The origin of sex

Matthew Parris T

eke all little boys I used to think La romance was soppy. They said it was just a stage I was going through. The trou- ble is, I'm still in it. This is undoubtedly a setback. But it offers a certain detachment from the starry-eyed crowd, like that imposed upon the lame boy who fell behind the Pied Piper. We are able, he and I, to

`Now eat it all up! There are thousands of Western children forced to be on a diet!'

take a cooler view of things.

From that disinterested standpoint, I must tell you that sex is very prevalent. It screams from every billboard, every news- stand, every conversation overheard, and in the words of every popular song. It is never far from people's thoughts. It is the theme of art and the object of leisure. Point me a page in a newspaper, or a television or radio programme, from which it is absent, and I will show you a dozen from which it is not.

`Nothing wrong or unusual about that,' you may say, `nothing surprising. Sex is an important and necessary part of people's lives, which cannot be suppressed. It is natural.'

Well, is it? I only asked. One thing, of course, cannot be denied: we have to pro- create. But we have to eat, too, to survive, yet you need not conclude that the more people eat, the more time they spend eating, and thinking and talking and writing and singing about eating, the more their true nature emerges. We have to keep our nails short, but the man with his nails bitten down into his scarred fingertips is thought to have taken a habit beyond what is natural. In both cases, we might look for causes beneath the surface. We might speculate that these creatures were frustrated or bored and that their obsessive behaviour betrayed the transference of other needs, other drives into what Freud would have called 'displacement activity'.

Freud had a student, Wilhelm Reich, in whose work I have become fascinated. On

his way to lunacy (he died in a mental asylum in New England) Reich stumbled

upon an important truth. He saw the significance of the link between sexuality and subordination and concluded that bullying springs from repressed sexuality. His life's study was to 'explain' fascist/ authoritarian politics. This assertion form- ed the main plank of the explanation given in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Repressed sexual urges, he believ- ed, are channelled into the institutionalised

bullying we call 'fascism', explaining both the desire to subordinate and the will- ingness to be subordinated — sometimes in the same breast. The bully is a displaced lover; and, in the machinery of the authoritarian state and the human cruelties which accompany it, we are seeing the twisted wreckage of man's craving to make love, and be made love to.

Reich is long dead and discredited. His theory, of which the above is a hopelessly crude caricature, grew more expansive and absurd with age. But something of his con- clusion has filtered into the popular con- sciousness. The image of the little man, probably with a cardigan, slippers and an unsatisfactory moustache, escaped from a viciously repressed and joyless childhood into a private world of National Front fan- tasy, is a strong one. Nietzsche himself rather fits the description. It sits comfor- tably with 20th-century liberalism, at one bound condemning the authoritarian as a pervert and dignifying the modern lover.

There is clearly something in the theory. The linkage between sexual behaviour, on the one hand, and the instinct to subor- dinate and be subordinated, on the other, is unmistakable. The middle link emerges plainly in sadomasochism and the various specialisms of 'bondage' and 'discipline', as well as in the double duty performed by words serving both boxing ring and bedroom. It can hardly be just coincidence that you screw the customer, bugger your car up, etc.

I was pondering this linkage recently, with one ear on the radio — the usual chat- show to discuss 'your personal, sexual and emotional problems'. The programme was interrupted by a news report about attempts to outlaw boxing matches. A succession of interviewers said that boxing was disgust- ing, shouldn't be allowed, and that it didn't matter whether people wanted to box each other — that was not the point.

Suddenly it dawned upon me. It is not sexuality which 20th-century society represses. It is aggression. Bullying does not spring from repressed sexual urges: obsessive sexuality springs from repressed

aggressive urges. The linkage, and the possibility of transference, is there, and Reich saw it. Where he was wrong was about the direction of transference.

Now it is all much clearer to me. I am still blinking my eyes with disbelief at the realisation that I am the first person in the history of the world to notice that the more civilised, and comfortable, and tame and bored people become, the more they make

love; that incessant mating is not a rever- sion to the primitive side of our nature but a retreat from it: a form of displacement activity; that domesticated animals mate more frequently than wild ones; that `primitive' human societies devote far less time and attention to the matter than we do, and are more interested in hunting and fighting; and that the obsessive incursion of sex into music, literature, conversation and even dancing! — can be correlated with the rise of the 'civilised' society and the frustration that accompanies it.

Of course my theory has been irritably rejected by all to whom I have explained it: but that is because the myth, that it is natural and 'instinctive' for a man or woman to be very much taken up with sex, is vital to the packaging of the drug. After all, the exciting thought that this is part of the primitive and irrepressible depths of our being is very much a selling-point — and the more so because the instinct which does run deep, aggression, is out of bounds.

The myth that sex is part of the animal side of our natures, like the myth that a craving for tobacco or alcohol is a mark of manliness, is essential to the self-esteem of the poor frustrated creatures that we are, permitted no release for our energies and condemned to take stupefying drugs, and mount each other in our cages, and pretend that these things are what life is all about. The myth must be believed because it bolsters the great lie at the heart of liberalism: that man is essentially gentle and that a human society can therefore be both gentle and free. Those human drives which are sympathetic to such a state of things must be encouraged. Those which threaten it must be written out of the textbook.

Well, sex does not 'hurt' anyone, now that the problems of disease and pregnancy have been overcome. It is, as a diversion, easy yet potentially absorbing. It needs no space and costs as little or as much as its participants can afford. It can engage all the senses and twist towards its purpose every kind of drive and emotion. Bored monkeys in zoos were among the first to think of it, and in a million pubs, clubs and discotheques across the western world human beings are doing the same thing in a grotesque profusion of variations upon the theme.

Liberal society cannot extend the same tolerance towards the aggressive instincts. Consider that group of human drives and appetites which embraces the pleasure of hunting and being hunted, capturing and being captured, dominating and being dominated, fearing, fighting, winning, los- ing, the thrill of danger, the pleasures of authority and dependence, obedience and command, and the exercise of courage. Increasingly in the 'humane and caring society' which we are incessantly enjoined to seek, such drives must be suppressed or transferrred. No wonder that sex, along with religion and the virtues of membership of the EEC, is now part of the school curriculum.

And therein lies a warning for those who order our lives. It is possible to push something just a little too hard — and, if you do, people may react against. I notice that the punk and new-wave culture, unlike the Fifties and Sixties pop generations, is quite dismissive about sex and romance. It is far more effective to forbid — but in a manner which serves to invite.

Our parents knew how to do that. Sex (or what my mother used to call 'strange' or 'funny' behaviour) was taboo in the sense that has lent the name to a brand of per- fume: something to be giggled about, with a sense of glorious mystery and impatient anticipation, mentioned obliquely and (like the wristwatch and the driving licence) waited for.

These days it is all but obligatory. One struggles manfully against the pressures but in the end one may have to give in. Like speaking in the Commons, one's consti- tuents absolutely expect it, and, like speak- ing in the Commons, it is best got over with — grit your teeth and plough through, so that no one can say you haven't tried.

As he so often does, Johnny Rotten has summed the thing up best . .. but in terms, on reflection, too indelicate for readers of the Spectator.