The Sexual Revolution

Today, I’m going to attempt a little bit of deconstruction. Warnings in advance that this topic won’t be nearly as exciting ( or at least not arousing) as the title implies – I’m going to look a little bit at theory, and probably won’t provide any dirty pics until the very end. (That’s the hook to keep you reading.)
In the time that I’ve known him, Dawson has mentioned approximately a dozen times his plans to start a sexual revolution. Generally, these attempts have been stymied by my own apprehensions/prudity, but I’ve just finished doing some reading for my Philosophy and Youth Culture class that’s making me reconsider. The piece comes from Herbert Marcuse, who as far as I know is a Neo-Marxist. This particularly delightful combination of words implies (among an overabundance of black coffee and cigarettes) one who tries to reconcile Marxist notions of historical materialism (particularly alienation) and Freudian psychoanalytic traditions. Whether or not this always works out is somewhat up in the air; however, this particular excerpt seems to be doing it for me.
Marcuse begins by talking about the sublimation of the pleasure principle by society – the need to deny our quest for self-gratification in order to build a cohesive society, eschewing sex and orgies and day-dreaming and everything else you did in highschool for more productive or society enabling activities, like working a fax machine or transcribing legal briefs.  Note my obvious sarcasm. Marcuse, who is understandably upset at the fact that he is confined to monogamy (which gets old as you get old) posits a sort of sexual revolution where once a sufficient amount of societal progress is acquired, we create a sort of post-modern transcendental capitalism in which Eros becomes the prevailing sought after good. This results in an eroticization of the entire body, rather than a relatively confined focus on genitalia and reproduction that existed at the time of his writing (and probably still exists today.) One thing leads to another, and everyone stops being so damned worked up about being naked and working so hard.

This is very intriguing to me. It’s difficult to deconstruct or move oneself away from these very doxic notions we have of sexuality – the word itself, as I think Foucault wrote, is an attempt to create an encompassing archetype for something that may be too multifaceted to be explained in such a way.  Loathe as I am to revert to the Ancients and a ubiquitous usage of ambiguous superlatives, maybe the distinction between a beautiful painting or a beautiful sunset and a beautiful person/body/idea aren’t as distinct as we would like to think. It seems hubristic to assume that interactions with humans achieve some sort of elevated relationship or precedence over interactions with the natural world. I’m not suggesting that there are sexy trees, but maybe that’s because I’ve learned, through reinforcement both overt and subvert that trees are not something which possess this uniquely human quality of sexy.

Interestingly enough, capitalism is already starting to break down these trends. Like they say, sex sells – however, it’s not just potential sexual objects themselves that sell, but just the idea of this sort of beauty. The fact that a Corvette or a Porsche can look ’sexy’ speaks to a somewhat less than harmonious understanding of the ’sex drive’ – an even cursory look into the language revolving around this gives it a heavily reproductive slant. As more and more things are sold by being sexy, we’ll eventually be forced to deconstruct our own understanding of what marketing is preying upon here – are we seeing sex in these everyday tools, or maybe the spillover of a societally repressed libido?

This confronts a couple conflict ideas, one of which I particularly hate to deal with because of the sinking suspicion that it may be right: biological determinism. The idea that we’re just slaves to genetics is of course a discouraging one, although the very fact that it’s discouraging gives renewed hope – if at least the notion of free will exists, who am I to try so hard to peer through the veil?

Now I’m all hot and bothered. Maybe I can convince some of these sorority girls to join the cause – Fell(ati)ow Travelers?