Once the homogeneous image of society breaks, and sexuality more
than previously turns into another market commodity
(prostitution, in its hetero- and homosexual forms), once morals
and direct commitments are substituted by rules of efficiency
and population control, the language of the erotic is emptied. It
is useless to accuse people of lower moral standards without
understanding that, under new conditions of human experience,
these standards simply embody ways of achieving the efficiency
that this civilization of illiteracy strives for. To own your
partner, as the marriage certificate is interpreted by some, and
to buy pleasure or perversion as one buys food or clothing, are
two different contexts for the self-constitution of the
individual. It is much cheaper-and I cringe to state this so
bluntly-to buy sexual pleasure, regardless how limited and
vulgar it can be, than to commit oneself to a life of reciprocal
responsibility, and unavoidable moments of inequity. The economic
equation is so obvious that facing it, one ends up discouraged.
But this equation is part of the broader equation of high
expectations defining the illiterate practical experience of
self- constitution in a world of a very large scale. In this
equation, access to pornographic sites on the Internet can
indeed appear to some as an issue of freedom of speech or
freedom of choice.
Even those living outside the platinum and diamond belt of wealth
and prosperity partake in the illiterate expression of sexuality
as this created global markets of prostitution, pornography, and
vulgarity, or widely opened the doors to sexual experimentation.
From food, music, and photography, to video, films, and clothing,
almost everything seems to address sexuality, moreover, to
stimulate it. Crime and sex drive the market (the art market
included) more than anything else. All age groups are addressed
on their own biological and cultural terms; all backgrounds,
including ethnic and religious, are involved in the fabric of
sex messages. One million children are forced yearly into the
sex market, the majority of them from poor countries. People who
do not know how to read or write, and who probably never will,
live under the seduction of the Calvin Klein label and will
imitate the lascivious moves of the models through which they
learn about them. Enormous numbers of people who might not have
appropriate shelter, or enough food, buy Madonna videos and
indulge in the fantasy that sexual freedom embodies in their
particular illiterate expression.
Today, humans no longer share a literate notion of the sexual,
but display a multitude of attitudes and involve themselves in a
variety of experiences, which include the expectation of a
common denominator, such as the family used to be. Humans tamed
their own nature and discovered, at the peak of what seemed to
become a collective sense of invulnerability, that there are
still points of individual vulnerability. Some are reviving
hopes of chastity and clean marriages, of generalized
heterosexuality-in short, of a return to the safe shores of an
idealized erotic experience of the past. Sexuality, however,
always had its bright and dark sides. Suffice it to recall the
explicit images in the ruins of Pompeii, or those in Indian and
Japanese art. Sometimes, not even our most aggressive sex
magazines, porno shops, Hollywood crap, and Internet sites
equal their boldness. But people have managed to hide the dark
side, or at least what could be construed as such, and to
propagate, through literacy, the sublime erotic poem, the clean
erotic novel, the romance, the love songs and dances, and
everything else testifying to the sublime in love. What is new in
the context of the civilization of illiteracy is that one side
no longer excludes the other. To be is to be different, even if
the biological equation of only two sexes seems so limiting.
Becoming more indirect and transitory, human relations affect
sexuality and the ability to cope with what is defined as
deviant erotic behavior in respect to tradition. AIDS will not
turn back events that made the current pragmatic context
necessary. Rather, it will add to the demystifying of love and
sex, and thus effectively bridge between genetic research and
the self-perpetuation drive of the species, rationalized in
formulas meeting higher levels of efficiency, resources, and
human reproduction. Such formulas, more sophisticated than the
progressions Malthus used, are already tested by various
organizations concerned with strategies for avoiding human
self-destruction by overpopulation. A condom is cheaper than
giving birth; all the pills women swallow over a lifetime are
far less costly than taking care of one child. It should not
surprise that Japan, committed to all the values of literacy and
the sexuality attached to them, is reluctant to adopt the pill.
The country has a very low birth rate, so low that its leaders
are justified in fearing that soon Japan will not have enough
people to fuel the economy through production and consumption.
Still, Japan sees a relation between the pill and the state of
morality as part of the cultural homogeneous fabric on which it
relies. Nobody really doubts that the globality of human
experience, to which Japan contributed through its productive
genius probably more than any country, will catch up with it.
Sexually, the literate Japanese are no less daring than the
illiterate Americans.
To continuously tend towards having more at the cheapest price-in
many ways an expression of rape of other people's work and
resources-means to exhaust not only the object, but also the
subject. Rape, one of the most heinous crimes people commit,
generalized in political and economic rape, projects sexuality
and its powerful action even outside the biological realm of
human life. To want all (especially all at once) means to want
nothing in particular. At the end of the total sexual experience
lies nothing but disappointment for some; for others, the next
experience. Profoundly subjective, deeply individual, unique and
irrepeatable, human sexuality has meaning only to the extent
that it remains an integrating factor, relating individual
destiny to that of the species. The similarity between the
creative and sexual acts might explain why changes similar to
those occurring in erotic experience can be identified in the
artistic, scientific, or political practice of the civilization
of illiteracy. Unless we understand the many implications of
such changes, we would only leap into a vortex of wild
conjecture. Family is the part of the experience of human
self-constitution in which such implications are most likely to
have a profound effect.