Camille Paglia describes with some deadpan aplomb, the state of confusion over gender roles in the chatting classes. Do read the whole thing.
Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution. But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.
In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.
Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.
I was just mentioning the effect of the Baby Boom on sexual attitudes to my daughter yesterday after she remarked on how there seems to be nothing that 12 year olds can do, but 13 year olds are OK. I talked to her about the world of film before the ratings boards, when people had more discretion but didn't actually need it so much when selecting a movie, book or entertainment.
The very idea of female viagra is more of the same - a confusion born at the prospect of a large society of peasants looking for the ultimate entertainment in their spare time. There's not much else left to exploit. The extreme sports are getting more extreme, the pecs on the actors at the checkout counters are getting more prominent, the political name calling is getting more caustic. It seems like only a handful of Americans anywhere have a sense of inner peace and are in harmony with their life's purpose. The rest are lining up to buy iPhones and then complaining about dropped calls two days later. PT Barnum would be rolling in clover plying his trade amongst today's vaguely dissatisfied and upscale masses. But the trump card would be and has become the idea that you're not quite healthy and sexy enough - that you have to enjoy more and better sex in order to fulfill your potential as a human being. The idea is already fertile, you just need the product. And what's more perfect than a pill?
I know better. Sex is dirty, complicated and embarrassing. It involves getting naked, making yourself completely vulnerable. And this is something we in the tail end of our revolution don't want to admit. It's something many of our youth can't even fathom. And of course it's something the pro-choice movement at core cannot abide. Sex must be, for today's unsatisfied peasant appetites and their marketing masters, all approaching the 'zipless fuck', that timeless fantasy revived by Xaviera Hollander aka the Happy Hooker. It must be the combination of exhilarating seduction, spontaneous orgasm and guiltless separation. How many millions of hours and billions of dollars are spent in that pursuit? What does it take? The right hair? The right abs? The right resort? And we just fall into it, right? Love, right? And don't even get me started about oddment sex.
Even the eHarmony guy says of us 6 billion fish, there's only 23 things we really need to know about each other and then boom. Instant happiness. But it isn't working out. That's why female viagra is necessary. Think about it.
We're going to have to get to the moment when somebody introduces legislation to get us building same sex bathrooms before the backlash bursts this gender happy slavishness. Straights know deep inside that we're not happy from sex. Gays know deep inside that they're not happy from sex. Yet we all keep pretending that happiness is out there if we just do enough rumpy pumpy; as if we could position our emotions like we position our bodies and get some kind of deterministic results. All we really know is that the drama continues and we can't quite seem to get ourselves extracted from it. Well, the unsatisfied among us.
The simple fact is that we've been eating at a McDonald's of sex, and the secret sauce is bad for us and not all for Victorian reasons. We've been supersizing our sex lives and becoming sybaritically obese. We've been expecting that every variety on the menu is equally nutritious and treating every exotic morsel like cuisine from another country all equally digestible. We've forgotten what it's all about because we're second hand consumers of romantic and sexual fantasy.
For me this goes rather deep. Ask my wife if I care about Cancun, she'll tell you I don't. I'm sure of it is just some buckwild maleness but I don't need exotic locales and drinks with umbrellas. I just need time and space. Without getting into the boys and girls details of desire, wants and needs - we've all been sold a pokey pig. You simply cannot satisfy yourself through the contemporary narrative of sex. It's literally perverted, and with the willing prevaricators of that sloppy thing called 'feminism', women are extra vulnerable and men are getting away with extra douchbaggery in addition to extra buggery.
I really have to laugh every time I watch a Hollywood production of some savagely efficient female spy, cop or soldier, and I wonder how long it is that American women are going to stand for this illusion. Female viagra doesn't work because its not what females want. It's what males want females to want - just like the chick in the Clooney movie 'Up In The Air' said. "Don't think of me as a woman, think of me as a just like you, only with a vagina". Zipless, and also perfectly gay and quite obviously perpendicular to family life. Perfect objectification of women, but like I said, many so-called feminists don't get it. They're eating at the sex McDonald's too.
I'll repeat myself. Sex is dirty, complicated and embarrassing. You have to get naked and vulnerable. In fully formed human beings, that takes some doing and some mutual obligation. More than we think we know, and more than most are willing to say.
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