(Sex as Performance Art)
By Eric Le Roy
Since in life as well as fiction, what gets left out is often even more interesting than what goes in – and since civilization is art as much as anthropology – I have sometimes wondered how sex fits into the Grand Scheme of things, especially from the psychological aspect, and for pleasure as well as mere procreation of species. For starters, its force is present in everyone, regardless of how each person chooses to handle it or is taught. At first glance, it seems – at least in its most frenetic, ecstatic, Olympian way – the province of the young.
And why shouldn’t it be? Nature brings forth the boys and girls to couple and to copulate. Nothing very mysterious in that regard. The only danger is that the testosterone (the “fuck it or kill it” hormone) that floods the ‘young, dumb, and full of cum’ guys can lead to extremely violent behavior and tragic outcomes. It’s why I no longer think of youthful soldiers going off to war with the same compassionate pity that I once did. Being older now, and observing the trigger-happy mentality of a lot of young men, I see that a certain breed of them are dying to fight somebody. All they need is a sergeant major to point them in the right direction: “The front is that way, lads!” – and off they go. Good luck, I say. The roads will be safer without them hot-rodding in and out of traffic.
And of those who once were considered ‘deviant’? Gay, lesbian, transgender – is that something we need to talk about? I don’t think so, because I don’t find that there is anything to discuss in terms of natural urges and proclivities. I’m pretty sure that we are all androgenous to an extent, and science appears to back me up there. And I also know that under extreme circumstances, people will resort to anything. Starving people will first eat their dogs and cats, and then cannibalize each other. Men stuck in prison long enough, once the shag-masters of the neighborhood, will start gobbling and buggering each other like hyenas in a feeding frenzy – when they have been deprived of female company long enough.
Upon release, most will return to form and go looking for a bottle of whiskey and a tart. Others may have found that fooling with other men was not such a bad idea, and they keep doing it. But it was in them all along, I figure. They just needed to be turned out. I mean, no thoroughly heterosexual man sits there, feeling bored and horny, and then suddenly perks up and shouts, “You know what? I think I’ll just go out and suck some guy’s cock!” Doesn’t happen like that. If he does it, it means he has been toying with the idea all along.
That’s my opinion, although I confess that an element of doubt has entered my mind in recent years. And that is because sex has become performative art, an expanding kind of exhibitism. Of course, woke psychologists will chime in: “This reflects a broadening range of acceptance.” And, as far as that goes, I’m fine with it. Kinks? Fetishes? I have no problem with any of that as long as it is between consenting adults and – best case scenario – nobody dies in the process. I am fully aware, on many levels, of the sadness and strangeness of life, and I can assure you that sexual peculiarities are not a subject that keeps me awake at night.
The problem is that sex has lost both its mystery and its intimacy – and least it has if we look at it through the lens of social media and all its derivatives. In the swirling world of optimization, the purpose of sex is to put on full display the equipment (the ‘parts’, the ‘works’) and advertise, as though it were a personal ‘brand’, the wonders that the ‘throbbing’ apparatus can perform. One might as well be in the market for a super-efficient weed-whacker or motorcycle that can blast through a rainforest or a swamp. But in some ways, it’s old school stuff with a special contemporary vacuity. For indeed, such self-advertising can even be found on the excavated walls of Pompeii. Forget the eruption of Vesuvius; massive Massimo has a big dick, and Ariadne can blow you off like you’re having a feast with Venus, the Lust Goddess.
But they had special rooms for that, and the whores were brazen. There was no pretence of anything but what you were paying for. Presumably, people courting or in meaningful relationships responded to the lyre and harp differently. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t creative. Well, I wasn’t there. But I am here now, and it is as though the sexual life of many people has been reduced to an endless search for novelty: gruesome, medieval-looking ‘toys’ on the one hand, high-tech state-of-the-art paraphernalia on the other, ‘quicky’ meetings where performance is tantamount, and often bleak ‘sex-hangovers’ that only drugs and alcohol can dull. There is, it appears, a conscious and deliberate distancing from anything beyond the surface. The result is an emptiness few can define and even fewer will admit to.
Have any of you been to a sex shop? I have. Have any of you ever watched porn, or is that a stupid question? Well, I sure have. I even went to a porn house years ago in Manhattan while I was waiting around, killing time before I had to go out to Kennedy airport for my flight to London. Times Square was full of that stuff back then, and, being the curious sort – and probably ‘half in the bag’ after a morning of drinking, I bought a ticket and went in. If I expected a narrow, smoky room with a lot of wheezing, coughing, and spunk tossing, I was disappointed. It was like a palace. A Madison Square Garden of splooge. Full House. Game Seven.
To repeat my question, have any of you been in such places? If so, how did you feel? Really, really excited, like you’d just seen the inside of a spaceship? Or did you undergo a sense of being cheapened, vaguely ashamed, and even embarrassed to be there, although it was obvious that the buxom floozy or teeth-rotted ghoul at the counter couldn’t care less. What if your Mom walked in? What if your boss from work stuck his head in the door, or your favorite teacher from school, and caught you fondling a double-headed dildo? Would you be proud? What would they think of you? (Or, interesting question, what would you think of them?)
As for sex parlors and sleazy shops, I’m not saying don’t do it; I’m just asking you a gut-level question: last time, did you feel on top of the world – or strangely diminished? If you ask me, only a sermon from a Pentecostal church could make sex feel dirtier,
Me? Well, to be straight up with you, I’ve always preferred vaguely seedy places to elegant lounges and drawing rooms. A tall, pale girl with the right face emerging from an old Soviet-style building in Russia was always a more exquisite turn-on for me than the idea of some air-brushed glamor girl jumping off the cover of a magazine. But that’s just me. In regards to the sex itself, I cherish my memories of supreme experiences with women I either deeply cared about or just desperately wanted. After many years, some of those occasions still live in my mind.
In fact, I continue to love those women, and among the ones I recall the best were – you may be surprised – the so-called one-night-stands. It’s like that sometimes, you know, and actually, one could argue that it’s a bit sad. This is nothing to do with ‘hook-up’ culture, but just another example of life’s endless capacity to be unfair, that you can ‘make love’ with your cherished, exemplary wife, husband, or longstanding partner a thousand times, and then find yourself nostalgically – or erotically – remembering, and suddenly longing for – the ‘proper stranger’ of years ago. The mind plays tricks on us, doesn’t it?.
But, for all of that, I do not have one single great memory of any time I ever pulled my pudding in the shower or indulged in a ‘quick one off the wrist’ while watching porn. It was always intimacy with somebody real, however fleeting. Love in the moment, if time or circumstance allowed for nothing else. There was never anything cold about it. Not for me. THAT’S THE POINT. It was never cold. Never perfunctory or mechanical.
Now, to me at least, it all seems different. Sex today – if what I see on the internet is an accurate reflection of modern reality – is not about love, genuine passion, or even a richly experienced eroticism. It is nothing more than jacking off inside (or on) another person. Sex for such punters seems only the physical enactment or equivalent of many hook-up ‘conversations’. Not a dialogue, are you kidding? Just emojis, etc., punctuated by the texted equivalent of a grunt.
“Uh, did ya get the pic?”
“Yeah.”
“U like what I’m packin?”
“Works for me. U cool with my stuff?”
“Hell yeah. Meet me outside the Twat Street metro at 8.”
“K… C U at 8. Don’t be L8. I aint’ got all nite.”
“No sweat. Ready Freddy. Action Jackson. That’s me.”
“Oooooo Baby, now you’re turnin’ me on.”
As we see, Romeo and Juliet were amateurs compared to these two strapped fuck muffins.
Now pay attention: I am NOT talking about puritanical squeamishness or the sexual tyranny the church imposed back in its oppressive heyday. The Christians have never been able to shake the notion that sex is basically…just dirty…kind of like the way animals shit in the street. Of course, marriage comes to the rescue (“It’s OK now. BUT KEEP IT DOWN IN THERE!! And when is the baby due?”). But for the most part, religion has lost its stranglehold. Not being Islamic, I couldn’t tell you what happens in the bedroom when the women of that regime unbind themselves from the pythons of gear they have to drag around in. Maybe they go hog wild, I wouldn’t know.
Nor am I speaking of how many times a day or a week one does the ‘wild thing’. In that sense, it becomes an assault on some imaginary record book, sort of like how many pints of stout you can down in a session. “Twelve pints of Mackeson and I knocked the bottom out of it TWICE when I got home. Hey, Lads, now that was a bit of Allllllll Right!!!!” Narcissism has its limits, and as any vagrant of the world knows, locker room sex chat from men is often more mythical than The Iliad and The Odyssey. And, besides, it just doesn’t matter. It’s not the point.
Let me put it this way, which is why I felt compelled to write this. In short, I believe that sex should contain a degree of mystery based on the seductiveness of suggestion and exhilaration of the build-up, rather than blatant self-advertising and hook-up photos of stiff dicks and dripping pussies (about as exciting as watching a jackhammer bust up a street corner); anticipation and confidence without cocksure arrogance; and even the risk of romance – all driven by an overwhelming desire not ruined by an egotistical need to conquer or impress. Sex should be intimate, not a form of product testing.
Now, I can feel the chill of the piss coming down on me from the rafters. What a gormless old bag of bones. What a spermless, spunkless clunk of a cadaver. But wait a minute. I am not saying that sex needs to be based on the soul-wrenching decision of a virgin to yield to her devoted and faithful paramour after a grand courtship long enough to kill off the grandparents of both families. Nor am I blushing at the idea that some people just have lusty appetites and simply like to ‘put it about’. In fact, hardly a merchant of virtue, I would describe myself as a decadent hedonist whose lack of impulse control has been slowed down only by advancing age. Hardly a prude. A slut, actually, if a man can claim the title. And proud of it.
So that’s not what I am talking about at all. No, it has to do with something that is actually depressing: a culture over-juiced with the need for ever-greater doses of novelty just to feel anything at all. Once upon a time, intimacy involved imagination — a slow ignition, a sense of mystery, the delicious uncertainty of another person’s interior world. You had to guess a little, wait a little, wonder. Now the erotic landscape is a digital buffet: click, swipe, repeat. The irony is that the more accessible everything becomes, the less satisfying it is. Infinite availability flattens pleasure.
It’s becoming like one of those dystopian novels (Brave New World comes to mind), where anybody can fuck anybody any time they want to, but love is forbidden. Love is the curse of the ‘perfect’ society, where the physical act is industrialized, compartmentalized, and desensitized. What’s that you say? Desensitized??? You’re joking! No, I’m not. Try thinking, and you will come to a grievous understanding that life today – for all its apparent variety of choices – is actually little more than a hapless attempt to find quality and happiness by stockpiling the transient and superficial distractions that, for a little while, make us forget how wanting, how desolate, how inadequate we have become. Technology, and all the endless ‘Tweets’ it serves up online, has robbed many, many people of the gift of imagination. Thus, they expend more to get less.
Just for the hell of it, I did some research into how many genders are now recognized (seventy-two, according to that fountain of reliable information, Google), and the bulky Catalog of Fetishes had names that would impress an Ivy League scholar. Some I recognised, many I didn’t, but it’s nice to know they’re out there in case I bump into somebody looking at me strangely. (Hmm, let’s see. I’m not an amputee…what do they want?)
But ohhh how they advertise. People today (the woke mostly) cannot wait to tell you that they are non-binary, intersectional, pansexual, and sometimes omni-sexual. The takeaway is that NONE of it sounds remotely sexual in any way that could be described as stimulating. (Hello, my name’s Megan. I’m parasexual.) Well, I’ll be goddamned. Ok, go in peace, my sister.
I have also noticed that, sexually speaking, the world is now a hotbed of ANAL pastimes. Check it out, and you’ll find it’s all the rage. I mean, I turn on a porn flick just hoping to see a slavering hotty playing the mouth-harp on some dude’s junk, and what do I get? Ass-licking and ass-fucking. Now THAT really makes me feel old-fashioned. And I can truthfully report that, of all the off-the-chain shit I’ve done in my life, ramming my tongue up another human being’s asshole and whipping it around in there like a protein shake in a blender has never been one of them. (Honey, it tastes like you must have had curry for dinner, am I right?)
But I guess I’m just out of touch.
Be that as it may, take this for what it’s worth from an old whore. The sexual imagination, once one of humanity’s great creative engines, has been reduced to an arms race. We no longer want people to know us. Just see us. And what we are advertising is invariably false. Visibility has replaced intimacy; validation has smothered affection.
And beneath all the noise hums a current of fear. For all the talk of liberation, people seem more terrified of real vulnerability than ever. The raw, awkward moments that make connection possible have been edited out. We curate even our private experiences. The result is a kind of emotional malnutrition: endless sugar, no sustenance.
It’s hard not to see the connection with our larger sense of helplessness. The world feels out of control — politics, technology, the environment — so we grasp for a handle wherever we can. What’s more controllable than one’s own body, one’s own pleasure? Except, of course, control quickly becomes compulsion. Liberation becomes routine. The more we try to master desire, the less we feel it.
I’m not speaking of some ‘right’ way as a corrective to a ‘wrong’ way. Nor am I shilling for more modesty, ritual, or pretentious ‘ceremony’. I see, for example, that people are not getting married as much now. Not having children. OK. The world changes, and I understand the reasons why the old ways no longer work in today’s hepped-up pressure cooker of manic thrashing and convulsing. So I’m not mourning the loss of modesty; I’m mourning the loss of mystery. The death of the unsaid.
Raised in a very ‘unsophisticated’ town in West Virginia, USA, and living as I did with my grandparents, I didn’t see a lot of passion. There was no physical affection, certainly nobody parading around naked, not even the crunch of bedsprings in the next room accompanied by squeaks and groans. Nothing. Sex was not in the air. I didn’t even know what a wet dream was until I had one. When I told Grandpa as he was driving me to school, he had to pull the car off the road until he could stop laughing.
At least he made up for it as soon as he twigged that I was ready to hear the ‘facts of life.’ We would drive sometimes over the winding mountains to Morgantown, and he would regale me with some of the funniest, smuttiest stories I have ever heard – and delighted in. Real small-town, West Virginia filth. Frankly, a lot of it made sex seem pretty messy and gross. But alive. Very much alive. I didn’t know if I wanted any of it or not. I didn’t know how to be free or what to make of my burgeoning, as yet unnameable desires.
Finding out was part of my odyssey in life. And, for all the drunken cavorting at 3 A.M., I also learned that sexual ecstasy can amount to a spiritual experience better than any Big Tent sermon you’ll ever hear – when it happens in a way not choreographed, manufactured, or signed off on by superfluous stuff like internet rabble and blatherings of mechanical mummies.
Tragedy can be funny in a dark way. The culture that promised infinite pleasure has produced numbness. We have become exhausted voyeurs of our own mischief. And maybe that’s the saddest part: beneath the posturing, the hashtags, vulgar boasting, there often comes, even to the cynical, a faint awareness that …something’s missing. Briefly, a pang of hunger that a hook-up burger can only squelch for a little while.
A hunger not for novelty, but for meaning. For tenderness. For the terrifying, irreplaceable vulnerability of being known — not as a product, but as a person.
This starvation we feel is really simple to explain. Deep down, we want wonders. Instead, we settle for an adrenaline rush. But it’s a junkie’s fix, and we have become junkies. Sex – that physical, psychological, and, yes, spiritual source of wonderment that has caused people to scale mountains, cross deserts, and sail the seas has been reduced by modern culture to monotonous banality and, finally, to frigid boredom. The Sex Dentist comes with all the Novocaine you could ask for. Just lean back and open your mouth.
