can, the hero cannot become the God-like figure he dreams of, since God, as a monotheistic deity, contains both paternal and maternal powers (even though in Catholicism it is often expressed by the image of Mary). As a result, he sets out to conquer, acquire and control the feminine. He criticizes women for lacking a penis, but that is only a reaction to his non-existent womb.
[F]rom the biological point of view woman has in motherhood, or in the capacity for motherhood, a quite indisputable and by no means negligible physiological superiority…
…Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement? (Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology, 60–61)
Womb Envy motivates the subjugation of women. Rendering women inferior and weak puts them in need of men’s guidance and protection, which in turn places the womb under paternal authority. Everything maternal, from reproduction to nurturing, becomes a male-centric activity. Sex becomes ‘screwing’ or ‘pumping,’ fatherhood becomes ‘breadwinning,’ childbirth becomes a ‘delivery’ by a medical professional, and education becomes an act of ‘drilling’ the young with information.
In Other Words
René Descartes’ solipsistic vision of experience, which has largely defined the modern era’s sense of self, leaves nothing to love and nothing to admire but the lone, rational ego. For the narcissistic hero, since the existence of everything else is in doubt, the only thing truly worth appreciating is itself. This displaces the awareness of beauty and the desire to love and be loved from a necessary sense of otherness.
It is important to recall that the story of Narcissus contains its own cure. Narcissus does not know it is his image in the water. He believes the image is someone else — the otherness of one’s soul, the otherness of another living being, or the otherness of nature itself — and without that sense of otherness love is ungrounded and beauty is forsaken.
The love in narcissistic heroism isn’t really love at all. Since it comes by way of dismissal, deception, exploitation and force, it effectively destroys the possibility for genuine, sincere love. It is, therefore, a fear of love, a fear of being vulnerable to an other — a fear of becoming “prey.”
The otherness Narcissus experiences opens a door to Psyche and Eros. Psyche desires to love and be loved, but unlike Narcissus she also wants to see the other for who he truly is (Eros wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Psyche, so he kept his identity a secret).
One night, while Eros was sleeping, Psyche set out to kill him (because she thought he was a monster). When she discovered the truth, that he was no monster, but Eros himself, she became startled and accidentally injured herself with one of his arrows and burned his face with some hot oil that splashed out from the lamp she used to see in the dark. Eros became upset and flew away in pain, claiming the relationship was over. This put Psyche through a lot of torment, sadness and worry. She desired to reunite with Eros, but she didn’t know what to do. Eventually, she performed a set of tasks for Aphrodite (Eros’ mother), and during the last one she took a box to the underworld, filled it with beauty and made her way back to return the box to Aphrodite. Psyche is not supposed to open the box, but the temptation was far too great. Once open the contents put her to sleep. Meanwhile, Eros had been imprisoned by his mother, but he escaped and eventually found Psyche.
Once he became vulnerable to her, and she to him, they were together again. They struggled and suffered, but there was no one to conquer or possess — no need for heroic ambition. It was not the arrow that took the heart, but the heart that took the arrow.
Bibliography
Brohaugh, William. English through the Ages. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 1998.
Conner, Clifford D. A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and “Low Mechanicks” New York: Nation Books, 2005.
Hillman, James. A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. Edited by Thomas Moore. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Horney, Karen. Feminine Psychology: Papers. New York: W.W. Norton, 1967.
Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams. Written and presented by Simon Schaffer. Produced and Directed by Nic Stacey. United Kingdom: British Broadcasting Corporation, 2013. Film.
Images
Automaton, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton#/media/File:CIMA_mg_8332.jpg, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 France.
Archimedean Screw, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Archimedes%27_screws#/media/File:Chambers_1908_Archimedean_Screw.png, in the public domain.
Damsel in Distress, from the film The Perils of Pauline (1947), https://archive.org/details/ThePerilsofPauline, in the public domain.
Mary, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angelico,_madonna_col_bambino,_pinacoteca_sabauda.jpg, in the public domain.
