On Sex: Red Shoes to Silver Hands

Part One

This is a long essay, over a couple of posts. If you feel your eyes going to sleep you may want to listen to the audio below.

No sex is casual sex. I’ve sometimes wished it was, but I can’t hang my heart on it. It’s not that all intimacy is meant to be lofty and serious––please no––but that it always comes with some kind of consequence. If it’s entirely transactional it often leaves us troubled. If it’s engaging and transforming it leaves us blissed, even peaceful. There’s quite the difference. One leaves us free, the other oddly bound.

It's a strange state of affairs, as if we are not quite keeping up with the emotional intelligence of our own bodies. In the massively over-stimulated, over-sexed waters that we now swim in it rarely seems that stacking up the body count (a modern and oddly telling phrase) makes us feel liberated at all. Most of us wouldn’t have the capacity to make a connection of depth with the polyamorous rapidity sections of the internet would be encouraging. We sense that this is not a liberation, but that it feels like a cheapening. Like so many of my generation, I’ve been down in the trenches with this reality, I’m not writing this from a hut above the cloud line.

Statistically at least, young people seem to be having less sex than before. Less teenage pregnancies, less bunk ups in the graveyard after a few sips of vodka. There are various theories for this, but the most common being: sex can’t compete with porn. For those inculcated in porn since adolescence, the theatre and ever darkening scenarios it offers are a far safer place to live than the mysterious and even sacred encounters possible with a real human being. Why chance the nuances of courtship and the possibility of under-performing when you can just shuffle off with your phone into a virtual world where nothing is actually risked?

It’s an odd, growingly familiar combination of lust and loneliness.

As a mythologist I wonder if we are moving from red shoes to silver hands.