When Hugh Hefner died recently, some conservative commentators lamented that his empire was built on the objectification of women. The irony was thick, since those same people have pushed a concept of a woman’s role as subordinate wife and mother. They have even more disrespect for women than what they accused Hef of having. To paraphrase John Irving’s “The World According to Garp,” it’s almost like they believe a woman is either someone’s wife or someone’s whore.
Huxley comes close to advocating something similar. Fanny’s reaction to Lenina contrasted with Henry’s observation about Lenina to the Assistant Predestinator suggest more than just the double standards for genders in Huxley’s time. He may have expected readers to be horrified that a woman would be pressured to have many partners instead of being monogamous. The overt treatment of women as meat may be intended to show the supposed natural outcome of eliminating the possibility of pregnancy, as Catholic commentators sometimes claim. And there’s Mond’s condemnation of motherhood as unhealthy emotionally, and the dichotomy where calling someone a mother is obscene but calling someone a father is merely comically smutty. It’s unclear how that dichotomy would even arise in the world Huxley describes.
Since one of Huxley’s characters speaks in Shakespeare quotes, it’s appropriate to invoke Much Ado Nothing and the Hero/Claudio relationship. I don’t know if old Will was satirizing the era’s attitudes about female virginity, but modern actors and audiences can certainly see Claudio as a jerk for rejecting a woman because she had a previous lover. Huxley may have believed in a slippery slope of contraception leading to the demise of motherhood and family, but didn’t realize that his dystopia would most likely have no gender hierarchy.
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Huxley comes close to advocating something similar. Fanny’s reaction to Lenina contrasted with Henry’s observation about Lenina to the Assistant Predestinator suggest more than just the double standards for genders in Huxley’s time. He may have expected readers to be horrified that a woman would be pressured to have many partners instead of being monogamous. The overt treatment of women as meat may be intended to show the supposed natural outcome of eliminating the possibility of pregnancy, as Catholic commentators sometimes claim. And there’s Mond’s condemnation of motherhood as unhealthy emotionally, and the dichotomy where calling someone a mother is obscene but calling someone a father is merely comically smutty. It’s unclear how that dichotomy would even arise in the world Huxley describes.
Since one of Huxley’s characters speaks in Shakespeare quotes, it’s appropriate to invoke Much Ado Nothing and the Hero/Claudio relationship. I don’t know if old Will was satirizing the era’s attitudes about female virginity, but modern actors and audiences can certainly see Claudio as a jerk for rejecting a woman because she had a previous lover. Huxley may have believed in a slippery slope of contraception leading to the demise of motherhood and family, but didn’t realize that his dystopia would most likely have no gender hierarchy.