Longer life and the ability to enjoy the fruits of industry
altered attitudes towards sex, especially reproduction.
Sexuality and marriage were postponed to the third decade of
life as people acquired more training in their quest for a better
life. Children were no longer a matter of continuity and
survival. After decades of denying the strength of nature's
drive towards self-perpetuation of a species, today we again
recognize that sexual life starts very early. But this
realization should not have come as a surprise. Juliet's mother
was worried that Juliet was not married at the age of 13.
Beyond the realization of early sexuality, we notice that
adolescents have multiple sex partners, that the average
American is bound to have 37 sex partners in his or her
lifetime, that prohibitions against sodomy are ignored, and that
half the population is involved in group sex. Statistics tell us
that 25% of the adult population uses pornography for arousal
and another 30% uses contraptions bought in sex shops; 33- 1/3%
of married couples have extra-marital affairs; the average
marriage lasts 5 years; the open practice of homosexuality
increases 15% annually. Incest, bestiality, and sexual practices
usually defined as perverse are reaching unheard of proportions.
It's not that changes in sexual experience take place, but that
practices known from the earliest of times assert themselves,
usually by appealing to the literate notion of freedom. As with
many aspects of the change human society undergoes, we do not
know what the impact of these sex practices will be. Probably
that is the most one can say in a context that celebrates
permissiveness as one of the highest accomplishments of modern
society. Such changes challenge our values and attitudes, and
make many wonder about the miserable state of morality. We
already know about the cause and physical effects of AIDS. We do
not even know how to wonder what other diseases might come upon
humanity if the human relation with animals moves in the
direction of bestiality. "Is this the price we pay for
democracy?" is asked by people accused of having a conservative
leaning. Enthusiasts celebrate an age of unprecedented
tolerance, indulgence, and freedom from responsibility. But no
matter to which end of the spectrum one leans, it should be
clear that these considerations are part of the pragmatics of
sexuality in the civilization of illiteracy. Shorter cycles are
characteristic not only of production, but also of sexual
encounters. Higher speed (however one wants to perceive it),
non-linearity, freedom of choice from many options, and the
transcendence of determinism and clear-cut dualistic distinctions
apply to sexuality as they apply to everything else we do.
Although it is a unique experience, impossible to transmit or
compare, and very difficult to separate from the individual,
sex is widely discussed. Media, politicians, and social
scientists have transformed it into a public issue; hypocrites
turn it into an object of derision; professionals in sexual
disorders make a good living from them. Sex is the subject of
economic prognosis, legal dispute, moral evaluation, astrology,
art, sports, and so on. One should see what is made public on
the World Wide Web. Highly successful networked pages of
pornographic magazines are visited daily by millions of people,
as are pages of scientific and medical advice. Questions
referring to sexuality in its many forms of expression increase
day by day. Questions about sex have also extended to areas
where the sexual seems (or seemed) excluded-science,
technology, politics, the military. For example, the
contraceptive pill, which has changed the world more than its
inventors ever dreamed of, and more than society could have
predicted, has also changed part of the condition of the sexual.
The abortion pill (with a name-RU486-that reminds us of computer
chips) only accentuates the change, as do many scientific and
technological discoveries conceived with the purpose of sexually
stimulating the individual or augmenting sexual pleasure.
Emancipation-social, political, economic, as well as
emancipation of women, children, minorities, nations-has also
had an impact on sexual relations. As such, emancipation results
from different pragmatic needs and possibilities, and reflects
the weaker grip of literate norms and expectations. Emancipation
has reduced some of sexuality's inherent, and necessary,
tension. It freed the sexual experience from most of the
constraints it was subjected to in a civilization striving for
order and control. Still, individual erotic experiences have
often culminated not in the expected revelations, stimulated by
the use of drugs or not, but in deception, even desperation. This
is explained by the fact that, more than any activity that
becomes a goal in itself, sexuality without the background of
emotional contentment constitutes individuals as insular,
alienated from each other, feeling used but not fulfilled. Lines
of a similar sway were written by opponents of sexual
emancipation, and as a suggestion of a price humans pay for
excess. These lines were articulated also by firm believers in
tolerance, free spirits who hardly entertain the thought of
punishment (divine or otherwise).
Concerns over human sexuality result from the role of scale and
the erotic dimension. Within a smaller scale, one does not feel
lost or ignored. Small-scale experiences are constraining, but
they also return a sense of care and belonging. The broader the
scale, the less restrictive the influence of others, but also the
more diminished the recognition of individuality. In the modern
megalopolis, the only limits to one's sexual wishes are the
limits of the individual. Nonetheless, at such a scale,
individuality is continuously negated, absorbed in the anonymity
of mediocre encounters and commercialism. The realization that
scale relates not only to how and how much we produce, and to
changes in human interaction, but also to deeper levels of our
existence is occasioned by the sexual experience of
self-constitution in a framework of permissiveness that
nullifies value. The human scale and the altered underlying
structure of our practical experiences affect drives, in
particular the sexual drive, as well as reproduction, in a world
subjected to a population explosion of exponential proportions.
The entire evolution under consideration, with all its positive
and negative consequences, has a degree of necessity which we
will not understand better by simply hiding behind moral slogans
or acknowledging extreme sexual patterns. No person and no
government could have prevented erotic emancipation, which is
part of a much broader change affecting the human condition in
its entirety. The civilization of illiteracy is representative
of this change insofar as it defines a content for human
experiences of self-constitution, including those related to
sexuality, which mark a discontinuity in sexual patterns. Sex
dreams turn into sex scripts on virtual reality programs within
which one can make love to a virtual animal, plant, to oneself,
projected into the virtual space and time of less than clear
distinctions between what we were told is right and wrong.
Telephone sex probably provides just as much arousal, but against
fees that the majority of callers can hardly afford. Less than
surprising, lesbians and gays make their presence known on the
Internet more than in literate publications. Discussions evolve,
uncensored, on matters that can be very intimate, described in
titillating terms, sometimes disquietingly vulgar, obscene, or
base, by literate standards. But there are also exchanges on
health, AIDS prevention, and reciprocal support. Gay and lesbian
sexuality is freely expressed, liberated from the code language
used in the personal columns of literary publications.