Society has a sex problem

Sex is a problem. It always has been. Its drives and torments once prompted Saint Augustine to plead, ‘grant me chastity and continence, but not yet’.

But something in the way we think about sex has changed. On the one hand society is sexualised to the max in fashion, music, film and, of course, online. On the other hand, people seem to be having less sex across all age groups. Sex is everywhere, yet simultaneously denied.

The way we use the word ‘sex’ today is telling. We now talk about ‘having sex’ as though there’s no one else involved. Its usage indicates a verbal divorce from human relations, just as someone today ‘falls pregnant’ as if it’s an immaculate conception. Healthcare professionals have even been instructed to talk about ‘pregnant people’ or ‘a person with a womb’ as though human beings are now asexual, self-reproducing organisms. This is a denial of sexual difference so profound it seems that any connection to another person has to be disavowed.

Sex is a canary in the coal mine of social change. At its heart sits a question of identity: where do I belong? Who am I in relation to the other? Are they my friend or enemy?

We appear uneasy talking about sex today. We talk around it instead, discoursing endlessly on toxic masculinity and Andrew Tate, violence against women and girls (which has even acquired its own acronym, VAWG), misogyny in the classroom, sex work, gender dysphoria. Even my own psychotherapy training focussed on sexual difference and perversions. Time and again we shy away from the key component of sex – desire.

If we were to take society into the consulting room, I would suggest that it has erected layers of defences deployed to ‘not know’ certain things that feel unbearable. This then begs the question, what is it about identity, and through this the sexual connection, that’s so terrifying? As with any analysis, to find out we have to peel back the layers to reveal the underlying anxiety.

On the outside of the onion, we see society’s commitment to social justice, which in its current form relies increasingly on the impulsion towards diversity and inclusion to equalise and make things fair. Essentially this means creating sameness, which opens up a paradox. We want simultaneously to celebrate difference while at the same time eliminating it.

Digging deeper, the prevalent diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) framework aims to eradicate discrimination and level society. We see this preoccupation in every form we fill out, with boxes to tick and identify us with a particular identity group. On the surface it sounds like a great idea. Figure out who’s left out and make sure the terms are engineered to accommodate them. What’s the outcome? Far from achieving integration, what we see are polarisations and hatreds more evident than at any time in my life.

Why is this and what’s it got to do with sex? Well, society wants to have its cake and to eat it. It wants to acknowledge ‘the other’ while stripping them of any alien characteristic that could be hostile. This also applies to our partner in the bedroom. Do they mirror us in their needs and desires or are they sufficiently separate that they pose no threat at all? The Dutch sociologist Eric Hendricks-Kim calls this a ‘flattening’ of difference. It ignores the reality that culture is determined not by skin colour or ethnicity but through different traditions, language, symbols and ways of being in the world which by their nature vary from context to context.

This is the intrinsic paradox. We think people share a common humanity and yet the framework of understanding through which we negotiate conflict and reach agreement is quite distinct. In attempting absorption, what we get is schism in society and sex, as differences refuse to evaporate. So why do we continue to invite the other in and yet shun love-making in favour of ‘having sex’? Because we cannot do without them. We are irreversibly connected to the other but without the ‘us’ being common. Robert Frost recognised this tension in his poem, ‘Mending Wall’: ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it’, and yet he concludes that, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’.

The implications of a defensive flattening for sexuality are profound. Desire is a two-stage process. First it seeks an object. Second, a connection. Substitute commonality for connection and either the object fails to satisfy or is split off as a plaything for us to use and abuse. To see someone as uniquely different but as real as ourselves, with their own devices and desires, risks rejection or attack, arouses envy of their attributes, demands the sacrifices of union. It is a tormenting enterprise. No wonder we would rather lean into social justice and see the other as an extension of ourselves than acknowledge their separateness and have to bear the uncertainty.

How did this happen? In his essay, How Civilisations Fall, political theorist Kenneth Minogue argued that new technologies in conjunction with feminism paved the way for equality at the expense of complementarity – that is, the idea that men and women possess distinct, naturally differing qualities and inclinations. A progressive political worldview denies essential differences in its project to reform and improve. Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis fed into this by suggesting that liberal democracy and market capitalism marked the culmination of social evolution. These ideologies worked like a magic trick to suggest that we can eliminate difference and conflict entirely.

The words of 1960s songwriters John Lennon and Joni Mitchellhelp to explain the longings that fuelled this dream. Conjuring the Kumbaya fantasy of harmonious cohabitation against a backdrop of war and devastation, Lennon imagined no countries and no religion. Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ takes this to its logical conclusion: ‘We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’ In other words, a return to the state of nothingness in a protected Eden. Even death it appears is better than the fear of separation.

The historian Christopher Lasch tracked this as the evolution of a new narcissism. He explains a deeply uneasy state of mind which seeks validation through the gaze of another, as though we need reflection to confirm that we exist. He attributed this partly to the loss of external authority, which had traditionally been provided by family, the church and community, shaping our conscience and sense of self, and an increasing focus on the therapeutic which emphasises looking inwards for a guide that is no longer there. The consequence has been an emptiness which looks out to another for the reassurance that we are somehow good enough, turning them into mirrors for our own reflections.

Difference is now a threat to our survival and not a condition to be admired and desired. We are in Mitchell’s garden with nothing to excite us except perhaps an apple threatening expulsion. How then to satisfy our appetites? We have been deprived, and the fear, anger and hatreds that this creates are turned back upon ourselves in the form of depressions and self-harm. We engage in desperate attempts to conjure that excitement through extreme forms of sex and consumption, and rage against those who deny us both the food and the reflections we so desperately seek. Steve McQueen’s film, Shame, starkly sums this up in its character’s failure to form relationships in a manic sexual acting out and a retreat to the familiarity of his sister.

The truth of desire is that it must be separate in order to combine, hence its transcendental delights and disturbances. Satisfaction requires the difference we all too often disavow today in pursuit of safety. It is a double bind and the refusal to bear uncertainty has hideous consequences. Sex is commodified. Prostitutes who offer physical relief but without a relational connection are legitimised as sex workers but fail to fulfil. Online pornographers are sanitised and recast as adult-content creators. Men become women and women become men as terror of the opposite and its potential to annihilate overwhelm. Floating between the two becomes a lifestyle choice.

The fragilities of women, issues of consent and the authorities’ intense regulation of a ‘vulnerable public’ terrify men and drive them into the dark corners of objectification and abuse. Meanwhile orgasms become the currency of relationships which then turn in on themselves as masturbation.

Sigmund Freud is clear. The drive to reproduce manifests as a fundamental pleasure principle. This is fuelled by aggression, a constitutional death wish shared by all living things. These two forces sit in an uneasy balance fraught with tension. What happens when this tension is experienced as unbearable and the separateness of the other is denied? Objectification and the ‘popularity’ of sadomasochistic sexual practices such as BDSM and choking testify to the ways in which people give into these urges whilst at the same time denying the deeper truth of what they represent. In other words, the more we try to repress our fundamental dualism in defence against annihilation, the more we create others who seek new ways to satisfy their appetites in us.

It seems however that where we fail, nature has a way of evening herself out. Unless we give into the truth of our humanity with its vicissitudes and learn to tolerate the uneasiness of negotiating Frost’s ‘good fences’, the pendulum will swing until its mechanism fractures, and conflict breaks out, as people become unable to control their emotions and abuse each other. Toleration means giving things up, sustaining disappointment, accepting sacrifice and recognising difference. The question is, can we achieve it?

Jo Cohen Jones is a writer, counsellor and group work practitioner.