sexual revolutions old and new

There are many aspects of the current Cultural Revolution that are, in my opinion, deceptive. What appears to be going on is not what is really going on. That’s particularly the case with sex and gender identity. I’ve written abut this before but I’m trying to flesh out my ideas a bit more.

It’s easy to assume that the explosion of pornography and the growing influence of gender identity politics is just an extension of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. I don’t think that’s the case. The 1960s/70s Sexual Revolution was all about sex. The objective was more sex and better sex. To an extent it succeeded. The amount of sex that people were having in the 60s and 70s has been exaggerated but there’s little doubt that overall people were indeed having more sex.

The current Sexual Revolution isn’t about sex at all. It’s about identity. To a considerable extent it represents a flight from actual sex. It’s a way of avoiding actual sex. Young people appear in practice to be having less sex than young people in the 60s and 70s.

One interesting thing is that while it appears that sex has never been more widely and more openly discussed that appearance is slightly deceptive. In the 60s and 70s people really were talking widely and openly about sex. There was also a real enthusiasm for finding out how human sexuality actually worked. In academia people like Masters and Johnson were trying to investigate sex in a rigorous scientific way. Their books were bestsellers. There were lots of other bestsellers on the subject. Some were scientific nonsense (such as Shere Hite’s infamous book which was rendered useless because it relied on self-selected samples) but they were all indicative of the interest in the topic.

Another fascinating phenomenon of the time was bestselling books on female sexual fantasies, and those books were indicative of a genuine desire to understand female sexuality.

I don’t see that sort of thing so much these days. The focus is on identity rather than on sex itself. People might identify as a polyamorous genderfluid queers but I get the feeling that many of those people aren’t getting any sex and may well be afraid of sex. Back in the 70s people didn’t worry about which of the 117 different gender identities they belonged to. They were more likely to just say, “Let’s take our clothes off and see what happens.”

I have a suspicion that the change of focus occurred because many people, especially feminists, started getting nervous about what was being discovered. They were worried that men and women might really turn out to be different. They were worried that male sexuality and female sexuality might really turn out to be totally different. To some extent the 117 genders we have today may be an attempt to evade the unpleasant truth that men and women are not the same sexually.

Feminists were also pretty worried about those books on female sexual fantasies. They thought women should be having fantasies about equality but instead women were fantasising about being gang-banged or being tied up by a man and spanked. I remember being very amused when a hardline feminist friend admitted to having lurid and extremely satisfying fantasies about being a harem girl. And being even more amused when another hardline feminist friend was driven into a sexual frenzy by watching The Story of O.

Which brings us to another point – how curious it is that these days only a very narrow range of alternative expressions of sexuality (as distinct from gender) is celebrated. I’m still waiting to see a BDSM Pride March or a Foot Fetish Pride March.

We live a very curious age. In some ways we’re a lot more sexually repressed than the Victorians.