SEX WITHOUT STIGMA

This post was prompted by this trailer for a Broadway stage "opera".  Maybe you'll want to watch it first.  Maybe you were getting impatient for something that justified that red "scare warning" before the blog opens.  The strategy here is to take on something so stigmatized that it was entirely secret, then blown open by a new wave of culture.  What was hidden, intimate, accessed by only a few people who considered it evidence of a precious insight into life, is now a shallow, loud, braggadacio that must be painful to the very people who made it possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WBeEGVzyPU

What it prompted is reflection on what would happen if the stigma on sex were gone, entirely gone, from every type of sex, true Bonobo abandon of standards or occasions or significance.  Many people give sex their highest priority in  life, esp. writers for crime TV and streaming shows.  it's the rationale for a million bloody stories.  I pulled away from sex in the opposite direction: letting it become so precious, so significant, so worthy of studying that no occasion or person was worth the actual act.

Today's presumed stigma of sex is based on dynamics that no longer exist.  The stigma was meant to enforce a certain view of life preferred by the usual suspects: rich old white men.  Consider:

• It is possible for a woman to have intercourse without having children.

• it is possible to identify the father of a child, even after that child is born and has become an adult: fatherhood is no longer determined by confining a woman so only one man has access.

• The entitlement tie of a father to his son or vice versa is far weaker, partly because of the law and partly because inherited traits are no longer a sure thing and the circumstances have changes so that traits that once helped success, no longer do that.

• Now that "culture" has become as powerful as "genes", the two acting against each other, the mother is usually the carrier of the culture so has gained power.  Women also have more economic power and so are not compelled to marry in order to eat.

• The world is so chaotic and people are so separated from the practices that document generational ties that birth certificates, christening records, marriage certificates, divorce transcripts and verdicts, death certificates are often nonexistent.

• Intimate relationships and true families are more often defined by economics than by eroticism.  People relate as much out of wanting to support children as wanting to screw.

• The act of sex is now subject to the same pressure as almost every pleasant occupation.  It must meet standards, there is a right way to do it, orgasms are ranked, fertility might be wanted or abhorred.  Thus, it is highly self-conscious when it has been proven that abandoning to the act is what validates it.

• The relationship of sex to disease was once deadly.  Then antibiotics made  them safer though behavior was the surest preventative.  Then the antibiotics began to fail.  Next was a virus, HIV, and a long struggle to at least survive it -- not everyone.  Still we have no cure or vaccine, but we can keep it down to a dull roar as long as the stigma exists, because the last little push depends on everyone demanding a cure.  It's too easy to abandon people who are even a little bit stigmatized.

• Childbirth is still a risk for both mother and child.  Cultures and economics are crucial.

• Some people will have fabulous rocket-launching sex lives.  They are higher grade than the reset of us.  They are having more fun that we are -- we imagine.  For those who have the hormones and imagination for it, there are probably ARE people who are having more of an experience.  Partly it depends on relationship to the media patterns.  Not the mercantile industry that says you must have a hundred candles burning and a certain kind of underwear.  

• The culture that has accumulated through the ages to produce a certain kind of paradox, the same kind as that of combat.  Extremely dangerous, lethal, punishing, survival threatening, is pitched against adrenaline-high, as emotional as humans can go.  The fact that one is negative and the other is positive makes both more powerful.  They co-exist.  Sex has in the past been punished by such draconian measures and rewarded by a chemical (emotional) state so primal, ecstatic and engulfing that it is quite comparable in impact to combat.  In fact, it can be used in combat with a little chemical help for the exhausted, or can just happen directly after combat because of auto-drugging.  But combat won't get you pregnant which means a third party is involved: the child.

So a man who is terrified of combat, paying big bucks to "prove" his sexual prowess (also buying marriage), and producing deficient children, is not admirable.  Tell it to the president.

Today I read about a new kind of porn -- or at least it has a new recognition and name:  "gobble porn," getting turned on by fantasies of being swallowed by a whale.  Or maybe being the whale and gobbling someone.  The idea is that the stomach of the behemoth is a soft, pulsing, resting place.  Anything works once it's eroticized.

What eroticizes a lot of people is being forbidden, being in danger, being criminal.  Even in today's dangerous life, it gets tiring after a while.  Then you have to fake it to be left alone.  But then, on the other hand, others are tireless drunk-on-stage performers.  Sigh.  Stigma becomes a practical barrier so people can get on with earning a living.