Sexual Revolution phase II- Sex, Violence and catharsis
Why has violence been suppressed by western civilization? What is inherently threatening about this natural urge to democratic culture? The effort to create an acceptable level of non-violence, because it is so basically contrary to human nature, has had a number of interesting repercussions. Secularism in general uses this as its excuse for the delegitimization of religion qua religion even among those who claim to belong to one religion or another, on the premise that anything “taken too seriously” (i.e. taken seriously enough to change the status quo) will lead to some kind of mass slaughter or holocaust. The same effort has generated a multimillion dollar entertainment industry which exists solely to provide human beings with catharsis. The main drives for which they require that catharsis in order to “be happy” are violence and sex.
The fact that human beings are violent threatens the essence of Democracy. Democracy is a system which, at the outset, basically says that “it doesn’t matter what’s right, what matters is making the greatest number of people happy.” Violence tends to make SOMEBODY unhappy (although this is largely due to our perverse view of violence, and not necessarily part of violence qua violence) and so it is viewed with suspicion, and must be legitimized by establishing the victimhood of the aggressor. Simply put, the villain has to kill some innocent person for no reason before it is “okay” with the audience for the hero to throw him out of a helicopter.
There is a reason that sex and violence are always mentioned in the same breath. In keeping with the theme of recent analysis, it is worthwhile to examine the notion that these two things are One Substance which has different properties under different conditions. The suppression of the notion that violent behaviour is acceptable behaviour in mainstream culture has risen alongside the notion that sex and sexuality is acceptable. We also see that, in cultural microcosms within western civilization in which violence is acceptable, the sexual mores and values more accurately reflect the mainstream beliefs of pre-humanitarian culture. Street gangs, militias, and rural communities that reject humanitarianism all display these traits, if not ubiquitously, at least frequently enough that you probably know what I’m talking about....
The thing is that nature doesn’t do anything unnatural. So the suppression of violence, on some level, must be natural as well. What could have motivated this shift in culture, and where is it leading?
From an evolutionary perspective, repressing violence has some possible advantages. There is no denying that this disrupts the natural process of competition, but, obviously, that HAS been disrupted. This disruption is natural too, so what does that mean? People might not like nature, but they can’t avoid it. What has occurred MUST be natural, by definition. The natural consequence of mutual identification between human beings, which begins to look like compassionate humanism, is that the species is artificially preserved, and the median “type” of human being is significantly degraded. When we can SEE violence being visited upon others, and IMAGINE how nasty it would be if it happened to us, we develop an emotional investment in preventing violence. It is no mistake that humanitarian culture developed alongside the progression of mass media, which provided an image-delivery-system through which these identifications could be made. Fromm observes that it is normal for human beings to identify themselves with the victim in a story, because most people feel powerless in their own lives.
It is important to note that violence-as-catharsis was not the role of mass media initially. It wasn’t until television became ubiquitous enough for large numbers of people to make these identity-emotion connections with the victims of violence that violent movies and television started to become acceptable. As people began to subconsciously fear and suppress even the most mundane expressions of violence, the demand for catharsis was created, and responded to by the media industry.
Religion, as Crowley says, is intoxication. That intoxication produces results that are destructive (for the reasons that Motta describes in his Arabian Nights analogy, which I discuss here) as well as creative. But we’re talking about one thing, not two. You can’t disrupt one side without disrupting the other. The ability to cathartically release violent urges created the demand to cathartically release sexual urges as well. I would argue that this is the source of our so-called “progress” in gender politics and sexual politics, rather than some kind of greater understanding or more enlightened civilization. Corporations discovered a demand for sexual catharsis, which would require the removal of certain social restrictions to create a supply for, and at the same time these corporations wanted to increase their profits. The only way to do this was to find cheaper means of production while increasing the cost to the consumer, and the only way that society could sustain itself economically under those conditions was if social barriers to women in the workplace were removed, so that families could have two producing-consuming members instead of just one.
I’m not saying that the social and economic equality of the sexes isn’t a good step IN THEORY, but don’t kid yourself. It wasn’t motivated by enlightened principles or an evolved understanding of woman and her importance on the part of man. Any serious examination of a sexual conversation that takes place among an all male crowd will quickly disprove this theory. This social and economic equality was a necessity for capitalist culture to sustain its growth (not, by the way, to sustain itself, but to sustain its expansion).
The art that we have produced to the end of providing catharsis for the urge to violence is, I have to say, pretty impressive. We can’t cure the common cold, but technology can produce special-effects illusions which defy description. This technology has developed incredibly quickly. Think back to the movies and video games of a short fifteen years ago. Catharsis, and the production of effective catharsis by breaking down the subjective distance between the viewer and the media, has produced some very impressive technology. That’s a good thing.
But what is the result of sexual catharsis?
I’m afraid that the effect of this type of catharsis is devastating. The sex drive motivates all of our creative energies. If that “itch” can be easily scratched, whether through internet pornography, MTV videos, oggling the ladies of Lost, or whatever, than THE URGE TO CREATE is severely impaired. We can argue about this all you want, but there weren’t too many thirty year olds living with their mom’s before internet pornography, and those that did had the decency to feel shame. What shocks me the most about many of the men I meet these days is not only that they produce nothing and have no ambition, but they do not feel the slightest bit of shame about this. These are totally alien concepts. When you have a sex drive that DRIVES you, you want to be successful, powerful, and have something that you have produced that you can point to as an accomplishment, because that was always how people got laid. Without that drive, people are perfectly happy to be dependant on others.
More and more, this is effecting women as well. As the standards for male ambition and accomplishment are lowered, so too do women correspondingly lower their standards, or, even worse, start to see accomplishment and achievement in the imaginary worlds in which they too have been caught up, in video games and science-fiction. The tension which creates passion is dying out in the love lives of the younger generations. This tension produces conflict, which is, of course, the source of all really good sex. Technological cathartic phenomena all seem to take longer to catch on with women than with men, but if this trend continues and internet porn comes to fill the sexual desire of women in the same way that it has of men, we will see this process of catharsis finally fully realize itself.
We will become a race of wankers. Nothing more. With no ambitions, drives, or desires capable of causing us discomfort, and thereby stimulating us to become better than what we are. These wankers will be nothing more than so much fuel, to be consumed in the age of force and fire.
When you just have an endless field of dried up dead matter, all it takes is a single match to ignite the world.
Sexual Revolution phase II intro