Can Men And Women Be Friends, Or Is Sex Always An Issue? Lessons From D.H.Lawrence

The post-modern canon says that men and women can be friends.  Sex while important is at best a distraction from real intimacy, and that more aware men will understand and appreciate women for their character, values, and beliefs more than their sexual allure. Traditionalists disagree and suggest that unless a relationship is incestuous, sexual dynamics must always be in play.

Paul Morel, the main character in D.H.Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, prefers to think of Miriam as his friend and never his lover; but his demurral has more to do with his sexual immaturity than any higher order of intimacy. He thinks that such a Platonic friendship is not only possible but desirable; that the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual communion they have is the apotheosis of love.  

This asexual conviction, however, has more to do with his Oedipal conflicts than any realistic, rational reasoning.  Paul cannot leave his mother.  He is duty- and love-bound to her.  She is his protector, his sexual shield, and his devotee.  His demurral, his sexual diffidence, and his cruelty to Miriam are guards of his maternal sexual privacy.  He wants Miriam as a woman, desires her, and wants a ‘normal’ relationship with her, but he cannot because of his stunted sexual growth and his overweening guilt, compassion, and responsibility for his mother.  He is an emotional and sexual cripple.



Nevertheless he eventually has sex with her – an uneasy and selfish affair.  He feels that he must have sex to validate his independence from his mother; and Miriam is willing because she is tired of his intellectual prevarications and her own sexual reticence.

“We are but friends”, he insists; and in his immature delusions is convinced that such friendship can indeed exist. It cannot, of course; and Lawrence goes on to say in this and later novels (The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover)  that not only is Platonic love an impossibility but an intellectual chimera.  Final sexual bonding, the simultaneous coming together of lovers, is the apotheosis of being – the be-all and end-all of one's life – and any suggestions that it can be otherwise are vain, self-serving, and ignorant.


Platonic love – in this case between Paul and Miriam – is fraudulent.  It is only a convenient cover for his sexual insecurity.  He cannot wholly commit to Miriam while he still has more permanent affections for his mother.

Miriam sees through his diffidence.  She knows that his reserve has less to do with her than with his mother.  She wants him –intellectually, physically, and spiritually –and has no barriers to their communion; but realizes that his adolescent attachment to his mother will always prevent a more mature relationship with her.

Paul leaves Miriam for all the wrong reasons. They are well-suited to each other, each with his own pretensions, convictions, and faith which temporarily impede normal intimate relations – but neither one can stop the inertia. Friendship was never enough. 

Paul takes up with Clara, a married woman with no sexual inhibitions, moral compunctions, or social ambitions.  A sexual relation with her could be satisfying and emotionally conclusive.  She is the woman he has been looking for.

Yet this too is an unsatisfactory union.  Sexual desire distorts his view of women, just as idealistic celibacy has finished his relationship with Miriam.  He is back where he started – a boy with no hope or recourse except in his mother's arms.

Sons and Lovers, among other things, give final lie to the notion of friendship between man and woman.  If sexual desire is so limitless, so insistent, and so potent, then how can a tepid, disinterested, respectful friendship ever take its place?  How, given the nature of sexual desire and the complex factors that determine it, can friendship ever compare? In Lawrence’s view there is no way that a simple friendship between man and woman can possibly suffice.  No matter how old the correspondents may be nor how sexually indifferent they might have been in the past, there can be no denying sexual attraction.


In Lawrence's view a man will never look upon an attractive woman as anything other than a woman.   For all her much appreciated intelligence, insight, and competence, he can never overlook her laughter, her sexual ease, and her feminine grace.  Friends of friends, distant cousins, relations by marriage can never be looked at asexually

Lawrence believed that the essential, fundamental, inescapably existential moment of life is that of simultaneous sexual climax, a Tantric perfection.  It is the union of sexual, spiritual, emotional, and historical purpose.  Given that conviction and that perspective, it is no wonder that he dismissed any notions of Platonic love.

Lawrence is hopelessly outdated and irrelevant in an age of female eminence, say feminist critics.  Sexual union is meaningless per se and is but an adjunct to necessary political/economic unions.  Romanticized sexual love has no place in the post-modernist world.  Marriage, mating, and sexual partnership is only governed by dominance, submission, and complaisance in a world which values secular values.  Without procreation, and without the momentary pleasure of orgasm, the heterosexual union has run its course.  Friendship, camaraderie, and sisterhood are far more important and relevant than any sexual union.

However, if one removes political lenses, leaves sexual deconstructionism aside, and steps back to take a dispassionate look at ordinary sexual relationships, one is still left with a final truth – sex, sexuality, and sexual desire will always trump social reformist politics.

No matter how politically invested a man or woman might be in social justice; no matter how technically unique they may be, sexual interest can never be ignored or dismissed. While professional competence and ability will always come first, sexual appraisal, approbation, and initiative will always rule.

Sons and Lovers has much to teach – the emasculating nature of overweening, selfish maternal love; the deformation of arrested sexual development; the saint-whore fabrication that distorts the reality of women; and the perils of the natural infantilism of men – but above all it is about sex, its universal imperative, its centrality, and its saving and redemption power.  There can be no such thing as friendship between a man and a woman.

Bad Management–What Do You Expect From Human Beings?

Bad bosses are everywhere.  Everyone has had one and knows about a hundred more; yet there will soon come a day when offices are managed by software; and bad managers – myopic, insular, arrogant, and as blindered by human ambition as anyone – will be things of the past.  Decisions concerning financial performance, employee productivity, information flow, and interdepartmental collaboration will be finally taken out of the hands of managers who, like all other people, manage by instinct, hunch, personal rivalries and affections.  Already offices rely more and more on computerized information.  Keystrokes are recorded, employees’ movements tracked, and distribution of time worked monitored.  Time sheets are things of the past when such surveillance permits objective clocking. Managers no longer need to rely on employee information and judgement, for the data stream from cubicle to corner office assures a far greater degree of accuracy.

More importantly negative trends can be anticipated long before they become problems.  Financial review meetings where spreadsheets are analyzed; data matched, correlated, and corroborated; and reasons for poor performance discussed are becoming increasingly unnecessary.  Managers no longer have to add up the columns, listen to staff defensive positions, and set revised performance goals for underachieving staffers.  Not only will elaborate software identify the problems by office, department, and employee, but suggest improvements.

Most employees resent office meetings which are inefficient, poorly-designed, and ineptly-run.  They are arranged more to encourage participation, collaboration, and mutual respect than to resolve problems, set goals, or agree on new procedures.  Some meetings are of course necessary.  There is no way that a mid-level manager can make reasonable decisions without inputs from Accounting, Personnel, Finance, Contracts, and Networks. Using advanced intelligent voice recognition software and sophisticated algorithms all meetings can be monitored electronically and analyzed for key factors – efficient flow of information,;appropriate, quality, data-based interventions; time management; and rational decisions give company policy, objectives, procedures, and guidelines.

Eventually middle-managers – the ones who run these divisional or project meetings – can be replaced since electronic management will generate data, process it through company directive portals and filters, and suggest avenues of improvement. For the time being employees and meetings are still necessary, but only until the software is able to manage networks of information.  It is easy to monitor individual output, productivity, and performance; but another, more complex task to assess network operations (i.e. cross-discipline ‘sharing’).

None of this should be either surprising nor particularly disturbing.  Most phone conversations between help centers, banks, medical offices, and government departments and clients/customers are routinely recorded ‘for quality purposes’ and of course they are monitored and analyzed to determine how well (courtesy, professionalism, technical competence, efficiency, etc.) the service provider performs.  While in some instances there may be a real person listening to these recorded events, more than likely it will be a software program.  Such electronic monitoring makes eminent sense, for all conversations can be reviewed not just a sample.

Affective software – programs designed to pick up affective clues about service or product satisfaction – is already monitoring s0cial media.  A young woman in Detroit messaging her friend on Facebook about her experience at the Marriott in Palm Beach will give subtle clues as to how she liked the food, the service, reception, and facilities.  Customer satisfaction surveys are never useful because few people complete them and if they do may arbitrarily assign values.  Such software can easily be deployed in offices which monitor voice traffic as well as written, and managers can pick up on developing frictions between employees and managers, managers and senior management, etc.

Privacy issues? In principle there are many, but the Internet Age adage, “We love our cookies’ – i.e. we don’t mind surveillance if it leads to more individualized and personalized consumer choices – has never been more appropriate.  We all know that all email, texts, social media messaging, Internet searches and purchases are being recorded.  We know that we are being tracked online, by traffic cameras and security surveillance equipment, but have accepted it for its benefits and not its risks.  Police cameras slow speeders and reduce accidents.  Security installations keep us safe.

Checkers at major supermarket chains know that they are being monitored.  Every item is scanned and recorded by the company thus improving inventory control and stocking.  At the same time the company knows how fast a checker processes consumer purchases, knows when she slows down or speeds up, and which items cause her difficulty.

The story of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance is taught in business school because of the lessons of management learned from the experience. Nancy Koehn, professor at Harvard Business School, and the author of a book on how Shackleton accomplished this remarkable achievement, writes (New York Times, 12.24.11):

“Shackleton’s sense of responsibility and commitment came with a great suppleness of means. To get his men home safely, he led them across ice, sea and land with all the tools he could muster. This combination — credible commitment to a larger purpose and flexible, imaginative methods to achieve a goal – were the key elements to Shackleton’s management of his expedition”, and are the essential elements of good management today.

She points to five factors of Shackleton’s management: 1) he was flexible and adapted easily and well to changing, unexpected conditions; 2) he understood human nature and how despair and weakness could result from idleness and lack of purpose; 3) he maintained a strict routine, both a way of keeping his men focused and emotionally stable and maintaining cohesion and order; 4) he focused on the future, always giving his men a goal, a hope, and a purpose; and 5) he managed his own ‘emotional intelligence’, for he knew that any sign of weakness, despair, or hopelessness in him would infect the crew.

Although the Shackleton voyage indeed makes a good management case study, in another way it is most certainly not.  Managers like Shackleton come along once or twice in a generation if that.  Few men or women have the innate confidence, intelligence, will, and sensitivity to accomplish what Shackleton did.  After a brutal Antarctic winter, a sea voyage in a small boat over hundreds of miles in the worst conditions, a climb over an uncharted mountain to get to a British outpost, and the trip back, not one life was lost – neither in the boat nor on land where most of the crew was sheltered.

Most managers have been promoted for one particular reason – high corporate earnings, sales, productivity, or financial oversight – but when they inherit a large department with many employees, they find it hard to match their political ambition and unique technical skills with personnel management.  They are often impatient, intolerant, even abusive in their attempt to right the ship or to set it sailing in their own new direction.

In an extreme example of such myopia, a departmental manager in a large private firm, relied on a popular affective assessment test to provide insights on how her employees might perform.  It would help, she said, to know if an employee were outgoing or reserved, people-oriented or work-focused, generous or private, etc.  A good manager would have already known the answers and known her employees, yet this one, confident of her ‘higher-level’ management skills (finance, economic performance, contract and legal affairs) but concerned about growing dissension in the ranks chose this discredited but popular parlor-trick to figure out what to do.

There are thousands of examples of managers who stumble over their own feet, who have no clue about social dynamics nor about individual aspirations and concerns, and who ultimately fail and leave many wounded on the corporate floor before they are dismissed.

So the sooner managers are replaced by intelligent software the better. 

The workplace, however, need not necessarily become robotic in an algorithmic environment.   As long as there people still manning the post and as long as they still spend eight hours a day together, they need to have ‘emotional time’ – time to be friendly, warm, humorous, or engaging.  Yet there is no reason why such water cooler camaraderie need disrupt the business of production.  It too can be factored, understood, controlled, and managed. 

The electronically-managed workplace is not a Brave New World.  It is most definitely a new world, but one which should be far more satisfactory than the old one run by bad managers.

When Apron Strings Strangle–D.H.Lawrence, Mother Love, And About Time To Grow Up

Sons and Lovers is a roughly autobiographical novel, the tale of a sensitive young man unusually attached to his mother; a mother who takes advantage of such dependence to control his life; and women who love him but to whom he can give little because of his supposedly Oedipal attachment to his mother.

Paul Morel from birth has love/hate relationships with his father and with women, but his problems are far more complex than simply Oedipal.  While many critics conclude that the unhealthy attachment between him and his mother is because of her initiative – her smothering, dependent, affirming control of her sensitive, insecure son – others dismiss Freud out of hand.  Paul Morel is simply a baby who has never grown up – a child overly dependent on his mother for support, encouragement, and a sheltering love in a complex often chaotic world.

Paul says the hates his father, but he is jealous of his simple, direct, uncomplicated maleness.  He cannot excuse his father’s abusive, domineering behavior towards him, his brothers and sisters and his mother; but his father is the man he can never be.  While seeking the protection of his mother’s ‘apron strings’ and wishing to be the intellectual, sensitive, artistic person he imagines her to be, he cannot ignore his father’s vitality, energy, and earthiness. 

Is Sons and Lovers simply a Freudian tale of mother-love and father-jealousy? A story of an inescapable destructive family triad, one destined by genes, human nature, and tradition? Or is it the story of an immature, impossibly adolescent man who for lack of intelligence, wit, insight, and character, cannot forge his own way?

Lawrence is never clear; and because the story of Paul Morel so closely mirrors his own, he prevaricates.  Walter Morel is an abusive, domineering father, but with essential male qualities of directness and virility.  His son sides with his more willful mother against him, but he can never lose the sense of maleness which he feels he should have but, given his female sensitivity, and profound sense of responsibility and the shame and guilt that accompanies it, can never have.

Much is made of the Oedipal myth – a boy who wants to sleep with his mother and kill his father – but Sophocles was writing tragic myth and Freud was transposing his own very personal 19th century on otherwise predictable men and women.  Paul Morel is not so much a victim of a predacious, demanding, and needy mother as he is of his own sexual timidity and doubt.  He is the culprit in this sexual drama, not his mother or his father.

Because of a stunted sexual maturity, aided and abetted by his mother but not the cause of it, Paul cannot form normal, mature, adult relationships with women.  He is cruel, dismissive, and abusive of Miriam, an Ophelia/Desdemona-like innocent who happens to be in the way of his sexually frustrated aggression.  He has sexual relations with Miriam in hopes that they will resolve his emotional conflicts.  Coming together both emotionally and sexually is for Lawrence a Tantric epiphany.  Sex can be and should be transforming and transfiguring; and Paul senses this resolution but cannot achieve it.  He assumes that sexual harmony and resonance aut0matically comes with sexual relations and that his relationship with Miriam will be forever changed.  Of course it is not.  She complains that he cannot give of himself and he hates her for her unwarranted demands that he do so.   

He feels that he has found a sexual-existential partner in Clara; but he thinks of her only in sexual terms.  He misunderstands the sexual imperative.  The epiphany can only happen if there is a mutuality of spirit, soul, and body.  Clara knows that Paul is weak, troubled by morality rather than guided by it, and forever on the outside of any relationship.

Clara and Miriam both appreciate him for his maleness and his uniqueness.  They notice his gestures, his comportment, his attitude; and they love him for it.  They love him for the man that he is and the soul that inspires him.  Paul is ignorant of individual women.  While he is caught in a self-serving categorization of women in general – whore/saint – he cannot distinguish among individuals.  Both Miriam and Clara have to suit his needs.

The book ends with his mother dead – his euthanasia – and the two women in his life separated from him, leaving him alone to deal finally with the consequences of his relationship with his mother and father and his own immature if not ignorant and selfish relationships with women.

Of all the characters in the book, Paul’s father is the most sympathetic.  He is unapologetically who he is – a rough, uneducated, uncultured, hardworking miner who enjoys the company of his mates, who is a responsible if not loving father to his children, and man who makes no excuses for who he is.  Unlike his wife, Paul’s mother, he has no airs, pretentions, or social ambitions; so it is not surprising that Paul, even though he has been infected by the aspirations of his mother, is not drawn to the directness and forthrightness of his father.

Both women – Miriam and Clara – are far more sympathetic than Paul or his mother.  They are much more like his father – unapologetic about their feelings and desires and hoping to conclude an emotional/sexual relationship which will satisfy them.  Miriam is drawn to the poetic, the natural, and the beautiful, and is willing to be schooled by Paul in the artistic context of her feelings.  She is disappointed by his pedantry, his assumptions, and his immaturity; but hopes that she can transform and reform him.  Clara is a sexual, physical, confident woman who is attracted to Paul for the same reasons as Miriam, but she is confident enough in her own perception of beauty, emotion, and purpose that she needs no tutelage.  She is disappointed in Paul because he cannot see beyond artificial perimeters.  He sees her a Sexual Woman but cannot appreciate her directness, her lack of pretention, and her emotional realism.  Baxter Dawes, her estranged husband is more of a man despite his dereliction and dysfunction.  He is no different from Paul’s father, and Paul’s disappointment at losing her to Baxter recalls his love/hate feeling for his father.

Paul is a baby who never grows up.  He is not emasculated by his mother since neither of his two brothers were.  He is not so stunted by his incapable envy of his father that he cannot become his own man.  He is responsible for his desire for the warmth and security of his unquestioning mother. He is afraid of relationships outside of her protective perimeter.  He is an emotional eunuch not because of his mother or his father but because of his own moral and emotional weakness.

Lawrence is equivocal when it comes to Paul, and well he should be since he is modelled after himself.  Lawrence the man cannot admit such personal, individual weakness and blame Paul for his troubles.  Nor can he blame his mother who was an important if not dominant figure in his life.  Nor can he dismiss his father who, like Paul’s was an important virile figure.

When all is said and done Paul Morel is not an Oedipally crippled character, emasculated by this mother and intimidated by his father.  He alone is to blame for the immaturity and selfishness that came with the genetic package.  Lawrence may have fashioned Paul after himself, but one hopes that the writer – as young as he was when he wrote the book – was not as immature and ignorant as Paul Morel.  Paul was selfish and immoral in his treatment of Miriam.  He had sex with her in an attempt to validate his assumptions, but then discarded her as ineffective and useless.  He met his match with Clara, but missed the very opportunity he was looking for. He never overcame his emotional immaturity.  Only the final lines of the book suggest that perhaps he might have a chance for personal redemption.  He looks toward the lights of the city and leaves his women behind him.