The first part of this series (of five articles) covers sex and gender, the nature of man and woman and the difference between them. Here in part two I speak of love, sexual conditioning and perversion. Future essays will look at dating, love-making, sexual misery, long-term marriage and divorce.
Speaking of Love
Making love solves all your sexual problems; premature ejaculation, impotence, sexual voraciousness and frigidity. It also solves all your other problems, dissolving the emotional barrier between you and your partner1 and freeing you from the anxiety, anger and sadness of the world.
After making love, you couldn’t care less what the world does to you. A gentle egg surrounds you that brings the world closer, making even hell more vivid and interesting, while at the same time protecting you from that hell, from the slings and arrows it launches at you, which bounce off and turn into flowers.
Ahhh… flowers. Sounds cheesy, doesn’t it?2 To speak of love literally is to manufacture cliche and invite a cynical shrug. Love, like consciousness, quality and truth, is not a literal thing, and so it is impossible to speak of it literally without betraying it. This is one reason why it is so difficult to say ‘I love you’.
And it’s why to say things like ‘God is love’ or ‘love is truth’ or to present logical arguments for the existence or quality of such things is to expose oneself to irrefutable rational objection (‘prove it!’) and invite either boredom (‘I am not interested’) or sycophancy (‘Oh wow, that’s so interesting!’).
The only way to speak of love truthfully is indirectly, non-literally and non-spatially; through metaphor, apophasis and music, to present it in terms of what it is like (metaphor) what it is not (apophasis) and through the musical rhythm and poetry of language, particularly in live, spoken language.3
This is not something that can be learnt in the normal way. You can learn words, but you cannot learn what words metaphorically, musically and apophatically have in common, because you are that. It is not knowledge that produces meaning but the consciousness which precedes knowledge.
This is why whatever it is you know about love ends up causing you pain. You have learnt it is such-and-such an experience, but then it appears as an entirely different experience, and so it either passes you by, or you destroy it by trying to force it into your preconceptions.
It also explains why philosophers write so seldom of love and, when they do, in such a shallow manner. They offer few insights into love, certainly none that are useful, because they do not know what love is. The number of great philosophers who had loving marriages can be counted on the fingers of no hands.4
Thinkers and speakers are confused about the reality of love because it comes before any thought or verbal expression of it. It must be here, in this room, before I can speak of it, and before you can hear it. In your case, dear reader, love might well be sleeping, and my words may come to you confusedly, as in a dream.
Or you might have very little love in you at all, and can only attend to the state through the prism of your clever, literal mind, which makes anything sweeter or stranger than abstract thought or sentimental emotion seem at best, ‘interesting’, at worst boring, or even laughable.
Or you may be in love, right now, happy today with the beauty of it; then there’s hardly any reason to read at all, except to enjoy the pleasure of recognition. This is why lovers enjoy being in nature, because nature reflects the simplicity, the beauty and the wonderful vitality of being in love.
Why You Cannot Love
To make love you must be in love. Not, first of all, with your partner, and certainly not with your self — which will take all the love you can ever give it and still want more5 — but with your life. If life doesn’t come first, your love will be needy, greedy and conditional, and therefore laced with anxiety.
‘But there is nothing I can love!’ To offer such a complaint more or less guarantees that you cannot make love with anything but your own misery. If you can find nothing to love, or be grateful for, in your life now, you’ll grasp at love when it comes along later, and then, like a shadow, it will slip away.6
You cannot make love if you have no love to give, and you have no love to give if you are not giving it now. Love isn’t capital, it’s not a substance which sits in the warehouse of the soul, waiting for the right person to come along and order it. Love is the experience of giving itself, over and over and over again.
What can you give your love to now? In this situation? Obviously, first of all, to the room you are in (including the room of the body). It might be an ugly room, and there might be pain in it, but unlike any other room in the universe, it is an actual room. You can only love, or be grateful for, what is real.
Secondly, following love for bare existence, there are parts of the room. The text you are reading is lovely, isn’t it? (If it’s not, for God’s sake go and do something that is). What about the pleasure of being able to breath freely? Or of sharing your life with someone you love? Or of having a roof, hot water and food?
No? You can’t find anything to love, now? Anything to adore? The sky through the window? The warmth of your underwear? Someone who cares for you in your family? Your cat? Your health? Your youth? Your experience? Or just the pleasure of being you? Nothing at all? Well then, you cannot love. Be off with you!
Attention on what you love — above all on bare existence — is not concentration though. It is not ‘tight focus’, there’s no effort about it, no trying. You cannot try to love — trying frustrates and disappoints. Love is soft and easy. There is, ultimately, just a lovely inward sensation, that makes you smile slightly.
This means that loving attention is necessarily, ultimately, selfless. There may be separate things your self loves—your friends, your car, your books—but the sensation of love that precedes them is necessarily selfless. There is no personal choice about it, no wanting or not-wanting. It’s just what is.7
If bare selfless attention doesn’t come first, it will be the self that is deciding, or trying to decide what to want and what to do, and as the self is inherently self-ish, and incapable of perceiving the present moment, all action that comes from its perceptions and conceptions will be confused and lead to regret.
What happens is the loveless self focuses on secondary things, which, without the bare ground of love, become attachments. I get attached to the secondary things of my life, and start wanting and needing them. This makes me wanty and needy which, as we all know, is not love at all, but the betrayal of it.8
This is why, as you’ll notice both from your own disastrous choices of partner and from those of the people around you, there is so much regret in the world, because self is looking for love, and self is choosing who to love,9 or who to sleep with, which always leads to shame, disappointment and regret.
And this is why there is no answer to the problem of love. Answers are based on things the self has learnt about love, from artists, from priests, from scientists and from friends and family. These people may have been in love, but your knowledge of what they teach is not love, it is the past, implanted in you.
The first people to implant the past in you are your parents. It is your mother and father who form the deepest foundation for your preconceptions about love. Not through what they merely taught you — that comes later — but from the quality of their attention which, when you were a young child, was your reality entire.
Parental attention is corrupted by emotion — irritation, anxiety, boredom, depression — which cuts them off from the situation and therefore from their children, particularly from very young infants, who thereby find themselves isolated, alone and in enemy territory. This is why they cry ‘for no reason’.
Generally speaking, if the atmosphere of the house was aggressively sexualised, then the child will restlessly hanker for sexual pleasure and attention. If there was a dry or cold numbness between the parents, there will be a certain insensate distance between the child and its objects of desire. This feels ‘good’.
More specifically, children seek, in their partners, a reflection of their opposite-sex parents. When a man whose mother was a ambitious and manipulative, meets an ambitious, manipulative woman he senses that here is the home he always needed. The association will be painful, but again, it feels ‘good’.
You acquired, from your parents, emotional pain and the means by which the self attempts to deal with that pain; resistance. In fact self is resistance (or form), but this ‘systolic’ resistance naturally, ‘diastolically’ relaxes back into the formless situation, into the selfless moment or context.
Where there is constant emotion in the situation, self cannot relax. It is in a state of perpetual tension. This, as Wilhelm Reich observed, manifests physically, as stiffness or up-tightness of physiognomy. It leads to the hard, mask-like face and grotesque inflexibility of eye of the repressed and unhappy man or woman.
But even the sweetest and most loving face and body will harden under the pressure of pain. If you are conscious, you will feel this in others, and if you are very conscious you’ll sense it in your self. The softness and ease has gone, and in its place is a clench, and the name of this clench is emotion.
Emotion calls itself love, but it is not love. It is familiarity, sentiment, neediness, wanting and fear of being alone. Emotion is the living past, appearing as the problematic condition of the present. If you are unable to overcome emotion, you cannot perceive the present, which means you cannot love.
Thus, the foundation of love between two people is supreme, joyous, emotionless aloneness, now. If you cannot live alone in the present, without relying on props, like imagination, fantasy, hope and narcotic stimulation or suppression (including the narcotic of the screen), then you cannot love.
Sex and Getting Off
Sex will crucify you.10 Sex is selfish mental-emotional wanting. It is selfish because it is what the self, cut off from the reality of the moment, thinks and feels it needs. It is impossible to feel this sexual need if you are selflessly experiencing the present moment, and the presence of the beloved in it.
This is why caged animals masturbate so much, and why man, caged in his self and in the prison of his self-made society, consumes so much pornography, an idea of sex projected onto the screen of his mind. Woman, always more selfless, does not have this desperate need, which is why, naturally, she is more loving.
Woman has a lower sexual temperature than man, partly because of her lack of testosterone and her need to be selective in choosing a mate, but she is also more present than man, and so less in love with conceptual fantasy. Her fantasies are emotional, although they are soon shattered on the hard reality of her experience.
A young woman may lack presence, and require a lifetime to return to the source of love, the body that man’s world makes an alien object of, and she may be given to absurd dreams of what love can be, but, at least potentially, she is far closer to the reality of love than young men, who are children in comparison.
But then she has sex with a man, a disappointing experience, even if the horrors of the pornographic screen have steeled her to the reality of man’s sexuality. If it is unlikely that she encounters a man who ‘knows what to do’ with her body, it is almost impossible that she comes across one who can reach her heart.
So she joins him in sex. Sex is a private experience, lights out, eyes closed, heart closed, fucking. He leaves first, enjoying the tremendously exciting pornographic idea of what is happening, and then she, unwilling to be left lonely out in the cold, withdraws into her world, enjoying the feeling of being enjoyed.
Fucking can be very pleasurable — it rarely is, but it certainly can be. But pleasure is not happiness, not joy, not delight, which is why it is possible to have ‘good sex’ without a hint of happiness, joy or delight.11 In reality, pleasure more intense than you can imagine is a by-product of happiness, joy and delight.
Notice how you feel about those words, happiness, joy and delight. Because they cannot be spoken of directly, only experienced (and then, as we’ve seen, expressed indirectly), they almost certainly evoke an idea, and therefore either sentimental interest or cynical disinterest in the idea.
Generally speaking then, man gets off on having woman, and she gets off on being had — he is inclined to sadism and she to masochism — but there is a vast range of specific variations, which today we call kinks, although in the past they were known, more correctly, as perversions.
Two Kinds of Perversion
Perversions are social and personal. Socially they are transgressive, or taboo, in that the pleasure of them comes from a self-assertive violation of social boundaries or totems. As such they can be seen as caricatures of freedom, the kind that children enjoy in being naughty simply for the satisfying sake of it.
Today in the West there are two fundamental social perversions, that of the management class, whose totem is equality — and whose taboo is therefore the sub-dom power-play of BDSM — and that of the elite class, whose totem is tradition — and whose taboo is therefore infidelity.12
Although taboos demonstrates the existence of totems, they also serve to regulate and reinforce them. Infidelity serves as a pressure valve for stultifying monogamy and BDSM and similar such ‘transgressive practices’ as a release from the pressure of maintaining the religion of fairness and inclusion.13
Personal perversions tend not to be transgressive (against the social other) but excessive (for the personal self). The self enjoys itself and seeks, in sex, a symbolic reflection of its singularity, of it’s particular combination of modalities,14 with its particular desires, for this or that person, this or that quality.
If self is in its place perversions, like phobias, remain innocuous, trivial and, as it were, disposable. A man might like slight, submissives who’ll wear bunny ears, a woman might like strong hairy men who can easily pick her up, and each will tend to go for someone who approaches his or her modal desire.
The self-informed, or selfish self however, unable to reach beyond itself in love, needs mad fetishised excess, perverse variety, an array of props and the use of technique in order to stimulate itself. These become more exaggerated over time, as the self ages, or as the excitement of sexual conquest wears off.
Excitement, Pain, Suffering
Sex is excitement, an image of an end that the restless, unhappy self projects upon the other and then pursues to that end — to the fabled orgasm. Post-coital rest doesn’t last very long though. It’s soon desperate again, for another end, and then another, and then another, ad infinitum, ad dolorum, ad mortem.
The body is never excited. It has no need for an end, and therefore no need for sex. In its selfless simplicity the body loves and admires the earth, or the earthy female form, or a lovely work of art, but it has no need to possess these things, to dominate them, and feels no regret that they have slipped through its fingers.
Another way to put this is that the body may feel pain, sometimes horrendous pain, but it never suffers. Suffering is the self’s judgement of pain, its fear of pain, its hatred of pain, its whining straining away from pain and its addiction to analgesics, including the greatest analgesic of all, the orgasm.
The self’s never ending thirst for orgasm (along with the various substitutes for orgasm that the world offers to those unable to pursue sexual release) is suffering. It is suffering in the pursuit, and as all who know who’ve lain in misery after lovelessly ejaculating into another, it is suffering in the outcome.
The identity of sex and suffering is evident in the sexual nature of sadism and masochism, and the sado-masochistic nature of loveless sex. Weak egos long to be dominated and abused, strong egos long to dominate and abuse (although selves being a composite of modalities, both poles can be present in one self).
The vicious circle of sex — disinterest, desperation, excess, satisfaction, sated disinterest — along with the various substitutes which stand in for sex — wealth-gathering, consumption, screen addiction, violent films, video games, spectator sport and more literal forms of porn — comprises life in the world.
The World is Sex
A desire to fuck and be fucked powers all the sadism and masochism, and all the inhuman ideologies and unnatural activities, that violent fear and fearful violence, lead to. Sex is behind all violence towards women and children and sex powers the greed that leads to violence towards all people, especially the poor.
Sex powers progress, man’s mission to dominate nature, a process which, ironically, has terminated in a numbed, sexless, spiritually exhausted, solipsistic society of the screen which obliterates demonic sexuality and dystopian desperation, but also heavenly sensuality and utopian passion.
The society of the screen has created an onmi-pornographic world of shameless indecency and perversity, while, at the same time, by relocating the body into the device, it has drained life of sensuality, of flirtatious playfulness, of an innocent ‘man-woman thing’ which once made social life so agreeable.
We find ourselves in the utopia of radical feminism, in which woman is free to ‘ziplessly fuck’ her way through life, without fear of consequence, in which, as in Huxley’s Brave New [Feminist, Socialist, Utopian] world, ‘everyone belongs to everyone else’. This is also the utopia of the first radical feminist; de Sade.
The Marquis de Sade, an egalitarian, inclusive, tolerant and perfectly rational enlightenment thinker, believed that ‘all men, all women resemble each other’, they are interchangeable objects which must be allowed freedom to pursue their desires, no matter how perverse. His dream has become our reality.15
Sade’s utopia is also Fay Weldon’s, Erica Jong’s and Germaine Greer’s. These ‘second wave feminists’ repudiate the monster they have given birth to, sexless, genderless, transsexualism, but our sadistic-narcissistic world is an inevitable consequence of the technocratic ‘freedom’ they pursued.
Technology gave woman the washing machine, which freed her from the sink, it gave her immigrant cleaners, which freed her from the ironing board, it gave her pill, which freed her from pregnancy, it gave her the screen, which freed her from society, and it gave her the surgeon’s knife, which freed her from her body.
Oddly though, woman isn’t too happy about her freedom. She is lonelier, angrier, more emotional and more unfulfilled than she has ever been. She has lost her love, her power, her presence, her empathy, her mystery, her home, her family and her body. She is now, like the man she has become, nothing.
Consider screen dating. It has stolen woman’s intuition and risk. She is now forced to assess suitors rationally, through disembodied images and metrics. Her embodied sensitivity to the spirit of man plays no part in the screen, preventing the characterful silence, tone and smell of a real man from ever reaching her.
Not that spiritless modern man minds. The screen works in his favour. He is comfortable approaching a woman through the intermediary of data and he is glad that her irksome feminity, with its outmoded need for chivalry, delicacy, commitment and genius, plays no part in the modern ritual of ‘hooking up’.
Male and Female Sexuality
Man, remember, is naturally disembodied, until he has fought his way back to the wholeness she was born with. This is why he is more insensitive than her, and why he makes a better killer, a better butcher and a better scientist, because he can more completely detach from the sensate reality of life.16
And this is why disembodied man is sexually obsessed. He is a split, selfish creature, frantically ‘in love’ with his idea of her. She learns the nightmare of this demonic sexuality17 sooner or later, but in her innocence she can barely imagine the depths of his sexual desperation and the violence of his pornographic desire.
Most men are sexually repressed, which leads to a division between their day and night selves that is as comic as it is tragic. Woman is familiar with the experience of being charmed and excited by a confident, in-control, man’s man who, as soon as she takes her clothes off transforms into a cretinous maniac.
Some men have powerful wills, which can stay in control of a powerful libido in extremely arousing situations. Others have suppressed or drained libidos — older men, for example, or young digital herbivores. The former brings hollow sexual pleasure to a woman, the latter, no sexual pleasure at all. Not much of a choice.
Man represses his sexuality, pretending by day not to be a sexual creature, in order to stay in control of his affairs, and to please, reassure or seduce women who are afraid of male desire, or disgusted by it. He keeps the beast carefully locked up, although it takes a sneaky look out of his eyes when it can.
Then, when the opportunity arises, if social control is lifted, and particularly if he has worked himself up, through imagination, or through adrenaline, the beast emerges, in all its horror. If you’re in any doubt about this take a look at how soldiers tend to behave with women during war time.18
A man who is not repressed is a rare creature. Such a man has discovered something other than the calculating and controlling will, which has power over his sexuality. This, unlike the will, does not suppress sexuality, but transforms it. He is a sexual creature by day and by night, but such sexuality is not demonic.
Woman’s sexuality, despite strenuous assertions to the contrary, is but a shadow of man’s. The most unhappy and restless of women, enmaled by the world, become deformed into the sexually voracious virago or man-made nymphomaniac, but to live with such poor creatures is hell on earth.
The intensity of woman’s love however, and her need and desire to be physically loved, makes man look like a cock with its chicken cut off. This is why, although her neuroses can be so easily played, she has so much more power over her sexuality than he does, and why she needs such a long build up to sex.19
The next essay in this series will look at emotion, feeling, society’s war on love and that most unfashionable of activities, courtship.
Further Reading
See Man and Woman for a brief guide to sex and gender. I also explore sex and gender in my books. There are essays on Gender and on Sex in The Apocalypedia (including a guide on how to make love), sections 59 to 77 of Self and Unself cover my philosophy of gendered love, situating it within the panjective whole, while ‘Panjective Gender’ in Ad Radicem (which also has a practical guide on how not to kill your wife, or be killed by her) and ‘The Myths of Pseudogender and Monogender’, in 33 Myths of the System, cover the subjects from a social historical perspective.
Finally, a simple, friendly summary can be found in my new beginner’s guide to reality entire, The Fire Sermon.
This word is rightly criticised for being neutral and introducing a genderless void where one’s man or woman should be. Nevertheless, it serves an obvious purpose when not referring to a specific person, when speaking generally, and so I use it.
A flower is one of the most beautiful things in the universe, yet a photo of a flower looks tacky, unless it has been doctored, filtered or taken from an unusual perspective.
See Self and Unself.
They either had fractious marriages (Socrates, Heidegger) or no relationship at all (Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard), or they were gay (Foucault, Wittgenstein), or they were mired in the kind of dependence, sympathy and bourgeois commitment that passes for great love but which is anything but (Hegel, Marx).
If philosophers had known of the mind-blowing truth that romantic love reveals they would have written of it, but they didn’t, and they don’t. Authors of fiction fare a little better — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Lawrence and several others, despite marriage problems, certainly knew the miraculous reality of love — but it is still extremely rare to see love as it is on the page of a novel.
Apart from anything it is extraordinarily difficult to write of love. Even putting aside whether the writer has experienced the primal depth of love, he faces additional difficulties presenting that love. He cannot be silent, obviously, and let love speak wordlessly. Nor can he rely on the natural rhythm of loving speech. Nor does the writer have access to the same context as the reader, much less can he sense out the specific quality of attention the reader is bringing to his text.
Thus if a writer is worth his salt, he must develop his art to a supreme pitch of mastery to do justice to love, just as he must to the natural world which reflects it. Not only must he have depth of lived experience, but the range of forms he can call on to metaphorically express what he has to say about love — the width of his literary experience (i.e. his reading and his study) — must be vast.
All this explains why second-rate writers either avoid love completely, presenting nothing but either weary irony and cynical misery or gluey sentiment and titillating porn.
As the great Barry Long pointed out. Long is the principal influence on a great deal of this account and readers interested in exploring the reality of love and sex are directed to his peerless work, particularly Making Love and his audio recordings, Beauty and the Beast, Physical Love the Noble Man and Transforming Sex into Love.
This partly explains the geysers of enthusiasm that erupt in some people when they hear or read of the truth of love, ‘yes, yes, yes, this is it!’ And then, a few months later, it’s all dribbled, away, ‘oh that, yeah, I’ve moved on.’
Naturally, from that attention, a judgement might arise — this text is boring, I want to stop reading — and then an action — getting up and doing something else.
I learned that it honours God more to contemplate him in all things than in any particular thing.
Julian of Norwich.
I’m not just referring to romantic partners, but to friends and associates. The self is inherently undiscerning — because all it sees is itself, reflected back from experience — and so it always gets disappointed in other people, which terminates, in middle-age, in cynicism. Anyone who ever makes a good choice in marriage, friendship or business did so because they listened to something other than their selves.
As Barry Long wrote. As above, I forget where.
It is even possible to ‘hate fuck’.
Including orgies, ‘swinging’ and voyeurism…
The supersized sexual appeal that nonmonogamous and voyeuristic acts hold for Republicans likely stems from the fact that sex outside of marriage and multipartner sex are huge no-nos in a political party that continues to make “traditional marriage” one of the cornerstones of its official platform and regularly funnels federal funds toward abstinence-only sex education. Nothing makes us want to try something like being told you can’t do it. This is why taboos, no matter what they are, often become turn-ons.
This same instinct may also help to explain, in part, the appeal of BDSM to Democrats. Within the Democratic Party, much of what drives the political agenda is the view that inequality is the source of a wide range of social problems. This is regularly seen in the party platform, which recently made multiple mentions of the need to “level the playing field.” It’s not a stretch, then, to suggest that playing with power differentials—especially in BDSM settings, where women and men might not appear to be on equal footing and where the lines of sexual consent might not always be explicit—is taboo in many Democratic circles.
Justin Lehmiller, Republicans and Democrats Don’t Just Disagree About Politics. They Have Different Sexual Fantasies
No matter how outrageously deviant, the sex-world of the professional class is, as you would expect, a managed, ‘transactional’ exchange regulated by an internal set of ‘boundaries’ and ‘laws’…
The concept of the “safe word” reproduces, in erotic contexts generally already ruled by the hookup-culture paradigm of total sexual liquefaction, the central premise underlying liberal modernity: the notion that society is a “contract” in which authority is only granted provisionally, and may be revoked at any time should the terms be breached.
Mary Harringon, Make Politics Kinky Again
See Man and Woman.
‘[Sade] saw that condemnation of “woman-worship” had to go hand in hand with a defense of woman’s sexual rights—their right to dispose of their own bodies, as feminists would put it today. If the exercise of that right in Sade’s utopia boils down to the duty to become an instrument of someone else’s pleasure, it was not so much because Sade hated women as because he hated humanity. He perceived, more clearly than the feminists, that all freedoms under capitalism come in the end to the same thing, the same universal obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed. In the same breath, and without violating his own logic, Sade demanded for women the right “fully to satisfy all their desires” and “all parts of their bodies” and categorically stated that “all women must submit to our pleasure.” Pure individualism thus issued in the most radical repudiation of individuality.’
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism
The word science originates in the proto Indo European word root skei, leading to the Greek skhizein and Old English sceadan which all mean split and divide. The word shit, another place that man is more comfortable than woman, has the same origin. This is why it is true to say that science is shit. Facts are turds shat from the body of life.
And, to his dismay, learns to exploit it.
Again, this doesn’t apply to the exhausted middle-aged modern man, nor to the sterile, sexless ‘nice’ guy of the middle-class. Such aphids have no sexual energy to repress, which allows them to simultaneously nurse their resentment towards and look down their noses at our old friend, ‘Chad Thundercock’.
This is evident in the sexuality of gay men and lesbian women. Homosexual men can have long and stable relationships, but they tend to hook up in a trice and often have hundreds sometimes thousands of partners. Lesbians can be promiscuous, but usually have very few lovers and much longer periods of courtship.