Sexuality and Conspiracy: National and International Spheres

WOMEN’S WORLD

Introduction

Is sexuality a stigmatised knowledge? Is it ego’s freedom? Sigmund Freud characterised it as melancholia or inability to grieve or as narcissistic disorder. There is a individual quest for instinctual freedom but civilisation demands conformity and instinctual repression. Here, sexuality represents a false mastery of an egoistic psychology in which the conspiracy is that consciousness has not adequately distinguished itself from the environment. The melancholia suffers from an unrealistic sense of both self and the other. It is very rarely that feminists let down the veils which conceal the achromatic doctrine of the other sex. Women can prevail against men in the great struggle for power and security only by keeping them disarmed and unwarned. Thus they have to apply their peculiar talents warily and with less regard to the danger of arousing the foe. The strategy lies at the heart of what Nietzsche called a morality based upon concealment of egoistic purpose; a code of ethics which for most characters is a bold denial of its actual aim.

National and International

Today almost all feminists, who write about international relations, use gender in a social constructive way. Of course some take a radical view of this. Their points are that the private is a realm of sanctuary from the public. Women, allegedly involved in drug trafficking and terrorism, make the personal conflict political. Soldier men and reporter women are animated in an imaginary war in which women no less than men could be intimately involved. Cynthia Enloe finds it eye-opening that abstract military doctrines such as ‘mutually assured destruction’ or ‘low intensity conflict’ rely on concepts such as motherhood and home-making as men think. The feminist sight of women makes men visible as man is involved in masculine politics throughout the international sphere. Few security experts would have anticipated that ethnic cleansing would soon be on the hidden agenda in the European conspiracy which still imagines that rape would appear as a war-fighting strategy in a series of European wars conducted in the nuclear age.

Enloe then returns to one of the oldest sites in her research of nationalism. She wants us to see that becoming a nationalist requires a man to resist the foreigner’s conspiracy of abusing his women. But nationalism rarely takes women’s experience as the point of departure. She bluntly states that it has typically sprung from masculinised humiliation and masculine conspiracy. Colonialism too sprang from manipulation of masculinised dreams of power and adventures. The main opposition to sexuality came from moral and religious conservatives such as Islamic fanatics who argue that commo-dification of sex should be banned because it is morally corrupt. But they try to suppress women in various ways.

The militarisation of Afghanistan has proved disastrous for women. Women are victims of religious fundamentalism. The more successful men in the community are more likely to be persuading women to keep quiet, and to swallow their grievances. In effect, local women protect the spirit of men who are meant to be protecting them with overseas military power. From the middle ages onwards it was alleged that Christianity did everything to silence sexuality and it is the subject of immense verbosity.

The business-like Franklin Roosevelt endeavoured to win the Latin American markets through a good neighbour policy of conspiracy of banana plantations; these are still run by men and sustained by women. Customers by contrast have overlooked women who appealed through marketing campaign in consumption sites to those of producer sites. The conspiracy for global resources justified the insecurity by addressing sexual differences. Growing banana by women has also an implication for the land policy. Feminists think of the world as structured around gender relations of patriarchy that can be dismantled through strategic moves such as separatism which is conspiratorial in nature. Women’s sexuality is being manipulated. Nature and women have to be tamed, mastered and managed in the patriarchal state.

Power and Strategies

Why should sexuality be subjected to the moral question in power politics? Feminists treat that language is mainly a man-made construction. They recognise that there is no single way of understanding human interaction in sexuality. It is a weapon of conspiracy between the powerful and the powerless because commodification of sex leads to objectification of women in society. The liberals believe in private/ public divisions. Different spheres of privacy are spilling into new notions of civic patriotism. In the Leftist view, sexuality was regarded as a weapon of a dominant class of a sick society. Work by women does not have exchange value. Women have hardly any power over their body that makes them alienated from the power structure. It is like a public woman hiding her vulnerability by using cosmetics. It is a story of people missing the sense of power in the background of important events.

There is a need to reconnect feminism with the reality of the female body refusing the separation of the imperial from the symbolic or of the material from discursive or of sex from gender. The women in foreign policy circles, a performance of power does not really pass out of incorrect experiences irrespective of the body of ambiguity all around. Ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was safe on both sides of ‘sex’. Her the ‘sex’ became non-representable as she defied any sense one might have in gender differen-tiation. Her power was commanding, convincing and recognised. But she did little for people who were identified as women.

After World War II, the old world order realised that tyranny had become unworkable. It did not make economic sense. The conspirator’s brilliant insight was that people could be rendered harmless by giving them things they wanted. And what people wanted, above all, was fantasy, escapism, a refuge from reality. Advertisement portrays a life-style that is infinitely glittering and seductive to many people. Once people are slaves to the fake world, they never want to leave it. They are addict to it with a desperate craving for glamour. The online world’s sexual life gives people the opportunity to create an idealised avatar of them that inhabits the sort of world in which they would like to live for real. The new world order does not seek to put us in concentration camps but in jail that we cannot see because we have been so brainwashed and deceived through the sexual conspiracy.

This has come up with the perfect formula for neutralising women’s conspiratorial therapy. Give ordinary women a shop to visit and a credit card, they will be docile and obedient consumers in the new world order. We live in a other-directed society, one where most people are scared to deviate from the normal, where the ‘fitting in’ is imperative. To be in conspiracy, we have to be prepared for conflict. It is us versus them. Fascist propagandists not only popularised the myth of a conspiracy by the illumination but claimed that it was a subversive secret society founded in Germany in 1776 which serves the Jewish elite that supposedly control both financial capitalism and Soviet communism in order to divide and rule the world. Both ignored the feminist world.

In 1940s, British writer and futurist H.G. Wells would go further than the progressives by appropriating and redefining the term ‘new world order’ as a synonym for the establishment of a technocratic world state and planned economy which is masculine in nature. Marilyn Ferguson was an American author known for the book The Aquarian Conspiracy (!980) and its affiliation with the new age movement in popular culture. Some religious groups contended that conspiracy was an attempt to allegedly subvert the Christian views because it was a religion that divides men against them. It says life is a burden which will be rewarded after death something that does not inspire women to revolt against masculine oppression. It repudiates both the creative impulses and its subject matter, Here, man fell from the aesthetic paradise and the paradise was lost.

Conclusion

History is not seen as a class struggle but a fight against repression of the individual instinct. Although Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation has been widely read as a criticism of psychiatric movement, it sees madness as a form of genius that modern medicine repressed. Ego claims that the purpose of life is simply the progressive advance of the pleasure principle which is half-truth in regard to sexuality. People become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the frustration which society imposes in the service of cultural ideas. Channeling the context of sexuality rather than banning it is necessary to move beyond the ‘pro- and anti-’ debate. The masses pay the world order to continually sedate them with mindless junk that makes them incapable of resisting the old world order. That gets victims to pay for their own enslavement. And who are the biggest victims? Women.

Dr Sunita Samal, who holds a Ph.D from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, is a political commentator based in Bhubaneswar. She can be contacted by e-mail at sunitasamal2007@ yahoo.com