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2 Why God lies and sex objects object
to sex By Spengler
According to tradition across all
cultures, the female sex drive vastly exceeds that
of men. The Greek seer Tiresias, who had been both
male and female, told the Roman gods (in Ovid's
Metamorphoses) that women enjoy sex far
more than men. [1] In The Arabian Nights,
the Persian Shah Shahryar observes his new bride
comporting with a whole troop of slaves. Giovanni
Boccaccio famously stated in The Decameron,
"While farmers generally allow one rooster for 10
hens, 10 men are scarcely sufficient to service
one woman." [2] The matriarch Sarah's first
reaction to the
angelic annunciation of the
birth of Isaac was, "After I am waxed old shall I
have pleasure, my lord being old also?"
Across ages and cultures, women
universally are said to be more libidinous than
men. I can find no report to the contrary. Women
get most of the pain in the propagation of the
species, so they should get most of the pleasure.
With the plunging birth rate in the industrial
world, one suspects that something has changed in
this equation.
A case in point is Joan
Sewell's book I'd Rather Eat Chocolate, a
middle-aged woman's account of sexual ennui. It is
customary to find salacious material on the
best-seller lists, but this to my knowledge is the
first time that the absence of desire has
attracted mass attention. Think of it as a
companion volume to Sex in the City.
American women are purchasing Sewell's volume,
perhaps to leave as a hint on their husband's
pillow.
Mrs Sewell "slathers her husband,
Kip, in chocolate frosting", reports Sandra Tsing
Loh, who interviewed the authoress in the Atlantic
Monthly. "She whispers naughty nothings in his
ear. She lights candles, dons a bustier and
fishnets, and massages him with scented oil.
Ho-hum. She would still prefer a brownie, a book -
anything to sex. And she says most women, unless
they're fooling themselves, consider the deed a
chore."
No wonder. Mrs Sewell dresses like
a prostitute with her husband. Sex is a chore
rather than a pleasure for prostitutes, and it is
fair to assume that the same is true for women who
act like prostitutes. Women do not like to be sex
objects. Yet Mrs Sewell's complaint is epidemic
among American women. The supposed sexual freedom
of modern secular culture objectifies women, and
eventually disgusts them. Nothing is more likely
to kill desire than the life depicted in Sex
and the City. In another location, I argued
that sexual objectification makes women paranoid.
[3] It also makes them squeamish.
Americans seem to suffer
disproportionately from this problem, but they are
not the only ones. A new survey by Japan's
Ministry of Health and Welfare concludes that two
out of five married couples in Japan do not have
sexual relations. Unfortunately the survey did not
ask couples why this should be the case - I do not
think it is because Japanese women dislike sex -
so we shall have to wait for additional
information before evaluating this report.
"What do women want?" asked Sigmund Freud,
reinforcing my suspicion that the man was a moron
(see Put a stake through Freud's
heart, May 9, 2006). Women in the
modern world want what everyone wants, to be
recognized as an individual unique upon the Earth.
One does not have to accept the religious view
that God made every soul uniquely and for a unique
purpose. Individuality is the marketing pitch of
modern shopping-mall culture. Women wander through
a labyrinth of chain stores that sell the same
products in a thousand locations, to pay them to
bolster their sense of individuality, which is to
say, to become a better sex object.
Prior
to our epoch of sexual liberation, men had to
court women to mate with them. The desired woman
was a princess, the sovereign of the man's heart:
that was the point of the ritual of kneeling and
presenting a ring, a holdover of feudal obligation
and etiquette. Women want to be loved for
themselves, that is, for their unique and
individual souls. Sexual objectification
diminishes their interest in sex.
There is
a story about a rabbi who is asked whether sex on
the Sabbath is pleasure or work. "If it were
work," the rabbi responds, "my wife would have the
maid do it." Being a sexual object is work, not
pleasure; it is not something one does for
oneself, but for someone else, and it must become
tedious. Women expect men to love them uniquely
and in isolation from the rest of their gender,
and want a man who actually and in fact loves her
because there is something about her uniquely
created soul that fulfills him.
Love and
libido, according to the latest research, affect
different parts of the brain. Professor Helen
Fisher of Rutgers University suspects that low sex
drive in women is due to the absence of love. She
told the New York Times:
Lust is associated primarily with
testosterone in both men and women ... Romantic
love is linked with the natural stimulant
dopamine and perhaps norepinephrine and
serotonin. And feelings of attachment are
produced primarily by the hormones oxytocin and
vasopressin, which at elevated levels can
actually suppress the circuits for lust. I'm not
so sure that sex drive diminishes when most
people believe it does. Show me a middle-aged
woman who says she's lost her sex drive, and
I'll bet if she got a new partner, who excited
her, her neurochemical levels for lust and
romantic love would shoot back up.
[4]
Every human being wants to be
completed by another person, like Aristophanes'
four-legged creatures in Plato's Symposium.
The trouble is that if everyone waited around to
be quite certain that
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