For much of my life, I have been interested — both personally and philosophically — in the question of whether some deeper liberation of Eros / sexuality was needed to transform society and emancipate humanity. I drew inspiration from Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (who wrote, “Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean a complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology.”), and also, somewhat problematically, writers such as Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Anais Nin.
I don’t see this line of thinking being pursued much anymore, outside of a few communities like Tamera and Western Neo-tantra movements such as the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA). One increasingly popular view is that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s was a mistake — good for some men, but bad for women, overall.
One book on this topic is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry. “Sexual repression is a blunt instrument, but it is not one we can do away with altogether, as the errors of the 1970s show,” she writes. “The radical desires of sexual liberals do not work in a world in which human sexuality is not always beautiful but often wicked and repulsive.” She argues that the sexual revolution mostly served the interests of those with a high degree of “sociosexuality” — mainly a subset of men who desire many sexual partners while women, generally, prefer monogamous unions.
I find value in her critique, as far as it goes, but I think we need a deeper level of systemic analysis that takes many more factors into account. I think we really don’t know, fully, what is nature and what is nurture. The book Sex at Dawn, for example, reviews a huge variety of practices across many cultures. There is also the interesting question of epigenetics, which suggests that different behavioral patterns and generational traumas may become genetically hardwired, making them difficult to address or change. Above all, there is the question of how the prevailing socio-economic system defines the shape of people’s individual lives.
Recent surveys reveal that, post Covid and #metoo, people — particularly young people — are having less sex, as well as fewer friendships. Social media tends to atrophy our capacity for authentic human connection. We aren’t living in a very sexy time.
In the US, on the Red State side, a resurgent Christian Fundamentalist Right has captured the Supreme Court and is removing women’s reproductive rights (in some Southern states, they are on the verge of making abortions punishable by the death penalty). Fascist movements always seek control over sexuality as the most efficient means to exploit human psychology. On the Blue side, we find dissatisfaction with traditional gender roles, repudiation of the aggressive or “toxic” aspects of masculine sexuality (although rarely looked at from a system-design perspective), and a focus on victimization and women’s long-unexpressed grievances.
Writing in the 1950s, Marcuse believed an authentic liberation of libidinal drives would transform capitalism and, indeed, all social relations:
“The vision of a non-repressive culture, which we have lifted from a marginal trend in mythology and philosophy, aims at a new relation between instincts and reason. The civilized morality is reversed by harmonizing instinctual freedom and order: liberated from the tyranny of repressive reason, the instincts tend toward free and lasting existential relations — they generate a new reality principle.”
Eros and Civilization fuses Marxist and Freudian ideas, but also refutes Freud’s pessimistic idea of a “death drive,” Thanatos, that would always thwart any attempt to create a hedonic, liberated society. He argued instead, that the death drive was a distortion of Eros, not something innate. It was only prevalent in society due to a certain form of conditioning.
Later, Marcuse was very disappointed by the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s, which didn’t lead to the emancipation he envisioned. He coined the term, “repressive desublimation“ to define what went wrong: The liberalization of sexual morals ended up reinforcing prevailing patterns of exploitation and domination, etc. We see this, today, in phenomena like Florida Spring Break, the proliferation of hook-up culture, and the Internet porn industry. Capitalism assimilated the new licentiousness, and profited off of it.
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