The Repressive Hypothesis is drawn from the middle ages and the rise of the bourgeoisie in society, it turns the act of sex into a secret bond shared only in marriage between a man and a woman. All other sexual discourse was considered despicable (evil) and indecent violations that were to be repressed in society.
Churches have been a part of Western society for centuries. Religion has gone to great effort to make sex part of the unspoken word. Most children know enough about religion growing up to know not only that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus but, that she became pregnant by immaculate conception. Everyone knows too that nuns live in abstinence once they decide to live a life of worship. This all makes the very subject of sex seem rather taboo (although according to Foucault this would later become a part of regulation). I mean, we go to church to confess our sins and we know that lusting over sins of the flesh is a sin you must confess to God. Sleeping with someone when your not married especially if it’s the opposite sex is a big one. Masturbation is another one. Even looking at a naked women (and later dirty magazines or watching dirty movies) is confessed. All of these things are met with acts of contrition, or a certain amount of prayers you must say asking to be forgiven. Still, you are not forgiven yet, you still must receive communion on Sunday before the Lord blesses you with forgiveness. Religion and societies continual need to understand why humans do the things they do are reasons why sex is repressed in society. Also, the need to punish people who go against the rules most of us agree to live by help to repress sex even more. We lock up people in jail for having consensual sex if one of the parties is under 18-years of age. Then there is the shame that the bourgeoisie may feel if someone in their own family is involved in any kind of scandle. They do everything they can to hide their families dirty laundry where no one can ruin their good name. Many homosexuals will not come out because of what their family (especially Fathers) would say or how they might react. So, instead of living their life happy and loving the people the choose to love, they instead live their life hiding in fear and shame full of guilt. This is sexual repression at it’s peek.
All of these things helped to create a Western world that at first glance seems to be repressing sexuality, but in reality is regulating it as a way of controlling people. The church gave away this secret long ago when it began letting the bourgeoisie buy their way out of the sins they committed. All of a sudden, the fact that you were rich meant you could commit as many sins as you wanted. It became abundantly clear that the rules were not equal for everybody.
I think Foucault calls the “Repressive Hypothesis” an indispensable fable because it has been years of conditioning the minds of the people that play by the rules that only a loving marriage between a man and a wife is normal. People buy in very easy to the picture of the white picket fence and children playing in the back yard on their swing sets and trampolines. It becomes hard to fight against the constant conditioning that is taught to us as children from our teachers at school, parents at home, judges in courts, and Preachers at church. All of the power bases that surround us each day keep us controlled as a society.
The difference between Foucault and Cixous is that Cixous places much more emphasis on the power struggle that women face in a male dominated world. Cixous looks at the patriarchy of women and men much differently. Men seem to have an inherent right to rule women. Cixous sees the world more through the analysis of Freud, and believes that men are the reason that women are sexually repressed. She talks much more about the phallocentricities that women struggle with and how their silence adds to their own sexual repression. She hopes to get women to speak up about what they need and desire more than they do today in hopes that by demanding more from society in general will in turn make society take notice and give back more towards female happiness.
Foucault, on the other hand, uses Marxist views that focus more on class struggle and societies power structures as the overall regulation of sex in society. He talks about the criminal convictions and power of the prison population control as one of the many ways of regulating how people behave. The Armed forces have become very good at mind control and manipulation of our youth in order to create fighting machines. So, controlling the rest of society has probably become fairly easy, especially since the creation of the mind control unit called television. Foucault, however, is more positive about it all and does not think it’s necessarily bad for society to face these power structures because he sees the way society reacts to the sexual repression as a good thing. He thinks that the more you try to repress sex, the more discourse is created and that it seeps in to society at large. He believes that the reasons for the regulation is an overall strategy of power structures to understand sexuality and that repression also leads to liberation.
Leave Your Comments