Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

by Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Woman as comestible. Woman as kingmaker. Woman as oblivion.

Why is our culture governed by the principle of separation? Beginning with a devastating exploration of the 1960s, understood up until now as the era of female liberation, free love and the tribal sharing of drugs, Antonella Gambotto-Burke deconstructs the past two centuries and shows how we are, in fact, moving towards the age of the Nietzschean übermensch, in which femininity will, if we do not change, be erased.



She skilfully draws together diverse threads, from the shockingly personal to the broadest societal trends and cutting-edge scientific research, to construct a brilliant and startling thesis that medicinal and recreational drugs have rewired our bodies and brains to a near-incomprehensible extent. Anxiety, artificial wombs, brutality, the class system, depression, dieting, racism and other issues – including the first plausible theory for rubber fetishism and other ‘kinks’ such as choking or breathplay – are explained within the context of the dominant cultural paradigm.


A devastating uppercut to a patriarchal ideology that has marred billions of lives, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine completely revises our understanding of addiction, art, drug use, homosexuality, murder, pornography, sex, war, and, critically, the significance of birth, infancy and motherhood in relation to human existence.



You will never see anything the same way again.

354 pages, Paperback

Published June 9, 2022

About the author

"If I close my eyes, I see femininity as an apple. Whole or halved, with a star at its heart concealing traces of a poison that, as it kills - and like a woman - can accelerate its target’s heartrate. I imagine the sound of that acceleration from within, listening as we all once listened, never thinking it would end, to the aria, charivari or lullaby of our mothers’ hearts."

- from APPLE: SEX, DRUGS, MOTHERHOOD AND THE RECOVERY OF THE FEMININE, by Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Links to podcasts, essays and reviews can be found on gambottoburke.com and instagram.com/gambottoburke

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apple started out as a book about feminism and motherhood, and took a sharp left turn when the author began to find out more about the drugs given to birthing women over the last century. This opens up a whole exploration of the nature of addiction and the complex consequences of birth for both mothers and babies under the effects of this hallucinogenic medication. I think of myself as a reasonably clever feminist, and found it hard to keep up with the roller coaster of ideas in Antonella’s book. Her thinking is complex, and there is a serious urgency in her writing that made me really have to think.

Antonella’s thesis that femininity has been “reconfigured and owned” by the masculine extends to the use of drugs to control birth, with the emergence of male birth attendants and the requirement for birthing women not to be so revoltingly female about it: LSD separates women from their agency in life, and scopolamine separates them from their agency in birth. She goes on to connect this to the cultured privilege of thinness, and the starvation particularly of the upper classes, of maternal nurturance, leading back to this need for psychedelic drugs.

This really is the book about maternity that you have never seen before, packed with ideas that will make you reflect hard on what you believe to be true. Approach with caution!

[Sofie Khachik · Rating 5 out of 5]

blindingly brilliant book - already passed on (which is the sign of a great book)- is a cultural commentary on the medicalisation of birth and its attempts to de-rail the connection between mothers and children. Personally, it confirmed and clarified ideas I have had over last few years in a very illuminating way. This isn’t just for mothers - this is for all humans, struggling or not, and will make you question your own attachment bonds, behaviours, and addictions. Meticulously researched, the implications are frightening but told through the lens of both Gambotto-Burke’s personal experiences and lots of other recognisable figures. A must-read.

[Gavin Monaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing can possibly prepare you for this book
Superlatives are easy currency, but this text will challenge everything you have thought to be true, from the moment you first drew breath to the moment you open the first page.
It’s essential, buy it and recommend it to a friend you care about

[Frankie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do not recommend

[Rehan Qayoom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

(W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’).

In an early evidence of humans relating childbirth to pregnancy discovered at Çatalhöyük (Turkey) in the 1960s, two females are depicted back to back in a Neolithic relief: one embracing a lover and the other holding a child. The link may not have been made explicitly in older primitive societies as it is not so obvious (a woman’s belly does not begin to swell until several months after conception).

If the promulgation of life only having meaning through one-to-one love and intimacy is the theme of Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s earlier books Mama, then attachment and the lack thereof in contemporary society (and its cause) is the overall theme of this one. She has said that if “Mama (in some ways) was the question, Apple is the answer.”[1] T. S. Eliot, in his iconic essay on Dante wrote that:

The love of man and woman, is only explained and made reasonable by the higher love or else is simply the coupling of animals.[2]

He explained this in a letter of 17th April 1936:

I don’t think that ordinary human affections are capable of leading us to the love of God, but rather that the love of God is capable of informing, intensifying and elevating our human affections, which otherwise have little to distinguish them from the ‘natural’ affections of animals.

(To Bonamy Dobrée, 17 April 1936. The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 8).

Gambotto-Burke has said that she felt like she ‘was bleeding from the head’ and ‘the first time I’ve needed space from a book – the writing of it was so INTENSE. I was emptied’. One is reminded of the lines from Ted Hughes, probably influenced by a similar experience he had in writing his tome Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being:[3]

Let them laugh
At your superstition.
(Remembering it will make your palms sweat,
The skin lift blistering, both your lifelines bleed.

It is often the case with such staggering books that they tend to write themselves and choose the author as a mouthpiece. As John Livingstone Lowes wrote of his epic critical masterpiece:

THE story which this book essays to tell was not of the teller’s choosing. It simply came, with supreme indifference to other plans, and automatically demanded right of way.[4]

Gambotto-Burke is onto something that explains why our First World society is where it is. The ‘Author’s Note’ states it is ‘a book for everyone, not only mothers’ (9). This book is Sappho supplicating Aphrodite to come and meet her in the apple orchards of her garden. Its theme is summed up in the introduction:

A fruit which, when sampled, makes gods of men and reduces them, emotionally, to dust.
Woman as comestible. Woman as kingmaker. Woman as oblivion.

(11, 12).

It is not so much the Gravesian Goddess,[5] nor for that matter, the Laurentian feminine,[6] nor that of Paglia (who compares the father’s contribution to creation as a ‘pin prick’, the female can use, suck him dry and cast aside, he might as well die as soon as he has ejaculated, she is done with him, her body will do the rest – she will still be pregnant). Catherine A. Mackinnon defined woman by her ability to be raped and reduced masculinity and femininity to the ‘erotization of dominance and submission.’[7]

There exists a spiritual dynamic in which the masculine does not feel threatened by the feminine so as to feel the need to annihilate it but is, annihilated by it:

So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.

Gambotto-Burke is overly critical of the patriarchy of the Abrahamic religions which, for all its faults, is unfair because as far as parenting and motherhood is concerned, it is strongly emphasised and systematised in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which place huge importance in marriage and parenting, on the upkeep of a stable family home and in which mother-baby attachment or the rights and duties of parenthood and of children towards parents, the rights and obligations of society towards orphans, the poor and those in need form the very mainstay of society. The Quran, for instance, is packed with consistent reminders to pray for one’s offspring even before their birth and to ensure their healthy upbringing (giving clear instructions regarding breastfeeding and weaning), to care for orphans and feed the poor and those in need. To further this, it replaces the system of interest by instigating the system of Zakat (a tax levied on the wealthy solely for the purpose of narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor) that has no parallel in the faithless, Godless society we have chosen for ourselves, leaving us irresponsible of the consequences of our actions and oblivious of the inevitability that we are or ultimately would be, brought to book for everything we have done. In such a society, the problems of abuse and addiction would be eradicated to a large extent. One could even go so far as to argue that a society built upon the plateau of Capitalism, that sees life as random, purposeless, without an ultimate Creator and Provider, would be conducive to creating psychopaths. That is not to say that religious societies are completely devoid of psychopaths but they could compensate for the birth trauma just as attachment does through mother-love.[8]

This book shows how the life-choices of mothers, pushed by a system of obstetric norms, are literally destroying life right from birth. The use of ‘dummies’ is shown to be closely linked to babies’ developmental problems in motor skills, breathing, speaking and swallowing whereas those who are breastfed, by and large, have superior speech and are more eloquent than (as breastfeeding helps the tongue develop) those who are bottle-fed formula; leading to language and communication problems leading, in their turn, to emotional and social problems, and develop all sorts of allergies and intolerances.

It is explained in detail how 70% eye-contact is made during breastfeeding and how this could be linked to increased psychopathy in their bottle-fed peers:

In being seen, we become aware that we exist.
Depression is impossible when one is seen.

(227, 234).

As explained, babies are biologically programmed to be nourished by their mothers’ milk. The number of scientific studies that support this view is beyond counting, dozens of sources that bear out the argument are cited in this book alone, and yet …

The link to obstetrics, the use of pacifiers et cetera to rubber fetishism is shocking and may explain why it is practically non-existent in other societies. According to one estimate 90% of ‘rubberists’ belong to the Upper or Middle Classes, (181).

Rumi wrote that 'Whoever looked upon a truly beautiful woman saw God.’ Thus in the spiritual realm, rather than confronting the birth trauma and ‘becoming one’ and tripping or resorting to lethal amounts of drugs, ‘empty sex’, pornography, or some crazy sadomasochism, the solar magic of the male provides for the lunar one of the moon to complete the circle:

To women, biology is now an open enemy.
It was only on giving birth that I realised detachment is a fiction. From between my thighs, a child has emerged, just as I’d emerged from between my mother’s thighs and she from her mother’s, all the way back to the dawn of being. The principle of separation on which our culture is based was bullshit.

(18, 24).

I could never fathom how some of the extreme sexual and masochistic fetishes and downright abuse, pushed by mass media as the standard of sex, such as humiliation, slapping, choking, gagging and spitting, exclusive to the First World countries only in the last few centuries in their various forms could possibly be erotic. Gambotto-Burke presents a convincing (with just under 1300 source notes) and highly plausible argument in that it is down to obstetric practices that have become the norm in these countries and the drugs and strong opiates administered during labour that cause lethal side effects/defects – We are all literally born tripping! That is the underlying theme of the book. It explains why this is normalised in the medical advice and the mainstream media and particularly widespread in pornography of the last decade or so – ‘The life-deforming anguish and horror of the drugged infant birthed to a drugged mother has, to the best of my knowledge, never been adequately addressed’, (169).

Gambotto-Burke has given numerous examples of how detrimental and damaging to natural human biological instincts the results of these contemporary norms have become and how damaging to relationships: the poet Scarlett Sabet who lauds her abuser Master’s violent blows, so heavy she can no longer think and yet she still grovels for his attention, or the novelist Erica Jong who still looked up to Henry Miller as her saviour and hero despite his humiliating abuse levelled at her. She gives the interesting fact that 25% of porn searches by women included violence against women including violent rape phantasies, rough sex, bondage and gangbangs making it ‘at least twice as common among women than men.’[9]

Feminism has hijacked the masculine traits inherent within testosterone such as competitiveness and aggression while knowing full well that women enjoy intimacy and are more likely to achieve orgasm with dominant men (excluding the minority of haughty, insufferable men with massive egos dreamt up by Incels who spend their lives in front of a computer screen or pointing and thumbing on their phones):

Contemporary Western culture sends an incredibly confusing mixed message to men by insisting they should be nice and soft and cautious at all times while at the same time their girlfriends and wives are salivating over books and films like Fifty Shades of Grey.[10]

The popularity of the books of Nancy Friday is an earlier example. Why is this so, when there is no evidence to suggest that such phantasies were popular before the wholesale administering of what Gambotto-Burke calls ‘obstetric abuse’?

To the young, sex has become synonymous with trauma or the threat of trauma.
Love is no longer associated with sex.

(28).

In the book The Lonely Century, Noreena Hertz shows how this divide has got to a point in First World countries where men prefer the easier option of forming meaningless relationships with sex dolls or synthetic humans. Gambotto-Burke gives the example of hook-up culture and dating apps to point out the direction we are heading in or are already at:

The new adult feminine: physically hairless, breastless, and detached from her young - in herself, purposeless. A proto-human or unfinished model, available for modification by the masculine.

(172).

It might be interesting to note (in the context of the mention of the poet Allen Ginsberg’s relationship with his mother) that Ginsberg describes in graphic detail, often seeing his mother naked as an adolescent in the long poem Kaddish.

Outside of the dynamic of a commitment of marriage and keeping house there could be something to say for the argument that females seem to be biologically driven to form relationships with men who mess them around, while men tend to be strongly attracted to females with complex issues:

It seems to me that bending someone else to your will, is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging scenes if you are female. And what is more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not all. I wouldn’t.[11]

In the Channel 4 dating show Five Guys a Week, one contestant observed “Mate, the hotter they are, the crazier they are.” Men and women both yield power in different ways but neither yield absolute power in any sense:

Not only do feminists paint all men with the same broad brush but they attribute the very worst characteristics of the most evil men to all men while simultaneously portraying all women as innocent and infallible angels with the purest of hearts. There is no worldwide conspiracy of men coming together to oppress women. There is no secret society which all men are part of and which excludes all women. The myth of the patriarchy is a convenient scapegoat for women who don't want to take responsibility for their own actions, failures and mistakes. After all, it's always easier to blame someone else for our own shortcomings.[12]

It is questionable whether the kind of experiences described by Leary (in chapter two of the book) can only be had by means of lethal narcotics and drugs that irreparably damage the body’s natural equilibrium. These are the resort of those who wish to acquire a half-way house between spirituality and the pursuing oblivion scot-free without having to offer the diligent sacrifice and investment required by faith.

The Bible teaches one to ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.’[13] Mystics and Prophets have been known to have reached even greater highs of spiritual ecstasy through spiritual exercises and practice alone without the unsafe use of hallucinogens and share their dimensions with celestial beings such as angels and fairies and achieve states of felicity in this very life. The short-cut of careless drug abuse and the repercussions thereof is in itself the self-constructed Hell of a life without purpose or meaning, devoid of the concept of a Creator. I say this because the ratio of those resorting to this kind of refuge is significantly less among those who know they have someone to turn to. Although the fervour with which those of faith and those of none embrace the concept of the zombie (a soulless husk of a body as opposed to a body with a soul or a soul without body) apocalypse which I do not share is beyond comprehension:

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"

As Gambotto-Burke states ‘To be human now is to require pharmaceutical or surgical modification’ (254). On one hand, Freud has put every human urge down to sex while on the other; Leary asks if the clitoris should be equated to the soul![14] Once addiction has taken root and we are ‘born tripping’ then there is no way out from this Hell of one’s own making and fat chance of attaining spiritual felicity:

True religions in their respective times are always uphill tasks and all human achievements are through uphill tasks and the pleasure-seeking of general non-religious societies are most often downhill tasks, they absolve you of your responsibilities and provide cheaper, easier pleasures and you feel easier and easier as if you are shedding weight but ultimately you find yourself at the lower end of the mountain at the very base and you can't survive because then there is no further downhill and you have reached the ultimate end. Then either you go mad because you can't see pleasure anywhere in any form because you have reached the ultimate end or you must turn back and start covering the same distance which you left behind. This is in reality the substance of the fight between religious and non-religious values. So an uphill task is definitely more difficult to follow in this sense but you have gained heights and look down at the lower grounds you have left behind and then you know the pleasure and what it is to climb.[15]

© Rehan Qayoom, June 2022.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

[Adrian Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book, well worth reading. It is about the widespread, baleful effects of 'birth trauma' – a condition brought about in the 20th century by the increasingly total medicalisation of the birth process. Bad for the mother, bad for the child, bad for everyone, bad for the world. Widespread problems of separation, alienation, addiction, disability, sociopathy, and much else are linked by the author to the history of modern birth practices. Antonella Gambotto-Burke (who I've been reading since the early 1990s essay/profile collection LUNCH OF BLOOD) links the disturbing 'triumph' of this medicalisation to patriarchal contempt (in almost all socieities, as she sees it) of what she calls the 'eternal feminine'. There are questions to ask and criticisms to be made of this book (the places & values accorded to fatherhood, queer sexuality, and feminism are ambiguous at best), and it swings a rather 'broad brush' of historical & cultural analysis, but I can testify: this book will immediately get into your dreams – and nightmares! It raises an important issue in appropriately dramatic terms, and sticks to it all the way to the end.

[X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not the easiest read, but an important one. Challenging, extensive and essential.

[Karl Tomm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provocative and eye-opening, challenging cultural paradigms and patriarchal practices over the last century. You will never look at drugs, intimacy, motherhood, anxiety, alienation, addiction, gender roles and expectations the same. Mind-blowing!

[Kanako Okiron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just wow. I wish I had more to say but let’s just say, like an apple, I bit out of the whole lot of this book and swallowed the core.

[Alexandra Almond]

A very angry book.

While I agree with many of the basic premises (drugs are bad, men can be awful, our attitudes to sex are a bit screwed, medical advice in relation to women is historically deeply flawed, artists are often troubled) I found the style difficult to relate to. It was presented academically with literally thousands of references, but with some dubious conclusions; nothing will convince me that rubber mats in birthing suites leading to rubber fetishism in adults.