Taboo: A Whisper in the Darkness
Taboo is generally acknowledged to be a limiting force, tainted by its longstanding association with shame. It is in a circular relationship with culture, simultaneously forming it and being informed by it. An anthropology student once told me that the variation in swear words (often embodiments of taboo) between cultures reveal the discrepancies in their values. For example, in much of Western culture, swear words – microcosmic breeding grounds of custom and convention – mostly depict bodily fluids or intercourse. However, in Korowai, Indonesia, earthworms are particularly taboo, symptomatic of their culture’s terror and reverence of the zombie-dead. Thus, taboo serves a revelatory function, a cultural cornerstone and litmus test for what we consider important.
When I tried to name some contemporary examples of taboo, I came up short. Recent generations have made the extinction of taboo a priority. Indeed, with the aid of reality television, intimacy has been rendered something for the spotlight rather than candlelight. Privacy is a thing of the past, an antiquated idiosyncrasy of prudish, older generations. Thus, the realm of taboo is now a rapidly receding territory, endangered real estate, an island of shadows that the glaring tide seeks to consume completely. And, thanks to its working relationship with shame, most would see this as a positive development, which, in some cases, it certainly is. However, through a re-examination of the role of taboo, I will show that this isn’t necessarily the case.
Certain taboos exist for good reason: e.g., pedophilia or necrophilia. And yet these topics are being probed, written about for public consumption, and romanticized or increasingly normalized by their appearances in creative mediums – see A.M. Homes’s “The End of Alice” or Takashi Miike’s “Visitor Q.” The shock factor is reduced each time these tropes are employed, building a global consumerist immunity to genuine horrors, leaving audiences around the world demanding “more! more!” To reduce this taboo, and here I evoke the full, shame-filled sense of the word, is to risk viewing such things as acceptable or natural, as part of the spectrum of sexuality. In this case, taboo provides a necessary and preventative dimension in cordoning off harmful and depraved extremities of human behavior, while also providing an essential aspect of collective self-definition by demarcating our moral values against that which we see as intersubjectively wrong.
In theology, certain concepts, by definition, belong behind a veil. This is a Heideggerian idea: sometimes to reveal something is to fundamentally change the essence of that thing. To remove the veil of mystery that surrounds something is to alter the nature of the thing itself. Some things, I believe, previously veiled by taboo cannot possibly retain the full depth of their original value and meaning, as they denature under the public gaze. Overexposure can bleach even the most vibrant of painting into irreversibly sepia tones.
For example, imagine a whisper in the darkness across a desert of pillows. It’s cloaked in promises and a seductive secrecy that only exists between midnight and dawn, a moment of vulnerability that can only bloom when the world is a merry-go-round of dancing shadows and your legs are entangled with those of the person you love. Words exchanged in such moments are precious and fragile and could never be born in daylight hours, when they would stand out, stark and naked, for dissection and ridicule. In the velvet embrace of darkness, however, they simply unravel from your soul and slip away, a whisper of your heart that will be gone by morning. There is safety in transience; there is intimacy in darkness. Only those present will remember those words, living memorials to their true, naked beauty. You see, some things are most themselves in darkness’ – or taboo’s – embrace, sustained by it even. Taboo acts as a shelter, a lifeline of sorts, for things that were not built for public consumption, but rather are more themselves when revered, feared, or discreet.
As a part of the UK’s secularization, we have failed to retain a sense of mystery, of reverence, and of the possibility that fear may not be a negative but a necessary thing, a natural emotion to feel when faced with something beyond ourselves. We are searching for such elements in other mediums – mindfulness, tarot, crystals – and more often than not we are disappointed. This may correlate with our departure from taboo. Take, for example, sex, a previous hub of social taboo and – particularly in women’s cases – unwarranted shame. It is no longer taboo: we advertise it on billboards, discuss it with friends, dissect it under microscopes afterwards, pushing it into a communal, public area rather than a private, personal one. In dragging this into the public eye, the intimacy and mystery – the veil – is also lost, like the aforementioned whisper transplanted into clinical daylight. Its essential nature is altered, and a newfound self-consciousness of the narrative aftermath finds its way into the very act itself before it is even performed, rendering it just that: performative. It abdicates the realm of the sacred and firmly plants itself in the secular, the everyday, the mundane. And this, in my opinion, is something of a loss, and an irreversible one.
I have sought to complicate the black-and-white portrayal of taboo as a solely negative phenomenon, highlighting its importance on both a cultural and individual level. Taboo is not something to be promoted, but perhaps preserved, and migration towards a shame-free variation of taboo may reintroduce certain elements of mystery, reverence and value that are absent at present in our world.
This piece was included in our inaugural print issue, Taboo. To explore this edition of MEUF Magazine, please visit the issues page.