Modernity loves trends, including sociocultural ones. Trends as topics for endless conversations, gossip and even scientific discussions. Here are some of the topical, most-talked-about issues, off the top of my head: gender, emigration, rights of all kinds of minorities, the right to choose not only religion, but also gender identity (say, for example, if you were born a man or a woman, and it makes you miserable, then you by no means have to endure this karmic injustice all your life—get a surgery done and be happy for the rest of your life).
The topic of gender-based violence is trending now. Not just murders, but violence in the broadest sense—from physical beatings in everyday life, to subtle sexual games, the rules of which are imposed by the “rapist”. The latter is usually a brutal man, but there are also charming female “rapists”, for example, young school teachers seducing innocent boys. That is much less common and those spicy cases almost never make headlines against the backdrop of much more publicized and showy men-related scandals in the society column. The most high-profile of those was the epic story of cultural and moral downfall, humiliation and mental annihilation of the Hollywood shark, the once omnipotent and influential producer Harvey Weinstein, who turned out to be an indiscreet sexual champion who had cajoled a lot of hot Hollywood beauties into sharing his bed. He was publicly accused, kicked out of all his jobs and disgraced. His wife left him, his company went bankrupt, and he himself was prosecuted. And the point is not how much the hapless smug producer is to blame—the point is that harassment, by default, is a crime, period. It doesn’t matter whether the actresses slept with him voluntarily, out of professional self-interest, in order to get a high-paying part in a big-budget movie, or the man pressured them to do so. The main thing is the harassment charge itself. It is not easy to wash off, especially if the accusations come not from one or two, but from quite a few famous actresses, and then other awakened beauties join them, “suddenly” and rather carnivorously recalling that, you know what, they too once screwed this salacious pig.
The social impact of the Weinstein affair was overwhelming. The #MeToo mass movement was born, when a huge number of female victims of violence began to accuse various public influential men of harassment. This movement, in fact, resembled regular bullying. Many culprits took a serious hit: they had to end all their social engagements, leave their jobs, sink into the ground, in short, disappear from the media field, which for many of them is tantamount to death, for modernity has convinced almost everyone that if you are not in the spotlight of the media, you simply don’t exist.
Interestingly, these facts and this movement itself emerged in the United States, a country notorious for its excessive puritanism, outwardly strict morals and moral code. I remember an acquaintance of mine, who had worked in the US for several years, giving me a friendly word of warning before my first trip to America back in the 2000s: “Try not to be alone with a strange woman, for example, in an elevator, or you might end up with a harassment suit, you’ll never live it down… “
But, for example, in France, the spermatic land of unbridled passions, gallant lotharios, expert courtesans and peculiar love stories, this movement faltered: a hundred famous French women, led by the wise Catherine Deneuve, called #MeToo “new puritanism” and defended men’s right to flirt. Now, this is interesting! Indeed, in fact, your regular flirting, with elements of playful psychological pressure, can be easily taken for unacceptable harassment and cost one one’s head.
All right, suppose this is all happening in the “civilized” first-world countries. But what about us, the third-world countries? Of course, there are no such anti-phallic, or, if you will, phallophobic show movements here. But we do get an occasional incident of direct gender-based physical violence. In short, it’s almost always a woman who ends up in the center of unfortunate and unpleasant events. Alas, it is true. Woman as a victim of violence. Local feminists and their sympathizers of either sex regularly raise these human rights issues, the topics of unacceptable “rules of the game” in a still deeply backward, patriarchal society, insufficient freedom and courage of women in the struggle for their rights, and so on and so forth. But this is not the point. The last thing I want to do right now is conduct a comparative analysis of how this happens with “them” and “us”. There is no “them” and “us” against the backdrop of global MODERNITY, just as there are no first- second- and third-world countries. Modernity has absorbed everyone in its overarching secular paradigm. This is the most important thing. All the nuances of differences in the context of this article are insignificant.
So, in this global and universal modernity, we have what can be called sexual aggression, which literally permeates the entire atmosphere of modern civilization. This sexual aggression manifests itself in different ways and at different levels—from some maniac shooting unfortunate children in American schools, to sexual violence, to the mass murder of 77 people committed by the Norwegian nationalist Anders Breivik, ethnic cleansing in local military conflicts, to legitimate cultural aggression in the constant stream of films and television programs with elements of open or hidden aggression in the media. Aggression is everywhere. It’s in the very air of the modern world.
I call it unowned aggression. Why? My idea is simple. I see aggression as a strong impulse to cross boundaries. The word itself, I admit, does sound unpleasant. It doesn’t caress the ear, especially the ear of an educated, intelligent person in the street. But in the sense of crossing boundaries, going beyond all sorts of limits, this word means the same as the word “transcendence” or “transcending”, i.e., going beyond the status quo. This is something extremely passionate, something that moves the spirit, which always strives for liberation from all forms, including the most subtle and sublime ones. And this is the most important quality in the living and, even more so, rational world—the quality of the ascent of the spirit (=thought) to the highest abstract dimensions of the World, not determined by any visible and objective forms. This ascent is usually traumatic. This is a very important and ineradicable force of being, without which there can be no life. In the lower dense energy dimension, this force manifests itself as sexual energy, which strives, on the one hand, to increase the diversity of life, the life instinct—Eros—and, on the other hand, to destroy previous forms and go beyond the extreme limits, the urge usually defined as the death drive—Thanatos. The most astute of us understand that this is the same thing. After all, say, human sexual intercourse is not always aimed at biological reproduction, as opposed to animals that mate solely for reproduction. Continuation of life is just one, and not the most important, purpose of sexual contact. In general, sex, in its non-biological meaning, being a mysterious phenomenon, through the intensification of the feeling of unearthly, almost mystical pleasure, is associated with transgression, i.e., with the same impulse to break through ordinary reality, the impulse to overcome, to overstep, to go beyond the boundaries—with the pathos of metaphysical crossing of the lines. Aggressive force is the fuel of sex. If a man lusts for a woman, it’s normal. If a woman is eager to give herself to a man, it’s normal. They say “he took her” or “he had her” for a reason. There is nothing humiliating about it. On the contrary, there is something of ritual sacred violence in it, a sacrifice, a kind of mutual mental suicide that must be understood as an act of self-liberation from the fetters of total triviality…
But this ritual of transgressive intercourse is good when it is in its specific, imperceptible, hidden niche in public life. When sex is not a public, but a private phenomenon, the intimate is not brought up for the judgment of curious onlookers, and the subtlety and delicacy of private space is not absorbed by the harsh social environment. But are these simple conditions met in the modern world?
Let’s take a look at what is happening. What do we see?
The world is not just permeated with eroticism, it is literally splashed with sperm, stunned by erotic screams, howls, flowers, undertones…—sex in all forms, seasoned with all sorts of spices creeps out of every crack of society. The media space is nothing but screaming erotica. Every single ad, even an ad for some ultra-modern vacuum cleaner or a cutting-edge iron, features a smiling, impossibly sexy beautiful woman, sometimes half-naked—not necessarily though, since the whole mood of a commercial is saturated with sex. The bright, glossy visual imagery is designed to excite the consumer, to captivate him (yes, him) at a subconscious level, so that he is bound to have an erection seeing these advertised household items (imagine a consumer getting a hardon for a vacuum cleaner… objectophilia!). Then we have fashion that accentuates, emphasizes seductive female forms, cinema that adores risqué topics, the porn industry of every possible form to fit every possible taste that easily occupied the Internet and got into teenagers’ pants, convincing the little nitwits that masturbating is much more creative and cooler than doing all that pesky, boring homework. To cut a long story short, eroticism is everywhere and anywhere.
But note that this ubiquitous sexuality is offered to us in an overwhelmingly feminine shape. With rare exceptions, there are only nude or scantily clad beauties everywhere: from unknown and random protagonists of ultra-fast commercials to famous actresses of the modern film industry eager to conquer the audience with their beautiful asses and boobs. Just look at the ceremonies of major TV/film festivals and other media forums where popular media stars of the fair sex try to upstage one another by demonstrating exclusive and extremely revealing outfits.
What does it mean? It’s rather simple and trivial: modern society shows us women as a commodity—or, to be more precise, the female body as a commodity, as an object of lust and sexual consumption. If so, how can the public have any issues, complaints, discontent and indignation if the buyer, client, consumer uses what the society itself offers him as a commodity? What we have here is the blatant disgusting hypocrisy of society: on the one hand, it shoves a sultry, delicate product down the consumer’s throat, and on the other hand, as soon as the consumer touches this product, the same society slaps him on the shameless hands. But we have digressed. The point completely different.
As the wise men of old said, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. When there is too much sex, it turns into its absence: if sexuality is spread throughout the entire modern human habitat, we end up with its decomposition, deformation, and pathology. It is a sexological fact that if one is in a constant state of sexual tension, it disrupts one’s sexual function. And modern society obviously keeps everyone in an unobtrusive but never-ending sexual tension. I think the logical conclusion suggests itself. What we are witnessing is nothing more than a mental castration of a modern person—mainly men, but women as well. Hence the impressive statistics of sexual dysfunctions, impotence, frigidity, and, in contrast, a hysterical development of the pharmaceutical industry aimed at eliminating sexual problems (take Viagra and many other similar drugs stimulating libido and potency). It is this castration and sexual fragmentation that cause sexual disorientation of a modern person and the emergence of the third sex. Man loses virility, his masculine, ontological status, and wants to no longer be masculine. Heroics and pathos have long been filed into the archives of history as relics of a naïve past. Woman, too, is tired of being sweet and feminine, and she puts on masks of an Amazon, a feminist… As an alternative extreme, she cultivates a presentation of herself as marketable, turning into an actual or potential whore. Real sex is being replaced by virtual sex. Birth rate in the Western world is plummeting. The subject of sexual minorities and transgender people is extremely relevant in modern culture. The fire of live sexual intercourse is extinguished by the icy water of perverse virtual phantasms. But… And here we finally get to the most important thing.
Mental castration of men through the total and ubiquitous sexualization of life in modern society results in aggressive sexual energy beginning to push through in other ways, manifesting itself in society in most unexpected forms. It mostly manifests itself in that unmotivated and spontaneous violence we mentioned at the beginning of the article. Aggression has become uncontrolled and unowned—and merciless. Modern society will have many surprises ahead in terms of the increase and exacerbation of violence. Therefore, all efforts of naïve intelligent people aimed at finding means to prevent violence in society are hopeless and doomed to fail. No amount of pinpoint adjustments will help. It is ridiculous to redecorate the house if the sewer pipes are rotten and ready to burst at any moment. The very root of the modern paradigm must be changed, as it is based on the principle of permissiveness affectionately and insidiously called “democracy”, and no one seems intent on changing it. Instead, there are marches, protests, petitions, panel discussions, pseudo-scientific conferences and other money-laundering projects. This is why we can expect the natural continuation of violence, blood, destruction, abuse, murder… “aristocratic” refinement of horrible perversions, primarily sexual ones… Perversions that will be brilliantly aestheticized by writers, artists, directors and other bored intellectuals.
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