Sex and Ethics in Spanish Cinema

Cristina Sánchez-Conejero

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349572205, 9781137576347
• eBook ISBN: 9781137573216
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Reflecting on a series of ethical and moral questions significant to contemporary Spanish culture, Cristina Sánchez-Conejero analyzes several issues related to sexuality in gender as they're portrayed Spanish film.

1

Fidelity: A Motion Picture Myth?

Abstract: This chapter examines how different religious and nonreligious beliefs look at this betrayal behavior from a moral (religious or not) point of view. Through the studies of films such as Balada triste de trompeta (2010) by Álex de la Iglesia, Belle Epoque (1992) by Fernando Trueba, El otro lado de la cama (2002) by Emilio Martínez Lázaro, Huevos de oro (1993) by Bigas Luna, and Chuecatown (2007) by Juan Flahn, among many others, the author emphasizes the need for a new ethics theory and the role Western values plays in how we see fidelity in our societies. The role of Spanish films is paramount in the representation of this current Spanish reality and in the eliciting of public awareness of the issue.

Sánchez-Conejero, Cristina. Sex and Ethics in Spanish Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137573216.0003.

“You shall not commit adultery.” So states the Bible in Exodus 20:14. Most religions including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity condemn adultery as a sin. The degree of moral disapproval and punishment varies from religion to religion though and for different reasons. While considering it a major transgression, Christianity allows adulterous people to confess their sin and be forgiven. In contrast, Islam prohibits adultery and condemns it with stoning, but only when the adulterous person is a woman. Hinduism considers it an offensive act of fornication, and Buddhism envisages it as unethical because of the suffering it brings to the person being cheated on.

If we look at this betrayal behavior from a moral (religious or not) point of view, several immediate questions come to mind: (1) Is adultery a more grievous infidelity than cheating in an unmarried couple? (2) Does gender play a role in our moral judgment of infidelity? (3) Is online infidelity less of a betrayal than face-to-face infidelity? (4) What does this behavior say about the psychology of the people involved? Starting with the first question, different possible answers emerge depending on whether we approach the issue from an ethical standpoint or a legal one. From an ethical position, infidelity—within a marriage or not—is generally regarded as wrong by most ethical theories: utilitarianism rejects it on the grounds that it causes unhappiness for the majority and, in most cases, only an ephemeral happiness for the adulterous people. Virtue ethics considers it a vice proper of non-virtuous people. Aristotle sees it as a major impediment to eudaimoia, that is, the ultimate state of “well-being” or integrity; Confucius identified it as a serious threat to the relationship, and in particular the family, which he considered the basic pillar of society and essential for the development of an individual as a virtuous person. The Golden rule maxim of “do unto others as you would want others to do unto you,” which is common in most Western cultures and religions, naturally rejects it. Contracts ethics, not surprisingly, opposes it too and regards it as an example of human’s evil nature. Thus the consequential need of a contract reinforced by a strong ruler emerges as inevitable in this theory. American philosopher John Rawls outlined in his 1971 masterpiece A Theory of Justice the elements needed for such a contract to be fair. These elements include what he calls the “original position” (a starting point to democratically create a society between people of different backgrounds and origins), and the “veil of ignorance” (a necessary ignorance about what role you will play in that new society). The objective of this is to promote fair laws between all members of this new society when creating a “maximum strategy” consisting of applying the majority of benefits to all humans in this society, including those who will play the worst social roles. This would be advantageous to everyone, since none in the “original position” would know which role they will end up playing. In the case of adultery, for example, since you do not know if you will end up being an adulterous person yourself, you will most likely be motivated to offer less severe penalties for adulterous people. In a hypothetical world, this new democratic society seems ideal. However, it emerges as a utopia in the current world we live in, because it seems rather unlikely that people of different religious and ethical backgrounds would agree to the laws and punishments they would implement in this new society. This is not to say that there cannot exist some universals as to what is right and wrong in humanity—for example, killing and raping are generally considered wrong, but it is the particulars (less general situations) and the specifics within the universals that create controversy.

Let us take the punishments for stoning, polygamy, and sexism as examples: Is stoning a woman to death for committing adultery considered “killing” or not? Christianity would say yes; fundamentalist Muslims no. Would a polygamist and a monogamist vote the same when passing laws regarding marriage and adultery? Would the monogamist consider polygamy a type of adultery that must legally be punished? Would the polygamist complain that monogamous sex in unmarried couples is “fornication” and must equally then be punished by law? And what about sexist laws like Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code (1860) which persecutes husband cheaters but not wife ones? Some feminists, for example, might agree with this law and see it beneficial to women due to their historically long endured oppression. Most men see it as sexist though.

This brings us to the second question we posed at the beginning of this chapter: What is the role that gender plays in the moral judgment of fidelity? There is not a clear-cut answer to this question because the fact of the matter is that for some people gender (regardless of their biological sex) may be more of a bias or prejudice element when morally judging infidelity and for others not at all. Stating otherwise would be as erroneous as saying that all men are chauvinists or that all women are feminists. There are different experiences of being a man and different experiences of being a woman. There are, among others, many social, economical, cultural, and personal elements that contribute to these different experiences and consequently, their different ways of viewing the world and judging (or not judging) moral behaviors.

Now with this said, we cannot forget the emergence of feminist care ethics, mostly popularized in the 1980s with Carol Gilligan’s 1982 work In a Different Voice. In this case, gender plays a vital role when considering ethical questions, but again, we have to contextualize it and be cautious not to align all women with this type of ethics. In theory, this type of ethics is designed to accommodate the way women generally think and feel differently from men. More specifically, it focuses on the importance of details and the particulars versus the universal, and of personal relationships and emotions when reasoning. This is in direct opposition to utilitarian ethics and Kantian ethics, both considered chauvinist by care ethics because it presupposes a general and, for the most part, just rational human being, which obviates the way of female reasoning underlined by feminist care ethics.

An additional challenge for care ethics is that as in the case of most branches within religions, this theory exhibits disagreements between different feminist care theorists too. For instance, while Nel Noddings places a higher emphasis on engrossment—that is, trying to achieve a deeper understanding for the person one is to care for—Carol Gilligan and Sarah Lucia Hoagland see care as a two-dimensional thing where the carer and the person cared for should be equally important. In addition to this, care ethics feminists have been criticized by other feminists and nonfeminists alike for their essentialist approach to women, which reduces them to the same stereotypes as the traditional ethics they try to refute. Once again, while John Rawls’ ideal society is laudable, in reality it would be an odyssey to implement.

These theorists provide examples of the disagreements on fidelity that exist in the real world. What happens in the virtual world though? When it comes to theory, the virtual world facilitates a diversity of forums to continue expressing these same different viewpoints on fidelity. However, when it comes to practice, the virtual world encourages unethical behavior, since it is often more accessible and anonymous. Cheating has exponentially increased since the public access to the internet in the 1990s, which leads us to our third question: Is online infidelity morally better or worse than offline infidelity?¹ Except for virtue ethics, most traditional and modern ethical theories focus on the actions of the person and the consequences that those actions have in that person and in others when judging someone morally. We lack an ethics theory that accounts for mental (and not just physical) based behaviors in our Internet era, despite or, rather, due to their hypothetical nature. Sure, virtue ethics focuses on the individual’s character and not so much on his or her actions or moral codes and would therefore, in principle, condemn infidelity because it works against Aristotle’s eudaimonia. However, virtue ethics says nothing about humans’ nonrational side. What do we do then with erotic or sexual dreams, with sexual impulses an individual may feel for somebody other than his or her spouse or partner (real, fictional, or imagined)? 2014 Carlos Marquet-Marcet’s 2014 film 10.000 Kms comes to mind. Its main characters, Alexandra (Natalia Tena) and Sergio (David Verdaguer) fall in love with the virtual image that they have of each other while maintaining a long distance relationship. Autómata (Automata, 2014) by Gabe Ibáñez provides another example of the need for a mental-based ethics theory in its profound reflection on the supposed human–machine dichotomy. This is reminiscent of Jonathan Mostow’s work in his 2009 film Surrogates, in which the scenery described in the lives of human-linked robots referred to as “surrogates” is basically a type of second life.

In our real world, despite the educational and otherwise conversational purposes that the Linden Lab Internet company promotes regarding the virtual worlds of the Second Life they created in 2003, the reality is that the virtual nature of those worlds has many thorny ethical ramifications. If you click on “what is second life?” in secondlife.com you will be directed to exciting colorful videos showing fantastic worlds where all the characters are attractive and live extraordinary lives. The words which answer the question appear while these images are being displayed and include “secret lives, including yours. Big adventures. Big fun. Live life on the edge. Venture beyond the ordinary.” The footer of these videos reads “enter a world with infinite possibilities and live a life without boundaries, guided only by your imagination.” To its right a bright orange buttom encourages you to “join now.”

Simulated lives where boundaries do not exist and which pejoratively label our real world as “ordinary” require very strong minds on the part of the Second Life users not to confuse—or worse, have the fiction affect the reality—the fiction of his or her virtual world(s) with the reality of his or her physical one. It happens though that perception and emotion are parts of the human mental function and not dissociated from reasoning. This is why the new ethics theory based on the mental activity and its pathologies—rather than on the behavioral acts alone—of the individual needs to have a strong psychological component.

Let’s take the case of the character of Natalia (Carolina Bang) in Álex de la Iglesia’s 2010 film Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus). Although the infidelity presented in this love triangle is not an online one, Natalia’s dysfunctional attraction to violence when it comes to love and its consequential sociological deviances on the part of her suitors are a perfect example of why simply judging her behavior as right or wrong or her character as virtuous or vicious is not enough. A psychological and pathological study of her mental activity when it comes to love is vital before any ethical conclusion can be reached.

In a few words, Balada triste de trompeta is the grotesque story of two clowns (Sergio—a happy clown and Javier—a sad clown) fighting for the love of trapeze artist Natalia. The film takes place during the last months of the Spanish 1936–39 Civil War and later during the last years of Franco’s dictatorship. Javier is an orphan who does not know what love—either familial, emotional, or sexual—is, but at a single glance, some may say that neither does Sergio (an abusive machista) nor Natalia (who is addicted to Sergio’s violence). The begging question which emerges here is: What is love? Is it fair to label as “right” or “wrong” different notions of love?

The truth is that the violence that defines Natalia’s relationship with Sergio, although marked by the sexual (versus the emotional) of what Anthony Giddens labeled in The Transformation of Intimacy (1992) as “confluent love” (i.e., transient and nonexclusive) in opposition to romantic love, has more to do with the mere abuse that many women endure in the name of romantic love. As we know, romantic love is unconditional, eternal, and one in which the loved one must be more important than oneself and necessary for one’s own definition. Natalia’s outings with Javier go directly against the exclusivity of her relationship with Sergio and threaten the latter’s sense of identity (since he needs her to define himself as the violent machista man he is, in the same way she needs him to define herself as the sadomasochistic woman she is). Both the “confluent” type of love and the romantic love we find in the Sergio–Natalia–Javier love triangle are the same types of love that permeate Western cultures today. In opposition to these idealized notions of love, in many Eastern cultures fixed marriages are common practice.

From a psychological point of view, Natalia suffers from a self-defeating personality disorder that is highlighted by her addiction to Sergio’s abuse (both physical and psychological). Hence, her sexual masochism. On his part, Sergio suffers from an obsessive love disorder which underlines the controlling and compulsive behavior that satisfies his girlfriend’s masochistics needs. One would think that Sergio’s obsessive fixation with Natalia, his stalking of her, and his constant accusations of cheating and physical abuse would make her lose interest in him. Instead, she sees this behavior as manly and it excites her. Javier is only a friend for her when things do not go well with Sergio, a safe shoulder to cry on. The sad clown, unaware of Natalia’s violence addiction, puts all the blame on Sergio, whom he hates and resolves to kill. His big mistake is his oblivion of Natalia’s ambivalent love–hate nature and relationship with Sergio.

Ortega y Gasset put it this way:

El verdadero amor se percibe major así mismo y, por decirlo así, se mide y calcula a sí propio en el dolor y sufrimiento de que es capaz. La mujer enamorada prefiere las angustias que el hombre amado le origina a la indolora indiferencia. En las cartas de Mariana Alcoforado, la monja portuguesa, se leen frases como éstas, dirigidas a su infiel seductor: “Os agradezco desde el fondo de mi corazón la desesperación que me causáis, y detesto la tranquilidad en que vivía antes de conoceros [ . . . ]. Adiós; amadme siempre y hacedme sufrir aún mayores males.” (32)

True love understands itself better and, if you will, measures itself through the suffering the woman in love is capable of. She prefers the anguish her loved one causes her to the unpainful indifference. In the Portuguese nun Mariana Alcoforado’s letters we can read sentences like these addressed to her unfaithful lover: “I thank you from the bottom of my heart the distress that you cause me; I hate the tranquility in which I lived before I met you [ . . . ] Good bye; love me always and make me suffer even greater evils.” (my translation)

This Eros-Thanatos dynamic was already pointed out by Freud in his 1923 work The Ego and the Id and in Denis de Rougemont’s 1940 work Love in the Western World. In De Rougemont’s words,

Passionate love, the longing for what sears us and annihilates us in its triumph—there is the secret which Europe has never allowed to be given away; a secret it has always repressed and preserved! [ . . . ] Both passion and the longing for death which passion disguises are connected with, and fostered by, a particular notion of how to reach understanding which in itself is typical of the Western psyche. Why does Western Man wish to suffer this passion which lacerates him and which all his common sense rejects? [ . . . ] The answer is that he reaches self-awareness and tests himself only by risking his life—in suffering and on the verge of death. (50–51)

It is the life and death instincts Freud described in his work. And Western love, with its pleasure/pain ambivalence, has both instincts. Javier is completely oblivious to this dualistic nature when it comes to love. That is why he acts surprised when he tries to rescue Natalia from his abuser and Sergio matter of factly tells him: “Qué poco sabes del amor, ¿no?”| “How little you know of love, no?” Furthermore, he tells Javier: “Yo no soy una mala persona, Javier. A Natalia la quiero de verdad”| “I am not a bad person, Javier. I truly love Natalia.”

Is he really not a bad person? Does he really love Natalia? If we look at his acts, all ethic theories would condemn his behavior as immoral. And if we exclusively pay attention to his mental activity, it looks like his thoughts and feelings (anger, hate, revenge) are no more laudable. However, both his acts and thoughts do comply with his “moral code” when it comes to love, understood by him as a power relationship where he is the master and Natalia his submissive servant. She freely and happily accepts her role. Therefore, the notion of power as oppression is rather relative here because, in this case, as Foucault stated in an interview to Lucette Finas, “there exist relatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Fidelity: A Motion Picture Myth?
• 2  Pornography and Its Discontents
• 3  How Much? Prostitution and Its Social Repercussions
• 4  LGBT: The Reality, the Fiction, and the Faction
• 5  Ethics and Law: A Happy Marriage or a Dysfunctional Relationship?
• Conclusion: IntermetaethicsToward a Plausible Ethical Solution
• Works Cited