The Great Sex Con

In the adolescent society, sex has been turned into the ultimate toy; not just a quick and easy pleasure fix, but a powerful iconic mystery weighed down with the often desperate and hopeless desires of existentially fragmented, under constructed and and immature personalities. They are denied the understanding that romantic and erotic love represent a not small, but the smallest, a not short lasting, but the shortest lasting and a not unimportant, but the least important strand of human love. They are therefore easily persuaded that orgasmic sex is the ultimate spiritual communion. Sex priests and priestesses preach a gospel of pubescence to senescence fuckritude, in every available media pulpit, constantly. Gender relationships are forever being represented in a frozen attitude of perpetual eroticism and grand sexual passion.

The reality is that sexual pleasure is biological candy to get us into difficult, demanding and complex long term reproductive relationships. The other reality is that the very basic lower brain function that controls sexual feeling shamelessly promises the world, demands the utmost urgent attention and really believes in the moment of its greatest release that life is just constant orgasms, interrupted only by sleeps and exotic meals served in bed by room service.

The thudding disappointment that eventually falls into the divide between these two realities doesn’t lead to questioning of the propaganda so much as polygamous flings and serial monogamy. The inescapable exhaustion of libido through permanent 24/7 mobilization in the economic 'trenches' of an all out protracted production 'war' that saturation 'bombs' markets with civil 'ordinance', is blamed on the partner or the self.  And that is before anyone has thought about screaming babies and the relentless toil of bringing up another generation.

The heat, sweat, adrenaline rush and glandular spike of orgasm has been turned into a metaphor for production warfare, the at-the-double tactical assault on production targets, the dominant themes of marketing war propaganda.and erogenizing the consuming experience of shop troops, as they sacrifice all they have, and all they don't have, to get their pleasure buttons pressed in the propaganda drill halls and mall temples.

Emotionally and reproductively fruitless sex symbolizes an equally sterile use and throw away production economy increasingly disconnected from and damaging the biological and cultural life force.

Courtship has degenerated in the age of instant gratification, so that it now has about as little ceremony as horse mounting. It’s on for first date or it’s all off. The pressure to conform and perform is enormous, especially on women, who have to be ‘liberated’ whether they feel like it or not.

Women's new-found sexual freedom has become a weapon to be used against them. “What’s the matter bitch? Are you frigid or something? Or are you just a dyke?” Even for men however, the pressure is almost as great. Failure to get sexual compliance quickly enough raises doubts about whether they are really made from the Right Stuff.

Sexual 'freedom' has not led to personal or collective liberation, which is a state whereby individuals and communities are not surplus pressured by the demands of sexuality, performance, looks and dress.  Liberated people are unafraid to be openly honest about their sexual  feelings and needs, and secure enough not to be enslaved to them. Instead of liberation, there has been a tightening of the screws of compliance and conformity to a culture of demand and almost impossible to meet prescriptions for desirability, around an increasing menu of sexual behaviors, some of which disrupt the already challenging politics of men and women..

The notion of emotionally disciplined freedom has been conflated with license to indulge in a much more ruthless, colder and alienated sexual politics. 

'Freedom'  for women now means not just being a homemaker, Sex Goddess and reproducer of children, but also a vital income producer in a marital deal that leaves her wondering why she is so exhausted all the time and why hubby doesn't pull his weight.  Perhaps someone forgot to tell him that she doesn't have an extra pair of hands for the extra functions she has taken on in the production war economy; extra functions that have progressively asset stripped the familial domestic 'economy'.

Even gays continue to act out equally unreconstructed gender roles, adding only some caricature to soften the harder edges.  And they are now involving themselves in the increasingly aggressive politics of equivalencing reproductively sterile same sex unions and fruitful cross gender ones, because the larger social reproductive effort and the business of constructing gender have been so undermined and looted by the protracted shift of social resources to the production war sector, that they can no longer defend themselves from hostile opportunistic takeover.

Conversations around gender have been almost entirely closed down into issues of sexuality. Rarely, except in a very restricted feminist circle do broader issues of gender reach consciousness raising and behavior altering thresholds. Complaint and discontent is rendered as ‘nagging’ and ‘neurosis’. And now feminist analysis itself is retreating before a barrage of too hard baskets; too hard because the status quo suits the dominant interests just fine.

Those interests only wanted sexual ‘freedom’ disconnected from the moral contexts and constraints of the past so that they could exploit its pleasure potential for the market, not so that an alternative group of moral and broader interpersonal contexts could be put in their place. Thus traditional moral ‘repression’ of sexuality has been transformed into manipulation of its pleasures, insecurities and vulnerabilities to leverage the consumer lifestyle. Under this regime, sex is never going to be allowed to become low profile or be treated, at least to a degree, as part of a connected continuum of human behavior.

Sexual license has been used as a weapon to enslave people in a way that repression never could. Repression leaks too much. It invites escape. A standing invitation to indulge all your fantasies is a much tougher entrapment.

Human beings sexually fantasize a lot of the time. However, the adolescent actually believes in and psychologically operates off them. Mature individuals don’t to anywhere near the same extent. They understand their fantasies to be entirely of their own manufacture and do not necessarily reflect anything about the nature of the external world or other people. They are therefore more able to exercise independent critical judgement and control and less likely to follow blind instinct. In the adolescent society, sexual fantasy is therefore an enormously powerful selling tool precisely because the immature individuals' lack of such control, strength and self-knowledge, makes them infinitely more susceptible to external manipulation.

The manipulation of sexuality extends far beyond the immediate requirements of commercial propaganda. At a much deeper level, the movement of women into legal autonomy, the industrial workforce, and their unprecedented control of their own reproductivity is paralleled by a continuous re-enforcement of the most primitive archetypal gender stereotypes. Even as women become heads of state and corporations, the dominant representations of them within the system of propaganda are as objects of male desire, with nothing between the ears, a completely vacant expression and an empty smile; as if all the heroic efforts over the last 100 years to raise their status has been for nothing!

The promises of the 'sexual revolution' were a fake.  They gave us the prospect of gratifying our sexual fantasies, but delivered a miserable pup that took away far more than it gave.  We were betrayed and now we are stuck with a regime that is easy up front, but disintegrates as soon as the going gets hard and a relationship has to get down to the real business of why we are here; to reproduce in security, to reproduce a reliable social product that can keep delivering the same down the generations.  That is dissolving before our eyes, as our reproductive industry becomes a trashed rust belt and slum of the city of the imagination.

Reconstruction is the only way forward left.  We just have to start again, by going back to the basics oft what life is supposed to be for; building for life and eschewing the sterile, the empty and the spurious claims of a laissez-faire libertarian dud.  It works nicely as a marketing tool, but beyond that has done little except leave a trail of disappointment, frustration, anger and dysfunctional relationships that threaten the viability of our system of social reproduction.