The decline and fall of sex

Who would ever have thought that the result of the last ten years of sexual freedom and liberation, absence of obscenity laws, all sorts of scientific sexual research, the woman's liberation movement, X-rated movies and increased sexual education would be in some strange way a diminution of sexuality. I am not gainsaying the gains. They have been necessary and they have been tremendous. But it is also time to assess the losses and to see if anything can be done to minimize them. The losses seem to me to come out of a changing focus about sex from a spiritual-psychological one to a technical-anatomical one. People have somehow forgotten that sex-the essence of sexuality-always has been and still is in the mind. Passion is still not anatomical. Learning 37 different positions is not necessarily going to make sex more exciting. Men and women have very powerful and exciting orgasms in their dreams. There is no technique or anatomical stimulation there. Lightly touching the hand of a person you are romantically in love with or a person who is taboo may be more exciting than participating in an orgy. Somehow we all should know these basic facts about sex, but the emphasis of the past ten years has made us forget them. And in the forgetting we have lost a great deal of the excitement about sex. The first porno film can be a tremendous turn-on. But the fiftieth hardly is. Similarly we all were very turned on by the past ten years giving us license and removing restrictions and inhibitions. But now that that thrill-and it certainly was a thrill-is over, where are we? That thrill-like the first porno film-is gone. Other thrills we used to have are also gone-or at least diminished. Some people who have not lost the thrill are the ones who have a special perversion. I do not like to use this word because it has so many pejorative connotations. Yet it is a technically correct word and I know of no other one that specifically defines the drive of a person who has combined some very unconscious emotional gratification with his sexuality in an unusual form of sexual expression and who experiences a great deal of emotional satisfaction through it. I remember hearing a hetero

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive psychology · Forgetting · Human sexuality · Passion · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sexual desire · Sociology · Taboo · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology