Sex Primers, Biblical Smiters & Other Mixed Signals

According to an article in the New York Times this Sunday, how-to sex guides have become all the rage in the publishing industry. One publisher explained the phenomenon as being fueled by "the need to seem relevant in an increasingly sexualized culture." One wonders whether all of this sex education is actually leading to more and better sex, or whether instead it's all publishing and no action, all commerce and no fun. A look a the titles in this article leads one to worry that here in this new millennium there are actually large numbers of people who don't know how to do it. And the fact that these books are selling best in the bible belt supports that idea. Dorian's Law: Wherever there is sexual repression there is sexual obsession. But again I ask: do people really need primers on how to have good sex? Or rather, do they simply need permission? I suspect the latter. If you see it on the cover of a book in Barnes and Noble then it must be alright. Right? Then, buying the book and skimming through it will offer even more of a sense of sexual entitlement, and that, after all, is what people really want. Sex rights. Not sex ed. Sex rights. But whatever works toward the furtherence of those rights, I applaud. Keep those books coming, publishers of America.

What's weird about all of this is the cultural backdrop. We just had a nasty election in which the "family values" people really kicked ass. The old patriarchal God that would have us cut babies in half, murder our sons, and smite nations to prove fealty and faith--that God seems to have staged a powerful comeback in America circa 2004. The threat of married "sodomites" got the culture so freaked out, in fact, tht it was better to vote for a war candidate whose war nobody believed in than for a candidate who might look kindly on sexual heresy.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is providing solid backup for all those sex manuals with their erectile enhancement drugs, Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra. Strength when he wants it matches know-how when she wants it. Bookish women and their athletic men. The librarian and the jock. Don't you just love it! Strangely, nobody in the bible belt finds fault with any of this. As long as the fiction is maintained that all this know-how, backed up with all these drugs, is being put into the service of baby-making, then hey...it's A Okay. Is there not a thread of unreason that winds through all these mixed signals? Well, it's not really unreason. What it is, is conflict. We have huge conflict here in La La Land. And the side that want's us all to be good little boys and girls is the most conflicted of all. Meanwhile, the industries--publishing, pharmaceuticals, big media, and God knows which next (see previous post)--are cashing in. Because repression means obsession, and nothing fuels the economy like obsessions.

One sex guide, by the way, that is off the beaten path, is Jonathan Light's The Art of Porn. It is Light's thesis that sex is a human right, that video porn--born of the 70s sexual revolution-- is a revolutionary form of "virtual sex," and that the next wave of that revolution will usher in the development of adult entertainment as a true, aesthetically refined, performing art. For anyone "into sex" as a liberating experience, it's hard to imagine a more foreward looking book than this.

Red Lights along the Yellow Brick Road

An article about sex and commerce in the Wall Street Journal yesterday got my attention (see link below). Sex may be the procreative force behind human life itself. But what about business and commerce? Traditionally that's been reserved for material necessities--things like food and shelter. But what would happen if our species should evolve to the point where our material requirements had been satisfied? (I speak of course for those who have money to spend, not the masses who don't.) With the 21st Century that day of capitalist reckoning may have dawned. It may no longer possible for material neccesities, nor even material luxuries, to drive our economy. But the American system is premised on one big factor; Growth, GROWTH, and yet MORE GROWTH. If companies don't grow, then nobody will invest in them. So we gotta' have growth, folks, and lots of it. But if those of us with money have all the "things" we need, how are we going to keep growing? That question seemed to be answered in the '90s, when--like a prince in shining armor-- along came the New Information Age. A new "primary need" was mercifully invented, something upon which a saturated economy could continue to grow. But here again a problem arose. The people could only absorb so much information. For a while we were kept busy in abosorbing information about information, as we poured our hearts and souls into the task of learning all the new technology of information. But that phase could not go on forever, now could it? What's more, it became clear that we were soon going to reach our thresholds on "content" absorbtion. We can get the entire Encylopedia Brittanica on a few cheap CD-ROMS. Visually, we can now view details on all the streets of our fair land with a few zooms on our computer screen. With amazing speed, we've become victims of INFO GLUT. So what's left? Well, friends, it seems it's back to square one. Back to Sex, where it all began a few million years ago, with the first upright walking homonids, who once lifted from the ground began to grunt intelligently, and then to speak, and eventually to write. Yeah, sex got us to where we are today. And now that we seem to have shot our wad on intelligent things to do, it's time to get back down on the floor of our caves to procreate some more real growth for our stalled economy.

Turns out the great internet bubble at the turn of the millenium has left us with something more than hundreds of thousands of shrunken retirement accounts. Left standing, and girdling the earth, was a splendid system of internet highways collectively known as the Broadband. A slick consortium of "telecosm" con men persuaded millions of us to plunk down our savings to build that highway, by buying stocks like Global Crossing and scores of other super inflated stocks like it. (In this they were aided and abetted by the American business media, which assured us these stocks weren't really inflated when one considered...the future.) We were assured this splendid Yellow Brick Road (for that is what it was) would immediately fill with profitable traffic, and the value of our investments would grow as the gigabytes turned to petabytes, and yet more magical fiber would need to be laid across continents and ocean floors to handle the demand. Such was not the case, and the rest is history. But the Yellow Brick Road is still there, hugging the ocean bottoms as it circles the earth, waiting, waiting, waiting for some...traffic. Any traffic will do, so long as it tosses coins into the toll booths and finally starts making some real money for the old con men who, thanks to the bankruptcy laws, are now free to make fortunes on the road that people like you and I built with our "dumb money."

So how are these new Highway Toll operators going to start raking in some cash, at long last, on our stolen road? With sex, friends, with sex. For some time now we've known that sex peddlers have been a primal force in getting the internet off the ground. Now with a glut of unused broadband waiting for users, waiting to make some money, sex is moving off our computers and onto our cellphones, as reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal .

An Orgasm a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

Sex is good for you. Something we long suspected was finally ratified on a cover of Time magazine last year. When something makes the cover of Time, it leaves the realm of controversy and enters the kingdom of fact. Yes, sex is good for you. It boosts your healthy hormones and it reduces stress. Pardon the naivety, but one must ask: What is Sex? Is it the kind of "strength when he wants it" missionary job that your typical erectile enhancement ad promotes as apple-pie normal? No. Turns out it's much more encompassing. In effect the experts are telling us that having an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away, and it doesn't matter how you have it! Aha! Then all of us can be healthy, and not just the lucky married folk for whom the flame never goes out. Now it can be told: even the solitary jerker is doing something healthy to reduce his or her stress and live longer. What's more, even the philandering wife or hubby who ain't getting any at home can now know that there is some "good" to be had in her or his action. Many, after all, believe that solitary sex can never be the super vitamin that "real" sex is. (There will be more on that in a later post.)

America, we've got some mixed signals here! I know. Imagine that. Mixed signals right here in the U.S.of A. I mean it's not just the sexual Taliban, and their demonizing ways, that is confusing us. We also get anti-sex messages "lite" from more moderate types--you know, the kind of people who run for politics or who appear as talking heads on TV. These more balanced types also promote abstinence as the best way to go for the young and unmarried because of AIDS, teen pregnancy, and general well being. But we all know, don't we, that their naysaying is due to the "Cover Your Ass" (CYA) syndrome that has so infected this good land of ours that it is near impossible to find an honest answer to any important question, especially as it pertains to sex. In the Time article, it was actually doctors who were 'fessing up up that Sex is Good for You! Imagine that. But when push comes to shove, these same doctors would probably fall back to a CYA position and say: "Don't do it unless you're married and you know for sure your spouse is faithful, and it would probably be a good idea to even then use a condom, unless of course you want to make a baby. Whew! Poor doctors. They have so much Ass to Cover.

But at least many of them are admiting something that most of us have long known. That sex is good for us. So what, then, exactly is the problem with sex? Why are the sexually free constantly on the defensive in this land of ours? I know. I know. Turn on the TV, you say, and you see sex everywhere. So who's on the defensive? But that's popular culture as reflected and distorted through the media, and that has little to do with political-corporate America. Carrie and her buds on Sex in the City are not only fictional phantoms, but even in their fictional world they are sexual outlaws dreamed up, many think, by gay male writers projecting their whoreishness onto straight women. To get a better read about what "official" America still thinks about sex, consider the governor who had to resign last year when the truth began trickling out that he was gay. Or far more dramatically, consider the torturous moral meatgrinder that America's politicians and pundits were thrown into over the Clinton affair just seven years ago. With amazement, I would read one distinguished liberal pundit after another gassing away about how the President's agony was deserved because he had had the gall to lie about his blowjobs. One wonders how America's gay citizens, many of whom have spent their lives "lying" about their sex, felt about that impeachment--especially since it is the official policy of the U.S. military to encourage its gay soldiers to lie about their sexual practice in order to maintain a sense of denial-based decorum in the barracks.

Yea. We're conflicted about sex, alright. But at least now we know that it's healthy to get your rocks off. Now perhaps we can start having a sensible debate about the healthy (and therefore) acceptable ways of getting it on.

This is the Age of the Dawn of Aquarius

Welcome to my webnest. The theme here is sexual. It will not be pornographic, only occasionally explicit, but intensely social--political, if you will. And philosophical. Yes, especially philosophical. Underpinning all social and political theory is philosophy, the mother of all disciplines. But what underpins our thinking on sex? A small amount of half-baked psychology and a huge foundation of over-ripe theology. True, psychology is a spinoff of philosophy, and some might therefore think that to view sex through that prism--especially as polished by Sigmund Freud--is philosophy enough. I disagree. The disciplines that have broken free of philosophy, like psychology, have all left speculation behind and embarked on paths of certainty, even when--as is often the case--that certainty proves ultimately unwarranted. What is needed now to rescue sex from the most recent upsurge in demonization coming at it from religionists of all stripes is some healthy "speculation." In other words, some philosophy. Some sexual philosophy. And that is the purpose of this blog.

My name is Dorian Grayson, and I spend a lot of time thinking about sex. Well, yes that too (i.e. doing it). But I mean thinking about sex, as opposed to fantasizing about it. Thinking about sex might be something you do après-sex, in the same way you might have a cigarette après-sex. (A lot of us do both!) But recently I've started thinking about sex at the damnedest times. Like, for example, when I'm watching a politician spout about values. I would like to make a radical suggestion: People who enjoy sex, either as a life style (i.e. your average college freshman), or in a "balanced" way (your average viagra user), should "get political" about it. I know. I know. "Is nothing sacred?" you ask. Well, once sex was sacred--sort of. Like back in the days of John F Kennedy, when world leaders were permitted to have all the consensual sex they desired, without being harassed by the press, let along impeached. To a certain degree, a decent degree, your sexual business was your own business back then. But then the anti-sex types arose from their slumber, like some great hairy hibernating beast, reached for their bibles, and started dragging sex back into the media and the halls of congress. By the time President Clinton was impeached in 1998, sex had been totally politicized by America's radical right. So sudden and out of the blue was this assault upon one of our most cherished private rights, that liberty-loving lovers are still in a state of confoundment as to how to respond.

So my suggestion is this: Gird your loins, grab your spears, and face the challenge like the virile men and women that you are. Hurl back into the face of these sexual demonizers their claims of moral supremacy. Ask yourself: Why is America ceding its moral high ground to its home-grown Taliban? Why are we allowing spiritual medievalism to seize the reigns of power here in the land of the free. And what is it that we are spilling blood and fortune to export to the medieval middle east--our own brand of medievalism? I say to the sexually free: take up the challenge, define morality on your own terms (which are bound to be far superior to the Johnny-One-Note morality of our Taliban: NoSex, NoSex, NoSex.) Ask yourself: why should the denial of sex, undoubtedly one of God's (or Nature's) greatest gifts to humankind, be the foundation of morality? This, my friends, is pure medievalism, and in our day and age is has become--to use their own favorite word--pure evil.

Back in the Sixties there was something called the Sexual Revolution. All of a sudden, almost overnight, it was as if an asteroid had hit planet Earth--an asteroid loaded with testosterone, the hormone of desire for men and women alike. Suddenly people were discovering that desire was not evil, that is was as natural as crunchy granola. The Seventies, in turn, were a celebration of this new found freedom. Then (conveniently for the forces of sexual oppression) along came AIDS, and the party was over, so to speak. Well, it was never really over. It just moved underground. People cannot suppress something as natural as their sexuality. We can't suppress it now, just as the people of the middle ages didn't suppress theirs (read Boccaccio's Decameron). All that really happens when the sexual demonizers are in charge is that "they are in charge." They demonize, while we make love. Sounds harmless, but it isn't. When Clinton was impeached, an ordeal that consumed an entire year of America's political energy and social vitality, the country had to drop the ball on all manner of vital issues, like anti-terrorism initiatives that an administration under constant fire simply could not deal with. Medieval morality will continue to take its toll on America, if the forces of reason and true morality do not fight back, and fight back hard.

The Sixties was only a glimmer of what was to come--of humankind's true liberation--and the forces of oppression and control needed time to reconnoiter and strategize. This they have done, thanks to the group of "philosopher kings" that have come to be known as the neocons. (Neo-conservatives who rationalize their anti-democratic behavior with one of Plato's most egregious notions--that a small handful of "philosophers" should wield all power in an ideal state.) Though mostly a secular, worldly gang, the neocons have been brilliant at rallying the forces of ignorance and fear to the side of their real political agenda, which is to transform America from the world's bastion of freedom into its absolute ruler, to create a world empire even greater than that of the Romans, to create in effect a New Rome. The faggot that is being thrown on the fire in order to achieve this end is sexual freedom. It worked for the Church, which inherited the power of Rome thru adroit demonization of sex, so why shouldn't it work for the neocons?

As always, it takes time for groups of people to see what is happening and react. But it never fails. True freedom is contagious and unstoppable. And true freedom most certainly includes sexual freedom. This was first realized in the Sixties, which were hailed as The Age of the Dawn of Aquarius. I say no. That was a false start. The real age of Aquarius is just about to begin.

This is a new blog. Please bear with me as I navigate the learning curve. Comments are not only welcome, but vital to the mission of Eros Rising.