Sex Crime
I have to confess an addiction to sex – but not in the way you might imagine; instead I'm addicted to sex as an expression of contra-cultural will; and always have been.
Even now, despite all the posturing that the situation has changed, there is little doubt that, culturally, we repress sex1. We repress it largely in the same ways we always have, even if for a small segment of the population (western urban middle class unmarried young women) there has been a small inclination to match the freedoms and constraints in other segments of the population2. The interest in this situation comes in the fact that the mechanisms of repression are of a piece with other mechanism of repression acting across society, and I suspect the roots of the repression issue from the same fundamentals of human behaviour3. Exemplars of freedom from these repressive tendencies, if they exist, have much to teach us, and it seems to me we recognise that: the hidden excitement in pornography, for many I think, is not the sex: it's that someone appears to sit outside constraint4.
As anyone who really knows me well will tell you, I have a deep interest in the swinging community – not because of the sex (I'm far too hypochondriac to be having sex with strangers5), but because they seem like a community beyond these bounds; beyond those cares. The irony, based on years of observation at the margins of The Lifestyle, is that swingers generally are some of the most conservative (small-c) groups out there, unable to actually escape the human need for cultural moral constraints, they simply shift the frame to match their desires while keeping all the cultural intolerance seen in the vanilla community. Few actually sit outside and they tend to be rapidly ostracised. Only a very small minority (probably around the same as in the vanilla community) genuinely seem free and at home6.
It interests me that many swingers seem to have conquered the individual taboos handed them, while heightening their commitment to, and aggressive protection of, cultural constraints, almost as if the two are linked with some fixed level of safety in their lives. This is despite the fact that one would imagine modernity would drive them in the opposite direction. For example, the taboo against clandestine infidelity seems as strong in swinger communities as it does outside – perhaps stronger – despite the fact that the most critical element of infidelity more generally is actively encouraged7,8. Liberty in one area is offset with constraint in another, in the mathematics of morality. It seems that humans can't resist the opportunity to constrain the behaviour of others, even when it appears otherwise. One would imagine, if asked, they would bridle at the thought that they displayed the same behaviours as the puritans of "The Scarlet Letter", and yet, to all intents and purposes, they do, and most humans do. This is despite something like half of both men and women engaging in infidelity and probably 100% having considered it. We imagine we are enlightened, modern, but really the core values and hypocrisies of society have little changed, even if in some areas the legal frameworks around them have altered.
Social control is not just a cultural externality, but, as Freud highlighted, an intimate part of our very makeup. And so, I continue to be fascinated by those very few people who don't fall into this camp, what their makeup is, and the pros and cons of harnessing those alternatives when confronted with the problems of modernity: of needing a more forgiving society in the face of globalism, population stress, and the unachievable allure of freedom. Although we can't assume tolerance is the answer that is best, it seems both ethically likely and that we should try it.
Notes:
1 While proximally movements like #MeToo are driven by the very real need for equality, there's an underlying distal sympathy with evolutionary constraints on male sexuality which have undoubtedly led to the same kinds of over-punitive reactions to attempted adultery we've seen throughout history. Equally, while men are keen for women to be more sexually active, the continued mixed messages around female sexual activity give nothing but a clear message about the need for women to shut down the volume of their desires as soon as they are in a relationship. On top of these apparently trite evolutionary conceits, there are broader cultural concerns about the disrupted nature of uncommodified sex in the capitalist structure, as highlighted best by Bataille.
2 For the vast number of people the quantitative element of that probably hasn't changed in the last 200 years.
3 Strangely, this isn't legal; the law is now well ahead of social constraints in terms of freedoms, at least in the West – adultery isn't illegal, and you're not allowed to use it as a murder defence, two wholly liberally-centred rules completely at odds with the stated notions, if not practical desires, of the population.
4 Albeit pornography, and classical art, have always stood on the boundary of self expression, desire, and commodification. While there can be little doubt, based on internal and external reporting, that the pornographic film business is mixed in terms of performers' protection and rights, there can be little doubt that, whether driven to it, or choosing, they sit outside of the usual constraints we live under, even down to those against nudity and exposure.
5 And, indeed, that's not my interest in sex; my actual comfort zone is with sex for intimacy with friends, but only friends – nothing less, and nothing, really, more. It has to be said, my attempts to pervert my various sexual partners to the idea of sex as an exploration of meta-political ideals have largely been unsuccessful long-term, even if temporarily, on the odd night, successful.
6 I suppose exceptions include some of the more anonymous orgiastic scenes. At least one of my male gay friends attends 'horse fair' parties (in which blindfolded 'mares' make themselves available to any number of 'stallions' who care to tally their backs with a marker). These certainly seem to sit outside of, not just cultural structures but, as much as there is a division, psychological ones. Similar heterosexual scenes exist, and if anything some seem to have even more of a concentration on debasement, as if the opposite to imposing morals is to place yourself under the boot. Strangely the reverse doesn't seem to hold, for the BDSM community seems no less morally stringent, albeit slightly more flexible on the type of relationships, and probably a little more left wing. Overall, scenes of absolutely moral absence seem rare, and, indeed, most people seem to revert to type once the fun is over.
7 The obscure and overloaded lip service to honesty in relationships, predicated on generalities which are either negated by swinging or ignored in practice by a vast number of people, swingers or not, in their actual relationships and which are founded on terrible and evil abstractions that breed intolerance of lived experience and a suspicion of people's abilities to make decisions on the basis of their personal circumstances, seems to me the perfection of human behaviour. And I don't mean that in a good way.
8 Ultimately the root of these constraints seems to be fear, and the belief that if we pay lip service to this, and ostracise others, nothing bad will happen to us, whatever our hypocrisy. This, in turn, is predicated on precarity. There'd be none of this in my socialist utopia. We are so used to this cowardly slight-of-hand across so much of human activity we barely recognise it, but is the root of much of the evils of wartime and totalitarianism.