sex in 1984 essay

George Orwell

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

As Julia observes, the Party polices sexual relationships because it realizes that the hysteria caused by sexual frustration can be harnessed into war fever and leader-worship. Because of this, when Winston and Julia make love they think of it as a political act, "a blow struck against the Party." The sadistic fantasies Winston has about Julia before they begin their affair indicate the strong link between sexual repression and violence. The red sash Julia wears and her voluptuous appearance arouses feelings of hatred and resentment that only dissipate when he learns that he can possess her physically.

Another reason that the Party restricts sexual behavior is that sexual desire competes with loyalty to the State: after Winston makes love with Julia, he realizes that it is "the force that would tear the Party to pieces." In place of heterosexual love, the Party substitutes leader-worship and patriotic feeling: thus, when Winston betrays Julia under torture, he learns to revere O'Brien and worship Big Brother.

Sex, Love, and Loyalty ThemeTracker

Sex, Love, and Loyalty Quotes in 1984

And then—no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment—one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over. “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

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GEORGE ORWELL

Nineteen eighty-four, sexual freedom and political freedom: on orwell’s ‘nineteen eighty-four’, by cass sunstein.

This is the full text of Cass Sunstein’s chapter, ‘Sexual Freedom and Political Freedom’ in A. Gleason et al., editors, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and our Future (Princeton University Press, 2005) pp. 233-241.

POSTED BY KIND PERMISSION OF CASS SUNSTEIN

Cass Robert Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities.

All images from 1984, dir. Michael Radford (Virgin Films, 1984)

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

One of the most vivid passages in Nineteen Eighty-Four appears in the middle of the novel, where Winston experiences what is meant to be a moment of revelation. The passage can be found immediately after Winston tells Julia about ‘his married life’: as it happens Julia knew ‘the essential parts of it already.’ Thus she describes ‘to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine’s body as soon as he touched her.’ This was ‘the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week.’ Winston notes that she ‘hated it,’ but ‘nothing would make her stop doing it.’ What Katharine called it, Winston says, Julia will ‘never guess’; but of course Julia ‘promptly’ guesses: ‘Our duty to the Party.’

Big Brother, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

Then Julia begins to ‘enlarge upon the subject’: It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The way she put it was: ‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’ This was very true, he thought. There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.

Two Minutes Hate, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

This passage lies at the core of Orwell’s stated account of sexuality, politics, and totalitarianism. We might discern from the passage a distinctive thesis: Totalitarian governments thrive on the repression of sexual drives; they repress sexuality in order to make room for mass ‘marching’ and public ‘cheering,’ that is, ‘sex gone sour.’ Nor is it hard to think of governments, and political movements, that appear to provide at least indirect support for Orwell’s claim. Consider, for example, highly eroticized political movements in America and elsewhere that thrive, at least in part, on the effort to combat sexual promiscuity, and that eroticize that very effort (sometimes by talking about sex so much).

Ingsoc party rally, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

My claim here, however, is that Orwell’s claim is wrong—that there is no ‘direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.’ The links between ‘sexual privation’ and ‘orthodoxy’ are much less direct and intimate, and sometimes the two are antagonists, not allies. Orwell’s treatment of the issue is diminished by the fact that Julia, most of all on this count, emerges as less a person than an adolescent male fantasy, a point that may also shed light on the weakness of the link that Orwell draws between sexual freedom and totalitarianism. Orwell has at most identified a mechanism, not a lawlike generalization.

Julia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

The point has contemporary implications. Many people seem to share Orwell’s belief that political totalitarian and sexual repression march hand in hand, both logically and empirically. On this view, it is no accident that authoritarian nations—Afghanistan under the Taliban, for example, or communist China—are concerned both to crush dissent and to suppress sexual liberty. In free and less free countries, those who insist on the protection of sexual liberty (in such domains as prostitution and pornography) often claim to be political dissidents, or close cousins of political dissidents, and urge that they deserve the same degree of respect accorded to those who attempt to topple a politically repressive regime. Nothing that I say here will challenge efforts to reduce government interference with sexual liberty, nor will I explore the question of what, concretely, sexual liberty should be understood to be. But I will offer reasons to challenge current manifestations of the tendency to find a link between sexual repression and political repression. I do believe that there is a close association between political repression and the repression of women, but Orwell is, unfortunately, quiet on that score.

Winston’s arrest, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

To deal with the relationship between sexual privation and political orthodoxy, it will be useful to begin more generally with Orwell’s treatment of sex and love. This treatment superficially supports but actually outruns his own thesis about the purpose and effect of sexual frustration. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, sex is portrayed in several different ways. First, there is the dutiful, dead, frigid, antierotic, pro-Party sex of Winston’s marriage, contrasted with the much freer relationship between Winston and Julia. But an alternative account of sex is offered early in the novel, during the Two Minutes Hate. Here Winston has ‘vivid, beautiful hallucinations,’ involving ‘the dark-haired girl behind him.’ According to those hallucinations: ‘He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity’. (Chancing upon her some seventy pages later, he notices ‘that by running he could probably catch up with her. He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone’.) This is the ‘girl’ who turns out to be Julia. In their first real discussion, he tells her: ‘I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone’.

Julia and Winston, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

Of Orwell’s three portrayals of sex, the most conventional involves the relationship between Winston and Julia. Their initial physical encounter is notably unerotic: ‘At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! Actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. He had pulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no physical sensation except that of mere contact. All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire’. Later, after sexual intercourse: ‘Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act’. (Compare Julia’s activity, feigned to be sure, for the Junior Anti-Sex League.)

While there are a number of portrayals of sex in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are only two love stories, involving two couples: Julia and Winston is one, and Winston and O’Brien the other; the most erotically charged, even intense scenes involve the latter. In a way the whole book is structured around a love triangle, in which O’Brien extinguishes the erotic connection between Julia and Winston, marking the triumph of the Party against a ‘blow’ that had threatened it, and re-establishing both chastity and political orthodoxy. (There is an obvious Oedipal dimension to the triangle, insofar as O’Brien is a kind of punitive father, splitting Winston from his beloved.)

O’Brien and Winston, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

The existence of a love triangle is signaled early on, where Orwell writes, of O’Brien, that Winston ‘felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. He had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to, if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone’. Winston has had a dream, or it might be real, in which O’Brien whispers to him: ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’ And this becomes the foundation for the long concluding section, which is portrayed as a series of sexually sadistic acts committed by O’Brien against Winston. In fact it is a sustained scene of rape and castration. (This is why Nineteen Eighty-Four, as opposed to, say, Brave New World, belongs as much to the genre of horror as to that of science fiction.)

Early on in the torture, when O’Brien momentarily takes away the pain, Orwell writes that as Winston ‘looked up gratefully at O’Brien,’ ‘his heart seemed to turn over. He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O’Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates’. When the more severe torture begins, O’Brien announces, lest there should be any question about what kind of scene this is, ‘You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves’. As this torture starts, ‘O’Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his. ‘This time it will not hurt,’ he said. ‘Keep your eyes fixed on mine.’ ‘The equipment produces in him ‘a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain’.

That is the rape scene; the castration scene follows. O’Brien forces Winston to take off his clothes, and while Winston is naked, O’Brien ‘seized one of Winston’s remaining front teeth between his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston’s jaw. O’Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.’ Then he commands: ‘Now put your clothes on again’. It is almost anticlimactic when, in the famous ‘rats’ scene, O’Brien leads Winston to betray Julia.

The arc of the novel appears to fit well with Orwell’s thesis. The erotic connection between Julia and Winston produces a threat to the Party. O’Brien has to sever the link in order to transfer Winston’s erotic attention to Big Brother (thus Winston, in the final paragraphs, is portrayed as bride, grateful rape victim, repentant son, suckling infant: ‘He was back in the Ministry of Love, his soul white as snow.The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain. O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! He loved Big Brother’). There are pieces that do not quite fit; the relationship between Julia and Winston fuels, at least on Winston’s part, political activity rather than not giving ‘a damn for anything’, and in the end Winston is perhaps less a sexually frustrated marcher (though he does cheer: ‘he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf’) than something hollowed-out and dead. But the basic picture seems to cohere.

Julia claims—and though this is not entirely clear, she seems to be speaking in Orwell’s voice—that if people are sexually active, they ‘feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything.’ Political orthodoxy is a consequence of sexual frustration, which governments can channel into marching and flag-waving and the Two Minutes Hate. Sexual satisfaction removes the taste for these forms of political participation; people will no longer ‘get excited’ once they are happy ‘inside’ themselves. (Compare: ‘Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun’.) In short, political fevers are a product of sexual frustration, and this is one of the things that a totalitarian government knows best. (Compare Winston’s approval of the fact that Julia had been with scores of men; his desire for her to have been with ‘hundreds—thousands’; his claim ‘I hate purity. I hate goodness. I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere’; his pleasure at her reaction to his question about her attitude toward the sex act itself, ‘I adore it’: ‘Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass’.)

It is not easy to know how to test Orwell’s thesis, which appears to be an empirical claim. But there are obvious problems. Many people who are sexually inactive, voluntarily or as a result of coercion, do not support the prevailing political orthodoxy. Why should we think that ‘hysteria,’ if that is what is induced by sexual deprivation, leads to approval of the political status quo? It is at least as plausible to think that sexual activity would lead to political rebelliousness as to believe that it is correlated with conformity. Some dissident groups take steps to repress sexual activity, sometimes with the thought that the repression will strengthen ties to the cause and hence further endanger the state. Or—to me more plausibly—it may be that the sort of people who are sexually active are often likely to be political rebels. In any case is it really true that sexual satisfaction makes people—in Julia’s words—not ‘give a damn for anything’? This seems implausible. Perhaps some people who are immersed in an extremely passionate relationship do not like to think about anything else; but that is a different point.

Notice in this connection that before O’Brien’s true nature is revealed, Winston and Julia, now sexual partners, do not abstain from politics but on the contrary enlist in what they think is a conspiracy against the Party. The conspiracy is one in which sacrifice for the cause—with one exception—is unlimited, in fact not so different, with that exception, from what the Party wants from its citizens:

‘You are prepared to give your lives?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You are prepared to commit murder?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘To betray your country to foreign powers?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?’ ‘No!’ broke in Julia.

The single exception embodied in Julia’s ‘No!’ shows that political loyalty can be undermined by an erotic relationship. But this is a quite different point from Orwell’s thesis.

We might compare in this regard the very different presentation of the relation between sexual freedom and political freedom in Huxley’s Brave New World . There sexual promiscuity is a kind of opiate of the masses, consistently encouraged partly in order to discourage political rebellion. Both novels portray the death of the individual soul, but with major differences: Where Nineteen Eighty-Four is a nightmare vision of Communism or Fascism, Brave New World is a nightmare vision of triumphant capitalism. We might even identify a Huxley hypothesis, one that appears to compete directly with Orwell’s: Sexual activity diverts people from engaging in political causes, and it ought therefore to be encouraged by a government that seeks a quiescent population. On this view, sexual promiscuity is depoliticizing, soul-destroying, a twin to soma, antagonistic to rebellion. Some political movements have in fact accepted this view, and it is easy to see how it might be true. We can imagine the possibilities described in the accompanying matrix.

Sexual Repression versus Sexual Freedom

On this view, Huxley’s hypothesis is the antonym to Orwell’s. But along one dimension, it is only apparently competing. The key point is that Huxley, like Orwell, identifies sexual activity with political passivity. In Orwell, the state seeks marching, even a form of fanaticism; in Huxley, the state seeks a kind of pleased, vacant indifference. Sexual repression is, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a necessary way of ‘bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force’; in Brave New World, the society is infantilized and pacified through catering to that same instinct. Thus it is that in Orwell’s world, a form of sex that is not a ‘frigid little ceremony’ is a threat to the political order, whereas in Huxley’s, the threat comes from a refusal of sex, or of soma, which will be and will produce rebellion. Compare Winston to Julia, who appears to have little interest in politics, and who says, ‘I’m not interested in the next generation, dear.’ When Winston says, ‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,’ she does not object but instead finds the statement ‘brilliantly witty’.

But there are other possibilities, very different from Orwell’s and Huxley’s shared view. It may be that sexual love can actually fuel political activity, by expanding the imagination and promoting empathic engagement with the lives of others. Probably we need to distinguish here, as Orwell does not, among different kinds of sexuality. It is not as if there is a choice only between ‘the Party’s sexual puritanism’ and ‘sexual privation’ (Orwell’s phrases) on the one hand and ‘making love’ on the other. Promiscuous relationships are not all the same; nor are enduring, passionate relationships. Promiscuous relationships may have different effects from enduring, passionate relationships. The connection between any one of these and political activity depends on many independent variables.

The prostitute, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

All this may not be quite fair to Orwell. He also seems to have another point in mind. It has to do with how sexuality is connected with individuality and self-expression, with the rejection of conformity, with what he seems to see as the truest and most distinctive self, anarchic and not governable. It is this that presents the deepest danger to the Party. Orwell is not speaking here of love or of intimate relations with individual persons: ‘Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces’. Here, too, there is an interesting relationship with Huxley, who portrays promiscuity as soulless, as an erasure of individuality, as a form of conformity. Both Huxley and Orwell may have a particular conception of authentic sexuality in view, and they may not be so different. The contrast is that Orwell portrays ‘the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire’ as active and a threat to political orthodoxy, something that, once unleashed, will lead to rebellion. O’Brien appears to agree. Winston’s torture and castration produce a kind of docility, even serenity, that paves the way for, or that is, acceptance of Big Brother and death.

Orwell’s conception of sexuality as an ‘animal instinct,’ and as an expression of something ungovernable and personal, may be right; certainly there is truth in it. But sexuality can itself be a product of social practices; it should not be naturalized, and opposed, as ‘true self,’ to cultural constraint. We do not know the extent to which sexual drives are themselves a product of private and public authority. Orwell tends to naturalize the ‘sex instinct’ (as the very term suggests). This is an under-explored point in the novel itself, where sexual drives seem to be something beyond the reach of politics or the Party, except through after-the-fact techniques of the kind used by O’Brien. Perhaps this is not Orwell’s full position; Winston’s early fantasies of sexual violence might be taken as a product of the particular social circumstances of Party domination. But this point is not much elaborated, nor is it brought into contact with Julia’s claims about the nature and consequence of sexual activity.

Does a free society allow prostitution and pornography? Does a free society attempt to eliminate ‘sexual repression,’ understood as state interference with people’s sexual choices? Much will depend on how we understand the idea of sexual liberty. Perhaps that form of liberty does not require mere freedom from governmental restraints. If preferences and values have social origins (at least in part), then the desire to go to a prostitute, or to be a prostitute, may reflect a lack of freedom. Notwithstanding this point, many contemporary critics do connect sexual freedom and political freedom. They seem to think that those who challenge sexual repression, or sexual orthodoxy, are in some sense striking a blow for political liberty as well.

If the discussion here is correct, the claimed link is illusory. Sexual freedom, at least in Orwell’s sense, need not be connected with political freedom, and those who seek the one need have no interest in the other. There is no link logically or empirically. In some ways Orwell’s conception of their relationship is a cousin of the conception of many dissident movements in the 1960s. Those movements combined an intense interest in sexual experimentation with an intense interest in political rebellion; they were a self-conscious challenge to conformity in various guises. But it is no coincidence that modern feminism outgrew those movements, in part because sexual liberty was understood, much of the time, as a matter of giving men greater sexual access to women. While I cannot support the claim here, I think that Orwell’s conception of sexual freedom belongs in the same family, and indeed that sexual equality is a large neglected topic in a book that otherwise has so much to say about both freedom and sex.

Julia eyeing Winston, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

Orwell suggests that totalitarian governments favor ‘sexual puritanism,’ which induces ‘hysteria,’ something that such governments mobilize in their own favor. This is the image of patriotic frenzy as ‘sex gone sour.’ On this view, sexual freedom embodies freedom and individualism, and it is the deepest enemy of a totalitarian state. A state that allows sexual freedom will be unable to repress its citizens. This is why O’Brien must achieve victory over Julia.

But it is possible to imagine other, equally plausible views. ‘Sexual privation’ might indeed induce hysteria, but of the sort that leads to rebellion and thus serves as an obstacle to a successful totalitarian government. I have suggested that in the face of existing social norms, many people who are sexually active are also likely to be political rebels, because of something in their character (itself perhaps a product of early childhood or genetic predispositions). And sexual freedom, even promiscuity, might be encouraged by totalitarian governments, in order to divert the citizenry and to induce apathy. (This is Huxley’s thesis.) Or we might reject the idea that the only two options are ‘privation’ and ‘freedom’ (as understood by both Orwell and Huxley). The real question might be what sorts of intimate relationships people are allowed to make with one another.

In the end I believe that Orwell’s thesis is a crude, vaguely Freudian cliché, implausible as an abstraction and in some ways undermined by the novel itself. It is true that some totalitarian states have attempted the approach he describes, and perhaps they have had some modest success. But Orwell was wrong to think that there is a ‘direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.’ The mechanisms that link sexual freedom and political freedom are extremely diverse. There are no law-like generalizations here.

The Ministry of Truth, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell / Radford

ORWELL’S ‘1984’ IN ‘MARA, MARIETTA’

From ‘mara, marietta’ part three chapter 14.

Underfoot, overhead, left, right, behind, ahead: Omnipresent, metal and glass conspire to remove all our bearings; unmoored, we ascend in spidery space. In a riot of shadow and light the guts of the construction invade our vision; reaching for your hand I catch your gaze: In the depths of your eyes as our hands entwine, I see Winston and Julia about to commit sexcrime.

Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris | © IMA / Fabrice Cateloy

Glass walls, polished floors; glowing columns, gleaming doors: Refracting, reflecting, surfaces shimmer with patterns of filtered light. And then it appears, a giant screen of geometric forms, a riot of proliferating motifs: Intensely-patterned panes unfold their symmetry. Look! Mirror-plates in meticulous rhythm, flashes of prudence and vanity; clockwork in crystal panels, wheels of time and fortuity.

You take my hand, and through filigreed light lead me.

Institut du Monde Arabe, south façade, interior

On the rooftop, in the corridor between the empty restaurant and the Seine façade of the building, cubic modules of wicker furniture stack up in disorderly columns. Bearing witness to winter, Arabic urns of barren earth punctuate the passage. We slip in between two stacks of chairs and wend our way to the railing. Spinning around, you say:

̶  Take off your coat.

In the dark groves of your eyes sulphur butterflies swarm; ready to do what must be done, I shake my jacket from my shoulders and toss it onto a railing post. You slip off yours and sling it over mine. Turning your back to the garde-fou, you pull me towards you.

̶  Fuck me.

Bringing your hand to my crotch, you rub.

̶  Fuck me, Sprague!

The fire in your eyes shames the uncertain sun; the risk is calculated, let it be done: Bending you over the railing, I slip my hand between your legs. Your lush ripeness hardens me as I heave rhythmically.

̶  Go down and kiss it.

A sharp tug on your belt releases the pin; I fall to my knees, open your jeans and pull them down. Warm, wet and feral, at once lulling and unsettling, your sex beckons. I pull down your panties.

IMA terrace

MARA, MARIETTA: A LOVE STORY IN 77 BEDROOMS

A novel by richard jonathan.

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George orwell: two photos & a book on ‘1984’.

Orwell, BBC photo, c.1942

On Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell, press card photo, 1943

VIDEO: ‘SEXCRIME (1984)’ – EURYTHMICS (Live, 1987)

Sexcrime (1984) – Eurythmics (Live, 1987)

LYRICS: ‘SEXCRIME (1984)’ – EURYTHMICS

Can I take this for granted With your eyes over me? In this place, this wintery home I know there’s always someone in

Sexcrime, sexcrime… Nineteen eighty-four…

And so I face the wall Turn my back against it all How I wish I’d been unborn Wish I were unliving here

I’ll pull the bricks down One by one

Sexcrime, sexcrime…

Leave a big hole in the wall Just where you are looking in

VIDEO: ‘1984’ – DAVID BOWIE (Live, 1974)

‘1984’ –David Bowie (Live, 1974)

LYRICS: ‘1984’ – DAVID BOWIE

Someday they won’t let you, now you must agree The times they are a-telling, and the changing isn’t free You’ve read it in the papers, and the tracks are on TV Beware the savage jaw of 1984

They’ll split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air And tell that you’re eighty, but brother, you won’t care You’ll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow’s never there Beware the savage jaw of 1984

Come see, come see, remember me? We played out an all-night movie role You said it would last, but I guess we enrolled In 1984 (who could ask for more?)

1984 (who could ask for more?) (More…)

I’m looking for a vehicle, I’m looking for a ride I’m looking for a party, I’m looking for a side I’m looking for a reason that I knew in ‘65 Beware the savage jaw of 1984

1984…

FICTION IN ‘MARA, MARIETTA’

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George Orwell

Franz Kafka

John Fowles

James Joyce

Anton Chekhov

Isak Dinesen

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Sprague’s Favourite Biographies and Memoirs

• References and Bibliography

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Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — 1984

Essays on 1984

Hook examples for "1984" essays, the dystopian warning hook.

Open your essay by discussing George Orwell's "1984" as a prophetic warning against totalitarianism and government surveillance. Explore how the novel's themes are eerily relevant in today's world.

The Orwellian Language Hook

Delve into the concept of Newspeak in "1984" and its parallels to modern language manipulation. Discuss how the novel's portrayal of controlled language reflects real-world instances of propaganda and censorship.

Big Brother is Watching Hook

Begin with a focus on surveillance and privacy concerns. Analyze the omnipresent surveillance in the novel and draw connections to contemporary debates over surveillance technologies, data privacy, and civil liberties.

The Power of Doublethink Hook

Explore the psychological manipulation in "1984" through the concept of doublethink. Discuss how individuals in the novel are coerced into accepting contradictory beliefs, and examine instances of cognitive dissonance in society today.

The Character of Winston Smith Hook

Introduce your readers to the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his journey of rebellion against the Party. Analyze his character development and the universal theme of resistance against oppressive regimes.

Technology and Control Hook

Discuss the role of technology in "1984" and its implications for control. Explore how advancements in surveillance technology, social media, and artificial intelligence resonate with the novel's themes of control and manipulation.

The Ministry of Truth Hook

Examine the Ministry of Truth in the novel, responsible for rewriting history. Compare this to the manipulation of information and historical revisionism in contemporary politics and media.

Media Manipulation and Fake News Hook

Draw parallels between the Party's manipulation of information in "1984" and the spread of misinformation and fake news in today's media landscape. Discuss the consequences of a distorted reality.

Relevance of Thoughtcrime Hook

Explore the concept of thoughtcrime and its impact on individual freedom in the novel. Discuss how society today grapples with issues related to freedom of thought, expression, and censorship.

Examples of Paradoxes in 1984

A comparison of dystopias: "fahrenheit 451" and "1984", made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

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Tranquility in George Orwells 1984

George orwell’s representation of authority as illustrated in his book, 1984, orwell's use of literary devices to portray the theme of totalitarianism in 1984, the culture of fear in 1984, a novel by george orwell, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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1984 by George Orwell: Literary Devices to Portray Government Controlling Its Citizens

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A World Without Love: The Ramifications of an Affectionless Society in 1984

On double-think and newspeak: orwell's language, the theme of survival and selfishness in the handmaid's tale in 1984, government surveillance in 1984 by george orwell: bogus security, george orwell's 1984 as a historical allegory, exploitation of language in george orwell's 1984, how orwell's 1984 is relevant to today's audience, the relation of orwel’s 1984 to the uighur conflict in china, symbolism in 1984: the soviet union as representation of the fears people, parallels to today in 1984 by george orwell, the relationship between power and emotions in 1984, proletariat vs protagonist: winston smith's class conflict in 1984, a review of george orwell’s book, 1984, o'brien as a dehumanizing villain in 1984, family in 1984 and persepolis, the philosophy of determinism in 1984, orwell's use of rhetorical strategies in 1984, control the citizens in the orwell's novel 1984, dangers of totalitarianism as depicted in 1984, dystopian life in '1984' was a real-life in china.

8 June 1949, George Orwell

Novel; Dystopia, Political Fiction, Social Science Fiction Novel

Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien, Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford, Ampleforth, Charrington, Tom Parsons, Syme, Mrs. Parsons, Katharine Smith

Since Orwell has been a democratic socialist, he has modelled his book and motives after the Stalinist Russia

Power, Repressive Behaviors, Totalitarianism, Mass Surveillance, Human Behaviors

The novel has brought up the "Orwellian" term, which stands for "Big Brother" "Thoughtcrime" and many other terms that we know well. It has been the reflection of totalitarianism

1984 represents a dystopian writing that has followed the life of Winston Smith who belongs to the "Party",which stands for the total control, which is also known as the Big Brother. It controls every aspect of people's lives. Is it ever possible to go against the system or will it take even more control. It constantly follows the fear and oppression with the surveillance being the main part of 1984. There is Party’s official O’Brien who is following the resistance movement, which represents an alternative, which is the symbol of hope.

Before George Orwell wrote his famous book, he worked for the BBC as the propagandist during World War II. The novel has been named 1980, then 1982 before finally settling on its name. Orwell fought tuberculosis while writing the novel. He died seven months after 1984 was published. Orwell almost died during the boating trip while he was writing the novel. Orwell himself has been under government surveillance. It was because of his socialist opinions. The slogan that the book uses "2 + 2 = 5" originally came from Communist Russia and stood for the five-year plan that had to be achieved during only four years. Orwell also used various Japanese propaganda when writing his novel, precisely his "Thought Police" idea.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.” “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred."

The most important aspect of 1984 is Thought Police, which controls every thought. It has been featured in numerous books, plays, music pieces, poetry, and anything that has been created when one had to deal with Social Science and Politics. Another factor that represents culmination is thinking about overthrowing the system or trying to organize a resistance movement. It has numerous reflections of the post WW2 world. Although the novella is graphic and quite intense, it portrays dictatorship and is driven by fear through the lens of its characters.

This essay topic is often used when writing about “The Big Brother” or totalitarian regimes, which makes 1984 a flexible topic that can be taken as the foundation. Even if you have to write about the use of fear by the political regimes, knowing the facts about this novel will help you to provide an example.

1. Enteen, G. M. (1984). George Orwell And the Theory of Totalitarianism: A 1984 Retrospective. The Journal of General Education, 36(3), 206-215. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27797000) 2. Hughes, I. (2021). 1984. Literary Cultures, 4(2). (https://journals.ntu.ac.uk/index.php/litc/article/view/340) 3. Patai, D. (1982). Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's 1984. PMLA, 97(5), 856-870. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/gamesmanship-and-androcentrism-in-orwells-1984/F1B026BE9D97EE0114E248AA733B189D) 4. Paden, R. (1984). Surveillance and Torture: Foucault and Orwell on the Methods of Discipline. Social Theory and Practice, 10(3), 261-271. (https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_1984_0010_0003_0261_0272) 5. Tyner, J. A. (2004). Self and space, resistance and discipline: a Foucauldian reading of George Orwell's 1984. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(1), 129-149. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464936032000137966) 6. Kellner, D. (1990). From 1984 to one-dimensional man: Critical reflections on Orwell and Marcuse. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 10, 223-52. (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/from1984toonedimensional.pdf) 7. Samuelson, P. (1984). Good legal writing: of Orwell and window panes. U. Pitt. L. Rev., 46, 149. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/upitt46&div=13&id=&page=) 8. Fadaee, E. (2011). Translation techniques of figures of speech: A case study of George Orwell's" 1984 and Animal Farm. Journal of English and Literature, 2(8), 174-181. (https://academicjournals.org/article/article1379427897_Fadaee.pdf) 9. Patai, D. (1984, January). Orwell's despair, Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 85-95). Pergamon. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0277539584900621) 10. Cole, M. B. (2022). The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984: Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times. Political Research Quarterly, 10659129221083286. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221083286)

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Heather Love; INTRODUCTION. GLQ 1 January 2011; 17 (1): 1–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2010-014

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This introduction for “Rethinking Sex” frames the contributions of Gayle Rubin to the contemporary field of sexuality studies through a discussion of her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex.” It discusses the 2009 conference that was the basis for this special issue as well as the significance of Rubin's career and her scholarship, focusing in particular on links between feminism and queer studies, empiricism and description, coalitional politics, and memory and the significance of archives.

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Thinking Sex

By gayle rubin.

• Thinking Sex Summary

“ Thinking Sex ” is Gayle Rubin ’s classic 1984 essay about erotic hierarchies and sexual oppression, particularly in the United States. It theorizes the role sex plays in moral panics and political anxieties, and it contributed to important debates about the relation of sex and feminism.

The essay begins by considering a history of policing sex and sexuality in the United States. In particular, Rubin notices three periods in which there was intense scrutiny of sexuality in the United States. In the late 19th century, Americans criminalized and policed homosexuality and prostitution, as well as pornography and birth control. In the 1950s, the policing of homosexuality in particular was intensified by a series of witch-hunts by local, state, and federal officials. In the 1980s, in which Rubin is writing, a series of campaigns against “obscenity,” including discrimination against gay people, continued to unfold across the country. That grew as well into a panic over AIDS, which rather than turning into an effort to help gay people, has been used to further marginalize them as diseased and unworthy of social integration.

Rubin thinks that throughout this time period, from the late 19th century to the present, there has been a sexual hierarchy. Society deems some sex “good” and some sex “bad.” The only sex that is consistently good is heterosexual intercourse within marriage. All other sex can, at some point, be seen on the other side of the imaginary line dividing good from bad. People police and stigmatize the bad sex out of proportion to any perceived damage it can cause society. This is in part because people have difficulty imagining how anyone could have or desire to have a different sex life from their own. We tend to outlaw what we do not understand.

To correct this, Rubin calls for viewing sex as a “vector” of oppression alongside other vectors like race, ethnicity, and gender. People are discriminated against and marginalized by their sexual activities in the same way that people might experience oppression on account of the color of their skin, their nationality, or their gender. In order to end sexual oppression, we have to address it as a unique form of discrimination that does not reduce to another kind of discrimination, including gender discrimination. That means, in the end, we need a “radical theory of sex” that is independent from feminism, according to Rubin. Feminism studies oppression based on gender, but the oppression of sex is not reducible to gender. Therefore, a new radical theory of sex is needed.

Thinking Sex Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Thinking Sex is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

How does Rubin present the notion of sexual hierarchy in the book?

The major theme of “Thinking Sex” is that American society always organizes sexual acts into a hierarchy. That means it values and legitimizes some sex, usually heterosexual intercourse in marriage. Any sex that is different than this is lower in...

Do you think that Gayle Rubin’s ideas of sexual stratification have a universal appeal and help us understand sexual marginalities in Indian society?

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thinking sex; a radical theory

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Study Guide for Thinking Sex

Thinking Sex study guide contains a biography of Gayle Rubin, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Thinking Sex
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Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality

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Gayle Rubin, a feminist cultural anthropologist, has written numerous works regarding the concepts and constructions of sexuality and gender. She has been highly influential as an activist and theorist, examining a range of sexuality-based subjects and observing many different subcultures, mostly in the United States. Rubin’s work in “Thinking Sex” (1984) describes the areas of contention within feminist thought during the 1970’s and 80’s concerning the subjects of gender, sex and sexuality. She identifies that ‘feminist thought simply lacks angles of vision which can fully encompass the social organisation of sexuality’ and that feminism should focus principally on gender oppression. She then initiates a move from feminism to a more discursive study of sexuality and describes how we have ‘learned to cherish different cultures as unique expressions of human inventiveness rather than as the inferior or disgusting habits of savages. We need a similarly anthropological understanding of sexual cultures.’ Within this essay, Gayle Rubin’s upbringing and the effect this had on her work will be examined, previous relevant feminist literature will be identified, and the question of ‘queer feminism’ will be deliberated over.

Schem Rogerson Bader

Queer Archives By the nineteenth century a vast array of ethnographies such as racialization, class, sexuality, gender and criminology had become the cornerstone to the social sciences. The body became a site of social regulation, and the notion of truth and its manifestations on the body became culturally realized through systemic ideologies. The social body was the triumph of Bourgeois order, where the political economy of Industrialism, Capitalism and Imperialism were entwined with the individual and the state, and where sexual conduct was converted to economic and political behavior. The category of homosexuality was a device meant to control and regulate. Foucaultian analysis asserts that nineteenth century prohibitions established far reaching oppressive sexual discourses, however, through systems set out to control sexuality - homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf (Foucault 1980). The queer archive provides a site of memory that historically has been entrenched in erasure, inscribing both the archives and their users with political power. Without knowledge of the past, what can we expect of future queer subjectivities?

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Guest Essay

The Problem With Saying ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’

By Alex Byrne and Carole K. Hooven

Mr. Byrne is a philosopher and the author of “Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions.” Ms. Hooven is an evolutionary biologist and the author of “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us.”

As you may have noticed, “sex” is out, and “sex assigned at birth” is in. Instead of asking for a person’s sex, some medical and camp forms these days ask for “sex assigned at birth” or “assigned sex” (often in addition to gender identity). The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association endorse this terminology; its use has also exploded in academic articles. The Cleveland Clinic’s online glossary of diseases and conditions tells us that the “inability to achieve or maintain an erection” is a symptom of sexual dysfunction, not in “males,” but in “people assigned male at birth.”

This trend began around a decade ago, part of an increasing emphasis in society on emotional comfort and insulation from offense — what some have called “ safetyism .” “Sex” is now often seen as a biased or insensitive word because it may fail to reflect how people identify themselves. One reason for the adoption of “assigned sex,” therefore, is that it supplies respectful euphemisms, softening what to some nonbinary and transgender people, among others, can feel like a harsh biological reality. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” is taken to be an indirect and more polite way of communicating that the person is biologically female. The terminology can also function to signal solidarity with trans and nonbinary people, as well as convey the radical idea that our traditional understanding of sex is outdated.

The shift to “sex assigned at birth” may be well intentioned, but it is not progress. We are not against politeness or expressions of solidarity, but “sex assigned at birth” can confuse people and creates doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn’t be any. Nor is the phrase called for because our traditional understanding of sex needs correcting — it doesn’t.

This matters because sex matters. Sex is a fundamental biological feature with significant consequences for our species, so there are costs to encouraging misconceptions about it.

Sex matters for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, meanwhile, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and commit the vast majority of homicides and sexual assaults . We aren’t suggesting that “assigned sex” will increase the death toll. However, terminology about important matters should be as clear as possible.

More generally, the interaction between sex and human culture is crucial to understanding psychological and physical differences between boys and girls, men and women. We cannot have such understanding unless we know what sex is, which means having the linguistic tools necessary to discuss it. The Associated Press cautions journalists that describing women as “female” may be objectionable because “it can be seen as emphasizing biology,” but sometimes biology is highly relevant. The heated debate about transgender women participating in female sports is an example ; whatever view one takes on the matter, biologically driven athletic differences between the sexes are real.

When influential organizations and individuals promote “sex assigned at birth,” they are encouraging a culture in which citizens can be shamed for using words like “sex,” “male” and “female” that are familiar to everyone in society, as well as necessary to discuss the implications of sex. This is not the usual kind of censoriousness, which discourages the public endorsement of certain opinions. It is more subtle, repressing the very vocabulary needed to discuss the opinions in the first place.

A proponent of the new language may object, arguing that sex is not being avoided, but merely addressed and described with greater empathy. The introduction of euphemisms to ease uncomfortable associations with old words happens all the time — for instance “plus sized” as a replacement for “overweight.” Admittedly, the effects may be short-lived , because euphemisms themselves often become offensive, and indeed “larger-bodied” is now often preferred to “plus sized.” But what’s the harm? No one gets confused, and the euphemisms allow us to express extra sensitivity. Some see “sex assigned at birth” in the same positive light: It’s a way of talking about sex that is gender-affirming and inclusive .

The problem is that “sex assigned at birth”— unlike “larger-bodied”— is very misleading. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.

Contrary to what we might assume, avoiding “sex” doesn’t serve the cause of inclusivity: not speaking plainly about males and females is patronizing. We sometimes sugarcoat the biological facts for children, but competent adults deserve straight talk. Nor are circumlocutions needed to secure personal protections and rights, including transgender rights. In the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, which outlawed workplace discrimination against gay and transgender people, Justice Neil Gorsuch used “sex,” not “sex assigned at birth.”

A more radical proponent of “assigned sex” will object that the very idea of sex as a biological fact is suspect. According to this view — associated with the French philosopher Michel Foucault and, more recently, the American philosopher Judith Butler — sex is somehow a cultural production, the result of labeling babies male or female. “Sex assigned at birth” should therefore be preferred over “sex,” not because it is more polite, but because it is more accurate.

This position tacitly assumes that humans are exempt from the natural order. If only! Alas, we are animals. Sexed organisms were present on Earth at least a billion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had never evolved. Sex is not in any sense the result of linguistic ceremonies in the delivery room or other cultural practices. Lonesome George, the long-lived Galápagos giant tortoise , was male. He was not assigned male at birth — or rather, in George’s case, at hatching. A baby abandoned at birth may not have been assigned male or female by anyone, yet the baby still has a sex. Despite the confusion sown by some scholars, we can be confident that the sex binary is not a human invention.

Another downside of “assigned sex” is that it biases the conversation away from established biological facts and infuses it with a sociopolitical agenda, which only serves to intensify social and political divisions. We need shared language that can help us clearly state opinions and develop the best policies on medical, social and legal issues. That shared language is the starting point for mutual understanding and democratic deliberation, even if strong disagreement remains.

What can be done? The ascendance of “sex assigned at birth” is not an example of unhurried and organic linguistic change. As recently as 2012 The New York Times reported on the new fashion for gender-reveal parties, “during which expectant parents share the moment they discover their baby’s sex.” In the intervening decade, sex has gone from being “discovered” to “assigned” because so many authorities insisted on the new usage. In the face of organic change, resistance is usually futile. Fortunately, a trend that is imposed top-down is often easier to reverse.

Admittedly, no one individual, or even a small group, can turn the lumbering ship of English around. But if professional organizations change their style guides and glossaries, we can expect that their members will largely follow suit. And organizations in turn respond to lobbying from their members. Journalists, medical professionals, academics and others have the collective power to restore language that more faithfully reflects reality. We will have to wait for them to do that.

Meanwhile, we can each apply Strunk and White’s famous advice in “The Elements of Style” to “sex assigned at birth”: omit needless words.

Alex Byrne is a professor of philosophy at M.I.T. and the author of “Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions.” Carole K. Hooven is an evolutionary biologist, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, an associate in the Harvard psychology department, and the author of “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us.”

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