Surrogate sex

Human sexuality is essentially a fantasy. From early adolescence to the tomb imaginary and real situations seldom coincide. But the mental ideals persist, and though some resign themselves or lose faith many pursue them to the end as a raison d’être. The fanciful search for sexual (I can’t get no) satisfaction can be extravagant and grotesque, and seems unlimited in scope, a diversity that has always been the prey of commercial interests.

Concerning sex, chimerical mental constructions have their origins in the interminable period of abstinence that society imposes on its youth. All those years sometimes prolonged into psychosis, of an arid sexual desert full of mirages where it is all in the mind. Adolescence romanticises sexuality because it has no other outlets, and the whimsical story has no boundaries as its confrontation with reality is forbidden by society. Adolescents are parked in a sexual dream world by morals and law, and very few manage to escape in adulthood. Their vital urges have been bottled up for so long that the final realisation is often catastrophic, provoking a regression to phantasmal representations and sexual substitutes. As Vance Packard commented a long time ago, “The motivational analysts began finding that a major sexual need of both men and women in America at mid-century was sexual reassurance. Women by the millions were yearning for evidence that they were still basically feminine; and men by the millions were yearning for evidence that they were still indisputably and virulently masculine. Merchandisers were quick to see the possibilities of offering both products that would serve as reassuring symbols.” (1) The prolonged fantasises of an adolescent sexual limbo could be exploited throughout adult life, commercially and politically.

Originally – and in many societies to this day – sexual abstinence concerned the male population. Girls were married at or shortly after puberty to an unknown adult, and faced the different and no more enviable fate of legalised rape. Children were their parent’s work force, and weddings were parental alliances. Sexual freedom could only distract youth from their essential functions. Also, boys are potential soldiers and sexual deprivation is a psychological inducement to violence. And even if child labour, child brides and child soldiers are at present frowned on and legislated against, the same scheme is simply applied at a later age. And the taboo on adolescent sexual experimentation remains as firm as ever. It is so ancient and so ingrained that it may be indestructible and will remain a basic obstacle to significant social and cultural transformations, as the same reproduces the same for ever.

Repressed sexuality breeds insecurity and the need for authority, the authority of political power, of science and religion, and of commercial advertising. It has been through the ages the subject of a lot of literature, and according to Freud is the basis of Western culture. But it also has a dark side that is generally denied and regularly explodes in a morbid media flurry around some particularly atrocious crime. The impulses find numerous ways out beyond infantile regressions and commercial addictions, and these strange paths fill the psychiatric annals. This is considered to be collateral damage, the price to pay for the social mainstays of authority and culture. What is uncertain, however, is whether societies actually require ominous father figures to command them, or the pathetic tragedies of Tristan, Romeo and Werther. Instead of being a pathogenic life-long obsession, sex could be a youthful recreational pastime, which would be the end of the world as it is.

1. The Hidden Persuaders, Cardinal editions 1958, page 74