YESTERDAY, we began to ponder a vision of sexual liberation for a post-corporate era.
For better or for worse, sex gets redefined in every generation. So let’s imagine what an early-century, post-NASDAQ-crash vision of sex might be:
- We are sexual beings (“from womb to tomb,” as one fetish-wear website says).
- Sex is fun. Not that aggressive fake fun of video games and theme parks, but honest fun.
- Sex is passion.
- Sex is life.
- Sex is dirty after all, and that’s part of what makes it great.
- Anti-sex is anti-life, and is the worst of America.
Sterile modern office buildings, barren strip-mall landscapes, flavorless cuisine, unsatisfying mass entertainment, socially isolating subdivisions. Virtually everything wrong with American culture can be described with adjectives of sexual dysfunction.
- Pro-sex is pro-life (and I don’t mean the anti-abortionists’ meaning of “pro-life”), and is the best of America.
Hot jazz, early rock n’ roll, western swing, blues–it’s all sex, the joys and sorrows and confusions of sex. Passion and lust-for-life are also eminently visible in the late-19th-to-mid-20th-century era’s gleaming art-deco skyscrapers, churning industrial plants, streaming railroads, gaudy Broadway spectacles, teeming downtowns, and fruited plains.
A pro-sex worldview is the needed antithesis to a worldview centered around the cold passions of power and money.
It won’t solve all the world’s problems (many of which have to do with the side effects of too-successful procreation), and can eventually lead to new problems (some of history’s most militaristic cultures (cf. Rome, Japan, precolonial India) made some of the world’s greatest erotic art).
But a neo-sexual revolution is still needed. I don’t mean the ’60s free-love schtick that got so quickly exploited by fashion marketers and predatory hustlers. And I don’t mean the dependency-building, intermediating commercial sex-biz that offers little more than loveless porn to men and masturbation toys to women.
I mean something forward-looking.
Something incorporating current sexual subcultures (suburban swingers, middle-class fetishists, gays and lesbians, etc. etc.).
Something that treats orgasms not as a merely pleasurable experience but as a way to get to know people. A way to build couples and friendships, to form virtual families as well as biological ones.
So have some great sex tonight. (If you don’t have someone to have sex with, keep looking and don’t ever stop.)
Don’t have it just for yourself. Have it to help save the world.
NEXT: Is it time to remember the ’90s yet?
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