Sex

Sex

T

he postmodern world is obsessed with sex. This obsession, ironically, springs directly from modernism’s insistence on abolishing sexual repression. To have replaced repression with obsession is hardly the liberation we were so enthusiastically promised. There was, however, a reason for such obsession. In a desacralized world, sex had  become our only hope for salvation. Sex was the Tao and the Tao was nothing but sex [1]. According to the Holy Writ proclaimed by Reich and others, only the Orgasm could save us.

            As Foucault has demonstrated [2], Modernity’s preoccupation with sex as liberation goes back to the Romantics. This is one of the reasons we may view modernism as ‘spilt Romanticism’. The preceding Enlightenment had viewed sex quite differently, seeing the libido as a flood which could at any time overwhelm the dikes which civilisation had built to hold it in check.

            So the eighteenth century trivialised sex to disempower it, forgetting that Venus “toute entiere a sa proie attachee,” will not be mocked and that orgasm (la petite mort) and death are closely linked. The goddess took her revenge through the French Revolution. The statue of the Goddess of Reason worshipped in Notre Dame was in reality that of Venus, who has dominated us ever since.

            “Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex” (Julian Barnes). Still, it’s interesting that after so many years of the sexual revolution, people should still want to reserve the illusion of affection, even after a one-night stand.

            It is said that Sophocles (c.496-406 BCE), when asked about his sex-life, reported that he was glad to be rid of it, “as though he had escaped from a mad and savage master”. We should remember, however, that this supposed conversation was reported by Plato (429-347 BCE) in his Republic, (1, 329b), and Plato has never struck anyone as being particularly interested in Eros. My own bet is that Sophocles, who lived to at least ninety, would almost certainly have taken Viagra, had it been available to him. The sexual drive is not so easily mastered. Nor does old age much diminish its insistence.

            Deficiencies in lexis reveal a lot about a culture. For instance, English has only a medical term denoting the clitoris. There is no common term for it, though within the last forty years or so the word has come into more frequent use and so been abbreviated to ‘clit’. In this deficiency, English differs from all other languages with which I am acquainted. In French, for example, the slang term la praline (‘almond’) is in common use. There exists an English term in the anti-language used by prostitutes (‘the man in the boat’), but this clumsy metaphor could not have been used much or a simpler term would have been devised. I have only once heard the latter expression used and that was on that notoriously deviant show, South Park, which specialises in breaking taboos. There is no trace of any term for clitoris in Partridge’s monumental Dictionary of the Underworld. No wonder the French though the English sexually clumsy and naïve.

            “Sex and drugs and rock and roll”, to quote  the title of a once popular song (1977) by Ian Dury, have been the preoccupation of the young since the sixties. Prior to that it was sex and alcohol and inanely lachrymose pop songs. Plus ca change… The real difference is that efficient contraception has made young women far readier to have sex, generally with multiple partners. Drugs and rock and roll are often merely preliminaries and subsidiaries to intercourse. The result is a welcome lessening of sexual neurosis and a sharp rise in sexual diseases, from AIDS to gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes and the now almost universal chlamydia. As antibiotics lose their efficacy, we may yet return to a more puritanical era, out of fear.

            The puritanism and hypocrisy of English society, even after the war, is almost unbelievable nowadays. In 1949, on leave from my regiment and wearing uniform, I was ejected from a London city cinema for refusing to take my arm from around my girlfriend’s shoulder. This was at a time when prostitutes hung around outside such cinemas, with the tacit approval of the management, who got a cut from their earnings. As William Empson remarked, after reading of a similar incident, “It takes a lot of cold nerve to live in a country like this”. Repression was still fighting a strong rearguard action in England until the sixties.

            English Puritanism, however, was as nothing compared with that of the Irish. In a Dublin dominated by priests and nuns you would be unceremoniously thrown out of a pub full of uproarious drunks – some of them priests – if your wife dared to sit on your knee because there were no chairs available. Drunkenness was acceptable to the Church, while anything even vaguely suggestive of sex, married or not, was anathema. A priest might vomit, but never fornicate.

            Ignorance of sex was widespread among well-brought up young women, especially Roman Catholics, even in post-war Britain. In the late forties, an eighteen year old Catholic girl of my acquaintance believed that babies were born through the navel, though how they got there she did not know, except that it had something unmentionable to do with sin. Presumably her honeymoon would have been spent like that of the Victorian bride, who was found half-naked and hysterical on top of the wardrobe in her hotel suite, screaming “Help me! My husband has gone raving mad!”

            Today we have swung to the other extreme. My fifteen-year-old-niece, a pupil at a prestigious private school, told me the other day that her class had spent a boring afternoon fitting flavoured condoms onto carrots in a sex education class. It was perhaps one of her classmates, a well-groomed young lady sitting at the next table to me in a smart beach café, who was wearing a tee shirt bearing the slogan, ‘A stork brings babies; a swallow brings no babies’. Fifty years ago she could also have displayed this enlightening message without fear of censure, for only a prostitute would have understood it.

            In the space of thirty years or so, attitudes to sex have changed dramatically throughout Europe, but especially in Britain. A survey of December 2001 revealed that over twenty-fiver percent of British women had sex regularly in cars, while one in three had enjoyed intercourse in the back of taxis. Such behaviour is not confined to Britain. Over thirty per cent of Swedes revealed that their favourite place for sex was in public places or on public transport. European society is reverting to types of sexual behaviour not seen since the eighteenth century, though in that era the women involved were almost invariable prostitutes. Boswell’s London Journal (1753) has some graphic entries describing his encounters with “shilling girls” in the alleys and back streets of London. During the French Revolution, especially in its early years, sexual license became extreme, as it generally does in societies menaced by mass death. Contemporary observers commented on both the revealing nature of women’s fashions, which utilized transparent or semi-transparent materials, and the abandoned sexual behaviour apparent in all classes. It could be that, subconsciously, people feel that we too are moving inexorably towards some sort of cataclysm and are changing their sexual habits accordingly.

            The cataclysm itself may well be sexual. Pandemics of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) invariably accompany sexual license. In the space of twenty years, AIDS has now become the fourth largest cause of mortality, worldwide, with over forty million people infected by the end of 2001, one third of whom are aged between fifteen and twenty-four. In the third world, heterosexual sex has no become the main means of transmission, in contrast to the industrialized nations where homosexual sex is the predominant vector. Africa is by far the worst affected region, for Africans account for almost seventy-five percent of all cases of AIDS. Elsewhere, AIDS is also growing exponentially, especially in China, India and countries of the former Soviet Union. The miniscule strip of RNA that constitutes this virus has a tropism about one thousand times greater than the influenza virus, which means that it is almost impossible to control it, let alone destroy it, since it mutates so rapidly. Since we can barely keep up with the mutations of the latter, how can we hope to keep up with the mutations of the former? AIDS is turning out to be the most deadly killer the human race has encountered, with the possible exception of malaria, which has killed about one person in four, so it is estimated, since the emergence of our species. Should it eventually mutate to an aerosol form – which is not impossible – it might well exterminate the whole human race. In spite of this, there is still widespread apathy about AIDS. In the majority of countries, it is not even a notifiable disease. As a species, we have still not learnt to think globally, still less think exponentially, in the face of looming threats to our existence. Our collective inability to do so may yet bring about the end.

            I still wince when I hear teenage girls using language which was once employed only by drunken servicemen and whores. In 1949, I recall attending a dinner party at my girlfriend’s, hosted by her primly conventional parents, in the course of which her sixteen year old younger sister, Jacinta, told me that someone had scrawled a four-letter word on the walls of her convent school. 
“What does ‘Fuck’ mean?” she asked, curiously. 
I broke the Arctic silence that followed by explaining that this was a dialect form of ‘yuck’, probably scrawled there by bowler-hatted and belligerent Orangemen to express their distaste for Papists. I was just silently congratulating myself on my ingenuity when the Irish maid brought in the second course.

“Oh, fuck!” exclaimed Jacinta. “I hate broccoli!”

The crash of china as the horrified maid dropped the tureen helped cover the resulting confusion. It was a long time before I was invited to dinner again.

           

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[1] Oddly, this doctrine had been proclaimed in China, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries of our era, by a sect which read the Dao De Jing as a treatise on sexual hygiene. The close connections between sex and Taoism are well documented.

[2] See M. Foucault, 1978, The History of Sexuality, vol.1, N.Y: Random House.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM