The Silence of the Lads

In the wake of #MeToo, progressive men can't express their subjective experience of Eros, empowering the Right

Eros.

This is Part Two in a series.

I want to write more about the social-political impact of #metoo — and, beyond that, where we find ourselves now when it comes to sexuality as a whole — but I admit to finding it very challenging. This is partly due to my own personal history and, also, the many different areas that the subject touches on. Sexuality is like a rhizome that reaches into every area of life.

I feel we don’t have anything close to a deep enough understanding of sex or, better, Eros — what it is, how it operates through all facets of society. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia writes: “Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be ‘fixed’ by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.”

According to Anne Carson, the Greek word eros denotes ‘lack’, ‘want,’ ‘desire for that which is missing: “The lover wants what he does not have,” she writes. “It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.”

For years now, I’ve been seeking — trying, failing, waiting, trying, failing — to dive into this subject deeper, to explore its many intricate, daemonic dimensions. Every time I approach the edge of this ocean and get ready to plunge in, I feel frightened. I pull back. It seems we have already, without knowing it, forfeited a degree of our freedom to express ourselves in this society. The NxReactionaries are correct, in some sense, about the stifling force of progressive cultural conformism. Jean Genet, Normal Mailer, Anais Nin weren’t as held back as we are today.

I fear public censure, public attack. Social media reprisals. I’ve already experienced all of that. It was painful. So I wait.

I worry about admitting to thoughts, feelings, ideas that are politically incorrect, let alone kinky, perverse, or even nasty. I fear my readers will start to hate me and retract. But I also think it is precisely these taboo, liminal areas that writers and thinkers must enter, to illuminate what is murky, unconscious, opaque. If we don’t do this — even if it is clumsy and awkward — we aren’t serving our function for society as a whole.

I don’t find my personal experience unique. Recently, men (heterosexual or “cis” men in particular) have found themselves largely unable to speak about or express their subjective experience of sexuality — they don’t dare divulge past explorations of eroticism, particularly if it involved subversion, transgression, miscommunication, failure. They can’t admit publicly to past mistakes without risking withering scorn and legal immolation.

Unless, of course, they are on the Right. In that case, they get blanket immunity from all past transgressions and sex crimes.