SPENGLER Japan's lost libido and America's
asexual future By Spengler
A Japanese government study that should
have shaken the psychology profession to its
shoelaces went through the news media with a mild
degree of titillation last month. Almost a third
of Japanese boys aged 16-19 and three-fifths of
girls say that they have no interest in sex. That
is daunting, for all the world's cultures have
believed that women enjoy sex more than men, as
the Greek seer Tiresias told the gods according to
Ovid.
The hormones of late adolescence
evidently rage in vain against some cultural
barrier that makes young Japanese "despise" sexual
relations, according to the Japan Family Planning
Association's report [1]. The whole edifice of
liberal social policy should have tumbled upon the
news, which refutes Freud's premise that libido is
the driving force in human character. For 60
years, the sexual
revolution insisted that repressed desire is the
root of all evil. It turns out that the ultimate
victim of sexual revolution is sex itself.
What makes the Japanese hate sex? The same
things that make a growing proportion of Americans
hate sex. Joan Sewell's 2007 book I'd Rather
Eat Chocolate became the manifesto of American
women who don't like sex, hailed at the as "the
next wild turn in the female sexual revolution" by
Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic Monthly [2].
Pharmaceutical companies are racing to
market a pill to revive fading female libido, to
no avail: women do not want to be sex objects, and
a culture that objectifies women will make them
hate sex, as I wrote in this space five years ago
[3]. But the problem has gotten worse than I
imagined it would.
Japan is a step ahead
of the United States, as the first industrial
country to bring sadism and pedophilia into the
mainstream. Mere possession of certain Japanese
manga is a criminal offense in other countries.
"In recent cases in the United States and
Sweden, authorities have made arrests over manga
books imported from Japan depicting sexual abuse
of children," the New York Times reported Feb. 10,
2010 [4].
A streak of cruelty pervades
Japanese culture, for example, the emphasis on the
aesthetic in suicide, a concept alien to the
Judeo-Christian West. But the West has begun to
embrace cruelty in sexual relations on a scale
comparable to Japan, and the consequences most
likely will be identical.
For
example:Fifty Shades of Grey, the adult
version of the Twilight
vampire-and-werewolf series, has become a
soccer-mom bestseller. Now we know what the
original, adolescent version was about, namely
sadism and submission. What is it that makes
adolescent girls crave sexual control and
degradation? Evidently, it is the same thing that
prompts their mothers to buy heavy-breathing pulp
versions of the same thing in more explicit form.
After half a century of sexual revolution
- otherwise known as objectification - women
suffer en masse from the sexual equivalent of
Stockholm Syndrome, identification with their
tormentors, as a number of popular commentators
observe. After a quarter-million e-book downloads,
Viking Press has just paid a seven-figure advance
to one EL James, an Englishwoman who initially
posted the manuscript as bondage porn on a
Twilight fan fiction site under the
screen-name "SnowqueensIcedragon" [5]. In the
original, still available online, little Bella of
the Twilight books is deflowered not by her
vampire boyfriend, but by a billionaire sadist
instead, and becomes his adoring sex slave. In the
commercial version "Bella" becomes Anastasia,
presumably to avoid copyright infringement.
"The trilogy has its detractors," wrote
the New York Times March 10. "Commentators have
shredded the books for their explicit violence and
antiquated treatment of women, made especially
clear in the character of Anastasia, an awkward
naif who consents to being stalked, slapped and
whipped with a leather riding crop."
That
seems petulant; the Times adulated the Austrian
novelist Elfriede Jelinek [6], who got the 2004
Nobel Prize in literature for explicit portrayals
of sexual violence, but with literary pretensions.
Jelinek, though, is an Austrian communist who
politicizes domination. As she told the Times, "I
describe the relationship between man and woman as
a Hegelian relationship between master and slave."
Jelinek's S&M porn, unlike Ms James',
presumably has redeeming social importance.
Why are so many American women fascinated
by sexual cruelty? The answer is that the
prevailing regime of sexual objectification
already carries with it the experience of cruelty.
For adolescent girls, the replacement of courtship
by "hooking up" with "friends with benefits" is a
cruel prospect.
Even though only three out
of ten American teenagers aged 13 to 16 are
sexually active [7], the options available to
adolescent girls are narrowly defined. Adolescent
boys are monsters, as anyone who has been one, or
known one, can attest, and to require adolescent
girls to engage in sexual activity of any kind
with such creatures is horrifying. The considerate
and courteous young vampire of the Twilight
books is a cavalier by comparison.
Freud's
question, "What do women want?," showed what an
ideologically-driven fanatic he was. Women want
what every human being wants, which is to be
unique, and to be loved for their uniqueness. With
rare exceptions, human beings become unique by
bearing and raising children: a child can have
only one mother. Women are unique as mothers, and
men are lifted above their animal instincts by
their attachment to the mother of their children.
The moment we separate sexuality from
child-bearing, we turn women into generic sexual
objects, which makes it impossible for them to
obtain what they want, because sexual objects are
generic. The one thing you know with 100%
certainty about any woman you see, supermodels
included, is that some man, somewhere, is tired of
sleeping with her. If women cannot control men by
bearing their children, what other means to they
have to control them? We find the answer in the
sudden popularity of dominant-submissive
fantasies.
The dominant "master of the
universe" in EL James' story can be controlled by
his own need to dominate, for the submissive
female heroine has something that he needs in
addition to generic sexuality. The stylized sexual
games that EL James recounts become a creepy
substitute for actual courtship. Like the romance
novel hero, who must pay court to the female lead,
the "master of the universe" must pay prolonged
attention to the female lead in preparation for
sexual acts. Romance fiction requires a suspension
of disbelief that is increasingly precarious in a
culture of sexual exploitation. The
dominant-submissive fantasy is more credible.
The sudden popularly of Fifty Shades of
Grey portends the death of America's libido. I
cannot speak from personal experience, but the
paradox of domination as explained by comedian Jim
Jeffries surely applies to the ritualistic cruelty
described in this silly book and its sequels.
After the initial frisson has passed, repetition
of the same handcuffs-and-riding-crop routine must
become unspeakably boring over time. One doubts
that many dom-and-sub couples live happily ever
after:
"Slave, get on your knees and put
your wrists together!" "Sorry, honey. I have a
headache."
And when perversion fails
to titillate, nothing at all will. Like Japanese
women, who encountered mainstream sexual violence
and now eschew sex altogether, American women will
have a great deal less sex and a great deal more
chocolate.
All the signs are there. It was
only recently that mainstream American
corporations began to advertise electronic sex
toys on prime-time television, indicating that the
market had, well, peaked. American women will
follow their Japanese sisters into asexuality, and
if women become sufficiently disgusted with men,
men will become disgusted with themselves.
There might be a simpler explanation for
the disappearance of Japan's libido. "Between 1998
and 2003, sales of anti-depressants in Japan
quintupled, according to IMS Health.
GlaxoSmithKline alone saw its sales of Paxil
increase from $108 million in 2001 to $298 million
in 2003. According to the company, during one
seven-month ad campaign it ran last year, 110,000
people in a population of 127 million consulted
their doctors about depression," the New York
Times reported in 2004 [8].
Back in 1998,
Proffesor Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University
warned that massive overuse of
psycho-pharmacopoeia might lead to a gigantic
decline in libido.
Prozac is well known to cause sexual
dysfunction, along with general calming. Maybe
the attack on depression and hyperactivity is
affecting aggression, violence, crime, and many
other antisocial behaviors. But creativity in
all its formseconomic, scientific, artisticalso
often first appears as antisocial behavior.
Maybe America and other nations are prescribing
themselves a gradual but gigantic and deadly
loss of libido. An ironic end to the Freudian
century.
Whether it is due to disgust
at the misery of their circumstances, or the
side-effect of drugs intended to dull the misery
of their circumstances, women are abandoning
sexuality.
When human beings cease to
desire each other physically, it is because they
have ceased to desire each other at all. The
things that motivate human beings to unite in
intimate and permanent union, procreating and
acculturating another generation, give way to the
pure exercise of ego. The typical American
household no longer harbors a family but a person
living alone. As Eric Klinenberg reports in his
much-commented new book Going Solo, 28% of
all American households now contain a single
person, compared to just 9% in 1950.
Klinenberg, to be sure, thinks this is
wonderful; his typical "Singleton" lives in
Manhattan, hangs out at the local sushi bar and
coffee shop, swims in a rich cultural current, and
devotes himself to the grand diversion of the age,
namely "self-realization", which is easier to
pursue in the absence of another self that might
make competing demands.
In another 20
years or so, though, the self-sufficient singles
of American cities will emulate the
kodokushi ("lonely death") victims of
Japan, another much-commented 21st-century
phenomenon. Time magazine reported in 2010 that
kodokushi clean-up has become a minor
industry:
In the 1990s, Taichi Yoshida, the
owner of a small moving company in Osaka, Japan,
began noticing that many of his jobs involved
people who had just died. Families of the
deceased were either too squeamish to pack up
for their dead relatives, or there wasn't any
family to call on. So Yoshida started a new
business cleaning out the homes of the dead.
Then he started noticing something else: thick,
dark stains shaped like a human body, the
residue of liquids excreted by a decomposing
corpse. [9]
That is the end that
enlightened secular culture has prefigured for us
at the end of the Freudian century: to leave no
trace of our mortal existence except for a
grease-stain on the carpet.
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