Sex Advice from a Former Slut

And why Eros has left the building

Sleeping Eros

March 21 is the official beginning of spring, which used to mean that everything in Nature, even humans, was set for an orgy of new beginnings symbolized by fluffy rabbits mating in blooming fields. That is the ancient root of Easter; it was a fertility rite. Sex, orgies, fertility—it was all good fun, and everyone could play. But that’s so yesterday.

Fast forward to today and instead of having sex and fun, we’re moaning about the bedraggled state of sexuality and fertility in the western world. We are told there is an entire generation no longer having sex, not having children, and certainly not having any fun whatsoever. Men and boys are so downtrodden by insane rules that they are barely able to function, much less have sex. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sexual-politics-is-damaging-young-men/ Someone must be to blame.

Enter Mary Harrington, a fellow Substacker, who says the reason sex is no longer Sex lands squarely on the feminists and the pill—they took the danger out and allowed us to view our bodies as commodities. And voila, good sex was replaced by no sex, bad sex, or rampant porn. She makes a powerful case in Make Sex Wild Again, an excerpt of her recently published book, Feminism Against Progress.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/make-sex-wild-again/

The gist of her argument is that to get back to some good old-fashioned lusty fornication, women must stop taking the pill and men quit watching porn. We should quit frivolous sex without consequences; it’s bad for us. Dangerous sex is what we women need. With a nice, normal man who isn’t into porn nor terrified of women.

…in de-risking sex, this technology has made it ubiquitous, and in the process stripped desire of anticipation, excitement and mystery: emptied it of eroticism. In its place we’re offered an increasingly coarse, commodified and grotesque landscape of all-you-can-eat lust.

And here is Harrington’s recipe for fixing our sexual malaise:

… in refusing this degraded parody of our most intimate embodied experiences, we can open ourselves to better ones – not with The One, but with a one: someone who is willing to step up – solidarity, intimacy, family and building a life together.

While some of that is sort of true, the sexual malaise we’re suffering from isn’t that simple. Why, for example, did it take 60 years for the pill to turn us into asexual creatures? And it seems to me that in focusing on women, Harrington falls right into the misandry that is everywhere, especially the schools. In trying rather too hard to ‘protect’ fragile young women from aggressive men, we have turned young men into such frightened creatures that they would rather not have sex at all than risk all the taboos we have erected around their behaviour. Too many of them are miserable and depressed. Where are these guys who ‘step up’ going to come from when we have done our utmost to vilify masculinity and equating it with an illness? The roots of our sexual malaise go deeper and yes, we should delve into them. A world without Eros is a world nobody wants.

First of all, I believe that making sex ‘safe’ is part and parcel of a societal trend that looks like an obsession with safety per se. Safe Spaces at universities? Check. Children no longer playing unsupervised outside? Check. Certain words now consigned to history because they are too dangerous? Check. Trigger warnings? Well, you get my point. The thing is, when you take safety to the extremes we have, life loses its charm. Sex becomes boring. We need a certain amount of danger to thrive, to test our mettle against, so Harrington is correct as far as that goes. She has taken on the hallowed assumptions of feminism about what women really want and that was a long time in coming. However, never having fully identified with the feminists myself, and quite unable to tolerate the pill, I followed the beat of my own sexual drum. And I can tell you that the conclusions Harrington comes to do not apply to me. I find myself on the outs with a reaction to a feminism I have never embraced. And I ask you why should I or indeed we women follow any utopian ideas about the most intimate aspects of our lives? Why should people who enjoy intellectual arguments be in charge of my sex life?

But to be fair, let’s go back to the sixties, when Harrington says, all the trouble began. She wasn’t an adult then, but I was. I actually lived through what we now call ‘the sexual revolution’ during my teens and twenties. And our ‘sex life’ was nothing like today. Before the pill and internet hookups, before we all assumed that more sex led to better sex, we lived in fear of getting pregnant though there were, even in those old days, other methods of birth control. They worked as long as you used them, but we didn’t always remember to do that. Accidents happened. And abortion was illegal. So there was indeed a sense of danger. Did it lead to wonderful sex? Of course not. Sex then was serious and often, quite mediocre. Also, making sweeping statements about it is silly since we’re all wired quite individually. I didn’t get around to having great sex until the seventies and eighties. More on that later.

So here’s what I believe has happened. A society obsessed with left brain control and manipulation should not be surprised that twenty first century sex is dead on arrival. Because the more we do that, the less fun it is. Modern day Eros is dying because we have clipped his wings and taken away his arrows. Blaming the pill seems a bit disingenuous. I believe the pill is more of a symptom than a cause. But there’s more. We didn’t just instrumentalize sex, we also lost our sense of humour along with it. We cannot laugh at our sexual foibles anymore. Indeed, laughter itself is now a problem, along with sex. And why is that? It’s because of our obsession with controlling our bodies and pretty well everything else. Both eros and laughter depend on letting go, of letting it rip, of giving in to imagination, intuition, the body and its longings. Not the ever-controlling left brain that is the water in which we all swim, me included.

Getting out of it requires us to return to a more ancient way of comprehending the whole messy thing we call sexual relationships. Instead of focusing on Sex, we might want to get reacquainted with Eros. The mythical one the ancient Greeks knew well. The Myth of Eros is a far better guide than any formulation by well-meaning feminists or anti feminists because it is beyond Reason, big R. Yes, if we want to reclaim the mystery and power of eroticism, we might try thinking about it in un-reasonable terms. And only Myth is up to the task. The rational language Harrington employs is counterproductive to conveying what it’s all about. Only the language of Myth can do that. And since we have spent the last hundred and fifty years or so devaluing it, it’s going to feel a bit odd. But here we go.

In case you’re not clear on Eros: As the winded god of desire, he carries a weapon—a bow and arrow that he uses with reckless abandon. He delights in shooting his arrows into the hearts of the most incompatible lovers and making fools of them. Fools for love. In the oldest version of the myth, Eros is the son of Chaos, and he delights in delivering it to the unsuspecting. Later versions turn him into the wayward son of the goddess of love, Aphrodite. She, like most mothers, gets quite exasperated by his antics. But eventually, Eros gets his comeuppance because he is wounded by one of his own arrows and falls in love with Psyche. Forever. So, according to the myth, even a God cannot control Erotic Love. He too must bow to its power. There’s an important message for modern humans in there.

Shakespeare knew this. He delves into it when he causes a most beautiful maiden to fall for a donkey in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare plays with Eros as an ambiguous and hard to control force, which is what we as postmodernists so dislike. Giving in to something bigger than ourselves is to admit that maybe we’re not in control of everything, after all. It is giving the right brain its due, and we’re currently taking the first tentative steps in that direction. All of a sudden, the truths we took for granted only yesterday, are no longer serving us. See Mary Harrington. We’re ‘rewilding’ our land as well as ourselves. Which is why things feel so …chaotic.

In a strange twist, we’re getting back to a more spiritual basis for our sex life. But that doesn’t mean we should get all serious about sex, again. I believe the opposite is necessary. True liberation is always about taking something lightly one day and seriously the next, depending on context. My own bad girl days were littered with one-night stands that were fun because we didn’t expect anything but some good orgasms and then a fond farewell. That was part of the thrill--there wasn’t going to be a commitment, pace Harrington. And I do not regret those crazy nights. No, it wasn’t about love at all. It was momentary pleasure and for some, the pill did enable that. But that wasn’t the primary driver. Irresponsible sex was a thrill, especially after the uptight fifties, when ‘going all the way’ was indeed a sin and girls who did that were sluts. Outcasts. Consigned to hell, forever. Being slutty only became fashionable during the late sixties to eighties, in case you remember those happy days. And now we’ve come full circle, with a dreadful sexual hangover and a lot of cultural confusion. It is time to remember that all extremes are dangerous and to revive the middle that we lost to too much rhetoric and self-righteous sermonizing by feminists and other idiots.

The mistake that we as a culture have made was to elevate casual sex to the top of the erotic experience. Us oldsters and a few youngsters know that it was never that. The best sex is always with someone with whom you have a deep connection that goes beyond sex itself. Sex is the vehicle, not the destination. Great, memorable sex is about dropping your guard, being vulnerable, connecting deeply while losing yourself in the other. About yearning. This is a mystical thing, this melting of one into the other and I would say very few movies have ever captured that. Happily, there is one: Three Thousand Years of Longing, a modern fairy tale about telling stories of erotic love succeeds brilliantly. I might just watch it again because it so perfectly captures our current malaise. Seeing Tilda Swinton make love to a Djinn (!) is worth your time. Take it from a former slut: this is about eros, not sex though there are plenty of scenes that show both. They each have their place in our long lives, wanting and needing sex as well as love. Life being what it is, sometimes you have to settle for meaningless sex. And that should be just fine. Returning to the fifties when sex was always so terribly serious and we laboured mightily to make it meaningful is a serious mistake. Those who lived through it know that it wasn’t sexual paradise. Better to take our past sex lives and integrate them into a new paradigm that no longer preaches at us about how great it all could be if we did this or that. Instead, why not take a large dose of levity, mixed with some wisdom and wit. Add some ancient tales, poems, plays, and Myths about love, lust and laughing at the absurdity of it all. Stir. Repeat. Let’s give ourselves permission to ignore the rationalists. We don’t need them. Could we please do that instead of sermonizing? Is it too much to ask? And let’s not take three thousand years. Time is short and we are mortal…