This is not about being anti-sex. This is not a call for a return to a puritan past where intercourse was had and not heard. It is not about being prudish, or easily embarrassed, or unliberated. But it is about anger, about feeling short-changed and wanting to shake awake the majority of us who have been badgered into apathy by the sexual saturation of modern Western culture. It is about taking back control of sex, its meaning and its representation from the market before it's too late. It's about celebrating the human freedom that sex embodies, how desire can take us to the heart of our greatest potential: that in a moment we might be anybody or anything.
Is this really our world, where it is no longer strange to see pictures of breasts on the side of buses? Where it is considered hip for middle-class men and women to visit swanky lap-dancing clubs while remaining oblivious to the continuum of exploitation that links those polished performers with the crack-addicted working girls on the street corner. Where celebrity magazines detail at length the copulation techniques of minor celebrities, but their readers remain unable to choose on any given night whether they'd rather sleep alone -- a third of young women say that they have been coerced into sex.
Similar data for young men does not exist, but I wonder how often they too feel pinioned by expectation.
This is what sexual liberation, co-opted by commerce, has delivered for women and men. A few years ago Germaine Greer pointed out that while in the 1970s she had fought for women's right to say yes to sex and not to be judged for their appetites, nowadays she felt appalled that women no longer had the right to say no, for fear of being branded inhibited and repressed.
The values of the market have turned sex into a competitive sport: better, faster, in ever more inventive contortions. The raunch culture identified by the US writer Ariel Levy puts forward pole-dancing lessons and no-strings liaisons as evidence of liberation, because women are, apparently, now able to consume sex on an equal footing with men. Female sexuality is celebrated as increasingly voracious, yet the images of women presented by advertisers are eager to please, easy to satisfy and as challenging as a blow-up doll.
But how does the white noise of public sex affect personal sexual development? There is some evidence that teenagers are becoming more confident about reporting rapes and sexual assaults. But if younger women know that they have the right not to be abused, they still don't think they have the right to satisfying, respectful sex, as the brilliant movie Kidulthood, about the lives of adolescents growing up in west London, documents starkly.
To desire and be desired can be many things: funny, awkward, transforming, sacred and profane. To be honest about what turns you on demands a particularly intimate bravery. But for all we are overinformed about how other people while away their bedroom hours, about what's hot and what's not, men and women are no closer to developing a common erotic language. Indeed, it seems that that private language is being gradually eradicated from the public domain by the megaphone imperialism of cultural sexism.
It is a reasonable question to ask -- do men and women bring the same expectations to sexual intercourse? Most national surveys show that women want sex less often than men, experience orgasm less often and find greater satisfaction in emotional intimacy than in genital sex.
But does this really mean that women are naturally cuddle-centric, finding it impossible to separate sex from love? Some would suggest that the higher male sex drive has a Darwinian rationale. I lean towards a more cultural explanation -- that young girls are taught from an early age that sex is part of a romantic narrative involving love, partnership and children, while boys are told that it is a discrete act underpinning masculinity. The teenagers I know still find themselves stuck with the slapper/stud convention around promiscuity. It seems to me that we need gender, as much as sex, education in our schools.
The process of expressing our wanting of another person is necessarily opaque; seduction is by its nature a masque. But this is very different from the wholesale sexual irresponsibility encouraged by cultural sexism. The British journalist Madeleine Bunting has charted the way that the expectation of sexual availability leads both men and women to outsource the role of seducer to media culture.
We have been conned into choosing the faux rebellion of visiting a strip club over the far more taxing mutiny of taking full responsibility for how, why and with whom we want to have sex.
There can be no prescription -- too many moralizers have tried and failed to codify desire. But we need to stop fooling ourselves that we can translate the sleazy simulacrum of sexual freedom from the billboards into our personal lives. To live the kind of sexual lives that are genuinely liberated, responsible and pleasurable, we're going to need a new manifesto.
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