sexual secrecy

[lemur]

Personally, I dislike the culture of whispering about sex. People subdue their voices to tell some secret about who is doing it with whom in a way that expresses that what's going on isn't quite kosher but they like the intrigue. If they would actively reject sexual taboos or actively criticize the behavior, they would talk openly about sex. If they would legitimately want to keep it secret, they would remain silent instead of whispering. Yet there seems to be some special pleasure in whispering. Whispering generates intrigue and tension. It suggests manageable danger, maybe. It breaks taboos without rejecting them outright. Why aren't people more uncomfortable with the hypocrisy inherent in it, though? Or do people just enjoy spreading intrigue and scandal simultaneously?

[Marat]

The social repression of sexuality concentrates its power and transforms it into a commodity which can be exploited for a number of social purposes. Advertisers couldn't attract consumer attention to products by posing attractive women next to them if sex had not already been artificially transformed into a scarce commodity by sexual repression. Young men wouldn't transform themselves into human bombs for a reward of forty doe-eyed virgins if sexual satisfaction in the real world were not scarce. Religions couldn't establish their social power and control people by regulating their access to sex through all the prescribed rules and rituals of divinely-approved sexual expression. Giggling and whispering about sex is the inevitable consequence of this artificial creation of a sex economy through a ritualized 'scarcity' of access to sex partners where there are in fact enough sexually-interested people for everyone always to be sexually fulfilled all the time.

 

All sorts of power are created by various organizations claiming control over the natural abundance which could easily satisfy the natural needs people have. Just look at the way religions create an artificial food shortage by all their unnecessary dietary restrictions. This is to establish their hold over people by in effect saying to the id: You can't even eat unless you acknowledge our power! The same absurd power game operates even more obtrustively with sexuality.

 

Thank goodness society and religion have not yet thought of creating an artificial shortage of opportunities to defecate. Otherwise we would be whispering and giggling about our naughty neighbor who had been caught going to a pay toilet.

[Mr Skeptic]

[...] there are in fact enough sexually-interested people for everyone always to be sexually fulfilled all the time.

 

Do you have any evidence of that? Your whole argument is based on a premise that appears to be false.

[Moontanman]

HEY LEMUR, IS IT TRUE THAT YOU AND JUDY FROM DOWN THE STREET ARE DOING THE HORIZONTAL BOP?

 

 

She bop--he bop--a--we bop

I bop--you bop--a--they bop

Be bop--be bop--a--lu--she bop,

I hope He will understand

She bop--he bop--a--we bop

I bop--you bop--a--they bop

Be bop--be bop--a--lu--she bop,

Oo--oo--she--do--she bop--she bop

 

 

Or would you rather I had whispered that one?

[Marat]

I suppose if some people can only tolerate sex with at least 12 other people simultaneously participating in the orgy, then there would be mismatches between the demand for sexual satisfaction and the supply of partners. But it is roughly true that with most people heterosexual, with roughly equal numbers of males and females, and with comparable numbers of male and female gays, there is no reason why people should not be able to be correspondingly paired up with few shortages. Also, given the refractory time between the ability/demand for sexual activity, plus the need to be doing other things with one's life, the capacity of people to delay sexual gratification to match up with other people's available time and interest would ensure a fairly constant matching of sexual supply with sexual demand.

 

But in contrast, look at the panoply of artificial shortages of sexual partners we unnecessarily burden human experience with now! Sexual partnering is restricted by the social conditioning of people to reject potential partners who because of excess age, insufficient attractiveness, or low social status because they assume that this must also lower their own social ranking. Religion, exaggerated fears of STDs, unrealistic fears of pregnancy, artificial conventions of shame, superstitious 'moral' rules requiring sexuality to be extinguished by marital boredom, forbidding sex before marriage, forbidding sex with people in certain age groups or between people of different age groups, all contribute to creating and maintaining a severe shortage of sexual partners which results in the sexual starvation of countless people in society.

 

If you have ever made the rounds through a cancer ward, a hemodialysis facility, an amputation recovery ward, or some similarly hideous place where people are suffering from the horrors which our physicality can inflict on us, then you viscerally experience our helplessness at creating a positive balance between the miseries of our physical existence and its pleasures. In this truly desperate battle to maximize the ratio between physical pleasure and physical misery -- which medicine is now losing badly -- it seems a pitiful waste of insane proportions voluntarily to throw away the greatest instrument we have to tilt the balance in favor of physical pleasure, which is human sexuality. Why struggle mightily with billions of dollars of research investment and decades of research to find a gentler form of cancer therapy in order to increase the net total of human physical pleasure vs. physical misery, but then just negate by unnecessary and ridiculous sexual restrictions enough physical pleasure in sexuality to compensate for all the cancer misery in the world?