Critique of Frank Brenner’s View that Biology is the Utopian Basis for ‘Anything Goes’ Adult Sexuality
Chapter 4, Part II, of In Defense of Pedagogic Sanity
On the Left, the usual explanation for support for LGBT narcissism is that they were “born that way”, that homosexuality is a “natural sexual expression”, despite the lack of scientific evidence for this biological essentialist positioni. The only Leftist attempt I know of to defend queer theory has been made by Permanent Revolution’s Frank Brenner.ii Brenner tries to lend a “dialectical”, “materialist” basis to queer theory’s celebration of polymorphous perversity as the ideal, natural, unrepressed human condition, not only for infants, but adults as well. In fact, the theory he presents is just another anti-dialectical anti-materialist Queer theory: for he opposes it to Freud’s theory of a dialectical materialist process of maturation toward genitality.
The following passage from Brenner’s article is obviously derived from reading Freud’s “The Primacy of the Genital Zones and the Fore-Pleasure”, Section I of “The Transformation of Puberty”: Chapter III of his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. Brenner starts by correctly outlining Freud’s concept of the dialectical process of sexual maturation:
Moreover, when we speak of a process of maturation, we have to understand this process
in a dialectical way: a later stage, i.e. genital sexuality, does not cancel out earlier stages,
i.e. oral and anal sexuality, but rather supersedes them in Hegel’s sense of terminating
and preserving.
Immediately after this sentence, in the same paragraph, Brenner reverses himself, however. He completely ignoring what he just wrote about the dialectical process. Instead of “preserving” the progressive elements of an earlier stage in the later stage, he writes as if the later stage does completely “cancel out” the earlier stage:
Surely, there is nothing mature or fully developed about a genital sexuality in which the sexual act consists solely of a man mounting a woman and thrusting his penis into her vagina until ejaculation; on the contrary, this kind of behavior is clearly a mark of extreme repression, of the constriction of sexuality to a mechanical, inhuman coldness. For genital intercourse not to be this kind of abortive act, for it to be a full and satisfying expression of human sexuality, something more is required – foreplay. But what is foreplay? It is a ‘regression’ to earlier oral and anal stages of sexuality, and, one might add, to sex as playfulness. But the dialectic at work here is that without this ‘regression’, without the preservation of these earlier stages, genital sexuality itself regresses - from humanized sexuality to the dehumanized behavior of animals.
Men can’t be simultaneously mature, and tender, with their women?! To be tender to their female lovers, they need to regress to a state of infantility?! This smacks of Carl Wittman’s belief, expressed in his Gay Manifesto, quoted earlier, that men need to be bisexual to be good in bed with women. But Brenner just admitted himself that the process of maturation dialectically incorporates earlier stages such as playfulness, which can be enjoyed by both boys and men—integrating this earlier stage into the stage of genital intercourse. In Freud’s own words, as long as the adult male doesn’t fixate upon “fore-pleasure” as an end in itself, it can “arrange itself into a new combination” with intercourse [my emphasis].iii to create a “unity of opposites”, a definite synthesis: tender and playful heterosexual intercourse, pleasurable to both the man and the woman.
Not according to Brenner’s misconception of dialectics, however. Instead, Brenner, after first delineating the dialectical concept, then takes the anti-dialectical viewpoint of Queer Theory. The antagonism between these stages becomes in Brenner’s view, a legitimization of queer theory’s view that the erotic attachments corresponding to each of them, in and of themselves, provides an equally valid, natural alternative to Freud’s genital synthesis. So instead of moments in this dialectical process outlined by Freud, and by Brenner earlier in the paragraph, an infantile fixation upon one or more of them becomes, instead, a valid consumer-menu choice.
The fact of the matter is that biology makes many kinds of sexuality possible - but what it
doesn’t do is assign any one of these possibilities some kind of favored status. Since they
are all possible, therefore they are equally natural - and beyond this bare fact, biology can
‘tell’ us nothing more.
Thus, where Hedges takes refuge in a purported realm of absolute freedom of choice, given to us by the social nature of human sexual development, in order to justify his subscription to Queer Theory, Brenner justifies his by saying that it is biology that “makes many kinds of sexuality” not only “possible”, but also imparts to each an ‘equal” ideality.
Yes, it is true, biology does make many kinds of sexuality possible; but no, that is no argument for giving each and every one of these possibilities equally favored status. As we noted before, human sexual development is both biological and social, yet in both these realms in which it moves, it undergoes a dialectical synthesis: a determinate super-session, an aufhebung, of all the moments in the dialectical process. Unless blocked by fixations upon the erotic objects appropriate for earlier stages, due to problematic environmental factors, it moves determinedly toward a definite outcome, which does indeed gain “favored status”, precisely because it has synthesized and superseded all the previous moments it has subsumed. Thus, as Freud argues in Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, heterosexuality does indeed have “favored status” over the infinitely varied menu of LGBT lifestyle choices that Brenner presents here as “equally natural”.iv
Let’s apply Brenner’s conception of the dialectical process of sexual maturation, to historical materialism. Let’s replace biology with humanity’s accumulation of various means of production—from the invention of fire by tribal society, through Asian bureaucratic civilization’s discovery of the science of irrigation, the ancient world’s water wheel, the feudal era’s introduction of the heavy plow and crop rotation, all the way up to the trains, planes, and automobiles, the computers, internet, robots and artificial intelligence, etc. etc. simultaneously created by capitalism, and making a revolutionary transition to socialism all the more technologically feasible and reducing to a minimum the necessary labor required. And let’s replace sexuality with the various historic modes of production that this accumulation of means of production has made possible, one after the other. Brenner’s “dialectical” conception of historical materialism would thereby read as follows:
The present level of the accumulation of the means of production makes many modes of production possible - but what it doesn’t do is assign any one of these possibilities some kind of favored status. Since they are all possible, therefore they are equally natural [i.e., equally progressive, desirable, advanced] - and beyond this bare fact, the present level of the accumulation of the means of production can ‘tell’ us nothing more.
The absurdity of Brenner’s anti-dialectical dialectic now becomes readily apparent. If we accept the dubiously “dialectical” logic of this revised passage, then tribalism, Asian bureaucratic society, feudalism, and capitalism are just as deserving of receiving “some kind of favored status” as is socialism. And each is an equally likely “possibility” to become a desirable endpoint for the dialectical process motored by the historical contradiction between the means and the mode of production!
Forget Hegel and Marx’s “Hic rhodus, hic salta!”, and about Rosa Luxemburg’s famous slogan, “Socialism or Barbarism!” We have four other wonderful options for the mode of production we should be “enjoying” before us, besides socialism, from which to freely choose!
Why not opt for employing the vast technical wealth of the human race as the basis for the genuinely progressive ideal of revolutionary socialism, instead? Just so in the field of sexuality. Why not move forward to a mode that promises a mature, adult enjoyment and intimacy: rather than fixate at a less advanced stage of development?
Brenner seems beholden to the anti-dialectic of Herbert Marcuse’s cynical view of the genital-maturational process. Marcuse promoted the idea the genuine revolutionary is one who stays in a state of pre-Oedipal, impulsive, psychic anarchy.
For Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization, there is no real dialectic to this process. Following the cynicism of Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse argues that each stage in this process of “unifying” what H and A derisively called the “autocratic” ego and advancing the self toward genitality, is constituted by sexual repression: not growth into the capability for greater and greater emotional and intellectual freedom. If this is a dialectic, it is unique. The historical materialist dialectic is constituted as much by technological advancement and a growth in humanity’s capacity and desire for freedom, than it is by repression. Implicit here is the idea that there can be no process, autonomous from the historical materialist dialectic, which can lead to any form of freedom. Each process must be constituted by repression, because the capitalist class is repressing us. This is nonsensical, however, on its face. It’s the “organic” theory of repression, imputing more power to capitalism to “totalize” its repressive transformation of social relations, than this system has the power to do. What’s missing is a healthy dose of the particularism and autonomy of various levels of social reality, posited by Gramsci, Althusser, and Poulantzas. This understanding brings us to comprehend that not all social or psychosocial relations or dialectics are the utter slave of capitalist repression. They do not emerge out of the head of capitalism like Athena out of the mind of Zeus.
It is certainly true that the growing crisis of capitalism makes reform possible: that revolution is rapidly becoming the only solution. But this is not the same idea. Marcuse (along with the postmodernists, and faux-Marxists like Brenner) adapted to Max Weber’s gloomy pronouncements about the “iron cage” snuffing out all human (i.e., bourgeois liberal individual) spontaneity. This is not a Marxist view.
And this view was contested successfully by Marcuse’s former Frankfurt School mate, Erich Fromm. The latter pointed out that Marcuse had had absolutely no clinical psychoanalytic experience whatsoever, upon which to base his pessimistic view of human nature. It was purely cerebral, not scientific or evidence-based. Despite the repressions of capitalism, grownups are freer, not more repressed, than eternal puers and puellas—and they also make the best revolutionaries.
The view of the capitalist era as unable to turn every process within it into a completely repressive process; and yet a view of this era which, because of the contradictions of capitalism, finds it increasingly repressive and totalitarian, is a basis not for arguing that genital maturity is by its very nature repressive, but instead, for seeing that late capitalism makes increasingly difficult—because it makes loving parenting increasingly difficult as well as unpopular—genital maturity, or growing up. Because grownups do make the best revolutionaries, the corporate capitalist ruling class grow increasingly desperate in their attempts to stop people from growing up.
One of the principal ways the capitalist class now does this, in the contemporary era, is their promotion of perversion. In this, they find helpful Queer Theory founders and spokespersons like Marcuse, Foucault, and Brenner: self-proclaimed “radicals” who are in reality unwitting pawns of this manufactured consensus that perversion is a good thing.
The theory that blames fascism upon the development of an “autocratic ego”, domineering one’s “inner nature” as well as “outer nature and society”, developed first by Horkheimer and Adorno, completely contradicts the conclusions drawn by both from the psychoanalytic evidence presented to them by Adorno et al.’s Authoritarian Personality and by the other, 1949 Studies in Prejudice, which Frankfurt School personnel conducted under the sponsorship of the American Jewish Committe. From these studies, Horkheimer and Adorno concluded that the psychological root of fascism is not a strong ego but rather a very weak one: weakened by the introjection of a harsh superego.v
Thus, in the writings of the Frankfurt School, we can see expressed two, widely divergent views. One--the Weberian gloomy side, which attacks the ego itself as "autocratic", leads to the postmodernists and Queer Theory. The other, opposite to the first, is their attack on authoritarianism, narcissism, and the weak ego created by corporate capitalism. This far more radical pathway is aligned with findings of the authors of the contemporaneous Lonely Crowd, C. Wright Mills’ White Collar, and then later, the 70s and 80s writings of Christopher Lasch.
The earlier, ancient and feudal modes of productions employed the patriarchal extended family to infantilize the male child. It is only in the modern, laissez faire capitalist era that a strong, inner directed “autocratic” ego was created by the bourgeoisie: not before this era, and not after, in the contemporary period, in which fascism arose. To create this ego, the bourgeoisie simultaneously domesticated mothers so they would bathe the male child in unconditional love, and strengthened the rule of the father within the nuclear family it carved away from the traditional extended family in order to create the Oedipal rivalry that the child, as he grew into adulthood, would transfer upon the family’s economic rivals. Simultaneously, the modern family system undermined the infantilism of the earlier, extended family patriarchal system. The ruthless competitor created by this system, if he was to successfully compete on the open market, could not afford to remain a child. He must develop an “inner directed” personality, and “sempre aude”--dare to think for himself: based upon the rigid superego he introjected from his rod-wielding father.
The corporate capitalist system undermines familial authority to once again, as in traditional patriarchal society, infantilize the child: but now, via behavioristic childrearing practices that distance parents from children. This is another means of creating a harsh superego, because such parents cannot mellow out the superego into a “wise loving guide”. Yet this superego, without the buffer created by the “second womb” of maternal love enjoyed by the modern bourgeois, greatly weakens the ego. As Horkheimer states quite clearly in his essay, Authoritarianism and the Family Today, many people born into this late-capitalist, pseudo-familial regime tend to adapt to this weak ego by adopting a narcissistic or sociopathic-impulsive, conformist, fascist-authoritarian personality. This evidence-based social psychoanalytic analysis, as opposed to the elitist, gloomily pessimistic neo-Weberian/anarchist ideology the two authors promote in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, was developed and deepened further by Erich Fromm, David Riesman, Reuel Denny and Nathan Glazer (The Lonely Crowd) C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth (Character and Social Structure), Herbert Marcuse himself in his One Dimensional Man, with his concept of “repressive desublimation”, and, most fruitfully, Christopher Lasch, in his works, Haven in a Heartless World and The Culture of Narcissism.
Perversion ‘profits’, not Satan and not only porn profiteers, as “Decent Literature” advocate and S&L crook Charles Keating had itvi, but instead, late, corporate capitalism itself. Perversion cuts us off from our genuine, mature sexuality and our sexual bodies, keeps us infantile, in a state of both perpetual semi-psychotic fantasy and sado-masochistic hostility, and thus unable to realistically and maturely band together to overthrow the system (but instead to climb into one or another invidious identity “autonomous” from the rest). This is not unlike, as Marxist composer and music teacher Eli Siegmeister pointed out in his Music and Society, how the feudal nobility and clergy fostered the Gregorian chant against popular dance music of the era. Where once people were bored into submission, and alienation from their bodies, now they are perverted to do so. This creates a solid basis for the unsolid feeling of groundlessness, or what Chief sp1ked Editor Brendan O’Neill has termed the neediness, fragility, and intolerance of identity politics.
After they pushed Erich Fromm out of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse developed a view, utterly rejected by Fromm, that became one of the bases for Foucault and Brenner’s belief: that while genitality is the product and tool of class oppression, sexual perversion offers a revolutionary challenge to it. The truth is almost completely the inverse.
In the schema that follows, we must remember that any schema has its exceptions. But in general:
Reich associated the genitality achieved via a patriarchal upbringing with the “rigid” character structure. Before the contemporary, corporate capitalist era. This structure was employed by class society, including modern capitalism, as a tool of social control. But the contemporary corporate capitalist class has found in perversity an even more effective instrument in its efforts to emotionally castrate the middle and, to a lesser extent, the working class. Even in the form it takes as a product of a patriarchal upbringing, genitality is now, for the ruling class, a source of potential resistance, even though, in this rigid form, it is often amenable more to right wing than left wing politics. Witness the Trump rebellion and the current right wing “libertarian” cast of the medical freedom movement, against the Great Reset. Genitality produced by a non-patriarchal, non-authoritarian upbringing, however—by loving, empathic, supportive parents—tends to create the character structures found in the “democratic”-minded subjects of the Authoritarian Personality study of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford. This character structure is the most potentially resistant to totalitarianism. The least resistant, the most compliant, is the perverse, pre-Oedipal, non-genital personality.
In other words, psychosexual regression does not conduce to socialist revolution!
Brenner’s Controversy with David Walsh
The World Socialist Web Site Editors, David Walsh, Barry Grey, and David North, rejected Brenner’s article. Walsh puts his finger precisely the problem with Brenner’s ideas that I noted above, in his response to the following quote from Brenner’s article, "By the same token, heterosexuality is no more natural than homosexuality because, objectively, the one is as much a constriction of the inherent bisexuality of human beings as the other." - p. 9” and this quote, "If we are bisexual at birth, then it must be society which makes us into males and females." In response, Walsh asks,
Why? Playing the devil's advocate, one might say, well, in the womb future human beings look more like fish than they do people, does that mean society makes us mammals? We're born bald, does society give us hair? Of course, these are physical characteristics, not behavioral ones, but I still think there's a problem. There is such a thing as a process of maturation. I think someone might easily argue that the bisexuality is precisely an indicator of the unformed, or partially-formed nature of the human being at birth, and that further development, ultimately puberty, brings out his or her inherent characteristics. (Aren't other mammals, who presumably don't live in society, bisexual at birth?) Would children be as likely, all things being equal, to become homosexual as heterosexual? Do evolution and the development of distinct sexual organs and characteristics have no significance? (Isn't homosexuality itself, in certain circumstances, a social phenomenon?).vii
Brenner’s responseviii is to claim, interestingly enough, that he is not guilty of bourgeois academic “queer theory”. His definition of QT contradicts that of Brunskell-Evan’s: for him. QT hypothesizes that heterosexuality and homosexuality are both natural; i.e., that straights and gays are “born that way.” He argues instead that bisexuality is the “natural current.”
But Brenner’s theory is far closer to Queer Theory than the “Born That Way” theory which he identifies it. The only difference with Brunskell-Evans’ version is that her version involves the fantasy of a spiritual “inner being”, whereas Brenner’s “inner being” is biological. His version is Freud’s theory of an innate infantile bisexuality: which, for Brenner, if not for Freud or Walsh, never develops dialectically into anything else.ix
To Walsh’s belief that “… the well-balanced individual in a future society would probably have both same- and opposite-sex attractions, [but] with the latter, I would imagine, dominating”, Brenner responds,
this is pretty much how people already behave in bourgeois society - mostly heterosexual with some degree of homosexual attraction, which is largely (though not always) unconscious. There is still a huge leap from this to a sexuality in which desire would not be determined by whether someone has a penis or a vagina in their pants. In communist society, we will love each other, first and foremost, as humans rather than as men or women. And sexual love will become an integral part of human relations, of how we work, of the friendships we have, of the way we live in the world--rather than confined to the shameful privacy of the bedroom.
Brenner’s vision of a socialist sexuality is eminently neo-liberal. For he writes as if a complete divorce of sexuality from the particular physical sex, including the sexual organs, of the participants, is a matter of sacred (and completely abstract) principle. Strangely, in Brenner’s version of “socialism” the individualist consumer reigns supreme.
Personally, I have never had a “shameful” experience in the “privacy” of a bedroom. Perhaps Mr. Brenner has. That is his own, private, affair. Moreover, I personally do not want to be “liberated” from my “shameful” desire to have sex in private, rather than do it “in the road”, as in Beatle Paul McCartney’s song.x
Brenner seems to advocate a totalitarian solution for society, in order to relieve himself of this personal emotional burden. But please, Mr. Brenner: don’t do the rest of us unenlightened mortals any favors.
This “socialist” utopia envisioned by Brenner reminds me of Woody Allen’s satire of the totalitarian ego-mania of the guerrilla leader in Bananas. Once he takes over the country, he insists that clean underwear is so important to his new revolutionary regime, that all will be required to wear it on the outside of their clothing, “so we can check.” More darkly, it resembles the dystopian visions of Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s 1984. In the name of liberation in a future socialist society, Brenner seeks to impose a sexual voyeuristic version of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. As the author of In Defense of Heterosexuality, the Reichian Stanley Keleman, would argue, Brenner’s dream is a depersonalized, inhuman nightmare: a fusion of the realm of the “pre-personal”--the “primordial organismic” biological realm-- with that of the “post-personal”: “the realm of societal experience, where we learn what behavior and roles we are expected to embody in the conduct of our sexuality”. This will not only serve to alleviate Brenner’s shame, however. It will also permit the ruling class, or a bureaucratic caste, can employ its cultural hegemony to manipulate and control us. Brenner seeks to obliterate the “personal” realm which makes us human, and which empowers us to fight for our freedom and against such manipulation. Keleman defines it as “the growth of individuality and … the development of loving and intimacy in our personalities,”xi As we have already discussed, Lowen and Fromm argued that such individuality, loving and intimacy can only genuinely develop through the achievement of (heterosexual) genitality.xii
It is worthy of note that Marx uses the term “Bentham” to describe the most narcissistic feature of the “very Eden of the innate rights of man” falsely represented in the wage labor contract: that each of the parties to the contract “looks only to himself.” Besides promoting such rugged individualism, the classic utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham also invented the Panopticon: a prison designed to permit the administrators of a prison to surveille their prisoners 24 hours a day—not unlike plans that such luminaries as Bill Gates, Yuval Noah Harari and Klaus Schwab have presented to us in their plans for a global “Great Reset”.xiii These two sides of Benthamism are not accidental. If each “looks only to himself”, then those in control of such a society must, and are in their rights, to transform it into a police state, where there is no privacy permitted whatsoever. Mr. Brenner proposes for his version of the “socialist” future, none of the “shameful privacy” [?!] that now, he purports, oppresses us, in our “bedrooms”, will be further endured. But the reality of his proposal is that he is promoting, here and now, corporate capitalism-based totalitarianism.
i J. Alan Branch, Born This Way. Lexham Press, 2016; Yet even Sigmund Freud himself, in his Three Contributions to a Theory of Sexuality, refuted this “born this way theory”, simply by examining the evidence available to him at the turn of the last century.
ii Frank Brenner, Gender and Materialism, 1998 at http://permanent-revolution.org/essays/gender_materialism.pdf.
iii Sigmund Freud, “The Primacy of the Genital Zones and the Fore-Pleasure”, Section I of Chapter III, “The Transformation of Puberty”, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. 2nd ed. Tr. A.A. Brill, 1920.
iv Brenner’s anti-dialectic reminds me of the pro-metropolitan, pro-bourgeois modernity view promoted by my beloved doctoral advisor, the late Marshall Berman All That is Solid Melts Into Air (1981), as well as a big fan of his, Andy Merrifield (Metro Marxism, 2002). Both these thinkers have or had their strengths, but in the final analysis, they are middle class academics with a petit bourgeois mentality. For each, though Berman had earlier compared it to a repressive “box” (The Politics of Authenticity, 1970), big city bourgeois “modernity” was/is a source of infinite possibilities, both pleasureful and painful—and because of the pleasures, let’s keep it that way! Merrifield even argues that big city slums should be preserved, so that youth can go there, and live the kind of life that Henri Mujer and his starving artist friends “enjoyed” in the Latin Quarter: so, they can create good art!
For Perry Anderson, however, in a debate with Berman entitled Modernity and Revolution, modernity must instead have a definite, determinate endpoint. Comparing Berman’s vision of modern society to Lasch’s “culture of narcissism,” Anderson said that, however interesting to the contemporary petite bourgeoisie, the modern era must be “punctuated”--by socialist revolution, to free humanity from the chaos created by modernity, so reveled in by Berman and Merrifield. This is the way we create an ordered, just society, where everybody, not just a relative handful of flaneurs, can actually get their needs met: including not starving!https://newleftreview.org/issues/i144/articles/perry-anderson-modernity-and-revolution
vI am indebted to my friend Geoffrey Blank, Ph.D., for pointing out this astonishing contradiction in Horkheimer and Adorno’s views.
vi Perversion for Profit (1965) (youtube.com)
vii Letter from David Walsh to Frank Brenner: Friday, June 5 [1998], at Gender and materialism (permanent-revolution.org)
viii Letter from Frank Brenner to David Walsh, Barry Grey and David North, June 28, 1998
ix This theory of Freud’s about the bisexuality of infants, by the way, was convincingly refuted in 1940 by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Rado. According to his study, “...there is no such thing as bisexuality either in man or in any other of the higher vertebrates. In the final shaping of the normal [i.e., non-intersex] individual, the double embryological origin of the genital system does not result in any physiological duality of reproductive functioning. Sandor Rado, “Critical Evaluation of the Concept of Bisexuality,” Psychosomatic Medicine,2(4):p 459-467, October 1940. pp. 163-64.
x Even in the song, however, McCartney assures his potential lover that “No one will be watching us.” John Bradshaw taught us that there is such a thing as a healthy sense of shame—a subject about which Brenner seems completely ignorant. Public sex is the only sex he wants in his dystopia.
xi Stanley Keleman, In Defense of Heterosexuality, Chapter 3, “The Three Realms”, Center Press, 1982, p. 21.
xii See above: Fromm, The Art of Loving, pp. ; Lowen, p. 38.
xiii See Adam Radek, “Stop the Great Reset”, Red Fire Online 12/16/20, at Stop The Great Reset! – Red Fire (redfireonline.com) , and Kees Van der Pijl, States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check, Clarity Press, 2022.