Essays in Idleness

One of the grimmest activities in this world is that of “sex” (i.e. copulation) without eroticism. This would pertain to all sterile forms of the exercise, which is the crown of modern commerce and advertising. It is true, much disease is spread along with the depravity, but the real costs are steeply higher. For we are dealing with a profound denial: a refusal to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the human domain; a determination to live only in one sordid corner. This reduces us to parity with the other animals — the rats, for instance — a demotion that should be pointedly avoided.

For a man, it turns a woman from a mystery, into a cheap puzzle. I daresay less, the other way around. When we come to the genital interactions of any supplementary sexes, which fanciful human minds are capable of projecting — I don’t want to know.

I learn, from a question asked me in a public place, that the world is now “debating” who may use which toilets in North Carolina. The progressives, with support from major American corporations, demand that men be given access to the ladies’ plumbing chambers throughout that State. But not all males: only those who would have been characterized as “perverts” by almost everyone, everywhere, before this generation. Progressive women must pretend to be pleased; the rest are being taught to stay quiet.

The issue is nothing like “the last straw”; only another stick in the bundle of progressive theatrics. To my mind it cannot be understood except in the context of a far larger public campaign to suppress the erotic. This becomes clear when one realizes that it is the latest strange twist in the long ideological descent from the puritan iconoclasm of the Reformation — a kind of “permanent revolution” to reverse the Catholic sacramentalism of the Middle Ages. In the absence of creative capacity, this necessarily involves the institution of new, parody sacraments, like the old ones but turned upside down: “rights” for “rites” as it were.

Ultimately, this goes back to the rebellion of Lucifer; but I must try to limit the historical overview.

The project to de-eroticize “sex” (in both the current and former usages of this word), was implicit in feminism and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Copulation has since drawn level with barbells and jogging: something you gotta do to get your endorphin high. The usual liberal inversion of terms has masked this operation; e.g. the habit of describing pornography as “erotic literature.” This is false on both counts, for there is nothing erotic about pornography; and in so far as it may contain written words as well as ghastly pictures, lubricity cancels every literary effect. Currently we are surrounded by cynical tradesmen in this worthless “art.”

Why do they bother to attack Eros? Because it is godly, an aspect of Divine Love; the thing itself, in relation to the Creation. The degradation of Love, to synonymy with “sex,” was the underlying, and undermining, purpose of that sexual revolution. It has so succeeded that the words are now used interchangeably in the mass media.

Yet the effect is temporary. It is another bold assault on ein feste Burg, which in the end must fail — for God will not be mocked.

Genuine eroticism has slipped for now beyond reach of our mass culture. It is the reason most marriages end in divorce, whether or not legally notarized; why children are almost invariably “planned,” with the use of de-eroticizing technology; why the old are now encouraged to die.

It is the reason musical appreciation has decayed, so that there are men today who can hear the Prelude and Fugue in A-minor, and not know that it resounds with the leaping spiritual eroticism at the heart of all Creation.