This deep, murky ocean of meaning we’ve poured on top of our simple need to continue the species. Our outrageous excess of drive. Thousands of years and a million stories to gild the lily of our animal nature. What a castle in the air we’ve created. What complex labyrinths we’ve constructed to keep sperm from meeting egg, or glorify it with ritual, codify it in law, raise it up to a fine art, to package it and sell it to each other as something extraordinary.
Why don’t we do it on YouTube?
And maybe that’s where all the disappointment comes from. That when it comes right down to it, all we really want is an orgasm and, once we’ve had it, for a blinding moment, we’re clear sighted and blank. Because that’s all the act truly merits: a sense of physical relief. And whether you got there by your own hand or by some clever little device, or by the expended energies of another, does it really matter? You’ve come. And so what? Time to eat and shit and sleep. All those other calls of nature. So one wonders why we are capable of being so rational about other urges and so pathetically irrational when it comes to this one?
Why don’t we do it on the page?
I know the biologists aren’t in possession of all the information that counts. And so I’m torn. I’m not as blindly immersed in the realm of fabula as you might think. There is a cold and rational side to my personality, a part that surveys the ridiculous complexity of our cultural constructions of sexuality and wonders why we’re such fucking hysterics about something so simple. I’ve never believed any god gave a flying fuck what you do with your dick. But I also know that this monstrous and intricate edifice we’ve built up around a physical urge is as curious, as beautiful as architecture or art or literature or music – all equally unnecessary to our survival and yet all deeply and compellingly meaningful to us.
Why don’t we do it more and think about it less?
All the prohibitions, the religious precepts, the social censures we’ve loaded onto our sexual drive and all the emotional baggage we’ve invested in it are entirely of our own making. But so is the whole web of things we call culture: language, laws, institutions, gender identities, hierarchies, roles, economies, concepts of beauty and ugliness, of honesty and deception. We are not born speaking, or with reason, or with the urge to create art, but with the capacity to do so. The possibilities of what we can do are inceptional and as much a part of nature as our instincts, as the hard-on you wake up with in the morning.
With the death of romanticism and modernism, writers have chosen to demystify sexuality. People complain that you can’t write about sex, but it’s not true. Contemporary literature, like all other mediums, is full of it. And in our time, we have rejected all the earlier restrictions we put on it. We’ve gone from thinking it was something sacred and veiled in mystery to something banal and marketable as product. Or, in literary fiction, it has become the meme for the stupid, pointless things we do. The self-centered way we work out the vacuousness of our identities.
There is no real difference between the frat boys taking turns banging away at some drunk girl’s ass on an amateur porn site to show what studs they are and the literary writer who uses sex to show how pathetically meaningless his character’s life actually is.
Why does it matter I think?
It doesn’t. I would not have felt at home in a world in which sex was always veiled in hypocrisy. And I don’t feel at home now. Like a lot of other people, I guess I thought that lifting the veil would allow us to situate our sexuality in aesthetically interesting places. In fact, lifting the veil has simply enabled it to be commoditized. Admittedly, sex was always a commodity, but never on such an industrial level.
We’re purging our world of meaning and putting quantifiable valuations on it instead. It’s a marketization of all our abstractions, especially aesthetic experiences. I’m too old to believe this is bad or good. It just is. We’ve changed.
But I can see that we are no less frightened. We’ve gone from fearing what God might think of our sex acts, to fearing that we, that they don’t come up to industry standards.
At least when sex was so shrouded in cultural and moral taboo, we could weight those prohibitions against our inner experiences of eroticism. Now I think we’ve decided that there is no real inner experience. That it is all just a figment of our historically burdened imagination and needs to be jettisoned. Certainly the amateur couples fucking on the internet are not burdened with that. They’re too busy ensuring the camera is focused and has a good angle. Certainly, the literary fiction writers are too busy insisting how empty it the act is. Certainly the erotic romance authors are too busy perpetuating product-placed, unattainable erotic ideals to sell more books with.
Some days I have the mental strength to insist that there is some middle way, between animal urge, sanctification and base economics, and that way is rich and nuanced and worthy of our consideration.
But not today. Today I’m tired.