Obsession with hierarchy is nearly always accompanied by unchecked, ritualized abuse of the most vulnerable.
As yet another Presidential candidate attempts to fend off credible accusations of sexual assault, patterns of power reveal themselves. It becomes easier to see how an abusive relationship, whether between intimate partners, a parent and child, or a boss and employee, replicates the same methods of control seen in all forms of oppression, along lines of class, age, race, or gender. The batterer isolates their victim from community, interests, and sense of dignity. Oppressive systems deny humanity from huge swathes of the population based on their ability to adhere to strict gender norms. Anxiety around this is the primary motivation behind most domestic violence.
Gender roles have long been used to instill hierarchy among people, with greater social stability promised to those who most closely obey inhumane norms of behavior and presentation. The stability and privilege is mostly a myth, however, only conferred upon the ruling class, plus a select few as examples. The contradiction between adhering to these norms and then not attaining the promised status leads to deep internal conflict. In a patriarchal society, this conflict manifests as abuse of those lower in the hierarchy, in an attempt to regain a sense of control. In intimate partner relationships, this usually means abuse of women and children.
For power to be maintained, it must be continuously demonstrated. A dictator may indulge in ostentatious military parades. In a capitalist society, power is synonymous with wealth. Money can buy real estate, luxury goods, people. In a romantic relationship, power is often demonstrated through coercive control over the partner’s sexuality. Methods include dictating dress, limiting who the person is allowed to socialize with, manipulation through possessive or jealous behavior, and accusing the person of being a poor example of their gender. Sexuality is so central to one’s deepest sense of identity, and is also fraught with socialized shame and stigma. Desire is inextricable from the self. To reveal ones’ desires to a partner is to dismantle the power dynamic through mutual vulnerability. A controlling, abusive partner will seek to undermine their partner’s erotic identity at any cost.
The relationship between the ruling structures of society and the anxieties provoked within one couple’s marriage is illustrated beautifully in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut.
Home after an elegant party, professional class husband and wife Bill and Alice are reflecting on the evening’s events. Alice teases Bill about a pair of young women he had been flirting with- he dismisses her (but doesn’t fail to mention that the girls are models). Bill comments, with a bit more venom, on a wealthy older man who had been paying attention to Alice. She’s offended at his suggestion that men only want to talk to her because of her body. The hypocrisy, the double standard regarding who is allowed to socialize with whom, becomes intolerable to Alice. She starts to reminisce about a fantasy she’d had while on vacation with Bill and their daughter Helena. She was completely caught off guard by her immediate physical attraction to a young Naval officer, and the idea of abandoning her structured life and economic security for a night of passion on her own terms occupied her for the rest of the vacation (and, clearly, for years since). The imagined sense of freedom she experienced within this fantasy is accompanied, too, by a real sense of love for her husband, mingled with pity.
Alice’s disclosure of her fantasy triggers a deep insecurity in Bill. That she never acted on it, that he was flirting with other women just that evening, this is all irrelevant. His assessment of Alice as a prized possession, a beautiful woman that signals his status to others, is undermined completely by the existence of Alice’s inner life. He feels he’s earned his status and wealth through hard work and merit, and applies this to his marriage as well. When Alice acknowledges having wanted to leave, that means she’s not staying because it is inevitable, she’s staying because she chooses to. He’s now beholden to her in a way that undermines his perception of their power dynamic. The idea that women have desire and agency dismantles the foundations of Bill and Alice’s relationship, Bill’s understanding of his own masculinity, as well as the basis of the power fantasies engaged in by the ultra wealthy who control the global economy.
Bill’s jealousy drives him to wander the streets in the middle of the night, obsessively fixating on his wife’s fantasy. He ultimately stumbles into a mysterious, elite sex party with silent, masked participants.
The fantasy power play enacted at the party is striking in its banality. Everyone’s behavior is measured and unemotional, the sex is not particularly transgressive or sexy. The real crux of the fantasy is that sex is a commodity, like any other, attainable through power and coercion. In order to commodify sex, the personhood of half the population must be denied. If women’s desire is nonexistent, consent is impossible, and irrelevant. Thus, the ultimate demonstration of power by these most powerful people, is possession through rape of the most desirable, valuable type of woman. Desirability is determined by pseudoscientific ideas about race and fitness (perpetuated by those like the evolutionary psychology and eugenics academics funded by Jeffrey Epstein). In the film, uniformly white women with identical, Scandinavian, underwear model bodies in high heels and g-strings all meet a certain exacting standard- an appraisal Kubrick invites with clinical, overhead lighting.
Occult-style ritual is used to heighten the sense of exclusivity and rarity. The function of occult is the imposition of order onto everything, even the supernatural. It is meant to be the ultimate expression of hierarchical power.
In a hazing ritual, violence is coupled with the promise of ascending to a position where not only will you no longer be subject to violence, but you’ll be the one to administer it. Those conducting these kinds of secretive rites subject their participants to violent, humiliating, abusive acts which foster an unshakeable sense of camaraderie and complicity. The more extreme the ritual, the more powerful the bond created.
A similar bond is forged early in the film between Bill and his wealthy patient Ziegler, when Bill is asked to confidentially treat a sex worker who overdosed while servicing Ziegler. Bill intuitively understands that Ziegler’s privacy is more important than the sex worker’s safety. The same woman later sees Bill at the party, and attempts to warn him of the danger of having stumbled upon this secret ritual. When Bill is confronted and threatened, the woman offers to sacrifice herself in his place, and later she turns up dead.
From Tim Kreider’s excellent Eyes Wide Shut analysis Introducing Sociology:
Ultimately, does it really make a difference whether Mandy was ceremonially executed by some evil cabal or only allowed to O.D. after being gang-banged again? Given Kubrick’s penchant for blackly humorous literalism (think of “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here—this is the War Room!” or “I said, ‘I’m not gonna hurt you’—I’m just going to bash your brains in!”), when Ziegler explains that Mandy wasn’t murdered, she just “got her brains fucked out,” the contradiction should be obvious.
In either case, the cause and the outcome are identical. The casual conspiracy when Bill rescues Mandy in Ziegler’s bedroom is echoed in the way these wealthy men ritualistically use women. Participating in the abuse collectively makes them mutually culpable, so they have power over one another, it displays their power to one another, and affirms their regressive views around sex and gender.
The fantasy is that the members of this small group are so powerful and wealthy that only they could have access to such depraved, sensory delights. The reality is one of brute violence toward, and disposal of kidnapped girls and sex workers. It’s simply abuse of very vulnerable people who are already considered invisible by society and the justice system. Virtually anyone can abuse a child or a sex worker in our society and get away with it.
Their power in the world relies on perpetuating the circumstances that make humans disposable, and the rituals they use to demonstrate power show exactly that.
A later scene in the film finds Alice laughing in her sleep, then awaking with a panic as Bill sits beside her on the bed. She relates a dream of being naked, making love with countless men, unabashedly and without inhibition. She and the men laugh at Bill, pitying and mocking him.
Kubrick positions Alice’s fantasy of being wanted and admired and uninhibited in direct opposition to the jealousy and lack of control Bill feels. Alice’s desire, her inner life, are a contradiction of the core assumptions that sustain patriarchy.
It is telling, too, that Alice doesn’t really seem to understand what she’s revealing about herself as she describes her dream. When she hurls jealous accusations at Bill, she uses childish nicknames for genitalia, and she finds herself incredibly distraught over fairly straightforward sexual fantasies. She’s unsure how to express her own desires, because being accustomed to being a sexual object has left her alienated from her identity.
Bill (nearly, sort of) stumbled upon the inner workings of the economic hierarchy that provides a rigid structure to our society. This system denies humanity to its victims while consolidating a power so absolute it’s virtually invisible. It’s through Alice, however, that Kubrick demonstrates how this structure is not just externally imposed. These global forces also shape our families, our relationships, and our own minds.
