Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
Why is our culture governed by the principle of separation? Beginning with a devastating exploration of the 1960s, understood up until now as the era of female liberation, free love and the tribal sharing of drugs, Antonella Gambotto-Burke deconstructs the past two centuries and shows how we are, in fact, moving towards the age of the Nietzschean übermensch, in which femininity will, if we do not change, be erased.
She skilfully draws together diverse threads, from the shockingly personal to the broadest societal trends and cutting-edge scientific research, to construct a brilliant and startling thesis that medicinal and recreational drugs have rewired our bodies and brains to an near-incomprehensible extent. Anxiety, artificial wombs, brutality, the class system, depression, dieting, racism and other issues – including the first plausible theory for rubber fetishism and other ‘kinks’ such as choking or breathplay – are explained within the context of the dominant cultural paradigm.
A devastating uppercut to a patriarchal ideology that has marred billions of lives, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine completely revises our understanding of addiction, art, drug use, homosexuality, murder, pornography, sex, war, and, critically, the significance of birth, infancy and motherhood in relation to human existence.
You will never see anything the same way again.
INCOMPLETE INTIMACY
‘Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.’
Blue Nights, Joan Didion
A rarely mentioned fact is that morphine and scopolamine, the twin engines of Twilight Sleep, are not merely amnesiacs and anaesthetics but hallucinogens. Derived from belladonna (night-shade), scopolamine is, as I have mentioned, known as the ‘zombie drug’ – as it subtracts awareness from action, its administration to unsuspecting victims is now associated with crimes in Third World countries. It was noted that the ‘most intriguing phenomenon [is] the submissive and obedient behaviour of the victim,’ casting a new light on its administration to labouring mothers.
The Psychedelic Revolutionaries of the 1960s, then, were not glamorous ideological freedom fighters ‘expanding human consciousness’, but adult victims of the obstetric administration of hallucinogens seeking comfort in the same way the barbiturate addicts of the 1950s and 1960s – adult victims of the barbiturates their mothers had been administered during pregnancy and labour – sought comfort from prescription pills.
Twilight Sleep and its later, equally hallucinogenic, obstetric adaptations lay the groundwork for a mass psychedelic movement, just as the continued administration of obstetric hallucinogens is creating a new, multi-billion-dollar market for legal hallucinogens through microdosing.
Imagine, for a moment, the experience of a foetus who, up until the toxic drugs administered to his mother pass his blood/brain barrier, experienced only comfort, ease, intimacy and protection. Imagine the violence of the anaesthesia’s impact, and the shock, which, in addition to that of birth, could only result in the terror of annihilation. The experience would be something like the climactic tableaux depicted in German director Roland Emmerich’s international blockbuster disaster movies, those witness statements of intense foetal agitation.
Imagine, too, the stunning transformation of the maternal environment into a field of poisons, of distorted perceptions, of disorienting sudden shifts in maternal rhythms – blood flow, breathing, cardiac – and unnatural pressure.
In place of flow, psychosis. In place of love, horror.
The foetal experience of a drugged birth is unrivalled as a torture, medieval in its brutality.
Like Mapplethorpe’s art and Brady’s murders, the liquid light shows characteristic of psychedelia, those strangely-hued mineral oils through alcohol that are often twinned with loud rock music, document part of the neonatal experience – in this case, the auditory and visual hallucinations drugged babies experienced during and after birth.
Timothy Leary’s doctrine of altered consciousness only found a cultural foothold because it offered the generations born tripping a means of self-soothing denied by drug laws. Promoted as ‘countercultural’, the directive ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ was, in fact, a repackaged reinforcement of the same old ‘square’ legacy: the abuse and denial of the feminine, the censorship of emotion, the insistence on conformity, and the use of propaganda and violence – in this case, neurochemical – to disable agency.
Innovation played no part in Leary’s philosophy. An entire philosophy of life was constructed to justify his generation’s return to the anonymised, emotionally disordered, isolated, internalised, pharmaceutically-dictated distortions they knew at birth.
For the most part, pharmaceuticals are solutions to problems created by their manufacturers.
Scottish music entrepreneur Alan McGee, who recalled his mother describing his 1960 hospital birth in Glasgow as ‘terrible’, started using drugs ‘on an industrial scale at 22, 23,’ but had used since his teens. ‘Until I got into Ecstasy, though, I never really enjoyed drugs; I just did them because everyone else was doing them. Why did I love Ecstasy? It made me feel centred. Feeling destabilised was kind of how I always felt, but Ecstasy made me feel complete. I never felt complete before, probably not, no. No idea why.’
Freud, too, failed to make the connection, understanding ‘intoxicating substances’ as a finger in the dyke of human suffering, a means of ‘slip[ping] away from the oppression of reality’ to take ‘refuge in a world of their own where painful feelings do not enter’.
The subtext of Freud’s words is that reality is the enemy of happiness, which is why pleasure can only be found in an escape from reality. Substance abuse was thus presented by him as a good thing, a means of ‘warding off’ misery, rather than as associated with decay and delusion and an obstacle to human contentment and evolution.
We repeatedly ‘return’ in any number of ways to the terrain of our births not only as a means of self-soothing, but of self-protection. Maier’s mother: the enfolding, nurturing, protective world of our nondeclarative hearts. Like homing pigeons, we are programmed to follow the psychobiological equivalent of ‘infrasounds’ (sounds below our range of hearing) in order to map our return to physical – and, in adulthood, psychological – safety.
Feeling unsafe is, for human beings, significantly more than unpleasant: feeling unsafe has been shown to be one of the primary sources of mental and physical illness.
Untroubled, a mother is not merely Firestone’s person-with-a- womb or, as American actor Spencer Pratt memorably dismissed his mother-in-law, ‘just [a] vagina’,1186 but home, and there is no issue of greater importance in terms of human civilisation on this planet.
The ‘home’ central to an infant’s sense of belonging is his primal territory, a territory which he later will, if securely bonded, defend with his life if only because its attack will be perceived as an attempt to destabilise the self. As American adoptee Dave Brown wrote, ‘Hiraeth is a Welsh word for homesickness, nostalgia, longing for a place that never was. For many adoptees, we are never really at home anywhere... Maybe the place I was trying to get back to never existed.’
The home for which he pined was the primal territory of his mother.
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