Save the world by sharing both your bank account and your bed
For years I have wondered about this question: Why is it that so many couples I know have sex together but not a joint bank account? I find this very, very strange. It seems to me that if you can have enough trust to make love to somebody you can trust them to have a joint bank account. Is this strange behaviour reflect why we treat nature like a “thing” to be used for our self gratification? Is that why prostitution is called “the oldest business”? I don’t know so that is I am now finally doing a little research about this strange behaviour. You see my theory is that how we treat sex and money reflects how we treat Mother Earth. If we change our relationships with sex and money it may help us who live in the life-destroying Anthropocene create a post-Anthropocene where humans AND other species are still thriving.
Let’s imagine this life affirming future. The most optimistic scenario, in which both the planetary health and societal conditions improve, sees a thriving circular economy, and the loss of biodiversity is brought to a halt. The first northern white rhino is rewilded in 2042, and by 2050 human activities no longer exceed the planetary limits. This trajectory is referred to as “Post Anthropocene”, as if to suggest that the human impact on the planet could be reduced to zero by 2050. Jan Zalasiewicz, from the University of Leicester, UK, argues, however, that much of the human impact that is now being considered to define the onset date of the Anthropocene is already irreversible. “The Anthropocene has already produced an indelible stratigraphic record. With huge effort, we might be able to clean the waters of plastics — but we can’t clean the plastics, or radionuclides, or change carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios, or fly ash particles out of the strata already deposited,” Zalasiewicz. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221931663X
It seems to me that our current life-destroying Anthropocene way of life is reflected brilliantly in how we have sex instead of making love; that having separate banking accounts with your spouse is like not having a joint bank account with Mother Earth. Both seem like a kind of porn to me. The “other” has become an “IT” instead of a “THOU”. An IT is objective, separate thing. A THOU is a subjective being in a dynamic relationship with you. If you want to delve deeper I strongly recommend reading “I & Thou” by Martin Buber. But I digress. Back to our topic of sex and money. Perhaps our distorted relationships with sex and money stem from lack of trust? From fear – the Fear of being alone? The Fear of death? Is it a kind of illness? Is it possible that the same illness that causes couples to divorce has caused us to be ‘divorced” from Mother Earth? Is our obsession with material goods and our narcissistic culture obsessed with self reflected in a love life that has turned sex into porn and money into a way to make me feel safe in a world where I trust no one because I am all alone? Why is that homes – a safe, social place to nurtures us and to be shared as we socialize with family, friends and those in need – have become houses that are primarily seen as an investment? Why is that we no longer say husband or wife but partner – which too many has a tone of a business arrangement, as in “you and I are business partners”? I don’t know. What I do know is that while ancient and indigenous cultures saw Mother Earth as sacred while we see the Earth as a resource to be exploited and used to meet our own needs. I do know that they too were just people like us and lived without destroying Mother Earth. This gives me hope that our life destroying culture can change. This gives me hope that you & I can change. This gives me hope that we can make love instead of hook-up sex and have joint accounts instead of separate accounts.
To me the metaphors of distorted sex and money as greed seem to accurately display, at a personal level, why it is that we creating the 6th mass extinction and the climate disaster. We have hook-up sex, but we do not make love. Is our society having sex with Mother Earth? But not consensual sex, but rather porn or rape? Is our lack of joint accounts just like our society not having a joint accounting of all the resources we extract and the garbage and pollution we dump on Mother Earth? It’s all about me. Me being the human species. The good news is that we can change that. We can help move from the Anthropocene to a life affirming post-Anthropocene by how we physically treat each other as we share and trust each other [sex only being the extreme example of this] and how we share our money to improve the quality of life for the social body rather than only MY body. Here now are some quotes from various writers to round out this thesis.
We no longer see the Earth as sacred
The ecological crisis of the late 20th century displays a profound alienation from nature and indeed from matter itself. Because nature had become largely identified as matter which can be manipulated. Nature is seen as a “resource” to be used rather than a “source” of life to be respected. Our planet is struggling against unprecedented assaults that include environmental pollution, destruction of entire ecosystems, the aesthetic degradation of nature, human overpopulation, resource depletion, industrial growth, technological manipulation, military proliferation, and, now emerging as the most pressing and desperate of all problems, abrupt massive species extinction – and in cases of recently discovered ones, often before they are given names. We are “Killing our World” wrote botanist Peter H. Raven (1993). Our feeling of alienation in the modern period has extended beyond the human community and its patterns of material exchanges to our interaction with nature itself. Especially in technologically sophisticated urban societies, we have become removed from that recognition of our dependence on nature – we no longer see the earth as sacred. https://biophysics.sbg.ac.at/transcript/rape.pdf
The Rape of Mother Earth in Seventeenth Century English Poetry: An Ecofeminist Interpretation
Money and Values
Now, back to money – our new God, confirmed by the fact that we seem to talk more about the health of the economy and the GDP than the quality of the lives of the people for whom that ‘economy’ is supposed to improve. At the end of the day, as we have often discussed in our CDN COR, its about values. We all have things we value and feel are really important in life, but the true test of that belief is reflected in how we spend our money which is our captured time and resources. I have a crazy idea I want to run by you. Imagine that a cultural anthropologist finds one of your credit card statements in 100 years. What would your spending suggest you value the most? Based on your spending, what assumptions might someone make about how you live your life? Our credit card statements (really, any financial statement) reveal a lot about what we care about. They are unintentional personal manifestoes. In stark detail, these statements lay out how we spend our money and our time. As a result, we end up with a clear picture of what we value versus what we say we value. So what does all this say about us? It’s the choices we make that really make us who we are, not just who we think we are or would like to be.
Let’s never forget that the future of the world is literally in our hands right now. Any little life affirming act we do matters. Astronomer Martin Rees has forecast in his book Our Final Century that our species had a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century. You & I can do our bit to increase those odds. So what can you do? Make love, not sex, and have a joint, not separate, bank account. Trust others, knowing that this trust must be earned and then shared. As a parting gift for getting to the end of this reflection, here is some advice from a couples therapist:
As an individual and couples therapist, people most often have come to see me about relationship problems centered on 2 forms of intimacy: sex and money. If money or sex is not one of the presenting problems or primary complaints, the issue will nonetheless eventually surface. Both sex and money share the commonality of being finite. Regardless of how much money and sex one might have at any given point in a relationship that can change and usually does vacillate throughout the relationship. Perhaps that’s what makes sex and money such vulnerable topics and common places of tension. [2]
References
1.https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/your-money/your-spending-choices-often-reflect-your-values.html
2. https://recoveryhelpnow.com/money-sex-in-relationships-what-happens-when-sex-declines-part-i/
3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41055135?read-now=1&seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents
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