Sex and Deviance

by Guillaume Faye

  Novels do not escape this pattern. Racy scenes are supposed to accompany and prove the literary talent of fashionable authors, as a sort of obligatory rite of passage. On television talk shows and in stand-up comedy one can notice an increase in sexual themes since the 1980s, as if even laughter must adopt the obligatory rite of passage that is sex.

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  This hypertrophy of sexual preoccupation is also found in themes that appear in the media. More than half the subjects treated in magazines which are aimed at young people, women, and men, as well as celebrity magazines, revolve around sex or romantic relationships. It is as though the Freudian obsession with explaining all human psychology by means of sex has spread to become a universal ideological dictatorship. Sex therapy occupies a larger share of the popular mind than astrology, health, or purchasing power. Television and the Internet mine this quarry for all it’s worth. In December of 2007, an entire program on the Arte channel was devoted to masturbation, in late prime time; pseudo-specialists armed with crude images spoke of solitary pleasure both masculine and feminine as if it were a subject as important as global warming. Several popular broadcasts dwell on the sex lives of the handicapped, the aged, the obese, and so on, going into detail in scientific and pretentious language, with the support of down-market psychologists. In 2010, France 3 launched a series of documentaries entitled Take It Off!, treating themes such as partner-swapping and fetishism. The programming schedule of the French cable network TNT, made up of twenty channels, offers an average of three so-called erotic movies each evening, with the note ‘forbidden for viewers under the age of sixteen’. This situation may change thanks to the ferocious competition offered by the Internet.

  There is not a single issue of any large-circulation magazine for men or women which does not include several articles relating to sex or sex therapy, supported by the authority of large numbers of self-proclaimed sexologists. Between ten and twenty percent of the subject matter of these widely-read publications has to do with ‘sex problems’, with the same subjects repeated incessantly.[2] One may ask whether these recurrent cock tales are not the expression of a mental infantilisation and, more generally, whether we are not witnessing a universal regression of sexuality to the adolescent stage. We may also ask whether we do not see, in this society of hypersexualised imagery, real problems of male impotence, loss of libido, feminine frigidity, and a loss of direction. It is a possible hypothesis in any case: the general disturbance of sexuality in our society will result in very serious drawbacks.

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  As already mentioned, in former times, in order to initiate young men before their wedding nights (so that they would not be entirely unexperienced), bourgeois families planned encounters between prostitutes or easy-going middle-aged women and their sons. Sex education was commonsensical and practical. Today, since the 1960s, sex education is theoretical and medicalised. This amounts to an unhealthy approach to sexuality, a ‘crisis’ approach. Sex education at school, the very archetype of a stupid idea, has never worked.[3]

  Of course, sexuality is at the heart of human nature. But when it is healthy, it remains implicit, natural. Treating it with so much voyeurism, objectification, insistent explicitness, harping on about it repeatedly, making it into a treatment — all this is obviously symptomatic of a collective pathology. This proves clearly that, in our societies, sex is a problem. It is as if we were all sexual patients. It is all that is talked about throughout the media. There are two ways of covering up a deficiency: suppression (puritanism) or verbose and spectacular emphasis (what we are currently experiencing).

  Contemporary Western societies that like to think of themselves as liberated are characterised by a lack of sexual satisfaction. The society of pornography and sexology is not a society of desire, pleasure, experienced sex, and eroticism, but one of artificial sex and dissatisfaction. As the commercial success of erectile medications shows, it is male impotence and female frigidity that characterise our society. Hyper-desire and super-libido in discourse and spectacle, lack of desire and sub-libido in reality: such is the lay of the land in our sexually impoverished age. We should note that this pathology is due more to men than to women.

  Asexuals and the Extinction of Desire: Fruits of Hypersexualism

  The rise in sexual abstinence in the ageing developed countries, especially in Japan, is disquieting. According to a study by the Japanese Minister of Health (January 2011), 36 percent of boys and 58.5 percent of girls between sixteen and nineteen years of age ‘have no interest in sex’, meaning real, concrete sexual relations. According to Dr Jacques Waynberg, director of the Sexological Institute, this phenomenon of asexuality is also affecting France. He is consulted by thirty-five year old couples who no longer have relations, who want to have children but cannot because they have no libido. In the English speaking world such people are described as sexless.

  He suggests one possible explanation: the stress of contemporary life, the anxiety over finding a job, or overwork. This is a joke in a world where working hours are much fewer than in former times. But he makes a couple of better suggestions as well. First, lessened desire of husbands for their wives is a byproduct of the explosion of pornography and the sex industry, with X-rated videos and masturbation often replacing real sexual relations because this solitary activity is easier. Paradoxically, our Western societies which are obsessed with sex (80 percent of Internet visits are devoted to it) are seeing a decrease in the frequency of real sexual relations. Sex does not disappear but changes its nature, becomes virtual, unproductive, and of low libidinal intensity.

  His second suggestion is a deep transformation in the nature of relations between men and women, especially couples, which are far more conflictual than formerly — especially because of both the masculinisation of women and of unchecked individualism. One does not desire a mate with whom one constantly quarrels. Chronic marital discord so characteristic of our societies (which have abandoned the notion of the stable couple) almost mechanically diminishes the frequency of sexual relations.

  In a story reported on France 3,[4] a Japanese woman admits that she had her children by artificial insemination, using her husband’s sperm (obviously collected via masturbation) because they Moreno longer desired one another. A thirtyish man recognises that he prefers X-rated videos, strip clubs, and sex toys to the effort of making love with his girlfriend. This progress of asexuality among couples must be related to the divirilisation of men, the conventionalisation of male homosexuality and, of course, to lowered fertility among European.

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  Of course, it was in the United States that the phenomenon of asexuality, called the sexless, first appeared: those men and women who — whether out of boastfulness or the desire to be original, or pathology, or by compensation — began championing chastity or prolonged virginity in a hyper-sexualised world. In the Netherlands, they are called the non-libidinal. Journalist Jean-Philippe de Tonnac tries to explain this sexual drought, whether inflicted or voluntary. Surveys show that sexual abstinence in France is increasing among people in their thirties, whether single or in relationships, standing at 25 percent among women and 15 percent among men according to an Ipsos study from 2004. In Tonnac’s view, ‘asexuality is a defensive reaction to the terrorism of pansexualism’.[5] This is an interesting analysis, and compatible with those of the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen[6] for whom second hand experiences, that is, spectacles and representations, dull one’s perception of reality and direct emotions.

  Exhibitionism and pornography weaken the libido and sexual desire. The riot of sexual images accessible even to adolescents, especially via the Internet, remove the mystery and the taboos of sex, and thus remove its attractions. Total unveiling and the absence of prohibitions cause desire to dry up. J-P de Tonnac writes: ‘sex is no longer taboo; it has become a totem, passing from a secret to an exhibit. Desire has always been related to a cer
tain impossibility of desire. This riot of free images does nothing but extinguish it.’ Might it be possible, then, that subconsciously voluntary chastity might serve to reawaken extinguished desires?

  In his Tyranny of Pleasure, Jean-Claude Guillebaud[7] suggests that ‘free access to pleasure’ has been transformed into a ‘pleasure imperative’. The omnipresence of sexual representations and the obligation of sexual performance thus has an inhibiting effect and provokes, according to Tonnac, ‘a fundamentalist anti-sex reaction’. The psychiatrist J-D Nasio[8] states that he has never before been so frequently consulted by patients who are still virgins at more than thirty years old: ‘In forty years of practice, I have never seen this. These men are handsome, intelligent, well-integrated socially.... But the very thought of making love to a woman sends them into a panic.’ These men are above all victims of performance anxiety, the fear of not being good enough. For the psychoanalyst Hélène Vecchiali, author of Ainsi soient-ils[9], [That’s How They (Men) Are –Tr.] men, who are more fragile sexually than women (the risks of impotence and lack of libido), especially at the beginning of a romantic relationship, are traumatised by the obligation to succeed immediately, by the requirement of virile excellence nourished by pornographic movies in which the actors are all priapic supermen.

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  We are thus brought back to the idea of sexual confusion. For these men who ‘sink’ before women they desire, whom they want to marry or whom they have married — would they experience similar difficulties with a paid prostitute whom they dominate and with whom they have nothing to prove? As I have said elsewhere, our society has instituted monosexuality. We have forgotten that for men, and in a different measure for women, there is a fundamental distinction between conjugal sex and impulsive sex, both of which are perfectly natural.

  By confusing impulsive sex with romantic sex, we have ended up destroying the latter. We see here one consequence of the ‘neo-primitivism’ of Western societies which, by a sort of regression towards barbarism, confound eroticism, raw sex, romantic sexuality, and the conjugal bond — exactly as happens among the lower primates, where sexual behaviour is undifferentiated.

  Among young couples of former days, sexual desire was inflamed by (relative) inexperience and by the social concealment of eroticism which made sex more exciting, in that it was under a hypocritical prohibition (a necessary hypocrisy). What is desirable is always gradual. Sexual intensity is born of the slow transgression of taboos. Without taboos, there no more desire, only impotence and frigidity — lethargy.

  Real sex with a great orgasmic charge presupposes long preliminaries for the romantic couple, a whole game of artifice, feigned modesty, restrained physical contact, flirting, low intensity rituals, simulated refusals, calculated progress, slow unveiling. Moreover, since the twentieth century, the systematic display of the female body as we know it is much less erotic and exciting for men (whose sexuality is more visual and less cerebral than that of women) than, for example, women’s outfits of long ago, at once modest and immodest, which suggested without displaying.[10] J-P de Tonnac, by way of rehabilitating pre-marital flirting,[11] writes:

  Love is first of all cheeks turning purple, modesty, the secret.... In the Middle Ages, one spoke of fin’amour, courtly love. Today people put the cart before the horse, i.e., the object of desire before desire itself. In the end, this amounts to signing sex’s death warrant.

  Immodesty as Anti-Eroticism

  The reason is easy to understand. From the moment representation takes precedence over action, the latter dies. In wanting to break free of the straitjacket of puritanism, the ideology of sexual liberation created something much worse than puritanism: it mutilated sex by transforming it into a banal image, into clinical discourse. It deprived sex of its feeling of mystery by flooding it with glaring light.

  For the power of the libido, of eroticism, of desire and sexual emotion rest on gradual unveiling, that is, by rising tension, which presupposes rules, ceremonies, prohibitions, subtexts, calculated hypocrisy, incomplete suppression; certainly not flatly getting right on with it, on the principal of immediacy, as in pornographic or therapeutic sex. The erotic power of sexual desire (like all emotion) comes from a certain mystery. The idea of modesty is of capital importance here. From the moment immodesty becomes the rule, the sexual act is debased to the status of ordinary behaviour, and so it loses its emotional charge, its strength of dissimulation. To think that making love is like going jogging or eating a pizza is to misunderstand the psychological mechanism basic to sex. For sex to be enticing, for the libido to function correctly, it is above all important that it not be reduced to the status of a banal physiological act. The sex act must include an aspect of ritual — something that our society has entirely forgotten. Making love is a ceremony.

  A double form of destruction is being practiced on the libido, from both upstream and downstream: from upstream by the protean porn industry; from downstream by the therapeutic theorisation of sex. Under these conditions, sexual excitement and eroticism can only decline. ‘Sexual liberation’, because it has taken clumsy and inadequate forms, has ended by weakening the libido, at once making a spectacle of it and making it abstract and cerebral.

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  The sexual hyper-representation of women (images, virtual women) and the hyper-sexualisation of discourse do not mean that real women are more ‘liberated’ and more approachable for men — hence a new, schizophrenic frustration for men: the represented sex of spectacle and the virtual realm is belied by the real opportunities for sex.

  I would go further: the virtual sexualisation of women, the onslaught of images and discourse which render banal easy and immodest sex end up producing, in a classic case of inversion, a withdrawal of real sex on offer. ‘Fucking’, as a spectacle and virtual representation, as it becomes ever more current and banal, becomes ever more difficult in the real world. The more society is flooded with pornography and sexual images, the less real sex is present. Picture the two as communicating vessels: the virtual vessel fills up at the expense of the real, by a simple difference of pressure.

  By contrast, in a society informed by modesty, where sexual representation (whether in words or in images) is limited and suppressed, sexual tension is paradoxically much stronger. The less sex is trivialised by imagery, the more fascinating and desirable it is in realty. The sexual palette on the Internet and elsewhere, accessible to everyone, trivialises and disenchants eroticism. There is nothing more erotic than the social organisation of modesty, including repression, which only stimulates transgressions.

  The Sexual Destructuration of Adolescents

  Sexual education is something that occurs gradually and requires norms, prohibitions, and slow discovery. Erotic appetite and sexual equilibrium cannot be built upon either sickly puritanical taboos or upon the trivialisation of the pornographic spectacle that we have today. At present, we are witnessing both a rise in puritanism (largely Muslim) and an inundation of pornography. The collision of these two phenomena will be explosive. Most adolescents, male and female, have access to all the sexual spectacles possible and imaginable from their earliest age — through television, the Internet, and all audiovisual media — without any silly ‘parental controls’ being able to stop it. The effect of such spectacles, observed from the beginning of adolescence, is very negative. It does not stimulate the sexual appetite; it deconstructs it and, above all, renders it pathological. The capacity for eroticism is gravely affected; in particular, the future relations of husband and wife are greatly perturbed.

  Most pornographic spectacles to which adolescents have access, whether they are privately uploaded or if come from the pornography industry, involve relatively pathological sexual relations which are voyeuristic, devoid of any erotic anticipation: hasty quasi-rape scenes, vulgarity, brutality, with a clear tendency for brutalising women — ‘all whores’, of course — not to spea
k of the male homosexual scenes which are usually part of the landscape.

  The devastating psychological impact that such spectacles may have on the minds of boys and girls in the very midst of puberty are worrisome. Their future sexual and married life will be changed by it. Becoming habituated to pornography destabilises the development of sexuality in the adolescent.

  Rapes, Sex Crimes, and Judicial Laxity

  The French judicial system has a reputation neither for severity nor for effectiveness. Paradoxically, while the general crime rate was soaring during the 1970s (which corresponds precisely with the beginning of mass immigration into France), the police and judicial apparatus was weakened.[12] This happened for three reasons: 1) the ideologically-motivated permissiveness of the magistracy — increasingly feminised, Leftist, and sensitive to the rights of criminals; 2) a legal thicket that resembles a gasworks where the sentences decreed fail to be properly carried out, if at all; and 3) a judiciary apparatus overwhelmed by the exponential increase in crimes with which it must deal, along with the overcrowding of prisons, increasingly unmanageable for an overwhelmed prison administration.

  Regarding rape and sex crimes, one is struck by the mildness of the sentences imposed. Rapes — often followed by murder and accompanied with torture — are regularly committed by reoffenders who had received mild punishments or were freed well before their sentences were up, and then barely monitored. While we are on the subject, the very idea of conditionally freeing persons in the middle of their sentences (inconceivable in the United States), universal in France, is nothing more nor less than a denial of justice.