Eros – that is, love, lust, desire – as the foundation of all humanity only comes into focus when we realize that you, me, and every other human on earth would not exist were it not for a single night of eroticism between our parents. I know, you don’t want to think about that single night, but let’s face it, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.

The Commodification of Desire

Before sex was explained to us in the sixties, we had to explain it to ourselves, and our versions were infinitely better …

As we pressed up against the idea of love, as we felt its heat and blinked in its light, the personal and the philosophical met in a blur. I would be seized with an incredible sincerity, and while I knew that this sincerity was temporary, there was a sense in which it was eternal too.

– Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage

It is a famous observation of young male friends that regrettable phrases are muttered among the sighs and slouches of post-copulate pillow talk. It is when those three irrevocable words first slip out, still unattached to the confidence that shapes their meaning. It is when the future seems both easy and inevitable; the past polished and forgiven; the red flags lowered into a well of endless patience.

I would imagine that women have been trained by friends and glossy magazines to cover their ears with a gauze of skepticism during these dreamy-eyed respites from the brute banality of Real Life.

But wait. There is also a song to be sung in praise of the muddled meanings which trail behind the syllables of post-coital male ineloquence. For it is this blog’s contention that such confused speech distinguishes what is ‘mere’ sex and something more. (Prostitutes and one night stands need not fear the future implications of forni-declarations.) Men have always been the fairer sex at shaping emotions into language. Pillow talk is just one more example.

I’m thinking about all of this – about love and sex and the inadequate language we use to discuss and think about both – because they are the very questions that Lewis Lapham was asking himself following an interview with 71-year-old Mae West when he was a reporter for The Saturday Evening Post.

Lapham is the best of bloggers, the type of Digital DJ I hope to one day become. Only, Lapham still uses paper, and his unhyper-links often lead us to sources thousands of years old. Long the managing editor of Harper’s Magazine, his newest project is Lapham’s Quarterly, an expansive anthology of poems, excerpts of texts, and images all focused on a single topic, and usually spanning at least two thousand years. (Globalists beware: Lapham’s Quartely is mostly a Western affair.)

The topic of the current issue is Eros, undefined by Lapham or any contributing writer, but treated as the meeting place between love, desire, and sex. What stood out most for me is how much the commodification of sex and love have shaped our attitudes toward both over the past half century.

Similarly with the assurances of enhanced performance, both highway and off-road, that come with the cosmetic surgeries and the rejuvenating chemicals—the warranty doesn’t cover the losses of self-esteem induced by the thrilling heart attack supplied at no extra cost with the penile implant. The disappointments follow from the belief that sex and money trade in the same market and that between them it’s possible to set some sort of reliable exchange rate. Fortunately for the future of the human race, the notion is ridiculous. Eros is more nearly matched to his description in ancient Greek myth—offspring of the wind and black-winged night, the double-sexed progenitor of the universe—than with a tabulation of the receipts from the Christmas sales on Madison Avenue and Rodeo Drive. In the same way that bad money chases good money into exile or hiding, the erotic additives and synthetics depress the market in midsummer night dreams.¹

In Dagmar Herzog‘s fascinating essay “Fear and Loathing” she traces a line from the public controversy surrounding the famous Kinsey Reports in the 1950’s to the reactionary and rampant libertine humping of the sexual revolution to the overwhelming American feeling of sexual inadequacy that has followed ever since:

The sexual revolution that Kinsey anticipated did indeed undermine the blatant hypocrisy that characterized the fifties. After all – as Kinsey’s tomes so scrupulously showed – the culture that existed before the sexual revolution had hardly been free of promiscuity and adultery … However incompletely, the sexual revolution leveled the playing field for women and brought social norms, laws, and behavior into greater alignment. It made talk about sex more open and contraception more readily available, and brought forth more challenges to the false pieties surrounding premarital chastity.

But the sexual revolution also created anxieties – not only about the newfound sense of freedom, but also about precisely the two concerns that Kinsey had overlooked: the quality of physical pleasure and the nature of passionate love. When the Kinsey Reports had first been published and Americans were able to learn about other people’s sex lives, the effect was primarily one of overwhelming relief. People discovered that they were far from alone in their secret deviance from the socially approved mores. But as the sexual revolution unfolded over the next several decades, incessant chatter and graphic imagery about the intimate details of other people’s sex lives began to cause tremendous insecurity. Someone somewhere had a more ardent, more adoring, more adept lover than you. Someone somewhere had a more agile tongue; a more fluent, sensational touch; a better knowledge of just what to do with the frenulum and the perineum, the nipples and the G-spot. Someone somewhere was having an easier time reaching those explosive orgasms that always eluded you. Someone somewhere was having better sex. Americans were endlessly comparing themselves to others and finding themselves – or their partners – wanting. The resulting feelings of inadequacy created a huge market for assistive technologies, from vibrators to porn to pharmaceutical remedies.

Signs of the American assumption of sexual inadequacy are everywhere: the magazines offering thousands of never-known-before tips to drive him and her wild. All the best selling books and videos which guarantee better and longer-lasting sex than has ever been had before. The teenage boys and girls who have been fooled by popular culture into thinking that “yes daddy, give it to me, harder, harder” is actually commonplace conversation during sex. And our email inboxes: full of offers for penile implants, breast enlargements, Viagra and its multitude of generic substitutes. We are surrounded by it. If we don’t use sex toys we are considered prude. I can hardly imagine what pubescent boys today think when they first visit the unrestricted Middle Earth of online male lust. Surely they must expect to be involved in an act of triple penetration before entering college. Images of 1970’s and 80’s pornography now seem so quaint.

Sex Throughout the Ages

Which is why it was refreshing to read through an anthology of writings about sex ranging from Euripides in 431 BC to Muhammad Al-Nafzawi in 1547 to Richard Wright in 1940. It’s not that the actual act of sex has advanced or evolved in anyway. In 150 AD Longus writes of Daphnis trying his best to convince Chloe to have a go at doggy-style with him (some things never change) and in 250 AD the Greek dream interpreter Artemidorus describes the symbolism behind a dream of a man practicing fellatio with himself and a woman having intercourse with an animal.

Rather, what stands out is the built-up desire that surrounds even the slightest mention of sex; the joyful anxiety of learning by doing; the bliss of ignorance, of feeling around in the dark. In the 1500’s poets wrote of love and lust and desire because they were compelled to do so. Today the poets of the people – that is, pop stars – are on contract with record labels and collaborate with ghostwriters.

One of the things we’ve lost is the terrific coaxing that used to go on between men and women, the man pleading with a girl to sleep with him and the girl pleading with him to be patient. I remember the feeling of being incandescent with desire, blessed with it, of talking, talking wonderfully, like singing an opera. It was a time of exaltation, this coaxing, as if I was calling up out of myself a better and more deserving man. Perhaps this is as pure a feeling as men and women ever have.

– Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage

We have forgotten how to woo.

For several days last month the NYTimes most-emailed article was Charles Blow’s “The Demise of Dating.” Blow rightly points out that, these days, rather than going on a few dates and then “hooking up”, most young people now hook up first and then decide whether or not they want to start dating.

The buildup of desire now lasts for about two hours and through two pints of beer.

Is Pornography Adultery? Are Romance Novels?

A headline from last month, clearly catered toward the blogosphere: “46% Of Women Prefer Internet To Sex, Says Intel Survey.” Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “Not Tonight Dear, I’d Rather Blog.”

A lot of interesting research is being done to figure out just what women want when it comes to sex, but what we’ve always known since the garden of eden is that it is more than a good romp under the apple tree. Women, it seems to me, do experience sexual desire, but it goes hand in hand with feelings of understanding and emotional connection. The commodification of sex has de-coupled lust and desire. So while men are seeking to satisfy their lust in the bedroom and with pornography, women have gone to the internet in search of emotional bonds.

The same dichotomy is evident when comparing the consumption of pornography and romance novels. Responding to an October 2008 Atlantic article in which a divorce lawyer focused more on the husband’s porn habits than his real-life infidelity, 35% of respondents claim that watching pornography is adultery while 25% disagree. In a letter to the editor, however, Jeff Raines points out that the billion-dollar romance novel industry caters almost exclusively to women:

Does that make my wife’s romance novels—in which the heroine meets and falls in love with a handsome sea captain with a Ph.D. in marine biology just back from Far Tortuga, where he was saving whales and attempting to get over the tragic loss of his wife, who died trying to climb K2 to raise money for the Special Olympics—better or worse than anything I might see on PhatFarmGirlz.com? She’s also cheating sexually, and she is involving herself emotionally—vicariously falling in love—with a fantasy male I can’t compete with (except for the perfect pecs and the cleft chin, anyway). Why is it that Mr. Douthat’s outrage is aimed only at men?

(And, yes, I did check out PhatFarmGirlz.com, a domain which, unbelievably, is still available.)

The Scientification of Desire

A theme throughout all of Milan Kundera’s books, but especially in Immortality, is the contentious relationship between the sexual body and the biological body. But for materialists, of course, there is no distinction.

In what I found to be a rather depressing (though admirable for its unparalleled geekiness) single’s night hosted by Radio Lab, Jad Abumrad (huge man-crush on this guy, by the way) describes the chemical processes behind our feelings of romance, infatuation, and companionship. Essentially, it’s all a matter of getting our brains – or, better put, the brains of others – to release bits of dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin at the right times.

If these feelings of romance, infatuation, and companionship can be regulated by chemicals, then surely they will be. If we take a pill of viagra for better sex, why wouldn’t we take oxytocin to help our long-term relationships or dopamine to rekindle the flame?

A Backlash on the Horizon?

I don’t mean to get too nostalgic for the pre-internet-porn era when a Boyz II Men song at a junior high dance could still produce a 6-hour erection. In the networked era information will always want to be free and information about sex will always lead the way. Still, I can’t help but wonder if a backlash is on the horizon – if the most cutting-edge, laptop-toting urbanists will decide to go retro in favor of seemingly revolutionary acts like candle-sealed letters, picnics under trees, and months of saving up unspent desire before the young woman, her back arched, her elbows drawn back, unclasps her bra to the perfect silence of both.