How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

i: Censorship

1.

When his demons grow unmasterable and Daisy is asleep, Jim often surreptitiously gets out of bed and climbs the stairs to visit the computer in the small study on the floor above.

As its defenders are forever pointing out, the internet is a superlative educational tool, connecting the intermittent intelligences of the continents’ scattered populations into a single, gigantic and ceaselessly active global mind. With just a few clicks and taps on the keyboard, Jim can find himself navigating the virtual stacks of the Library of Congress, checking the weather in southern Italy, looking at classic cars at a show in California or investigating contrasting graphs of the planet’s median air temperatures over the past two decades.

Yet with equal ease, he can of course run a search on ‘slutty teenagers fucking’ and lose his mind. No wonder sales of serious literature are down across the world: books are going to have to be really interesting to compete with this. Anything else – a spacecraft’s landing on Mars, a child’s first nativity play, the discovery of fifteen previously unknown Shakespeare folios – will struggle. The real question of the age is why a man might ever choose to lead his own life rather than just click on, obsessively, from Amateurs to Blondes, Bondage to Interracial, Outdoors to Redheads and Shemales to Voyeur.

2.

Pornography is often accused (typically by those blessed souls whose entire direct experience of the subject comprises a peek or two inside an old issue of Playboy and perhaps an abbreviated preview of the adult channel, glimpsed some years ago on a hotel television set) of being comfortingly ‘fake’ and therefore unthreatening to the conduct of any sensible and intelligent existence. But this is unfortunately far from the truth. Modern pornography now looks so real as to resemble our own lives in every detail – with the significant difference, of course, that in the former everyone happens to be having continuous, beatific sex.

The associated waste of time is naturally horrific. Financial analysts put the value of the online pornography industry at $10 billion a year, but this figure doesn’t begin to evoke its true cost in terms of squandered human energy: perhaps as many as two hundred million man-hours annually that might otherwise have been devoted to starting companies, raising children, curing cancer, writing masterpieces or sorting out the attic, are instead spent ogling the mesmerizing pages of sites such as www.hotincest.com and www.spanksgalore.com.

3.

How deeply contrary pornography is to the rest of our plans and inclinations becomes clear only after orgasm. Where just a moment before we might have sacrificed our worldly goods for one more click, now we must confront with horror and shame the temporary abandonment of our sanity. Nobility as Aristotle conceived of it in the Nicomachean Ethics – ‘the full flourishing of what is most distinctively human in accordance with the virtues’ – has surely been left far behind when an anonymous woman somewhere in the former Soviet Union is forced onto a bed, three penises are roughly inserted into her orifices and the ensuing scene is recorded for the entertainment of an international audience of maniacs. We are far from dignity, happiness and morality – but also not so far, in certain eyes at least, from pleasure.

Yet this poison is not easy to resist. An unlikely and partly unwitting alliance between Cisco, Dell, Oracle and Microsoft on the one hand and thousands of pornographic-content providers on the other has exploited a design flaw of the male gender. A mind originally designed to cope with little more sexually tempting than the occasional sight of a tribeswoman across the savannah is rendered helpless when bombarded by continual invitations to participate in erotic scenarios far exceeding any dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological makeup to compensate for developments in our technological capacities, nothing to arrest our passionate desire to renounce all other priorities for the sake of a few more minutes (which might turn out to be four hours) in the darker recesses of www.springbreakdelight.com.

It was not so difficult to concentrate on reading Chekhov’s short stories by candlelight when the only other diversion on offer was a chat with a neighbour who lived a twenty-minute walk away down the lane. But what chance do Chekhov or any other writers stand when we can split our Dell screen into two, on the left side arrange a photo collage of naked cheerleaders, and on the right, with the help of MSN Messenger, conduct a real-time conversation with a svelte twenty-five-year-old pole dancer (in reality a doughy male truck driver of 53) who will gently encourage us, in our own guise as a curious but uninitiated teenage lesbian, to take the first tentative steps towards our sexual awakening?

4.

When the intellectual framework behind our modern secular societies was first developed, by such seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers as John Locke, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, the ideal of personal liberty was set at its centre. In their ‘good society’, citizens would be left alone to read what they wished, look at whatever images they liked and worship any god they chose. The only limits to be imposed on the individual’s freedom were those justified by a need to prevent harm to others: people would not be permitted to bludgeon their neighbours to death or rob one another of their livelihoods, but short of such extreme behaviours, they would be allowed to do as they pleased. This fundamental principle was famously asserted in John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty (1859): ‘The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual.’

Even today, when we meditate on what is most distinctive and honourable about contemporary democracies, we will tend to single out freedom. Our automatic defence of this ideal rests on two foundations. First, our embrace is cautionary: we are well aware of the dangers associated with any sort of state intervention. Believing it impossible for one person really to know how another should live, we hold that the potential benefits to be derived from curtailing others’ activities are far outweighed by the inherent perils. It seems preferable to leave people to work out their salvation in their own ways, rather than run the risk of causing a catastrophe by interfering. Lest any doubt should persist on this score, the spectres of Hitler and Stalin are routinely invoked as reminders of what can happen when one person decides he knows what is best for everyone else.

Second, and more optimistically, our defence of freedom rests on the belief that we human beings are at heart mature, rational creatures, able to adequately assess our own needs, look after our own interests and get along perfectly well by ourselves, without requiring a great deal of protection. What we are exposed to doesn’t need monitoring, for we don’t tend to be overly influenced by things we look at or read about. We aren’t going to be irreparably harmed by a book or a picture; we aren’t likely to become violent after reading a bloodthirsty novel or lose our moral bearing on account of seeing a film or a photograph. Our mental equilibrium is stronger than that. We aren’t made of blotting paper; we can safely live with, and take pride in, a free press and a democracy of ideas.

5.

In almost every detail, these secular tenets contradict the beliefs of most religions – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that the philosophy of modern liberalism evolved largely in reaction to the drift of religious doctrine. For their part, the faiths have always argued that they are in possession of some highly reliable understandings of right and wrong and hence are morally obligated to impose their value systems, if necessary with vigour and coercion. They have also held that humans are not at all impervious to the messages they find around them. They may be deeply affected by material they read or look at, and so must constantly be protected from themselves. They stand in need of censorship.

The very word is normally terrifying, evoking the Soviet and Nazi experiments as well as the vengeful stupidities of the Catholic Inquisition. Yet before we reject the idea of censorship out of hand, even though we are on a slippery slope at the bottom of which lie some appalling scenarios, it may be worth entertaining the possibility that there could be such a thing as a beneficial and necessary variety of censorship. Perhaps we really are, as many religions would have it, vulnerable to what we read and see; perhaps the influence of books and visual materials doesn’t just wash over us. Because we are passionate and largely unreasonable, buffeted by destructive hormones and desires, it doesn’t take much to make us lose sight of our long-term ambitions. Although this permeability may insult our self-image, the wrong pictures may send us down a fatal track; unhelpful reading material may deflect the needle of our ethical compass; and a few ill-intentioned adverts in a glossy magazine can (as advertisers well know) play havoc with our values. In such cases, a bit of censorship might not be such a bad idea. Without, of course, ceding all of our freedoms to an arbitrary and tyrannical authority, we ought nevertheless, sometimes and in some contexts, to be willing to accept a theoretical limit to some of our rights, if only for the sake of our own well-being and our capacity to flourish. In moments of lucidity, we should be able to see for ourselves that untrammelled liberty can paradoxically trap us, and that – when it comes to internet pornography, for instance – we might be doing ourselves a favour if we willingly consented to cede certain of our privileges to a benign supervisory entity.

It is perhaps only those people whose logical selves have never been obliterated by the full force of sex who can remain uncensorious and liberally ‘modern’ on the subject. Philosophies of sexual liberation seem to appeal largely to those who harbour no especially destructive or weird desires which they long to satisfy once they have been liberated.

By contrast, anyone who has experienced the power of sex in general, and of internet pornography in particular, to reroute rational priorities, is unlikely to be quite so sanguine on the topic of sexual freedom. After sufficient late-night hours spent obsessively watching a succession of people undress and penetrate one another, even the most libertarian among us might find themselves calling for someone to make a giant bonfire out of every last server, router, data-farm and cable on the planet, so as to put a definitive end to the system responsible for delivering a diet of poison into our homes and minds.

Pornography, like alcohol and drugs, undermines our ability to endure certain kinds of suffering which we have to experience if we are to direct our lives properly. More specifically, it reduces our capacity to tolerate our ambiguous moods of free-floating worry and boredom. Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted – processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs. Furthermore, the ready availability of pornography lessens our tolerance for the kind of boredom that grants our mind the space it needs to spawn good ideas – the creative sort of boredom we may luxuriate in during a bath or on a long train journey. Whenever we feel an all but irresistible desire to flee from our own thoughts, we can be quite sure there is something important trying to make its way into our consciousness – and yet it is precisely at such pregnant moments that internet pornography is most apt to exert its maddening pull, assisting our escape from ourselves and thereby helping us to destroy our present and our future.

6.

Only religions still take sex seriously, in the sense of properly respecting its power to turn us away from our priorities. Only religions see it as something potentially dangerous and needing to be guarded against. We may not sympathize with what they would wish us to think about in the place of sex, and we may not like the way they go about trying to censor it, but we can surely – though perhaps only after killing many hours online at www.youporn.com – appreciate that on this one point religions have got it right: sex and sexual images can overwhelm our higher rational faculties with depressing ease.

Given its resistance to censorship and its faith in mankind’s maturity, the secular world reserves a special scorn for Islam’s promotion of the hijab and the burka. The idea that women should have to cover themselves up from head to toe so as not to distract male believers’ focus from Allah seems preposterous to the guardians of secularism. Would a rational adult man really turn his life upside down because he caught a glimpse of a pair of beguiling female knees or elbows? And who but a mental weakling could be seriously affected by the spectacle of a group of half-naked teenage girls sauntering provocatively down the beachfront?

Secular societies have no problems with bikinis or sexual provocation because, among other things, they do not believe that sexuality and beauty have such extraordinary power over people. Men are presumed to be entirely capable of watching a group of young women cavort, whether online or in the flesh, and then getting on with their lives as though nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.

Religions are often mocked for being prudish, but insofar as they warn us against sex, they do so out of an active awareness of the charms and the power of desire. They wouldn’t judge sex to be quite so bad if they didn’t also understand that it could be rather wonderful. The problem is that this wonderful thing can get in the way of some other important and precious concerns of ours, such as God and life.

We may not want to go so far as to veil beauty, but perhaps we can come to see the point of censoring the internet and applaud any government attempts to reduce the ready and unchecked flow of pornography down our fibre-optic cables. Even if we no longer believe in a deity, we may have to concede that a degree of repression is necessary both for the mental health of our species and for the adequate functioning of a decently ordered and loving society. A portion of our libido has to be forced underground for our own good; repression is not just for Catholics, Muslims and the Victorians, but for all of us and for eternity. Because we have to go to work, commit ourselves to relationships, care for our children and explore our own minds, we cannot allow our sexual urges to express themselves without limit, online or otherwise; left to run free, they destroy us.