The big bang
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Pleasure and desire are found in real human encounters, not corruptions of them. But recognising that, writes Guy Rundle, will need a sexual revolution bigger than in the 1960s.
Shortbus begins with an act of auto-fellatio, and gets more explicit from there. Shortbus? If you've been down a mineshaft for the past month, Shortbus is the latest entry in the explicit-sex-film-that's-not-porn stakes, with a bevy of actors having workshopped together for several months being then let go to get it on on camera. "Just like the '60s," says one character of the eponymous club of the title, "but with less hope", the avalanche of real sex in the film was intended by director John Cameron Mitchell as an ironic yet optimistic riposte to the darkening clouds of conservative and repressive opinion in the US, and to rally the forces of liberty and freeplay.
Yet the most amazing thing is not the fact of a movie such as Shortbus getting a general release without much fuss, but the fact that I can begin an article about it with a word that, a generation ago, would have had a goodly section of the readership tear this paper clean down the middle through sheer astonishment. The presence of the word, the absence of any sort of barrier between public discourse and a private act would have been simply intolerable. Now it's not only unremarkable - though the act is, well, rare - but more or less essential that the debate can go to that sort of vocabulary if issues are to be discussed. Something has happened. Something has changed. But what?
The usual answer is something to do with liberation, something to do with permissiveness, something to do with being honest and open about sexual matters after the long night of fear and ignorance. But that's obviously wrong. We've been open about sex for four decades now, and while some areas took a while to, erm, fill in - substantial acceptance of homosexuality, say - we had pretty much hit, erm, saturation point (and no further innuendos will be noted) some years ago. Two generations have now grown up in a cultural framework of a more substantial openness about sex, and the period before it - one in which not merely the odd S & M film but literally thousands of books could be banned, and Bondi beach could be stalked by bikini inspectors - is fading into sepia-toned memory, as distant as shipbuilding and hop-picking.
"Sexual intercourse began in 1963," the poet Philip Larkin wrote, and added, "which was rather too late for me" - but anyone that it was too late for, anyone who grew to maturity in an era before it was a contested zone, is now heading towards the mandatory retirement age. Sex, talking about it, negotiating its meaning, its centrality - sex is part of the psychic furniture, ever-present, at hand.
Yet in the time since then, sex became something else. Or to put it more exactly it always was taken as something else, standing in for another thing that was wanted. The sexual revolution that barrelled through the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s had started a lot earlier, in the salons of bohemian Paris, in the free morals of the Bloomsbury group (Lytton Strachey, upon meeting Virginia Woolf for the first time, pointed to a white stain on her dress and said "semen?") in psychotherapy, and even in the Russian revolution, but the tenor that ran under all of it was the expectation that sexual liberation was leading on to something else, more, other, a fuller liberation in human affairs.
It was Freud, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, who had established the notion that the exclusion of overt sexuality from everyday affairs was not simply a matter of humans becoming more refined, but a dynamic equation, a trade-off. Working in the age of the steam engine, Freud's theory copied its form - it was all about the exchange of pressures, and chambers and pipes, from ego to id and back. Civilisation was not refinement but repression, for which we paid a necessary price. Freud was reviled as some sort of antiChrist, but in fact he was the patron saint of bourgeois civilisation, arguing that what it offered - an everyday unhappiness relieved by moments of satisfaction - was superior to the ecstatic chaos of living instinctually. It took his follower Wilhelm Reich to argue that more could be had, that political and sexual liberation were not only possible, but two sides of the same coin, that only by putting sex at the centre of life could we reach true freedom.
Reich, who worked in Germany in the 1930s and thereafter in the US, has a fair claim to be the single greatest influence on everyday life that no one has ever heard of. If the women's magazines are crowded with clitoral stimulation rather than cake recipes, if the sex manuals crowd out whole sections of bookstores, if the notion of transfiguring orgasm has become the snow-dome centrepiece of our lives, then Reich is to credit/blame. His voluminous writings can be summarised into one principle: that sex, if done right, can clear the slate of accumulated hostilities, negativities, and sadistic impulses - and that by contrast repression or bad, perfunctory sex is the root of frustration, envy, hate and violence. It's an oversimplified theory, true, but you can't deny that it's one that people work from, a framework of assumptions brought to everyday life, one of the few things we all agree on, whether we admit to it or not.
Indeed it's so general a principle that it's difficult to convince people that there was a time when it did not hold sway, that sex was not credited as having a central role in cultural life. The pre-Freud, pre-Reich sex manuals were not puritan, anti-pleasure tracts - but they presented the pleasure of it as icing on the cake, not as a qualitatively distinct and incommensurable experience. The very title of even relatively liberated works such as Marie Stopes' phenomenally successful World War I sex manual Married Life, say it all - it's about the whole continuum, not the thing itself.
Reich went a bit crazy in the '50s - he believed that he could collect an energy called "orgone" using specially constructed boxes, and died in prison after years of persecution during the McCarthy era - but there were plenty of people to carry on his vision. The work of influential "heavy" writers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and above all Germaine Greer all bear the marks of his influence, as do films like Easy Rider or bands like the Doors - but it's above all in the magazines and the radio talkback and everyday life.
Reich thought that sexual liberation - or sexpol as he called it, sexual politics - would be a way into communism, to a world that would emerge from its deadened, commercialised nature, and be appreciable as sensuous and particular once again, and for a while it looked like that might be the case. The '60s slogan "make love not war" is Reich in four words.
But when that revolutionary wave rose and broke, it was inevitable that its radical impulses would be taken over by something else. By the late '70s, the sexual revolution was being sucked back into a more segmented and commodified form. Male pornography had - via Hustler and Penthouse - entered its gynaecological phase and, sex had also become part of the major discourse of everyday life, that of advertising. Even up to the early '60s, the bulk of advertising had had some vestigial relationship to the specific content of the product, its real or spurious qualities - it was in other words, literal. By the mid-60s this was changing rapidly, and the change was not merely technique, but that of its very being. By the late '60s, advertising was comprehensively metaphorical, its primary means of selling being to argue that a product was not what it was, it was something else - a car wasn't a mode of transport, it was success or power or speed. A cigarette wasn't a nicotine delivery system, it was friendship, or acceptance, or style. There wasn't much point in comparing one product to another product, that would be circular - one needed a sort of gold standard of desire, some human want that was unique and of itself, and sex was it. What began as a pretty woman draped over a car has become a default setting of selling. To expose yourself to any media is to be lathered, margarined in a sort of minimal low-grade sexual content, overwhelmingly heterosexual and male-directed of course. The effect is to empty sex of its content. Sex has become to the visual world what gold is to the material one - a universal standard of exchange which once had a character of its own, but which has long since become nothing more than an expression of everything else, a universal metaphor of no content. This worked to a degree at its inauguration in the '70s, but inflation has long since set in. Advertising, as most ad executives will admit after a few margaritas, stopped being effective for particular products decades ago (except when it's targeted at children). Advertising now sells only desire in general, and the sex within it is not there to stimulate desire but to symbolise it, to suggest some unimaginable beyond in which all desires could be fulfilled.
Yet it is not only advertising that empties sex of content. Even the most liberatory of discourses quickly became routinised. Nothing could be more "Reichian" than something like Cosmopolitan magazine, with its intense focus not only on the right type of orgasm, but also on the right to it - and yet the impression it gives is not of profound human freedom but of deep anxiety, of being subject to something. Often that's the duty of satisfying men but it is also to making wild anarchic sex regularised, all but Power-Pointed, postmodern pleasure taking on the same form of postmodern work - an admin job, segmented into dot point tasks and goals. And as femininity came to be grouped around the mysteries of the Big O, masculinity went in a different direction, as represented not merely by lads' mags like Ralph and FHM, but also by publications like Men's Health, upmarket erotica like Black+White, and the cult of the gym. Reich himself, watching the rise of the Nazi strength cult in the '30s, had been scathing about bodybuilding, seeing the buffed body, as actor Jack Nicholson, one of Reich's followers once put it, as "life-denying male sexlessness". Six-pack abs are not an expression of male power, but a fear of embodiment, neurosis made flesh, muscular armour to keep the world, and chance, and connection, out. You can see this in hardcore porn, in the now dominant US-San Fernando valley style - robotically hardbodied men and impossibly shiny, curvy women, going at it amid a setting of chain-store furnishings. The aesthetic is essentially fascist, futurist, human beings ascending to the status of machines - and in that respect exemplifying a sort of Protestant-porn-ethic of ceaseless anti-pleasure production.
Once a culture - especially one centred around the market - opens up the rules of sexual exchange and conduct, then it quickly gets into problems of transmitting and reproducing the transcendental pleasure that was sought after in the first place. Despite the protestations of Shortbus' director, there is something unwilled and automatic about the expansion of sex within a culture, such that it begins to occur to someone who wants to make something transgressive that the only way to do it is via the language of sex. The profound lassitude that that summons up has been effectively captured by the novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose portrayal of a nullified pan-sexual world is captured in the French title of his first work - Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (Extension of the Field of Struggle, 1994), his argument being that sexual liberation had been an enslavement to atomised competition in every field of life.
In that process we've become a little strange about sex, a cultural mix of knowing and unbelievably navety. Most cultures recognise its anarchic power, and thereby put in place rules to regulate conduct that allow, well, allow things to get done. Segregation of men and women, formalised courtship rituals, rites of passage between childhood and adolescence, we treat all these things - whether they appear in Islam or Inuit cultures - as essentially backward, waiting for the benefit of our liberation. At the same time we have both a culture of free sexual expression and an assumption that it will never get out of control
Future generations will wonder about a culture in which every fashion spread seems to be composed of 13-year-olds in adult clothes and make-up, yet goes into a rictus of horror every time a PE teacher and a student have an affair. Because we have turned sex into something other than itself, we can't feel its real power, can't credit it as requiring something more than sensible self-regulation to keep in control. And our notions of liberal equality have turned into a delusion of identity - we can't really get our head around the notion of gender difference, that men and women have a different relationship to visual desire. You can't say that the matter hasn't been settled - as, in the last two decades, the lapdance and strip clubs have expanded across every major city in the West, the market for male strippers remains confined to the hen's night market - the exception that proves the rule. What alarms us about Islam, and the veil, is not the repressive nature of some of its attitudes, but the fact that it acknowledges this difference, and the power of feminine embodiment. By some crazy logic the "ho" look of Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera, entirely oriented to male desire, is seen as a free choice, while a form of covering that denies it is an expression of false consciousness.
Forty years ago we had a revolution in desire whose surface effects in clothes and music fooled some people into thinking that it wasn't a fundamental cultural shift in the West, from a culture living along Judeo-Christian lines, to one dominated not by secular atheism, but by a pagan sensibility. By pagan, I don't mean the marginal nonsense of druids and healing crystals, which few people believe in deeply. What makes our culture pagan is that there has been a decisive shift in ethics in everyday life, from the centrality of the "good" to that of the will. What has become most sinful, as evidenced across the cultural field, from the art avant-garde to reality TV, is to not do as thou wilt, to abnegate, to pull back from the pursuit of satisfaction. To us, meekness - put at the centre of Christian belief by the sermon on the mount, as a riposte to the Roman Empire's will-to-power - is genuinely repulsive, a strangling of one's selfhood by a renunciation of what one wants. Of course, in some way we are more "ethical" than we have ever been, with the spread of the notion of human rights, and a concern for distant others unimaginable in the age of faith. But very few of us feel that domain of life as real, in the immediate and challenging way that power, ambition and above all desire figure in existence. Nietzsche was the first to propose, in the latter 19th century, that humanity could only be saved by going beyond Christian morality, which was choking off the free expression of the human spirit. Geoff Waite in his masterpiece Nietzsche's Corps(e), argues that the world we now have is one created by those ideas, bubbled through D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Janis Joplin in equal measure. It is a world in which the central figure of Christian mythology, culminating in a figure like, say, Dickens' Oliver Twist, cannot be looked on without some contempt for their failure to act. Why does Oliver just take it, we think? Why doesn't he stab his tormenters in the throat - god knows they deserve it.
Despite falling church attendances, church leaders tend to crow whenever some survey finds that 70 to 80 per cent of people sampled believe in God. Of course people do - there are even fewer atheists in focus groups than there are in foxholes. But the god to which such people subscribe is not the incarnated man-God-spirit of Christianity, mediated through 2000 years of tradition - if it were people would actually be turning up to church. What people believe is some sort of formless theistic point, the sky-God of animist and pagan tradition who is simply the unknowable font of creation - and who has no opinion about where you put your genitals, or much more besides. Cardinal George Pell and Archbishop Peter Jensen will continue to act as if they have an army behind them, but in terms of what people actually do with their lives and the choices they make - especially as regards sex and desire - they are significantly less influential than a 22-year-old deputy editor of Dolly magazine.
The essence of paganism is that we're here for a good time, not for a long time - that the afterlife is an unknown quantity, and that what we really get is 30,000 sunsets and the warmth of others, and renunciation of that for a possible redemption ain't a great deal. Hence the victory of sex, and its return to the centre of human life - because nobody could remember what the fuss was about. Yet it only took two decades for it to pass from liberatory moment into the market, and the circuit of images, to a point where terms like "porn", "prostitution", "pole-dancing" are bandied about as something verging on career options. Now sex has become the denial of desire, its antithesis, a metaphor for everything else. Shortbus has tried to reclaim a shame-free space from the religious right, and the aim is noble, but what its makers haven't realised is that the problem comes not from without neo-pagan culture, but from within, from a culture which, in trying to get nearer to the transcendental alchemy of sex and what is really behind it - the connection to nature - we have turned it into the opposite of itself, into industry and image. Reclaiming not merely sexuality, but human life itself, involves not reclaiming the image, via art, but turning away from its power - a revolution far more comprehensive than the '60s one, and one whose mere suggestion fills people with horror. What? I won't find liberation at a film festival? Well, no. If sex is about the real encounter with the other, then its apotheosis won't be found in art. We could try and ban sexual imagery in ads etc, as we have tried to do before, but piling regulation upon corruption is really the antithesis of freedom. What Shortbus is hinting towards, is something its own medium belies, that as the poet John Ashbery suggested in Some Trees
We will recover desire only when we can turn away from the screen and back to full human presence. When we do, narrow life-denying Christian and Islamic fundamentalism will be as discarded and useless as an old combine-harvester, their reasonable and identical response to the sexual meat-market - "keep it all off" - rendered irrelevant. But it will only happen when we realise that Pell and porn, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali and hardcore are two sides of the same de-denominated coin. We are face-to-face with the unmediated natural world of sex and death for the first time in history and without easy stories, both conservative and liberated, we will have to make sense of it.
Shortbus begins with an act of auto-fellatio, and gets more explicit from there. Shortbus? If you've been down a mineshaft for the past month, Shortbus is the latest entry in the explicit-sex-film-that's-not-porn stakes, with a bevy of actors having workshopped together for several months being then let go to get it on on camera. "Just like the '60s," says one character of the eponymous club of the title, "but with less hope", the avalanche of real sex in the film was intended by director John Cameron Mitchell as an ironic yet optimistic riposte to the darkening clouds of conservative and repressive opinion in the US, and to rally the forces of liberty and freeplay.
Yet the most amazing thing is not the fact of a movie such as Shortbus getting a general release without much fuss, but the fact that I can begin an article about it with a word that, a generation ago, would have had a goodly section of the readership tear this paper clean down the middle through sheer astonishment. The presence of the word, the absence of any sort of barrier between public discourse and a private act would have been simply intolerable. Now it's not only unremarkable - though the act is, well, rare - but more or less essential that the debate can go to that sort of vocabulary if issues are to be discussed. Something has happened. Something has changed. But what?
The usual answer is something to do with liberation, something to do with permissiveness, something to do with being honest and open about sexual matters after the long night of fear and ignorance. But that's obviously wrong. We've been open about sex for four decades now, and while some areas took a while to, erm, fill in - substantial acceptance of homosexuality, say - we had pretty much hit, erm, saturation point (and no further innuendos will be noted) some years ago. Two generations have now grown up in a cultural framework of a more substantial openness about sex, and the period before it - one in which not merely the odd S & M film but literally thousands of books could be banned, and Bondi beach could be stalked by bikini inspectors - is fading into sepia-toned memory, as distant as shipbuilding and hop-picking.
"Sexual intercourse began in 1963," the poet Philip Larkin wrote, and added, "which was rather too late for me" - but anyone that it was too late for, anyone who grew to maturity in an era before it was a contested zone, is now heading towards the mandatory retirement age. Sex, talking about it, negotiating its meaning, its centrality - sex is part of the psychic furniture, ever-present, at hand.
Yet in the time since then, sex became something else. Or to put it more exactly it always was taken as something else, standing in for another thing that was wanted. The sexual revolution that barrelled through the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s had started a lot earlier, in the salons of bohemian Paris, in the free morals of the Bloomsbury group (Lytton Strachey, upon meeting Virginia Woolf for the first time, pointed to a white stain on her dress and said "semen?") in psychotherapy, and even in the Russian revolution, but the tenor that ran under all of it was the expectation that sexual liberation was leading on to something else, more, other, a fuller liberation in human affairs.
It was Freud, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, who had established the notion that the exclusion of overt sexuality from everyday affairs was not simply a matter of humans becoming more refined, but a dynamic equation, a trade-off. Working in the age of the steam engine, Freud's theory copied its form - it was all about the exchange of pressures, and chambers and pipes, from ego to id and back. Civilisation was not refinement but repression, for which we paid a necessary price. Freud was reviled as some sort of antiChrist, but in fact he was the patron saint of bourgeois civilisation, arguing that what it offered - an everyday unhappiness relieved by moments of satisfaction - was superior to the ecstatic chaos of living instinctually. It took his follower Wilhelm Reich to argue that more could be had, that political and sexual liberation were not only possible, but two sides of the same coin, that only by putting sex at the centre of life could we reach true freedom.
Reich, who worked in Germany in the 1930s and thereafter in the US, has a fair claim to be the single greatest influence on everyday life that no one has ever heard of. If the women's magazines are crowded with clitoral stimulation rather than cake recipes, if the sex manuals crowd out whole sections of bookstores, if the notion of transfiguring orgasm has become the snow-dome centrepiece of our lives, then Reich is to credit/blame. His voluminous writings can be summarised into one principle: that sex, if done right, can clear the slate of accumulated hostilities, negativities, and sadistic impulses - and that by contrast repression or bad, perfunctory sex is the root of frustration, envy, hate and violence. It's an oversimplified theory, true, but you can't deny that it's one that people work from, a framework of assumptions brought to everyday life, one of the few things we all agree on, whether we admit to it or not.
Indeed it's so general a principle that it's difficult to convince people that there was a time when it did not hold sway, that sex was not credited as having a central role in cultural life. The pre-Freud, pre-Reich sex manuals were not puritan, anti-pleasure tracts - but they presented the pleasure of it as icing on the cake, not as a qualitatively distinct and incommensurable experience. The very title of even relatively liberated works such as Marie Stopes' phenomenally successful World War I sex manual Married Life, say it all - it's about the whole continuum, not the thing itself.
Reich went a bit crazy in the '50s - he believed that he could collect an energy called "orgone" using specially constructed boxes, and died in prison after years of persecution during the McCarthy era - but there were plenty of people to carry on his vision. The work of influential "heavy" writers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and above all Germaine Greer all bear the marks of his influence, as do films like Easy Rider or bands like the Doors - but it's above all in the magazines and the radio talkback and everyday life.
Reich thought that sexual liberation - or sexpol as he called it, sexual politics - would be a way into communism, to a world that would emerge from its deadened, commercialised nature, and be appreciable as sensuous and particular once again, and for a while it looked like that might be the case. The '60s slogan "make love not war" is Reich in four words.
But when that revolutionary wave rose and broke, it was inevitable that its radical impulses would be taken over by something else. By the late '70s, the sexual revolution was being sucked back into a more segmented and commodified form. Male pornography had - via Hustler and Penthouse - entered its gynaecological phase and, sex had also become part of the major discourse of everyday life, that of advertising. Even up to the early '60s, the bulk of advertising had had some vestigial relationship to the specific content of the product, its real or spurious qualities - it was in other words, literal. By the mid-60s this was changing rapidly, and the change was not merely technique, but that of its very being. By the late '60s, advertising was comprehensively metaphorical, its primary means of selling being to argue that a product was not what it was, it was something else - a car wasn't a mode of transport, it was success or power or speed. A cigarette wasn't a nicotine delivery system, it was friendship, or acceptance, or style. There wasn't much point in comparing one product to another product, that would be circular - one needed a sort of gold standard of desire, some human want that was unique and of itself, and sex was it. What began as a pretty woman draped over a car has become a default setting of selling. To expose yourself to any media is to be lathered, margarined in a sort of minimal low-grade sexual content, overwhelmingly heterosexual and male-directed of course. The effect is to empty sex of its content. Sex has become to the visual world what gold is to the material one - a universal standard of exchange which once had a character of its own, but which has long since become nothing more than an expression of everything else, a universal metaphor of no content. This worked to a degree at its inauguration in the '70s, but inflation has long since set in. Advertising, as most ad executives will admit after a few margaritas, stopped being effective for particular products decades ago (except when it's targeted at children). Advertising now sells only desire in general, and the sex within it is not there to stimulate desire but to symbolise it, to suggest some unimaginable beyond in which all desires could be fulfilled.
Yet it is not only advertising that empties sex of content. Even the most liberatory of discourses quickly became routinised. Nothing could be more "Reichian" than something like Cosmopolitan magazine, with its intense focus not only on the right type of orgasm, but also on the right to it - and yet the impression it gives is not of profound human freedom but of deep anxiety, of being subject to something. Often that's the duty of satisfying men but it is also to making wild anarchic sex regularised, all but Power-Pointed, postmodern pleasure taking on the same form of postmodern work - an admin job, segmented into dot point tasks and goals. And as femininity came to be grouped around the mysteries of the Big O, masculinity went in a different direction, as represented not merely by lads' mags like Ralph and FHM, but also by publications like Men's Health, upmarket erotica like Black+White, and the cult of the gym. Reich himself, watching the rise of the Nazi strength cult in the '30s, had been scathing about bodybuilding, seeing the buffed body, as actor Jack Nicholson, one of Reich's followers once put it, as "life-denying male sexlessness". Six-pack abs are not an expression of male power, but a fear of embodiment, neurosis made flesh, muscular armour to keep the world, and chance, and connection, out. You can see this in hardcore porn, in the now dominant US-San Fernando valley style - robotically hardbodied men and impossibly shiny, curvy women, going at it amid a setting of chain-store furnishings. The aesthetic is essentially fascist, futurist, human beings ascending to the status of machines - and in that respect exemplifying a sort of Protestant-porn-ethic of ceaseless anti-pleasure production.
Once a culture - especially one centred around the market - opens up the rules of sexual exchange and conduct, then it quickly gets into problems of transmitting and reproducing the transcendental pleasure that was sought after in the first place. Despite the protestations of Shortbus' director, there is something unwilled and automatic about the expansion of sex within a culture, such that it begins to occur to someone who wants to make something transgressive that the only way to do it is via the language of sex. The profound lassitude that that summons up has been effectively captured by the novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose portrayal of a nullified pan-sexual world is captured in the French title of his first work - Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (Extension of the Field of Struggle, 1994), his argument being that sexual liberation had been an enslavement to atomised competition in every field of life.
In that process we've become a little strange about sex, a cultural mix of knowing and unbelievably navety. Most cultures recognise its anarchic power, and thereby put in place rules to regulate conduct that allow, well, allow things to get done. Segregation of men and women, formalised courtship rituals, rites of passage between childhood and adolescence, we treat all these things - whether they appear in Islam or Inuit cultures - as essentially backward, waiting for the benefit of our liberation. At the same time we have both a culture of free sexual expression and an assumption that it will never get out of control
Future generations will wonder about a culture in which every fashion spread seems to be composed of 13-year-olds in adult clothes and make-up, yet goes into a rictus of horror every time a PE teacher and a student have an affair. Because we have turned sex into something other than itself, we can't feel its real power, can't credit it as requiring something more than sensible self-regulation to keep in control. And our notions of liberal equality have turned into a delusion of identity - we can't really get our head around the notion of gender difference, that men and women have a different relationship to visual desire. You can't say that the matter hasn't been settled - as, in the last two decades, the lapdance and strip clubs have expanded across every major city in the West, the market for male strippers remains confined to the hen's night market - the exception that proves the rule. What alarms us about Islam, and the veil, is not the repressive nature of some of its attitudes, but the fact that it acknowledges this difference, and the power of feminine embodiment. By some crazy logic the "ho" look of Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera, entirely oriented to male desire, is seen as a free choice, while a form of covering that denies it is an expression of false consciousness.
Forty years ago we had a revolution in desire whose surface effects in clothes and music fooled some people into thinking that it wasn't a fundamental cultural shift in the West, from a culture living along Judeo-Christian lines, to one dominated not by secular atheism, but by a pagan sensibility. By pagan, I don't mean the marginal nonsense of druids and healing crystals, which few people believe in deeply. What makes our culture pagan is that there has been a decisive shift in ethics in everyday life, from the centrality of the "good" to that of the will. What has become most sinful, as evidenced across the cultural field, from the art avant-garde to reality TV, is to not do as thou wilt, to abnegate, to pull back from the pursuit of satisfaction. To us, meekness - put at the centre of Christian belief by the sermon on the mount, as a riposte to the Roman Empire's will-to-power - is genuinely repulsive, a strangling of one's selfhood by a renunciation of what one wants. Of course, in some way we are more "ethical" than we have ever been, with the spread of the notion of human rights, and a concern for distant others unimaginable in the age of faith. But very few of us feel that domain of life as real, in the immediate and challenging way that power, ambition and above all desire figure in existence. Nietzsche was the first to propose, in the latter 19th century, that humanity could only be saved by going beyond Christian morality, which was choking off the free expression of the human spirit. Geoff Waite in his masterpiece Nietzsche's Corps(e), argues that the world we now have is one created by those ideas, bubbled through D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Janis Joplin in equal measure. It is a world in which the central figure of Christian mythology, culminating in a figure like, say, Dickens' Oliver Twist, cannot be looked on without some contempt for their failure to act. Why does Oliver just take it, we think? Why doesn't he stab his tormenters in the throat - god knows they deserve it.
Despite falling church attendances, church leaders tend to crow whenever some survey finds that 70 to 80 per cent of people sampled believe in God. Of course people do - there are even fewer atheists in focus groups than there are in foxholes. But the god to which such people subscribe is not the incarnated man-God-spirit of Christianity, mediated through 2000 years of tradition - if it were people would actually be turning up to church. What people believe is some sort of formless theistic point, the sky-God of animist and pagan tradition who is simply the unknowable font of creation - and who has no opinion about where you put your genitals, or much more besides. Cardinal George Pell and Archbishop Peter Jensen will continue to act as if they have an army behind them, but in terms of what people actually do with their lives and the choices they make - especially as regards sex and desire - they are significantly less influential than a 22-year-old deputy editor of Dolly magazine.
The essence of paganism is that we're here for a good time, not for a long time - that the afterlife is an unknown quantity, and that what we really get is 30,000 sunsets and the warmth of others, and renunciation of that for a possible redemption ain't a great deal. Hence the victory of sex, and its return to the centre of human life - because nobody could remember what the fuss was about. Yet it only took two decades for it to pass from liberatory moment into the market, and the circuit of images, to a point where terms like "porn", "prostitution", "pole-dancing" are bandied about as something verging on career options. Now sex has become the denial of desire, its antithesis, a metaphor for everything else. Shortbus has tried to reclaim a shame-free space from the religious right, and the aim is noble, but what its makers haven't realised is that the problem comes not from without neo-pagan culture, but from within, from a culture which, in trying to get nearer to the transcendental alchemy of sex and what is really behind it - the connection to nature - we have turned it into the opposite of itself, into industry and image. Reclaiming not merely sexuality, but human life itself, involves not reclaiming the image, via art, but turning away from its power - a revolution far more comprehensive than the '60s one, and one whose mere suggestion fills people with horror. What? I won't find liberation at a film festival? Well, no. If sex is about the real encounter with the other, then its apotheosis won't be found in art. We could try and ban sexual imagery in ads etc, as we have tried to do before, but piling regulation upon corruption is really the antithesis of freedom. What Shortbus is hinting towards, is something its own medium belies, that as the poet John Ashbery suggested in Some Trees
That their merely being thereMeans something; that soonWe may touch, love, explain.And glad not to have inventedSome comeliness . . .
We will recover desire only when we can turn away from the screen and back to full human presence. When we do, narrow life-denying Christian and Islamic fundamentalism will be as discarded and useless as an old combine-harvester, their reasonable and identical response to the sexual meat-market - "keep it all off" - rendered irrelevant. But it will only happen when we realise that Pell and porn, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali and hardcore are two sides of the same de-denominated coin. We are face-to-face with the unmediated natural world of sex and death for the first time in history and without easy stories, both conservative and liberated, we will have to make sense of it.
posted by LeBlues @ 9:47 AM,
2 Comments:
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At December 15, 2006 at 11:13:00 AM GMT,
buzzardspaw said...
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something has happened, something changed
generation ago things
weren't the same - the can of worms
opened now with Internet
porn, porn, porn. Want it? Get it!
the difference? - Internet -
At December 17, 2006 at 2:43:00 PM GMT,
randomdeepmusings said...
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This comment has been removed by the author.
