The Erotic is Political (But Why?)
Sexualization, Normalization, and the Death of Culture
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I don’t remember what film it was from, but one of the best “I’m much older and wiser than you” insults I’ve ever heard came from a movie, and it went something like this:
"I’ve been doing this since before you were jerking off to the underwear section of the Sears catalog.”
For men of a certain age, it’s a perfect insult…because we all did it. If you grew up anytime between the late 1960s and early 1990s, naughty pictures were hard to get. They were traded on the black market between boys starting in about the third grade, and, when you’re that young, the girlie magazines—even the soft ones, like Playboy—are often a case of “too much, too soon.”
No matter how much you wonder about women’s anatomy, or how much you don’t wonder (say, if you grew up in a home or a subculture where incidental nudity is no big deal, or if you had younger sisters whose diapers you changed, or if you saw animals mating) there’s something about the way that adult erotica is photographed that’s more…confrontational than you’re quite prepared to deal with.
The sheer biology you’re confronted with actually gets in the way of the erotic experience. It’s a kind of information overload.
The classic explanation for this is that the tease is more interesting than the real thing. It’s the air of mystery that generates that erotic charge. Lingerie stores are often thought to make their living on this premise.
But if this was true, the world would look different.
If such were true, couples should tire of one another quickly—yet it’s quite common for couples married for fifty or sixty years to be more regularly randy than couples weathering the bustle of middle age and trying to remember that it’s actually worthwhile to schedule time for sex.
If such were true, nudists should have boring sex lives, yet they run the normal gamut that other couples do, with similar rates of adultery, divorce, and sexual satisfaction as others in their local cultures (and sometimes, they fare better, for reasons we’ll explore below).
There is something about human sexuality—in its healthy form, as well as its unhealthy forms—that defies such pat answers.
As a new wave of prudishness sweeps over our world (occasioned by fifty-plus years of hard campaigning by both feminists and Focus-on-the-Family types, and aided by a glut of poor-quality pornography and poorer-quality advertising) it seems to me that it might be worthwhile to take a look at what eroticism actually is, how it works, and why it just might have nothing at all to do with “sexualized imagery,” “objectification,” or any of the other stupid buzzwords that get bandied about in this protracted moral panic.
The Erotic Impulse
Consider this moment in the film Blue by Polish filmmaker Krystov Kyslovski (you’ll have to click through to YouTube to view it, but it’s only 40 seconds long and it’s totally worth it):
This scene is certainly patient, but it’s not boring. It is, instead, absorbing. The recorder played by the street musician gives a mournful, hypnotic ambiance that wraps the scene. As we listen, the sugar cube siphons the coffee slowly and deliberately, as if it wants to lose its being as it sucks the dark liquid into itself.
In the film, the moment follows a scene of alienation between the main character and an admirer—she is buttoned down and desperate for control, so will not accept his overtures despite her attraction to him. This scene captures the desire that persists in her alienation—the desire to take, and to give, to unite with abandon and vulnerability, to get lost in something beautiful and bitter, to fuse and transform.
The sugar cube is a striking, unmistakable metaphor for feminine sexuality. It shows us what the main character’s true desires are, even as she denies them to herself, and it is utterly erotic even though it’s not exactly intended to turn the audience on.
The erotic has always been with us.
We should expect that, shouldn’t we? I mean, given how we’re a sexually reproducing species and all. Sexuality and eroticism—not just sex as a topic of ethical concern—was deeply embedded in every recorded religious and aesthetic tradition1 before the modern world.
Every ancient religious tradition, for example, has its own sacred pornography. Hinduism famously has the Kama Sutra. Islam has a vast and dispersed tradition which is examined in some depth in the recent volume A Taste of Honey. Babylon, Assyria, Sumeria, and Persia all had their goddesses of fertility with their sacred texts and erotic songs. The Levantine cultures had the sacred romance of Ishtar and Tammuz which was celebrated in annual fertility rites, a liturgy for which made its way into the Jewish tradition (and the Christian tradition by inheritance) as the Biblical book The Song of Songs. While its most famous passages—the protestations of devotion and similes that compare a woman’s breasts to a couple of baby deer in a field of flowers—often sound clunky and overwrought to modern ears, it nonetheless strays into hardcore (but still poetical) territory complete with erections,2 intercourse,3 fingering,4 oral sex,5 and sexual fluids.6 And that’s just the start.7
Or consider sacred architecture. Temples always and everywhere have only two modes: the solar, and the sexual—and, usually, those modes are blended together. Cathedrals, Celtic temples, Jewish temples, Stonehenge, the Parthenon, and others are traditionally oriented so that important rites happen in the light of the rising sun on particular days (the altar is on the east wall, the sun shines through the key window or archway on the solstice or the equinox or other sacred day, etc.).
Meantime, from the womb-like caves of the Mithraists to the phallic obelisks and pyramids of the Egyptians, the way that religious buildings are constructed mirrors the construction and function of our sexual anatomy.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that Christianity is immune from this. The defining cultic movement of early and medieval Christianity was (is?) the Cult of Mary (a Christian version of the worship of Athena, a Greek goddess worshiped for her sexual unattainability—”The Parthenon” is, literally, the Temple of the Virgin). The porticos of a Gothic cathedral are not-so-cryptic labia and vestibula, and the grand window arches at either end of the nave are often capped by a clitoral Rose Window. There’s a reason they call it “Holy Mother Church.”8
Brings to mind that classic zinger:
“Have you ever noticed how much they look like orchids? Lovely!”
—Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, by Robert A. Heinlein
Or consider the Temples of Khajuraho, the ancient Hindu temple in Madhaya Pradesh, India, that is built in the shape of a cluster of phalluses and saturated with bas relief sculptures of human figures engaged in every conceivable sexual act.
Or, perhaps you’d prefer something a little closer to home, such as these great knockers from a library door in Italy:
All this nakedness and pornography (from the symbolic to the realistic) dripping off the intellectual and religious walls of our ancestors represents quite a contrast with the attitude espoused by Irish comic Dara Ó Briain in his 2012 stand-up special as he complained about titillating television being marketed to middle-aged men:
“I mean the presumption that I have to be kept slightly horny all the time or I’ll get angry about it…it’s patronizing to men and limiting for young women.”
That right there is what you call an “historically novel” attitude, and, as you may have picked up from my other articles, I regard things that are historically novel as often (though not always) a bit suspicious.
The current anti-sex reactionary mood is incredibly odd by historical standards—it’s even odd by our own culture’s twisted standards, as it’s not coming just from those who identify as political and cultural conservatives.
Suspicious, as well—but we’ll get to that.
The world has always been saturated with sexuality, sexual imagery, erotic philosophy, and erotic concerns at every single level. Even those sacred spaces where the mind is supposed to be on “higher things” are designed and decorated around the ubiquitous human connection to sexuality at the most basic level, and on all levels above that.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s ever been to a charismatic church meeting (where the participants are often driven to frenzies that resemble—and sometimes actually include—orgasm), or experienced the soft romantic haze of an evangelical campfire strum’n’hum, or stood in a circle of druids at dawn on the solstice. That which we call “spiritual” or “the Sacred” is that liminal space in which all parts of a human being—from toes to crown, individual to group, intellect to emotion—all align in the same direction. It’s an altered state of consciousness, and it is entirely sexual, because we are entirely sexual.
But, to give O’Briain and all his sympathizers on all political fronts their due, our “sexually saturated” culture is doing something profoundly wrong. Something unhealthy. Something that is even—believe it or not—anti-sexual.
What is Sex?
This seems to be the question of our age, and not just because of the current fever-pitched wars around gender, gender roles, transgenderism, and the like. Fortunately, the biologists among us have an easy answer, which lets us move on to more important things:
Sex is a biological phenomena designating which gametes you produce. Big ones, you’re a female; small ones, you’re a male.
Okay, so, now that we’ve got that sorted…
Oh, wait…hold on.
Unfortunately, it just ain’t that easy.
Saying that sex is only a matter of gametes is akin to saying that water is only a marriage of hydrogen and oxygen. The construction is, itself, an instance of the genetic fallacy that strays perilously close to a motte-and-bailey: utterly defensible on its face, and completely false if taken as the whole truth. If you were to relate to water as merely a marriage of hydrogen and oxygen, you would utterly fail to appreciate how it shapes (and exists in dialogue with) geology, biology, thermodynamics, climate, agriculture, and consequently human culture.
While sex is all biology, it isn’t just biology.
It is, instead, everything, because it defines everything about the human experience.9
First, sex is the most intensely and unassailably private thing about us. Those things which motivate us, move us, turn us on, turn us off, induce us to reach out, prompt us to sacrifice—no matter how by-the-numbers typical our buttons are, the experience of having those buttons pushed animates the very center of our beings. Even if your mate knows how to get a rise out of you (literally or figuratively), that doesn’t mean s/he knows what that feels like.
There’s a reason lovers tell one another “you don’t know what you do to me”:
It’s true.
That ineffable quality of core emotional experience is wrapped up entirely in our sexuality, because of the other half of the sexuality paradox.
Sexuality is not just the most protected private part of ourselves…
…it is also, simultaneously, the most uncensorably public part of our life.
Uncensorably public?
Consider the difficulty that transvestites, transsexuals, actors, spies, and undercover journalists have “passing” as the opposite sex. To do it right, you have to start with a physical frame that leans towards androgyny, and on top of that you must use makeup, padding, corsetry, binding, and a dozen other cosmetic tricks in order to pass.
If you manage to pull that regimen off with an acceptable degree of aplomb, you might pass well enough for a still photograph, but if you really want to pass your work is less than half done.
Next, you must change the preferred resonance chamber for your voice. Then you must change the way you walk (difficult, as your normal gait is partly an effect of your adult skeletal structure, which is a secondary sex characteristic). On top of that you have to subtract habitual affectations (habits of speech, gaze direction, where and how to sit, how to hold your hands, etc.) that are appropriate to your sex and substitute for them habitual affectations appropriate for the sex you’re trying to pass as. And then, you have to internalize-to-second-nature the manners associated with the sex you wish to pass as (easier in our day-and-age than in most, but there are still thousands of little wrinkles in etiquette that can give you away).
Without this kind of work, not even hormones and surgery will allow most people to convincingly pass as the opposite sex.
And, if you don’t put in that kind of work to camouflage yourself, there isn’t a person on the planet who won’t immediately know (roughly speaking) your psychological responses, your average interests, and the shape of your genitals by looking at you from across a football field.
And that’s just your presentation.
Your “private life”—encompassing how you structure your family and your home, what kind of person you’re most likely to sleep with, your kinks and tastes, and what techniques you probably use to masturbate are nearly as obvious to the casual observer, especially if you actually have the audacity to go out in public with your friends, family, romantic prospects, etc.
Sure, your “body count” and its “roll call” might be private,10 and things like “when you most recently had sex” and “are you on birth control?”11 Other small things, too, like whether you’re circumcised, or shave your pubic hair, or what nipple type you have are things people can’t guess unless you share those things with them, but that is pretty much the extent of your sexual privacy.
I mean, really, the only reason you have any sexual secrets at all is that most people don’t want to think about this stuff, so everyone just kinda pretends it’s not true in order to save themselves the embarrassment.
This public/private duality, in our culture, has led to a cultural split that would be hilarious if it wasn’t so goddamn creepy:
Those who are most interested in reproduction are most censorious about sex, and those who are least interested in families tend to be the least censorious about sex.
The reasoning offered by the former group is:
Sex is too adult for children. Sexuality is not something children are born with. It follows, then, that it shouldn’t be imposed on them until their bodies make it impossible to avoid the subject—and, even then, they should be insulated from injury, mistakes, and stimulation.
Here’s the fun part: some (or most) partisans of the latter group entirely agree with the baseline assumption of the first group, which is why they are happy to champion things like Drag Queen Story Hour and children’s books offering instruction in the broad array of adult sexual orientations, practices, and techniques. The reasoning goes something like this:
Being born without sexuality, children have to learn about it somewhere, and if they’re limited to learning it from observing their parents (who, one would expect, are fucking behind closed doors), what’s going to happen to them when they hit puberty and suddenly become sexual? They’re going to be confused, depressed, suicidal, and easy to socially pressure into unwanted or unhealthy sexual interactions, that’s what. How else could the sexual exploitation of minors flourish so easily in conservative environments such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church?
Cutting out the genuinely sinister actors (which there are on both sides of this particular cultural divide), this is why approximately half of you look at approximately the other half of you as if you’ve rationalized your way to enabling child sexual abuse in order to advance your political and cultural agendas.
And, insofar as this mutual bafflement is concerned…
Both sides are correct.
Both sides are correct because both approaches proceed from the false premise that children have no sexuality. Both, therefore, are very easily led into conducting, rationalizing, defending, and/or covering up different sorts of sexual abuse that seem, to the abusers, to be forms of mercy and decency.
But wait! I hear you say. “Children have sexuality” is one of the basic talking points of the NAMBLA12 types!
Yup. Because every good lie requires a coating of truth to make it slide down easily. The NAMBLA types aren’t actually interested in the idea that “children have sexuality,” they’re after something else (we’ll get to it).
Now, back to the Big Lie.
Forget “sex assigned at birth” or even “sex observed at birth.” Every human—just as every mammal, and indeed every sexually-reproducing animal on Earth—is born sexed. It ain’t just gametes, it’s everything from skeletal structure to brain structure to sensory response.
How that sexing gets expressed is influenced by so many factors that it doesn’t even bear going into in this forum, but the fact remains that every single perception that an individual has, from the moment they are able to perceive, is filtered through the matrix of their sexuality. If mothers I’ve known who have borne both sons and daughters are to be believed, even the movements of a fetus in utero are different in intensity and frequency for a boy vs. a girl.
Here’s the weird part:
The Post-Industrial West is highly unusual in insisting that children are not sexual beings. And yet, somehow, there are those among us who point out incessantly that we seem to be one of the most sexually-saturated civilizations in history.
Can these things both be true at once?
Certainly the case for a “sexually saturated,” “highly sexualized,” and “objectifying” culture seems easy to make. Everywhere you look, advertising is flashing enticing images. Freudian views of the world have literally formed everything about our culture since the invention of modern marketing.13 You can find porn of any kind you like at any time you like. No school board meeting or court hearing, no Tumblr or Reddit board, no religious forum is ever more than a (literal) hand’s breadth from the mention or display of something titillating or sexually controversial.
But what if this is all a clever light show to cover up the fact that our civilization is one of the most sexless, anti-erotic civilizations in history—and that all these things we call “sexualization” are, in fact, desexualization?
Back Seat Fumbling
Sexual saturation is the order of the day for human society. It always has been.
Sigmund Freud, who hailed from Victorian-era Austria before relocating to the United States, famously argued that sexual repression was the root of both sexual perversion and civilizational development. The erotic drive, he argued, was the place where humans got their energy for building monuments, building institutional religions, and developing highly non-reproductive (or anti-reproductive) kinks ranging from sadomasochism to pedophilia to homosexuality.
This line of argument is one of the few things Freud (himself a fairly infamous pervert14 along several lines) was undoubtedly partially correct about. The rise of complex industrial civilization coincides with the formal regimentation and repression of the sex drive.
Partially correct, but not entirely correct. For the other side of the story, a look into Bronze Age civilizations shows that regimentation and repression were not always the go-to method for coping with the tremendous erotic potential of the human animal.
The arts still, sometimes, preserve this more erotocentric tradition. Something as mechanical and brutal as a car can be made beautiful by the incorporation of the erotic:
And something as erotic and sensual and sensually absorbing as the pleasure of cars and driving can be made horrific simply by pointing unflinchingly to its erotic subtext, as JG Ballard did with his 1973 novel Crash (which was adapted fairly faithfully to film by David Cronenberg in 1996).
But something about industrial civilization is different.
Since the fifteenth century, the ebbs and flows of culture have coincided with waves of moral panic and sexual repression. Freud and other observers have pegged religion and/or civilization per se as the culprit for these waves of repression—sometimes to demonize these things as “unnatural” and/or “anti-human,” other times to commend these things as helping to liberate us from and/or raise us above our animal natures.
What’s more, these waves of repression and moral panic don’t always alternate with periods of sexual liberation, they increasingly coincide with one another—the repressive waves often rise in response to social chaos, and the liberationist waves arise in response to the same chaotic forces. Each of these waves then build into purity spirals in reaction to one another.
The “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and the rise of the Religious Right happened right on top of one another, and neither of them were propounding new dogmas. A previous pair of waves arose in the Pre-War era, and before that in the early 1920s, and before that in the 1890s, and before that in the 1870s.
If you’re counting, that’s pretty much once per generation—as a new generation comes of age, it has to fumble with itself in the back seat and in the church pew, attempting work out the puzzle of sexuality for itself, because the prevailing dogmas of post-Reformation European civilization are all…
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, they have all been hypocritical at best, and cynical at worst.
And, with each generational turn, allowing for a certain amount of variation, things have gotten a little bit more extreme on each end.
How extreme can it get?
Look around.
On the one hand, we have the ubiquitous availability of porn,15 the brutality of app-based dating, and the increasingly normative failure of adults to move on from adolescence and form families. On the other, we don’t have “sober and responsible erotic life,” we instead have insane panics about masturbation,16 “sex trafficking” profiteering by those who set their charities up in order to participate in and foster the activities they claim to be trying to prevent, and perversions so extreme that they could only be packaged as “respectable”:
This guy is a popular conservative pundit and journalist.
Not to get all moralistic on you, but I have trouble imaging anything more perverted than being so horrified at your spouse’s biology that actually watching it work would ruin your sex life.17 If a feminist were to post something like this regarding male biology (Testicles are ugly! Semen is gross!), she’d be (rightly) lambasted for having an infantile view of sexuality.
In fairness, horror at female sexual biology is nothing new. Immature men have been complaining about menstruation since at least the time that the Levitical and Deuteronomic codes were written, and female puberty has long been a cause of emotional discomfort or trauma for some girls that go through it.18
Which brings me back to NAMBLA. A little while ago, I mentioned that the NAMBLA crowd (and their modern successors) was using a bit of truth to wedge open a crack in the social fabric—and in so doing, I said that they weren’t actually interested in the truth.
So what are they after?
They are using the pretext of the sexuality of children, not to sexualize children (a ridiculous notion if children are sexual from conception onward), but as a wedge to gain social sanction for their fetishization of children and children’s sexuality.19
They are, in other words, making a play for respectability.
Because of the power of the sex drive, deep perversion—whether it’s the kind of perversion proudly trumpeted by Elijah Schaffer (above) or by the pedophile activist community—is intensely alienating for the person thusly perverted. Because their own sexual dysfunction is the central obsession of their own life, in order to win their own self-respect they must normalize their obsessions. Whether it’s NoFap and virginity cults one one hand, or non-consensual public performance of hard kink and pushes to make pedophilia respectable on the other, the depth of perversion can be measured fairly directly by observing the level of evangelical and activist zeal surrounding it.
A healthy sexual deviant (“deviance” being a relative term meaning “different from the perceived social norm”) is comfortable enough with him or herself to arrange their life and sexuality so as to be fulfilling to themselves and their partners, without demanding that the rest of the world follow suit.
So, if all that is true about perverts using truth as the thin end of a wedge of lies, what possible truth could the Elijah Schaffers of the world be referencing?
Could it possibly be that there is something about modern life itself that is inherently perverse, perverting, and deranging?
Dancing Through Dystopia
The late nineteenth-century through the early twentieth century was the era of the Utopian dream. Marx and Engels, the American nationalists/socialists, the Republican party and its attendant Progressive movement, and dreams of Atlantis as a model for a new-and-better world without slavery, without want, and without hatred suffused a European-dominated world that was onward-and-upward in terms of big civilization movements, but deteriorating from the point-of-view of vast swaths of the population.
The mass movement of people into cities created a world of squalor and misery as it transformed “work” from something complex and rhythmic that was integrated into the whole of your life, to an activity where your humanity was stripped from you and you were forced to hew to the rhythms of a machine.
This happened to the bulk of the population in Europe and America over the course of three generations. Marx called this transition “alienation,” and marketed communism as a solution. His program got a lot of takers, as did other such programs promulgated by the hucksters, dreamers, and scam artists whose presence defined the era, and whose dreams defined the following era.
In England it was the Fabians, and their grand prophet H.G. Wells, who envisioned the technocratic triumph of science and intelligence over everything from economics (The Time Machine, Things to Come, Anticipations) to biology (The Island of Dr. Moreau).
In America, the defining dreamer was Edward Bellamy, whose novel Looking Backward coined the term “Nationalism” and became the nexus of a politically potent nationwide movement that defined the American Progressive, Nationalist, and Conservative movements (and still partially steers them today, even though the book itself is largely forgotten). It is arguably the single most civilization-shaping book in Western history, excepting perhaps the Bible.
In Germany, the romantic tradition won out, and the operas of Wagner mixed freely with German Idealism20 and Theosophical neopaganism to give birth to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.
And in Russia...well, this article can only be allowed to get so long, but German idealism was the root and branch of the intellectual life of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.
But once the dreamers and schemers found their patrons, and brought their ideas into the halls of power, the Utopian dreams were shown to be…less appealing in real life.
These Utopian dreams all had something in common:
To work, they required a New Man, because the old, tired, flawed mass of humanity simply would not do.21 The eugenics movement, born in England and America and brought to public embarrassment in the Holocaust, was the natural companion to this dream.
To make the New Man, one must first unmake the Old Man. The effort to do so gave birth to the twentieth century—the century of the dystopia.
Former Fabian Aldous Huxley laid public the Fabian vision in Brave New World.
English Socialist George Orwell exposed the Stalinist program-in-progress in 1984.
George Lucas (yes, that one) showed the anticipated end-result of Bellamy’s program of Nationalism, already then well-in-progress, in his film THX-1138.
We’re all familiar with the Cyberpunk dystopian vision that reached a popular focal point in the 1984 film Blade Runner (even if you haven’t seen that film, you’ve seen everything that film brought together in just about every dystopia since).
All of the worlds depicted in these works have something in common:
A war on sexuality.
In Blade Runner (and its sequel Blade Runner 2049, written by the same screenwriter), there are no relationships, only commerce. The only sex that appears to exist anywhere in polite society is found in advertising, pornography, and prostitution. Only the outcast replicant slave class appears to have actual, non-commercial, meat-based sexual relationships (and only rarely).
In 1984, romance is flatly outlawed for those in The Party. Only the downtrodden proles have families, and they pay a heavy price for their animalistic ways. The plot of the novel revolves around the arrest and torture of the main character for the crime of thinking independently enough to pursue his affection for another Outer Party member, and carrying on an affair with her.
In Brave New World, sexual communism is the order of the day. Children are trained to the dogma that everyone belongs to everyone else, and in sexual technique, from the age of four. To refuse sex with anyone is a sign of deviance. To play favorites and develop personal relationships is a crime which draws the attention of the authorities. Inconvenient emotions are controlled with the mood-stabilizing drug soma. In this world, intellectual and artistic curiosity, ambition, and love are all considered perversions.
In THX-1138, the citizens of the future underground world are shaved head-to-toe, dressed in androgynous clothes, drugged to suppress their sex drive, furnished with VR pornography to take care of the urges that the drugs can’t suppress, and required to live in co-ed conditions while being forbidden from developing personal (to say nothing of romantic or sexual) relationships with their roommates. As in Blade Runner, Brave New World, and 1984, propaganda is ubiquitous. Moreso even than in 1984, the awareness of sexuality is aggressively stamped out, to the point of every single surface of the world being polished and hypermodern, scrubbed of beauty, line, and proportion; a sterile environment for a sterile and sterilized people.
All of these artists anticipated our modern world of desexualized sexuality, of eroticism-free erotica, of personal atomization, and of ubiquitous perversion because all four understood that modern life requires a fundamental perversion in order to function:
Man must be remade in the image of ideology.
And for the ideology to win, the power of sex must lose.
Perversion and Modern Life
Which brings us to the truth at the thin end of the wedge of lies promulgated by the Schaffers of the world.
Since the dawn of time, humans have been monogamous, polygamous, situational swingers,22 communally sexual, and (occasionally) fully celibate. We’ve always had public nudity (everything from communal bathing in the Germanic and English middle ages, to sauna in Northern Europe, to the simple brute fact that most families, throughout most of history, slept in the same bed and shared a one-room house), and homosexuality (both situational and preferential). And paraphilias23 have always manifested in those cultures where sexual intercourse isn’t a regular part of daily life.24
While human civilizations have existed in all sorts of sexual arrangements, one thing has persisted:
Some sexual segregation.
Being a man and being a woman are both social as well as sexual endeavors, and—especially during youth and young adulthood—the social piece of this puzzle requires regular access to the company of others of your own sex (and not just of your own age) in contexts where the other sex is either not present, or is a stark minority.
As I explored in Team Players and Groupthink, men and women communicate and think in fundamentally different ways. These communication styles are rooted in biology, but they are inflected by culture. Having strong separate cultures of men and women provides the ground upon which a common culture of men and women is possible.25
We do things differently in our world. We have spent the past century-and-a-bit aggressively removing sex-segregated spaces from the map. We’ve done it in the name not only of equality, but also in the name of suspicion.
Suspicion first of masculinity (men on their own might be sexist, or racist, or make back-room deals and conspire against women), and now of femininity (women on their own are exclusionary of feminine men, gay men, and trans women, and “exclusion” is one of our current cardinal sins).
Far be it from me to demonize egalitarianism. I am a man who very much enjoys the company of women, whether those women are friends, lovers, colleagues, collaborators, or the dazzling woman I’m building my mountain retreat with.
But one of the reasons I can so easily enjoy the company of women is because I grew up in the company of men. Having a firm foundation to work from, I was able to learn the language of women without having to face the problems I see so many young men dealing with—especially, the lack of understanding of and comfort with one’s own masculinity that leads so easily to heartache and confusion when interacting with women.
The lack of same-sex spaces in our world is not an accident, nor is the lack of eroticism or sexuality in our culture.
It is the point.
And it is from this common font that all the perversions of our modern world spring.
What Are You Worth?
So what is a person worth?
If you’re in a communist country, your worth is demonstrated by your ability to further the aims of the Party.
If you’re in a fascist country, the story is much the same.
If you’re in an industrial capitalist system, your worth is measured in terms of your contribution to GDP.
In all cases, the individual is not an individual—he or she is a cog in the machinery of State.
Now consider:
The price of something is determined by its supply relative to its demand. If something is rare and wanted, its price will be high. If something is common and wanted, its price will be low. If something is unwanted—whether it’s rare or common—it is virtually free.
The more people who can be trained to do a particular job, the lower the price of their time. But, more importantly, the more stable will be the system that depends on them, because, after the saturation point, workers are fungible.
In any ideologically-driven system of state, though, it’s not just the bodies of the people that are worth commodifying; their minds are of equal or greater value. The more uniform their thinking patterns, the easier it is to manipulate them, which means that securing legitimacy is a much easier job than wrangling a mass of individuals with their own centers of power (relationships, families, identities, property, strong communities, martial prowess, conscience, developed intellects).
In theory, you might think a good citizen who can advocate for himself, who can vote his conscience, who has a conscience of his own, would be vital to a functioning Republic. The Founding Fathers of the United States certainly thought so (or, at least, some of them did).
In practice, however, the key to winning the game of democracy—especially democracy in a world of workers rather than of merchants and tradesmen—is the ability to suppress the individual and denude him of as many private centers of power as possible.
The ultimate ploy in the game of politics isn’t divide-and-conquer—that’s just the first step in a playbook that ends with atomize-and-commodify. If you want to atomize and commodify men and women, you must find a way to desexualize them:
Make them believe their essence (their self, their spirit, whatever) is a separate thing from their body. Teach them to loathe being at the beck-and-call of biology.
It doesn’t really matter if you want to do this for reasons of religious purity or economic advantage or political homogeneity, the playbook of all cults and ideologies eventually boils down to a very simple goal:
Kill the individual.
Make people fungible.
Start by removing them from their physical and social context,26 then remove them from their ideological context, then alienate them from their own agency, divorce them from their own biology, and, in the end, control and re-shape their desires.
Neuter them effectively, either through total repression or by taking those things in life that are meant to be a rhythm of highs and lows and replacing it with a constant, low-level drip, drip, drip—always give enough to take the edge off the hunger, never give enough to satisfy. Do this long enough, and the very feeling of hunger becomes alien, and feels unhealthy.
Regardless of how they are instantiated, all social customs and rules are ultimately about sex. By creating fault lines around anything touched by sex, you problematize life itself. You create the opportunity for totalitarianism.
Because sexuality isn’t exactly about fucking, and eroticism isn’t exactly about arousal, or titillation, or stimulation. It isn’t even about desire. It’s about something far deeper, far more powerful, and far more dangerous to any authority figure:
Longing.
To Breathe on the Embers
We are all born heroes. We are ejected from a comfortable, safe place into a bright, cold world. We draw breath. We cry. We grasp for contact. We seek out a nipple. We find nourishment and connection.
We are driven by longing and lust—the longing to connect, the lust to grow. Our longings steer us throughout our lives, and even when we are low and alone, we can be stirred and awakened by beauty. Life, vibrancy, proportion, curves, everything we experience that pulls us forward does so because it feels familiar as much as it feels alien.
Sex, sexuality, and eroticism are the ground upon which everything human plays out. Spirituality, sociality, aesthetics, and cognition are all outgrowths of sexuality.
Sexual desire motivates and saturates art, architecture, spirituality, and (at least in previous eras) military conquest.
Now, consider:
You want to sell something. You’ve got an ideology, or a new mathematical system,27 or a civilizational project, or an empire, or a religion, or an industry. You believe in it, and you want it, but it’s not something you can do on your own.
You need to get people to do some of the work for you. Well, you’ve got a reliable way to manipulate them into desiring to do what you want them to do:
Alienate them from their erotic instincts.
All those bright advertisements? Those raunchy music videos? The endless talk about sex-as-identity?
These are not “sexualizing” influences. They are desexualizing influences. By dressing alienation up in the garments of erotic tantilization, they deaden the erotic instinct. By reducing sexual desire to a simple question of “who and when I want to fuck,” by reducing sex to just an itch to be scratched, you remove from life the thing that motivates everything from rocketry to craftsmanship to music.
“The guitar is an extension of what’s between your legs.”
—Guitar Heroes episode of The History of Rock’n’Roll
Is it any wonder why developed nations (i.e. those touched by either international commerce or managerial governance, or both) are literally dying out?
Is it any wonder why in the West it’s only the isolated subcultures—the bohemians off in the mountains, the Amish, the first generation Latin Catholics, etc.—that maintain positive birth rates and a vibrant cultures?
Perhaps now it’s obvious why nudists—like those other subcultures—do as well as or better than their surrounding subcultures in measures of social and relational and sexual health; they make the re-connection with the physical, embodied nature of life a regular part of their existence. Because it’s a powerful (and thus dangerous) part of life, they must develop social norms that allow the connection to be managed well.
Eroticism is the spark of life for the human animal.
It’s not just the longing for sexual gratification, it’s the lust for life itself.
When you wrestle with how to make sense of your desires, when you find yourself astonished by the beauty of a cathedral, or enraptured by a song; when you’re distracted by a bodybuilder, or a breastfeeding mother, or a group of boys playing mud football; when you smile quietly to yourself at a little girl picking daisies or dance furiously at a tango meet; when you memorize poetry or get slain-in-the-Spirit—when you do any of these things, you’re tapping into your erotic nature and glimpsing a piece of the glory and beauty of the world.
Our sexless, desexualized, pornified, identity-obsessed culture has no room for the erotic.
Unless, of course, we decide to make some of our own.
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In many cultures, the religious and aesthetic tradition are one and the same. In others, such as ours, the aesthetic tradition and the religious traditions run in parallel, but are not synonymous.
Song of Songs 5:15
Song of Songs 2:17, 4:6, 5:1, 6:2,
Song of Songs 5:4
Song of Songs 2:3, 2:16, 4:16, 5:1, 6:2
Song of Songs 4:10-12, 4:15, 5:5, 6:12, 7:2
The distance provided by both cultural gaps and translation-to-please-the-hangups-of-believers don’t do the poetic randiness of this poem justice by a long shot. Many of the above-cited references are far more explicit in their original language and context, as are several other passages in the book. For example, the recurring motif of the stag…actually, I’d better let you figure it out lest this footnote turns into a full-scale explication of the poem.
In case you actually want to know the reason, it’s that in Christian theology the Church (the community of believers) is envisioned as the “Bride of Christ.” The fact that it’s also the “Body of Christ” doesn’t seem to affect the architectural iconography of the Catholic church, which is thoroughly gynocentric.
Don’t worry, I’m going to prove it.
Well, mostly. A trained observer can often guess, pretty accurately, who you’ve slept with (or wish you’d slept with) based on how you interact with them in public. They can also pick out, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, if you were sexually abused at some point in your life, and how severely.
Except that you actually walk differently if you’ve had an orgasm in the past 24 hours, and if you’re a woman your body exhibits symptoms of ovulation if you’re not on hormonal birth control, and if you’re pregnant your whole body advertises it even before you miss your period.
The North American Man-Boy Love Association, who were at the forefront of pro-pedophilia activism from the late 1970s through the 2000s, when they disbanded under legal pressure.
Remember: Edward Bernays, who codified the discipline of propaganda, was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. He’s also the uncle of Reed Stephens, the founder of Netflix. Marketing genius seems to run in that family.
I use “pervert” and, later, “perversion” in the technical sense—those fixations which redirect the erotic drive from life-affirming activities (beauty, bonding, the continuation of life, the creation of community, the core pleasures of the body and spirit) to activities which are either utterly incidental (paraphilias such as foot fetishes) or destructive and/or life-negating (such as disgust for life/sexuality, child molestation, and serial killing).
Not to beat a dead horse, but it’s been well-established for decades that the market for porn is most pronounced and most perverse in those markets where the culture is most buttoned-down where sex is concerned. Score another one for Freud (as a former psych major, you have no idea how distasteful that phrase was to write, however in the interests of intellectual honesty one must give the devil his due, no matter how benighted the devil in question might be). If you’re interested in testing this assertion, start with the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts and go from there.
From John Harvey Kellogg to NoFap, these are as dependable as the rising and falling of the tide.
Before you go pointing out that gynecology and obstetrics were historically women’s work, you should bear in mind that before the ability to reliably induce labor, it was the normal and expected duty of a husband to deliver his wife’s baby if the midwife couldn’t be brought in time.
For a graphic exploration of the coincidence of female biology and female self-loathing, see the bracing and brilliant Catherine Breillat film The Anatomy of Hell.
The hell of it is, they’re only a few notches off “normal” in doing this. For a thorough and well-documented historical exploration of the common social roots of the pedophilia movement and social (as opposed to political) conservatism, see the book Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting by James Kincaid
The philosophical tradition that runs from Kant through Hegel through Marx, Mussolini, Hitler, Schmidt, and Heidegger. It remains the animating philosophical movement of the ruing classes of the Western world to this day.
This wasn’t a new idea. Christianity first tried it during the Roman Empire, and this aspect of Christianity was periodically revived in gnostic cults—such as the Cathars and the Hussites—that rose and fell over the course of the middle ages. And, of course, there was a raft of new ones (including the first American colonists, the Puritans) following the Reformation. I talk in more depth about this kind of thinking in The Year that Never Happened.
The most common variety of this in pre-modern context is something called “sexual hospitality,” whereby visitors were, by custom (sometimes obligatory custom), invited into the familial bed. People-groups ranging from the Inuit to the medieval Catholic Europeans engaged in this practice. Among Europeans, it fell out of favor (along with prostitution) as a result of the syphilis epidemics beginning in the final years of the 15th century. The first of these epidemics was a marked driver in the rise of Protestantism, which by and large had a far more buttoned-down attitude towards sex than the Catholic hoi polloi of the era.
Colloquially known as “kinks,” these are erotic fixations on non-sexual things and situations. These range from the harmless and playful (like foot fetishes and sploshing) to the dangerous (hardcore BDSM) to the murderous (cannibalism, serial killing).
Depending on which sources you believe and which tribes you’re talking about, tribal sexual frequency ranges from 0.5-6 times per day for the married members of the community. The average for American married couples—the most-frequently-laid demographic in the U.S.—is ~4 times per month.
Watch for an upcoming essay about how cultural traditions function to preserve societies and sociality with regards to vice of all kinds.
For example, by taking conquered peoples from their families and placing them in missionary schools or with families of the conquering tribe as done in Canada, the United States, and Australia (among other places).
Don’t forget, Pythagoras ran a mystery cult and was revered as a god.
I am all for dividing the genders on some things. Ladies need their time to cluck about and men and boys need their time to, well whatever they do ;-)
But for goodness sake, the idea that watching your a woman bring forth your child into the world hurts intimacy is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And it's demeaning. Birthing a child can be a very proud moment for a woman, and to compliment a man by wanting him to be a part of that only to have his reply be "ew gross" is loathsome.
Not that that was the main point of the article but goodness that got my riled up :-)
Another job well done Dan, lots to think about
Besides Playboy for the sex-starved adolescent boys there were also back issues of the National Geographic magazines with bare chested women in New Guinea or in Africa. For the gay young men there was Joe Weider’s Muscle and Fitness magazine or watching pro-“wrestling.”