On Sex

We tend to believe that our society promote sex. It certainly rubs it in our eyes, in our minds; but like anything human, society can say one thing and do another. Is sex promoted? No... it is used. Sex has always been used. It has been used most often for a consistent reason: power. Whether it is the power to begin wars (Troy) or end them; the power to control your population; or today, the power to get people's money, the source of power today.

So sex is still used. It is used more blatantly than ever, one could say. Certainly, the standards by which we hold each other have never been more relaxed. Bill Hicks once described the ideal advertisement as a naked woman spreading her legs for you, accompanied with the words "drink coke." I'm sure I will see it before the inevitable reaction occurs. People can get away with all manners of dress, deportment and discussion without repercussion, though this may now be changing, as can be seen in the re-adoption of school uniforms which is now going on.

Sex, however, remains suppressed. Despite the best attempts of artists for many decades, sex is still largely taboo. You can speak of it with your adult friends, but certainly not with children, you pervert. It is certainly not something to be done in public, and obviously not for money. All of these restrictions are debatable, as are their effects, for good or ill. What is perhaps not examined, however, are the effects of the disconnect caused by this affair of promotion and suppression.

Sex is pervasive in the culture. However, are we talking about "real" sex? Not usually. Often our first exposures to sex (the cinema), are "Hollywood." Much as we ridiculed "Hollywood" displays of war, so we should with sex. First of all, our cultural activities make it seem that sex is easy. This is not new - kids are forced to study Romeo and Juliet, a play about young love over 400 years old. The formula remains unchanged: two people meet, they fall in love, and consummate their relationship, either within a few minutes or hours or pages. Even a film which is honest enough to try to show the progression of a relationship over the course of "years" can only do so in a matter of minutes. It is the minutes that count, especially to people with an undeveloped sense of time, not to mention an undeveloped capacity to understand consequence.

People think it is common for people to hook up. They even believe it is common for some people to hook up frequently, as though they were macho or slutty. The reality when confronting the good old hook-up story is that these stories are all culled from a period of years, and when those handful of stories are put in the context of thousands of days, an interesting thing happens. You realize that these stories are not so often told because they are "awesome," as the first impression would have you believe, but that their rarity makes them more "awesome."

The most obvious critique of "Hollywood" love is its apparent display of the perfect relationship. The gullible are left to believe in the prince charming, or the princess. The fear is that when people encounter strife, strife being a centre of the human condition, they are trained to run away, to seek out that perfect relationship. There is likely some credence to this, but I doubt it is as common as people believe. Certainly people are averse to risk and strife - but that is a by-product of success more than cowardice, though they can go hand-n-hand. Divorce rates are as much a symptom of strife-aversion as it is a plague of choice. Choice does not come from the movies, it is an ideology of the culture at large.

Maybe I will finish this later. I doubt it.