The Promiscuity Revolution- Destroying the Power of Sex

I have said before that ultimately I hope that the revolution, when it comes, will not just be a political revolution, but a cultural one.

And one massive sea change I hope will happen will be what I see as the third and final phase of the feminist revolution and the second and more comprehensive phase of the sexual revolution.

My essential view on sex is thus.

Now we have separated sex from reproduction, now we have made sex ‘safe’- and it will become increasingly more so, I do have faith that we will eradicate AIDS, syphilis, Chlamydia and all those other irritations- this radically alters how we need view sex and its role in human society.

And so let us ask ourselves- what role does it CURRENTLY play in our society and does that role do more harm than good?

The reality is that sex is in fact a basic bodily function. Not just sex, but also intimacy, are things we all crave. Badly. We don’t die without them, but we all need it.

And because of how much we need it, it acquires power. As a commodity.

In fact, so much of our culture is actually geared up to the buying and selling of sex. We ourselves- every one of us- live lives geared up to buying and selling OUR OWN sexual favours.

The curious thing about sex, is that isn’t a resource. Not like food. Let us say two people, a man and a woman are sitting side by side in a room devoid of food. They cannot feed eachother. The food has to be got from somewhere.

But we have a society where most people deliberately starve themselves of sex for one purpose and one purpose alone- so they can sell their sex as a commodity.
We deliberately choose to make it expensive.

What never seems to occur to us, is that what we do is contribute to keeping the price high. We feel we do not want to devalue it.

Which is strange really. If someone told us that tomorrow, modern scientific advances would mean that all food now only cost a tenth of what it now costs, we’d think that an advance.
And yet with sex- we ourselves have the power to devalue it. As a culture.

I guess this one thing I’ve hesitated in actually saying. Precisely because people get wary when they hear of sex being cheapened. And yet of course, that really is what I am proposing.

The value of anything is related to supply and demand. With most commodities the supply depends on ability to produce. But with sex, it really is true that there are absolutely no limits on the supply. It really is a matter of choice. We as a culture choose NOT to supply to the degree we could, so as to increase the demand relative to supply, so as to keep the price high.

Furthermore, we encouraged women to believe it was something they themselves didn’t enjoy. That made them dirty. So really, if a woman valued herself, she sold high.

The purpose of this, was to get men to pay for sex, basically.
Now why did we want this to be so? Well, because although that’s what men were paying for, their payments were used to pay for the offspring sex produced.

The whole point of Judaeo-Christian morality regarding sex is to ensure that the price men have to pay for sex is high. So the supply is limited and confined by moral codes and a rigidly constrained set of cultural constructs designed to price sex outside of wedlock out of the market. Because the price involves getting stoned to death.

Now in primitive society, the payloads of this system were so great that some of the evils created by this control of sex could be ignored.

Firstly, it creates the culture in which sexual offences flourish. There does seem to be good evidence that the stricter a society’s sexual taboos, the more child abuse, the more rapes etc are part of it. Why? Because most rapists and child abusers are using sex as a tool of power. Because sex has overpowered them, basically. They use sex as a tool of power because they seek some kind of revenge on sex itself. Sex has twisted them. It’s not that simple and I’m not maintaining that cultures with a wider degree of sexual promiscuity are free of sexual offences. But by definition they create less hatred of sex in itself. Rapists despise female sexuality. Child abusers seek to rectify their sense of powerlessness in the face of sex by turning it onto those weaker.

Secondly, it creates sex trafficking. Women only sell their bodies because men will pay for them. We see this as exploitation, and it is, in it’s practical results. But not for the reason we generally give. The results are that women who sell their bodies are seen as selling themselves cheaply, so they either live secret lives, or live ostracised by polite society. The same society that set a high price for sex, and looks down on them- because they undercut the price.

The men who use prostitutes aren’t the whole problem. The society that treats that level of prostitution- undercutting the basic price of sex so as it becomes an underground trade, linked with heroin addiction and poverty- is as much to blame.

Because as a society we still try to maintain the ideal that the price of sex should be a white dress and a gold ring.

Now of course, I have always conceded that our attitude to sex has always been conditioned by our mode of living.

So, once we have truly moved over to communal living and we can be sure each child born is guaranteed to be provided for, once we have completely broken the connection between sex and the need to ensure that there is a price for sex- how then should we view it?

We would then be right to view its pricing as the root of so many evils in the world. And our aim should be- to cheapen it. Quite deliberately.

Shock horror from the morality brigade.

Except what the morality brigade don’t see, is that new circumstances now make the pricing of sex immoral. Our culture now serves simply to aid and abet sex as use of a power tool and a commodity, intimacy for barter, for cash, for oneupmanship, for asserting dominance.

So I would be hoping that the post revolution world will see sexual promiscuity as a virtue- every citizen ho increases the supply of sex is reducing its demand, therefore rendering sex powerless, lacking any grip whatsoever.

And all it takes to do that, is to stop people thinking that too much sex, or the wrong sort of sex, demeans and devalues them.

So- my proposal in a post revolution world would be simple. Instead of the barrier being a simple barrier at sixteen, one introduces two barriers. No one over eighteen may have sex with anyone below eighteen. However, anyone between fourteen and eighteen may have sex between anyone else in that age range.

And during that period, we totally change sex education. Instead of it being a simple explanation of how not to get pregnant, we teach adolescents that sex is good and virtuous. And encourage them to have it with eachother. Encourage them to have sex with anyone else they feel like and that to do so is virtuous.
I would actually go so far as to suggest that society pretty much insisted on everyone becoming sexually active and comfortable with sex at this level. That sex was taught in schools and as it was being taught, pupils told to go away and practice what they had learned with eachother. And that would go for both heterosexual and homosexual sex. All pupils of both sexes would be taught how to practise both and feel comfortable with both. Then it would become a matter of choice for them which they chose to practise one form to the exclusion of the other, or not. But no one would see either form as better than the other.

The benefits of this would be that once true adulthood was reached at eighteen, no one would think that sex was dirty, or think any form of consenting sex between adults was dirty. No one would think less of any woman for having had multiple sexual partners, because all women would have done- as would men. And no males would be homophobic, because even though males inclined to what we now call heterosexuality would predominate, they would all have experienced homosexual sex.

So indeed, when two people met, sex would no longer be the end game, something which games were played for to achieve, it would be the begining. The initial gesture by which two people met. Like shaking hands. Or buying someone a drink.

Would it be less pleasurable?
Of course not. It would just have no power any more. It would be something people did just because they felt like it. Something that couldn’t be bought or sold, because it had no power. Everyone gave it freely to anyone who had a reciprocal urge.

It would become a simple pleasure. The one pleasure that cost absolutely nothing to give and nothing to receive. A symbol, perhaps of the capacity of humanity to bond. And cherished as such.
And those of us who gave it most, would be seen as the most virtuous of all.

A person would not be considered virtuous be how high a price they set on their sex, but on how freely they gave it.

And a person would seek out for their true love, not someone who gave their body solely to them, but one who gave their body to many.

And sex would finally- finally- have become a true gesture of love.

A sign of the love of the species.