Extracts from The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, which’ll be published on 2 Feb 2012.

I wish ideas like these were more widely known - that it was common knowledge quite how culturally contingent and historically specific our attitudes to gender and sexuality are. This would give people a lot more freedom.

The orgasm became a battleground: was the “apocalyptic orgasm” the key to revolution, as Reich and Mailer claimed, or a false aim that camouflaged the hipster’s narcissistic and hedonistic selfishness?

Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love - or the Orgasmatron - with a philosophy that true political revolution would be possible only once sexual repression was overthrown. Nice article about how his ideas became fashionable in the US post-WW2 among the Beat Generation and other writers & intellectuals.

Nice point at the end:

Reich’s ideas certainly became a rallying point for a new generation of dissenters, and his orgone box, however unlikely an idea it may now seem, became a symbol of the sexual revolution. But it was also a symbol of how the use of images of sexual liberation to sell things had become big business; when it was realised that new sexual attitudes couldn’t be contained, they were exploited. In January 1964, Time magazine declared that “Dr Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big orgone box.”

With today’s model, it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night. From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes larger-than-life-sized images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books that a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotica. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.

[…]

Sexual liberation, despite its apparent eventual successes, might be interpreted, as the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested (with reference to Reich), as having ushered in “a more devious and discreet form of power”

The massive carnal void at the heart of “sexy”, which is not at all sex but nonetheless a kind of desire, still - desire to be young cool attractive, to be wanted, desire to be desired, desire to rebel in just the right way, desire to fit in, desire for the mirror to look back at you and say, Yes. You are part of society. You exist.

Laurie Penny, aka @PennyRed, writing in the New Statesman on the Erotica show at Olympia.

It looks like an SEO string for the most attention-grabbing subjects on the internet 2010, which might explain why the Sunday Times commissioned cultural critic Camille Paglia to write about why Lady Gaga means Sex is Over.

Which is to say, how the archetype of the sexy cinematic blonde has now been obliterated by Gaga’s non-stop cultural quotation / appropriation, (somehow when Madonna did this it was ok,) with lots of tasty asides about how Gen Y are so digital we can’t speak / feel / fuck any more.

Overall the article was quite entertaining (it successfully made me pay for a real dead-trees copy of the Sunday Times, extraordinary!) but not entirely coherent - a sub-Baudrillard piece that correctly identified the proliferation of symbols, but yet could not see that such a deluge is as much constructive as destructive.

I will, soon, do some proper reading of B. and come back to this. For now, however, I shall simply appropriate comments left under the (underwhelming) Guardian article in follow-up…

On a more serious note, I actually think Gaga is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. Madonna’s use of sex might have been revolutionary at first - maybe - but in any case, it quickly became less about sex - and all the messy, subversive, human experience it entails - than about making money. Gaga, I would say, recognises this, and does not try to sell sex as such - instead, she creates an image of sexuality that is so relentlessly artificial that it reminds us of just how trite and used-up most ‘artistic’ representations of sexuality nowadays are.

And I think Paglia, in her hand-wringing about mutilation and death, might also be missing the point. Freud postulated that there is a death drive at least as powerful as the death drive; countless others have pointed out that the loss of self via sex is comparable to a kind of death (not for nothing is climaxing called ‘la petite mort’ in French). Maybe Gaga is actually drawing our attention back to this darker side of human sexuality in her own way - now that would be a really interesting move.

said Feierabend

Gaga is an entertainer doing a pretty good job of one-upping a milieu that adores “trashiness.” Her native environment - the pop-industrial complex - revels in cheapness and disposability: buy it, throw it out, get the flashier new one. The product isn’t supposed to have substance; if it did, the consumer might be satisfied. Shape-shifting Gaga embodies this principle - she’s a mile high but just an inch deep. Where the previous product had flash, Gaga has flash, bells, whistles, and big shiny whirling things - and she’ll keep adding gew-gaws until the whole structure topples over.

said Ciccina

The argument Paglia should have made was one about surfaces.

WOW.

“Some critics of “hook-up culture” have suggested, more or less moralistically, that the problem is that all this casual sex is going to mess with girls’ heads. But whatever you think of casual sex, it’s not new. What’s mind-boggling is how girls are able to understand engaging in it, especially when it’s unidirectional, as a form of power.

Jean-Paul Sartre, taking a cue from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, proposed in “Being and Nothingness” that what moves human beings to do things that don’t quite square with one another is that we are metaphysical amalgams. Like everything else in the world, we have a nature: we’re bodily, we can’t control what happens around us, and we are constantly the objects of other people’s judgments. Sartre called this part of ourselves “being-in-itself.” But at the same time we’re subjects, or what he, following Hegel, called “being-for-itself”: we make choices about what we do with our bodies and appetites, experience ourselves as the center of our worlds and judge the passing show and other people’s roles in it. For Sartre, the rub is that it’s impossible for us to put these two halves of ourselves together. At any given moment, a person is either an object or a subject.

The Cartesian dualism that drives Sartre’s understanding of human beings as metaphysically divided from themselves is decidedly out of fashion these days. Most contemporary philosophers of all stripes reject the idea that we possess selves that are made of more than one type of metaphysical stuff. But we shouldn’t forget that the claim at the heart of Sartre’s picture is thoroughly phenomenological: it’s not so much that people are split as that they experience themselves as such. Notoriously, Sartre was convinced that we are inclined to deal with the schism by acting in “bad faith.” On occasion we find ourselves pretending that we’re pure subjects, with no fixed nature, no past, no constraints, no limits. And at other times we fool ourselves into believing that we’re pure objects, the helpless victims of others’ assessments, our own questionable proclivities, our material circumstances, our biology. Sartre’s view gives us a way to understand how a girl might construe her sexually servicing a random guy or shaking her thong-clad booty at a video camera as an act of unadulterated self-expression and personal power. But this interpretation comes at the cost of an epistemic superiority complex, according to which young women are hiding from themselves the ugly truth about what they’re “really” doing.

Leave it to Simone de Beauvoir to take her lifelong partner Sartre to task on this very point. If you have it in your head that “The Second Sex” is just warmed-over Sartre, look again. When it comes to her incredibly detailed descriptions of women’s lives, Beauvoir repeatedly stresses that our chances for happiness often turn on our capacity for canny self-objectification. Women are — still — heavily rewarded for pleasing men. When we make ourselves into what men want, we are more likely to get what we want, or at least thought we wanted. Unlike Sartre, Beauvoir believed in the possibility of human beings’ encountering each other simultaneously as subjects and as objects. In fact, she thought that truly successful erotic encounters positively demand that we be “in-itself-for-itself” with one another, mutually recognizing ourselves and our partners as both subjects and objects. The problem is that we are inclined to deal with the discomfort of our metaphysical ambiguity by splitting the difference: men, we imagine, will relentlessly play the role of subjects; women, of objects. Thus our age-old investment in norms of femininity and masculinity. The few times that Beauvoir uses the term “bad faith” she’s almost always lamenting our cleaving to gender roles as a way of dealing with what metaphysically ails us, rather than, à la Sartre, scolding women for doing the best they can in an unjust world.

The goal of “The Second Sex” is to get women, and men, to crave freedom — social, political and psychological — more than the precarious kind of happiness that an unjust world intermittently begrudges to the people who play by its rules. Beauvoir warned that you can’t just will yourself to be free, that is, to abjure relentlessly the temptations to want only what the world wants you to want. For her the job of the philosopher, at least as much as the fiction writer, is to re-describe how things are in a way that competes with the status quo story and leaves us craving social justice and the truly wide berth for self-expression that only it can provide.

Lady Gaga and her shotgun companions should not be seen as barreling down the road of bad faith. But neither are they living in a world in which their acts of self-expression or self-empowerment are distinguishable, even in theory, from acts of self-objectification. It remains to be seen whether philosophers will be able to pick up the gauntlet that’s still lying on the ground more than half a century after Beauvoir tossed it down: whether we can sketch a vision of a just world seductive enough to compete with the allures of the present one.”