Raw Sexual Subculture

Walking through the local park, thinking about Jane’s email. Strange how she’s picking on the same thing preoccupying me, our culture’s crass mishandling of sexual matters. Everything divided into false pigeonholes. Neatly labeled. Sowing wild oats. Settling down. In love. Wedding. Happily married. Midlife crisis. Divorce. Remarry. Get old. Die.

All harmless enough, if vacuous. The trouble is, as Jane says, life imitates. Even if you yourself shy away from the fatuities, others won’t, the false cultural construct still shapes their minds, forms their expectations. So you either conform, living a lie. Or you rebel and explain, causing incomprehension and pain. Or you rebel and lie.

In the park, a mother and grandmother chatting, smiling, a doll in a pushchair, the child pushing. A sacred triangular relationship. No such wrenching disjunction between life and culture there, they’re behaving with sweet naturalness, and exactly in line with their assigned roles.

Maybe it’s in the nature of sex, it’s just too feral, it can’t be culturally captured, domesticated. As Jane says, Dionysian abandon versus Apollonian order, with cultural mendacities inclining toward Apollo. Culture thereby spinning to oblivion. Thereby leaving a vacuum.

There’s the rub, the deep pulsing heart of sex won’t go away, it pushes through the falsehoods, filling the vacuum. A new raw sexual subculture. Thousands of new porn videos a day, free for all to see on the internet. Oral sex, anal sex, orgies. French sex, German sex, Russian sex. Outdoor, lesbian, cartoon. Each watched hundreds of thousands or millions of times.

Forget novels, plays, journals. Watch a porn movie instead. Or lay out the cost of a theatre ticket and try a multi-sensory immersive participative experience, half an hour with an escort, no longueurs.

Fine for men, I wonder what women do. Most seem to find porn boring, the number of escorts offering services to women is insignificant. Maybe they’re like those people I saw, grandmother, mother, child, maybe sex isn’t important to them. Could that be right? Those people certainly made a very picture of unsexual familial happiness so beloved of, what was Jane’s expression, social mores.

Maybe for some, but that doesn’t apply to Jane. She can’t be the only one. You sense a great ocean of female sexual unhappiness corresponding to men’s. Well, women’s problems, not for me to solve, I wouldn’t be that presumptuous. And vice versa, hopefully.

Walking under the trees, feeling connected with Jane, kindred hearts thousands of miles apart. I hope she finds a way forward, maybe finds a lover like she plans, that would be wonderful.