THE GREAT COSMIC PRANK

London to get high-tech sexual 'theme park' (Globe and Mail, October 7th, 2005)

Developers announced plans Friday to open a multimillion dollar sexual "theme park" near London's Piccadilly Circus, home to the much-photographed statue of the Greek god of love.

Backers say the London Academy of Sex and Relationships, due to open next spring, will not be a sleazy sex museum, but an educational multimedia attraction that will teach visitors to become better lovers and provide valuable information about disease and sexual problems.

Located within the Trocadero entertainment center — just around the corner from Soho, London's red-light district — the $8.3-million (U.S.) project will feature unspecified "high tech and interactive exhibits."

Everyone has a now-familiar role to play in response to stories such as this one. Traditionalists are expected to splutter with red-faced indignation and mumble none-too-coherently about decency, morality, the corruption of children and the decline of family values, all in the embarrassed voice of one who is trying to discuss his private affairs publically. Delighted libertines move in quickly for the deconstructionalist kill and accuse naysayers of being in the grip of some warped psycho-sexual hell that only their radical “honesty” and “freedom” can cure. Leftists find torturously weird ways to put all the blame on the oppressions of a dark and dreary past and usually give their approval provided the spectacle is “socially meaningful”, which means as clinical and unerotic as possible. Libertarians wax poetically about choice, insisting that it is none of anyone’s business and that the mere existence of such ventures proves a pre-existing demand only a totalitarian would dream of trying to stifle.

The debate continues, but it is hard not to conclude that, whatever is actually going on in the nation’s bedrooms, the libertines have won the battle for hearts and minds in the West, at least outside of seriously religious communities. We’re all Freudians now, and the fear of prudishness and thwarted desires reigns supreme in popular culture and social discourse. As a consequence, Western society is fast losing, not only the common values, but also the common language that would undergird any reasoned discussion on how to contain or limit sexuality to avoid the destructive and obscene. Indeed, it is a particularly amusing modern experience to see dull and dutiful middle-aged types defend the legitimacy of sexual appetites and practices one suspects they would murder their spouses for even dreaming about trying.

There is a always a place for debate on first principles, but on this subject it is masking our ability to see what is going on around us before our eyes. The devil is in the details, but few can debate details on this subject without snickers and leers and a quick retreat to the abstract. Far from bringing freedom and a relaxed, carefree contentment, the sexual revolution has given free rein to an unquenchable thirst for ever-greater preoccupation, experimentation and titillation. Only the wilfully obtuse would think the easier general accessability of porn is bringing satisfaction of heretofore repressed appetites as opposed to an endless demand for more porn, rawer to the point of abuse or parody. Theater aims to shock what it knows full well is an increasingly unshockable public, and so ups the ante with each passing year. Youth are cut loose without a rudder in an exploitative milieu only a fool would judge them prepared for. It is all well and good to debate pornography and sexual licence in the abstract, but at some point one has to confront directly the gulf between a young person's confusion and agitation at the glimpse of a racy French postcard and his trying to negotiate anal sex on the third date.

No one really knows where all this is leading. The subject is too elusive and human nature too varied to reduce it to reliable syllogisms or Las Vegas-style wagers. But we know enough from history and experience to understand that sexual extremes are terribly destructive to both individuals and society, and we live in an age of sexual extremes--the obverse of the most rigorously repressed ideal Calvin ever dreamed of. Conservatives tend to focus on the predatory and exploitative aspects, but insightful artists from Flaubert to Woody Allen have sensed a perhaps even more disturbing enigma. The road to sexual liberation may pass through thrills and rapture, but it ends in impotence, disappointment, boredom and often a bitter emptiness. That so many adults know this within themselves, but have been so intimidated or programmed by the zeitgeist that they stand tongue-tied and watch their children choose that road, is an act of collective social suicide. Jacques Barzun’s clear-eyed description of our decadence explains why not just civilization, but also sexual fulfillment, requires a firmament of sublimation and even repression:

The sexual act itself was imitated wherever it could be managed, on stage or onscreen; some performers went so far as to commit indecent acts in front of their live audience. There was a cult of nudity, in serious plays and on public beaches, quite as if in those settings bodies were not the reverse of aphrodisiac. Pornography, protected by the rules of fress speech, was abundant but of low quality compared with the classics from Petronius onward; even the 19th century models were better literature. Closely allied were the writings of innumerable doctors and psychologists, seconded by columnists in magazines and newspapers, who offered advice on coital technique, or methods for luring the opposite sex, or encouragement to the old not to give up. The preoccupation with the subject began about the age of 12 and was in proportion to the incitement.

The greatest damage from the sexual emancipation occurred in the public schools, where sexual talk and behavor, being tolerated, distracted from work. The resulting early pregnancies caused disasters of all kinds. But so great was the thrall of the sexual that school authorities dealt with the problem by means of courses, free contraceptives, and handbooks giving a full view of the subject, its variants and aberrations. [...]

The sexual reality was often halfhearted and disappointing, much obsession but little passion–what D.H. Lawrence had called “sex in the head”. Men and women did not benefit from the boasted “revolution" as they had expected; it did give some people the free play they wanted, but it pushed many more into courses unsuited to their nature and capacities.

It did not install the Mohammedan paradise on earth, although everything in sight suggested it had. Pornography is a form of utopian literature and, like the advertising of Desire, it set a standard that brought on paralysis. When an erectifying drug was put on the market, the millions who rushed to obtain it numbered the healthy young as well as the ailing old, and women at once demanded its feminine equivalent. It was apparently not known that desire must be dammed up to be self-renewing.