LAST THURSDAY, we briefly discussed whether the “swingers” (organized spouse-swapping) movement was a potential force for social liberation or merely just another middle- to upper-class recreational option.

Last Friday, we briefly discussed the new Austin Powers sequel, whose time-traveling plot’s mainly set in a retro-parody of the “Swinging London” era (albeit in 1969, close to that era’s real-life demise if not just after it), and which depicted the hero’s sexual hijinx as something more than mere casual “shagging” but as a necessary regular recharging of the life-force he needs in order to keep saving the world.

Today, we’ve got a link to a British social critic who claims the casual promiscuity of ’60s-style “swinging” and the organized, invite-only group sex of ’90s-style “swinging” are both less-than-optimal expressions of sexual nature.

Jennie Bristow, writing in the magazine LM (no, I don’t know what the letters stand for), takes a dim view of “playful” sexual expressions of all types, paying particular scorn at “queer culture” and at young heteros who wish to emulate it.

It’s not that Bristow doesn’t want folks to have fun. It’s just that she thinks fun-for-its-own-sake isn’t enough.

Bristow claims consumer culture’s emphasis on the orgasm as a personal experience (little different from a drug high or an athletic feat), combined with radical-feminists’ and corporate-conservatives’ moralistic phobias against coital intimacy, has left a new young generation in the U.K. and the U.S. obsessed with looking and feeling sexy but deathly afraid of anything approaching the deeper, interpersonal aspects of sexual interaction.

The result: College campuses full of sexually-suggestive imagery, attire, walks, and stances. Joy-of-masturbation books and seminars. A booming market in self-pleasuring toys. S/M iconography everywhere, from movies to comic books and video games. Hetero young adults pretending to be bi so they can appropriate the self-righteous hedonism of queer culture.

But also, increasingly draconian sexual-harrassment rules and regulations treating almost everything people do with one another (and especially what males do with females) as (1) really sexual and (2) potentially menacing.

“In public,” Bristow writes, “sex is more than acceptable; in private, between individuals, it is treated as suspect.”

She concludes, “Passion is what sexual codes of condust seek to regulate, and passion is what most of the fashionable forms of sex are safe from. In today’s antiseptic culture, where relationships are conducted at arm’s length and in the public eye, the closer you get to somebody the less you are encouraged to trust them, or commit yourself to them.”

That was certainly the credo of Austin Powers’ spoof source, James Bond, who in Ian Fleming’s original novels was depicted as an aloof aesthete who mated and killed with equal dispassionate skill.

It’s somewhat akin to the credo of the mate-swappers, who enjoy their extracurricular rites but are expected to emotionally bond with no one except the spouse they came in with.

It’s also, as we briefly noted previously, the credo of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “everyone belongs to everyone else,” where promiscuity and virtual-reality porn are everyday institutions, but where deep one-on-one love is considered a threat to the social order.

I can sort-of partly agree with some of Bristow’s points. I believe public sexual-posturing, erotica, sex toys, and fetishes can be all well and good within their inherent limitations. And I support queer culture more than she does; but I’m more willing than her to know that gays and lesbians are indeed capable of deep relationships with all the associated turmoils and rewards. It’s the rewards part that “sexual liberation” advocates sometimes forget about. There ought to be an approach to sexuality that’s neither the Religious Right’s old-style repression, the Andrea Dworkin crowd’s new-style repression, and the lonely rugged-individualism promoted by the porn and dildo industries.

Sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart.

Tomorrow: Some more thoughts on this.