There’s an advert emblazoned on the sides of London double-decker buses for a computer game: ”Paste your girlfriend’s white bits here.” Another irritating sexualisation of public space, another insistent, insidious message of how culture shapes expectations of our sexuality, another reminder of one’s own powerlessness to assert other images of sexuality with anything like comparable prominence. Imagine: could I have an equivalent number of double deckers trumpeting the message that sex is the magical experience of mutual giving?
Boring … duh … The problem about our pervasive cultural sexism is that the debate is tilted all one way. Pornography is colonising all other forms of media; occasionally a brave voice such as that of the New York magazine writer Ariel Levy speaks out, but, despite the force of her arguments, a multimillion-pound industry will carry on churning out the websites, DVDs and magazines that are distorting our sexual mores. While the cash rolls in, millions of lives are muddled, sometimes even ruined, by the multiple misconceptions being peddled.
Men and women plot their way with bitter bravado through a minefield of sexual mores that bear little relation to their own desire for sexual fulfilment: they recount the mismatched expectations, the lack of romanticism and the huge quantities of alcohol required to mask the self-doubt. Peer pressure engineers a culture of sexual availability: men no longer need to seduce women — they’ve outsourced that role to a media culture — while women’s capacity to consent has been culturally massaged long before they ever get near the bed.
The rise of raunch — the explicit flaunting of one’s sexuality — is all about how we’ve been persuaded to advertise our desirability. The latter is no longer a process of conscious and playful revelation but must be in yer face — I’m sexy, geddit? It’s as boring as preferring to eat slabs of meat off a chopping board than a plate of pleasingly arranged, deliciously cooked food.
Another of the many concepts of the market that have infiltrated intimacy is an instrumentalism: ”I get this need met in return for meeting her need on that.” At its crudest there is no responsibility to the other person beyond the striking of the deal. That instrumentalism absolves the individual from any wider consideration of their lover’s wellbeing. The only responsibility is to pop the question and register the one-word answer: yes or no. It is a very thin concept of consent.
The inadequacy of this truncated responsibility was made clear in the collapse of a rape trial in south Wales last November because ”drunken consent is still consent”. Aren’t the ethics of all intimate relationships, especially sexual ones, based on response-ibility? You can’t divorce responding to a person (which sex is) from responsibility for the lover’s wellbeing as well as your own.
There are other metaphors of the market distorting our behaviour: the compulsion to compete and excel is now as true of the bed as the office. We’ve deregulated the market in intimacy over the past 30 years; as the taboos and inhibitions have been dismantled, so the pressure to sexually perform has emerged. Looking ahead, one can see how the proliferation of virtual reality will only multiply current confusion. As porn technology becomes ever more sophisticated, the boundary between relationships with real people and fantasy creatures will become increasingly blurred; hence the sense of foreboding prompted by the aforementioned bus advert.
The intriguing question is why we have been susceptible to this reconfiguration of our sexuality in line with market principles. The answer is that we’ve been seduced by a dream of sexual liberation, but what we’ve ended up with is a tatty cardboard-cutout version — perhaps the people who are the most promiscuous are the least liberated, the least likely to have a purchase on the total abandonment of sexual pleasure.
There’s been no golden age when people succeeded in matching their desire for sexual pleasure with their needs for emotional fulfilment and security; this has probably been the arena of human relationships most riven with conflicting and contradictory irrationality throughout history. Just don’t make the false assumption that we are more liberated than previous generations: we are as badly served by cultural conventions as ever. — Â