The defining attribute of modern society is sterility. One sees it everywhere. The obsession with setting boundaries and guidelines to what a relationship should be, the preference for quick sex without attachment over anything serious, the insane overreaction to the coronavirus. There is an emptiness to everything that modern culture touches. Even classic novels with taboo themes are reinterpreted by the spokesmen for 'media literacy' as morality tales (see the discourse around "Lolita" on twitter).
We're terrified of any intensity, of anything raw. One sees it everywhere. When I was a teenager I was often surprised by the negative reaction that New Atheism garnered from even secular people, who would throw around terms like ‘secular fundamentalism.’ They weren’t irreligious because the claims of religion offended their sensibilities. Rather they preferred to have no commitments at all. The flaw of religion, to them, was the intensity that it created, and they wanted nothing to do with the passionate atheism of someone like Hitchens.
I'm an early zoomer/late millennial and precious few of my peers have ever been in love. Most of them have never felt genuine erotic or romantic intensity. Their society teaches them to avoid it, to stamp it out. Anything that one cannot easily emotionally extract himself from is ‘toxic.’ We think that sterility is health. No wonder so many young women read erotica about ‘toxic’ relationships; there is a safety net of statutes to save them from the fall in the real world.
Our society is utterly hedonistic, but it’s a negative, cold, harm-avoidant utilitarianism, not the hot, raw headiness of a dionysian orgy. Restraint is the order of the day. Intensity inevitably burns, so everything is deliberately shallow and therapeutic. No one is to feel anything too deeply; that could lead to conflict and struggle and pain; everything that the negative hedonist wishes to banish from the world.
Heterosexual monogamy is out of fashion not because we’ve all given in to indulgence but because we fear it. In every extracted promise of fidelity is an inherent threat: “I own you, leave me and I’ll make sure that you hurt too.” Quite offensive to feminist sensibilities, obviously, but hardly any more welcome on much of the online right, where any inkling of female power terrifies. Homosexual dalliances sit far better with both.
The “Youth Pastor Right” fears intensity too. Christianity has always taught that man and his inclinations are naturally evil, and always feared raw, emotional intensity directed towards anything but the church. They even see the most faithful, monogamous Christian marriage as a potential competitor for the jealous Lord’s attention. They want to believe that the devil has unleashed an age of sexual excess. That would be far more exciting. But it also offers them a foil.
Excellently written post. I would still disagree and say that a fully sexually open society and what we have now are both undesirable longterm, but we do lack that romantic spark as a whole. Of course, some couples still have it individually, but again, we lack it in general. I was just rereading a part of a biography for Andrew Jackson for a series I’m writing and he was quite the romantic writer (to his wife) that would be a welcome change of pace today.
This is probably my long-term inclination as well. I'm careful to not go full an-prim and return to monkey, but I believe understanding and being true to human nature is more desirable no matter the consequence than completely absconding it as we have. "Having known what that is, we can begin to negotiate with it" as I conclude
Maybe this is unrelated to your article but ashwagandha became a popular supplement in the west about 6 or 7 years ago and a lot of people suffer anhedonia and sexual numbness after taking it. It's called "ashwagandha syndrome." It's added in a lot of supplements too. I wonder if people were taking it and suffered from the syndrome but didn't realize the reason why. And now they are just anti-sex.
Great stuff. I loved the section about the distinction between different drives. I hope “drive” as a concept makes a comeback.
I’m with you on the Youth Pastor stuff, but how do you separate the quasi-hypersexuality of our culture that you refer to from a healthy hypersexuality? The fact that a large contingent of the population is a virgin doesn’t seem to suggest that we are not a highly sexual culture. How many of those 27% use porn daily? How many pay for only fans? And it could be argued that this disparity is a result of hypersexuality, which has women fighting over a small group of highly sexed men.
It seems that sexuality really is everywhere, and it isn’t clear to me that what we have now isn’t expressly hedonistic. How does “true” sexuality differ from this? How would a healthy hedonism avoid these things?
I know this is a difficult topic and don’t expect a big reply. But I am curious. Could you maybe explain this in terms of drives? I don’t know. It’s interesting.
On twatter responded to sort of the same question with this:
"Despite it being a theme of the article it probably isn't best to focus on what our proper relationship to pleasure is. I think in the most general sense the way out entails, other than the obvious stuff such as ending mass prescription of sedative "anti-depressants" and such, is to make the two sexes depend on each other. Utterly, in all physical, economic, spiritual, etc. senses... Or at least prevent it from reaching the South Korea problem where they hate each other in the deepest sense. Today, neither sex requires anything of the other, and so there's nothing driving the attraction other than spontaneous urges that people don't understand where they are coming from.
This is Laurentian "blood-marriage" on the societal level, which seemingly every people in human history except ours possessed. All (healthy) sexual intimacy inclines towards the physical pain of separation, and therefore marriage. Not even necessarily the contract or social structure of marriage, but the union between man and woman that the state merely "certifies". This is that "wholeness" that Lawrence and other vitalists talk a lot about, which sexuality plays an important but not exclusive role in.
On that note, neither "manosphere" or reducing women to incubators will be conceptions in much demand. Women have to be sold on this arrangement, too, as they always have before one way or the other. Other problems like women in laborforce etc also tie into this idea. But on the personal level... I think that feeling, the pain of separation, is a very important concept to retain in mind.
Lawrence: "We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual—and each half is as important as the other. Any relation based on the one half inevitably brings revulsion and betrayal. It is halfness, or partness, which causes Judas.""
--
Indeed man and woman are driven towards one another, seems implicit in the very existence of the two... Klages calls all love (Eros) as a "yearning to possess", that is man & woman "having" one another. That's true for all the types of drives/loves, the yearning to consume wine, a mother to hug and squeeze her child, and the yearning for intimacy.
In nature the selective hypersexuality you speak of ends with something like leks, where the females submit utterly to a handful of men. Not even this is the case today, women aren't driven to men *at all* and increasingly not the case for vice versa either. We just don't have anything "sexual" to speak of at all, and where it does show itself are in completely crude imitations of it ie pornography and prostitutes. It would be easy to call all of this "sexual" but I don't think that's capturing the problem accurately, hence the article.
This is why I say sometimes here a world of uncontrollable fuck frenzies would be preferable, actual hedonism. At least there that drive exists! Maybe one day we find that again and relearn how to keep an ordered society with it... Apollo & Dionysus
This is interesting. I hope you develop this idea in future articles. It’s interesting to value the pain of separation, and this even seems to go against hedonism in a way.
What we tend to see in the poly people is an attempt to stamp that out so as to maximize sensual pleasure.
I think I’m on your side, but this seems to point away from hypersexuality as an omnipresent cultural force. If we really are to value this form of possession or “having,” it might require a certain degree of modesty. Not out of any moralistic impulses but simply in an attempt to preserve these deeper forms of unity that sexuality can create.
You may want to check out Scheler’s essay on shame. It has some cool stuff on this.
Not the author but I believe he would say pornography is not hypersexuality but is instead dissipating and enervating of the real sexual drive. There is huge distinction between going out to bar and getting laid every weekend vs. spending your evenings hunched over yourself in front of computer...
Thanks for the reply. I think this requires a much deeper investigation into the nature of sex and its meaning.
I’m also not so sure there is a big difference there, at least with respect to sexuality. Many casual relationships are basically masturbating with a person present. The difference is in the degree of vitality, I think.
It might even be that a “hypersexual culture” in the sense that we have it is not conducive to the development of what sexuality is. Gildhelm almost seems to be going in that direction. True hypersexuality, in this higher sense, might be grounded in values that are unrelated to mere sensual pleasure. It’s an interesting question.
Here's my hat in the ring: Real and healthy sexuality doesn't ask stupid questions. Imagine a marriage that had absolutely nothing to do with any of the gay buzzwords either side loves. On the Right, they/we talk about the population crisis and falling birthrates. On the Left, they talk about boundaries and self-actualization and harms.
Love done right wouldn't even waste a nano-second, a single neuron, on making sex "safe" or checking menstruation cycles. "What if we do something that doesn't cause a pregnancy? SHOCK! HORROR!" or, "What if we do something that causes a pregnancy? SHOCK! HORROR!"
Well, what of it? Man see wife, wife pretty, man bed wife. Simple as.
Bad, stupid, loveless plastic fake modernism says either, "Love is love" or "Love is the worst reason to get married", which are both equally false and idiotic. It says to spend all your time micro-managing the most unimportant details until there's nothing left of why you actually wanted to be with that other person in the first place.
I think Eros was killed - "God is love." But, "God is dead and we've killed him." Since Eros is also Thanatos, then Thanatos was also killed. Death and Love were both killed for a sort of gnostic idolatry / automatism. It's beyond particular religions and morals as you noted. The new idolatry also generates more money and misery.
True but that's because we have evolved concealed ovulation. Would be more like the few other species who do have this... ie, hate to say it, but bonobos
His overall criticism is well-taken, the dichotomy of egalitarian sexual liberation and then egalitarian moralism as a response to the inherent hurt feelings that result creates a vicious cycle that ends up destroying sexuality.
I just don’t think this vague idea of ‘pursuing sexuality and “love” for their own sake’ is the answer. I think outside of procreation and marriage they are kind of meaningless, and even in relation to those they are incidental and fleeting.
The modern weirdness around sex is, in the west, just an Anglo phenomenon. Anglos have always been weird about sex. It shouldn't be seen as a universal social issue. Everyone else is doing fine.
In some ways true, I'm reminded of the Italians pledging to the statue of village girl with huge ass a few years ago. But Spain has the highest LGBT population share in Europe at 14%. Ireland among the lowest at 6% (per Ipsos polling)
Im from the uk, but i spend plenty of time in other countries. If the uk can be taken as representative of part of the anglosphere, then I would say that the average person is just significantly dorkier than anywhere else, spain very much included. Sexlessness and weirdness around sex is just a phenomenon resulting from dorkiness and being generally uncool. There is something wrong with Anglos, I really dont think anywhere else has these issues in any great degree outside of Asia.
I don’t see how this attitude at all will repair busted family units remotely. As the criteria for long lasting social stability has little to do with sexuality or its indulgence.
I really appreciated your thoughts on this! The inclusion of JP II's "Theology of the Body" was a really nice touch. I would love to see another essay touching on what you wrote about in one of the other comments about "the pain of separation."
I am going to sit with this for a bit. I help a lot of women navigate love and sex addiction, where it becomes really important to establish where they end, and other people begin. It is complex and personal. Some need to learn to build up boundaries for safety for themselves and others. Most modern women could use to learn to take them down.
Romanticizing romance can make it idealized, leaving out the messy parts about falling in love, which include being physically and spiritually vulnerable. Every woman I know is knee deep in "spicy" romance novels. The men in those books anticipate all needs. They live on purpose. They are omnipotent. It is just as unfair to men in real life as traditional pornography is to women.
My friend Yoshi wrote an essay on emotion and desire that rocked me. I will link it! Thanks again!
I like the post as a critique but it is lacking in terms of “generative principle” (I don’t mean procreation, but a definition of sexuality that moves beyond the dichotomy) aside from Klages’ quote. It is observable that there is a qualitative difference between what he is describing and how sexuality is presented today.
Your comments here and especially your article have been incredibly insightful to me. I had never heard of D.H Lawrence before but after reading more about what he called 'blood marriage', it answers a lot of feelings and thoughts I've had that I've never been able to put into the words he has. Are there any specific books of his that you'd recommend for someone who's newly interested in him?
‘No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.’ -P.J. O'Rourke
https://kinshipmag.substack.com/p/the-sterility-of-american-liberalism
The defining attribute of modern society is sterility. One sees it everywhere. The obsession with setting boundaries and guidelines to what a relationship should be, the preference for quick sex without attachment over anything serious, the insane overreaction to the coronavirus. There is an emptiness to everything that modern culture touches. Even classic novels with taboo themes are reinterpreted by the spokesmen for 'media literacy' as morality tales (see the discourse around "Lolita" on twitter).
We're terrified of any intensity, of anything raw. One sees it everywhere. When I was a teenager I was often surprised by the negative reaction that New Atheism garnered from even secular people, who would throw around terms like ‘secular fundamentalism.’ They weren’t irreligious because the claims of religion offended their sensibilities. Rather they preferred to have no commitments at all. The flaw of religion, to them, was the intensity that it created, and they wanted nothing to do with the passionate atheism of someone like Hitchens.
I'm an early zoomer/late millennial and precious few of my peers have ever been in love. Most of them have never felt genuine erotic or romantic intensity. Their society teaches them to avoid it, to stamp it out. Anything that one cannot easily emotionally extract himself from is ‘toxic.’ We think that sterility is health. No wonder so many young women read erotica about ‘toxic’ relationships; there is a safety net of statutes to save them from the fall in the real world.
Our society is utterly hedonistic, but it’s a negative, cold, harm-avoidant utilitarianism, not the hot, raw headiness of a dionysian orgy. Restraint is the order of the day. Intensity inevitably burns, so everything is deliberately shallow and therapeutic. No one is to feel anything too deeply; that could lead to conflict and struggle and pain; everything that the negative hedonist wishes to banish from the world.
Heterosexual monogamy is out of fashion not because we’ve all given in to indulgence but because we fear it. In every extracted promise of fidelity is an inherent threat: “I own you, leave me and I’ll make sure that you hurt too.” Quite offensive to feminist sensibilities, obviously, but hardly any more welcome on much of the online right, where any inkling of female power terrifies. Homosexual dalliances sit far better with both.
The “Youth Pastor Right” fears intensity too. Christianity has always taught that man and his inclinations are naturally evil, and always feared raw, emotional intensity directed towards anything but the church. They even see the most faithful, monogamous Christian marriage as a potential competitor for the jealous Lord’s attention. They want to believe that the devil has unleashed an age of sexual excess. That would be far more exciting. But it also offers them a foil.
This is so well written.
Thank you.
Excellently written post. I would still disagree and say that a fully sexually open society and what we have now are both undesirable longterm, but we do lack that romantic spark as a whole. Of course, some couples still have it individually, but again, we lack it in general. I was just rereading a part of a biography for Andrew Jackson for a series I’m writing and he was quite the romantic writer (to his wife) that would be a welcome change of pace today.
This is probably my long-term inclination as well. I'm careful to not go full an-prim and return to monkey, but I believe understanding and being true to human nature is more desirable no matter the consequence than completely absconding it as we have. "Having known what that is, we can begin to negotiate with it" as I conclude
Maybe this is unrelated to your article but ashwagandha became a popular supplement in the west about 6 or 7 years ago and a lot of people suffer anhedonia and sexual numbness after taking it. It's called "ashwagandha syndrome." It's added in a lot of supplements too. I wonder if people were taking it and suffered from the syndrome but didn't realize the reason why. And now they are just anti-sex.
Insane. Seems like every pill today has the side effect of making people allergic to fucking!
It's tragic. Maybe it's all by design.
Great stuff. I loved the section about the distinction between different drives. I hope “drive” as a concept makes a comeback.
I’m with you on the Youth Pastor stuff, but how do you separate the quasi-hypersexuality of our culture that you refer to from a healthy hypersexuality? The fact that a large contingent of the population is a virgin doesn’t seem to suggest that we are not a highly sexual culture. How many of those 27% use porn daily? How many pay for only fans? And it could be argued that this disparity is a result of hypersexuality, which has women fighting over a small group of highly sexed men.
It seems that sexuality really is everywhere, and it isn’t clear to me that what we have now isn’t expressly hedonistic. How does “true” sexuality differ from this? How would a healthy hedonism avoid these things?
I know this is a difficult topic and don’t expect a big reply. But I am curious. Could you maybe explain this in terms of drives? I don’t know. It’s interesting.
On twatter responded to sort of the same question with this:
"Despite it being a theme of the article it probably isn't best to focus on what our proper relationship to pleasure is. I think in the most general sense the way out entails, other than the obvious stuff such as ending mass prescription of sedative "anti-depressants" and such, is to make the two sexes depend on each other. Utterly, in all physical, economic, spiritual, etc. senses... Or at least prevent it from reaching the South Korea problem where they hate each other in the deepest sense. Today, neither sex requires anything of the other, and so there's nothing driving the attraction other than spontaneous urges that people don't understand where they are coming from.
This is Laurentian "blood-marriage" on the societal level, which seemingly every people in human history except ours possessed. All (healthy) sexual intimacy inclines towards the physical pain of separation, and therefore marriage. Not even necessarily the contract or social structure of marriage, but the union between man and woman that the state merely "certifies". This is that "wholeness" that Lawrence and other vitalists talk a lot about, which sexuality plays an important but not exclusive role in.
On that note, neither "manosphere" or reducing women to incubators will be conceptions in much demand. Women have to be sold on this arrangement, too, as they always have before one way or the other. Other problems like women in laborforce etc also tie into this idea. But on the personal level... I think that feeling, the pain of separation, is a very important concept to retain in mind.
Lawrence: "We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual—and each half is as important as the other. Any relation based on the one half inevitably brings revulsion and betrayal. It is halfness, or partness, which causes Judas.""
--
Indeed man and woman are driven towards one another, seems implicit in the very existence of the two... Klages calls all love (Eros) as a "yearning to possess", that is man & woman "having" one another. That's true for all the types of drives/loves, the yearning to consume wine, a mother to hug and squeeze her child, and the yearning for intimacy.
In nature the selective hypersexuality you speak of ends with something like leks, where the females submit utterly to a handful of men. Not even this is the case today, women aren't driven to men *at all* and increasingly not the case for vice versa either. We just don't have anything "sexual" to speak of at all, and where it does show itself are in completely crude imitations of it ie pornography and prostitutes. It would be easy to call all of this "sexual" but I don't think that's capturing the problem accurately, hence the article.
This is why I say sometimes here a world of uncontrollable fuck frenzies would be preferable, actual hedonism. At least there that drive exists! Maybe one day we find that again and relearn how to keep an ordered society with it... Apollo & Dionysus
This is interesting. I hope you develop this idea in future articles. It’s interesting to value the pain of separation, and this even seems to go against hedonism in a way.
What we tend to see in the poly people is an attempt to stamp that out so as to maximize sensual pleasure.
I think I’m on your side, but this seems to point away from hypersexuality as an omnipresent cultural force. If we really are to value this form of possession or “having,” it might require a certain degree of modesty. Not out of any moralistic impulses but simply in an attempt to preserve these deeper forms of unity that sexuality can create.
You may want to check out Scheler’s essay on shame. It has some cool stuff on this.
Not the author but I believe he would say pornography is not hypersexuality but is instead dissipating and enervating of the real sexual drive. There is huge distinction between going out to bar and getting laid every weekend vs. spending your evenings hunched over yourself in front of computer...
Thanks for the reply. I think this requires a much deeper investigation into the nature of sex and its meaning.
I’m also not so sure there is a big difference there, at least with respect to sexuality. Many casual relationships are basically masturbating with a person present. The difference is in the degree of vitality, I think.
It might even be that a “hypersexual culture” in the sense that we have it is not conducive to the development of what sexuality is. Gildhelm almost seems to be going in that direction. True hypersexuality, in this higher sense, might be grounded in values that are unrelated to mere sensual pleasure. It’s an interesting question.
Here's my hat in the ring: Real and healthy sexuality doesn't ask stupid questions. Imagine a marriage that had absolutely nothing to do with any of the gay buzzwords either side loves. On the Right, they/we talk about the population crisis and falling birthrates. On the Left, they talk about boundaries and self-actualization and harms.
Love done right wouldn't even waste a nano-second, a single neuron, on making sex "safe" or checking menstruation cycles. "What if we do something that doesn't cause a pregnancy? SHOCK! HORROR!" or, "What if we do something that causes a pregnancy? SHOCK! HORROR!"
Well, what of it? Man see wife, wife pretty, man bed wife. Simple as.
Bad, stupid, loveless plastic fake modernism says either, "Love is love" or "Love is the worst reason to get married", which are both equally false and idiotic. It says to spend all your time micro-managing the most unimportant details until there's nothing left of why you actually wanted to be with that other person in the first place.
I am trying to read but cable service hold music is disrupting my brain… How strange
very good. easily could be a book-length study.
I think Eros was killed - "God is love." But, "God is dead and we've killed him." Since Eros is also Thanatos, then Thanatos was also killed. Death and Love were both killed for a sort of gnostic idolatry / automatism. It's beyond particular religions and morals as you noted. The new idolatry also generates more money and misery.
Animals don’t have sex during menses or after conception. So ‘realization of man and woman as animal’ =
True but that's because we have evolved concealed ovulation. Would be more like the few other species who do have this... ie, hate to say it, but bonobos
His overall criticism is well-taken, the dichotomy of egalitarian sexual liberation and then egalitarian moralism as a response to the inherent hurt feelings that result creates a vicious cycle that ends up destroying sexuality.
I just don’t think this vague idea of ‘pursuing sexuality and “love” for their own sake’ is the answer. I think outside of procreation and marriage they are kind of meaningless, and even in relation to those they are incidental and fleeting.
Astonishing and piercing article. Personally convicting. I wish I had this essay printed and bound.
The modern weirdness around sex is, in the west, just an Anglo phenomenon. Anglos have always been weird about sex. It shouldn't be seen as a universal social issue. Everyone else is doing fine.
In some ways true, I'm reminded of the Italians pledging to the statue of village girl with huge ass a few years ago. But Spain has the highest LGBT population share in Europe at 14%. Ireland among the lowest at 6% (per Ipsos polling)
Im from the uk, but i spend plenty of time in other countries. If the uk can be taken as representative of part of the anglosphere, then I would say that the average person is just significantly dorkier than anywhere else, spain very much included. Sexlessness and weirdness around sex is just a phenomenon resulting from dorkiness and being generally uncool. There is something wrong with Anglos, I really dont think anywhere else has these issues in any great degree outside of Asia.
Cotton Mather referenced!!
absolutely bang on “and while I was fiercely critical of his decision to not wait for cooler weather” I guffled
https://x.com/mangla_96k/status/1995418584588407040?s=20
"Women have a rape fantasy.
Men just want to be part of it."
I don’t see how this attitude at all will repair busted family units remotely. As the criteria for long lasting social stability has little to do with sexuality or its indulgence.
I really appreciated your thoughts on this! The inclusion of JP II's "Theology of the Body" was a really nice touch. I would love to see another essay touching on what you wrote about in one of the other comments about "the pain of separation."
I am going to sit with this for a bit. I help a lot of women navigate love and sex addiction, where it becomes really important to establish where they end, and other people begin. It is complex and personal. Some need to learn to build up boundaries for safety for themselves and others. Most modern women could use to learn to take them down.
Romanticizing romance can make it idealized, leaving out the messy parts about falling in love, which include being physically and spiritually vulnerable. Every woman I know is knee deep in "spicy" romance novels. The men in those books anticipate all needs. They live on purpose. They are omnipotent. It is just as unfair to men in real life as traditional pornography is to women.
My friend Yoshi wrote an essay on emotion and desire that rocked me. I will link it! Thanks again!
https://open.substack.com/pub/matsumoto/p/a-systemic-inability-to-be-human?r=tsqxm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I like the post as a critique but it is lacking in terms of “generative principle” (I don’t mean procreation, but a definition of sexuality that moves beyond the dichotomy) aside from Klages’ quote. It is observable that there is a qualitative difference between what he is describing and how sexuality is presented today.
Your comments here and especially your article have been incredibly insightful to me. I had never heard of D.H Lawrence before but after reading more about what he called 'blood marriage', it answers a lot of feelings and thoughts I've had that I've never been able to put into the words he has. Are there any specific books of his that you'd recommend for someone who's newly interested in him?
I wrote on Lawrence a while ago, you can find some excerpts of his many works here
https://open.substack.com/pub/gildhelm/p/great-heathens-ii-dh-lawrence?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=tuevu
Thanks!