Sex and Death: Part 2 Electric Boogaloo

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Henry and Ethan brought up this question about sex and death in their panel presentation: just like in Ragtime, sex and violence are undoubtedly, but very depressingly, connected. In the essay they presented, the author describes the sexual language with which the war enthusiasts describe war, particularly the “post-coital satisfaction” of the process of “mopping up”. The entire concept of war as conquest is associated with an overblown masculinity, and that concept of war is sexualized. Violence and sex are linked, fetishized by men and used to exploit others. As the author says, Vonnegut essentially genders the concepts of conquest and innocence. When masculinity is overblown in this way, the world we live in is ultimately a dangerous and deeply misogynistic one as well.

The way sex is described in calmer parts of the novel isn't any less troubling. For Billy, any sex with either his wife Valencia or Montana Wildhack are fundamentally about comfort. They are depicted as comfortable, passive experiences. With Valencia especially, he’s filling a preconceived role in his mind of he needs a wife, and a wife is what will make him comfortable. It’s not her in particular, just a woman to calmly live with. Montana is barely even a character either, she’s exceedingly one dimensional and again merely a part of his fantasy of having a woman as a sexual object to comfort him. Like in many other parts of the novel, Vonnegut doesn’t treat Billy’s passivity kindly. The depiction of women as one-dimensional sex objects is almost as bad as the machismo interlocking of violence and conquest with sex. Even if death is meaningless and war made obsolete by passivity, what's the point of living without love or anything else?

Both the grand delusions of men and their passivity lead to a one-dimensional acting of gender roles, rather than complex individual values. Mary O’Hare doesn’t receive attention and respect simply because she’s female and the voice of this theoretical innocence, but rather because she stands for a point and sees the truth about war. There’s a pretty strong argument here for individuality, for finding meaning within a psychologically troubling world. Vonnegut shows the problems with draining things of meaning. Through his depictions we see that death should mean something. Sex should mean something. Our lives should mean something, even if that meaning is constructed and meaningless in some grander scheme. But it’s the passivity which allows us to succumb to those delusions of masculinity, to submit to the forces of life fully. Maybe Billy's right about the Tralfamadorians, but thinking like them won't make the world a better place.

Anyway, here’s a quote that nicely connects all of these ramblings and also feel that Vonnegut would like:

“I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. Then they came for the Jews, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”
Martin Niemöller

Comments

  1. ErinMarch 14, 2020 at 2:13 PM

    First of all, I love that quote, and there's a really good documentary based on it called "And Then They Came For Us" about Japanese Internment during WWII. Secondly, I think your point about connecting masculinity in the violence of war and sex makes a good point about the "anti-war" nature of the novel. I had a hard time noticing the one-dimensionality of the female characters because it felt the same as the detachment and apathy we were getting from Billy as our protagonist.

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  2. Ethan AshbrookMarch 15, 2020 at 5:33 PM

    It does kind of seem like Vonnegut completely fucked up all of the pre-conceived notions we have about war and sex by making everything so passive. I feel like Vonnegut ended up making most, if not all, of the characters in the novel fairly one-dimensional or archetypal, in a way that the figures we'd normally see as being masculine just end up being ridiculous. The "men" of the novel end up feeling just as one-dimensional as the women are, simply because they all follow grand meta-narratives that don't work out the way that they think they will. War and sex both seem like they have meaning in the world of the book, but like you mention, it sure doesn't feel like they do.

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