In the relatively few years I’ve lived on this strange planet I’ve managed to devise a simple formula to get people to listen to me. In order to achieve full, mouth-foaming hysteria just simply pick one of the following topics and set it motion: sex, religion and politics. But let’s be realistic here, while everyone pretends to be interested in the other two, it’s really all about the sex. Whether you’re a Tibetan monk or Britney spears, most of human endeavour seems to centre on sex and sexuality. Even if you have no interest in sex whatsoever, sex will still define your whole identity as you’ll emphatically be known for not liking it- asexual people are defined by and are given a whole identity based on this thing that they are not. I’m not here to judge the centrality of sex in our lives as a good or bad thing, but realising it and coming to terms with it, with the goal of putting sex in its right place is the good thing and pretending it’s not an issue and letting it wreak havoc underground in our unconscious is the bad thing.
I’ve grown up in a culture that is obsessed with sex…implicitly that is. Sex was such an unmentionable for us that we couldn’t even say the word, it was too embarrassing to talk about even if you were discussing it scientifically. Unless you were talking about one’s biological sex, which itself was embarrassing, you had to spell it out to avoid saying a dirty word: S-E-X. Now imagine having this culture at home and also being taught sex education at a very young age because of your school’s very liberal values. I was taught about sex at the grand old age of 8 (7 actually because I was put up a year for reasons too long to go into). Of course, I didn’t realise how strange this all was at the time, and paradoxically, I don’t recall any extreme reaction from my parents. They must have known what we were being taught through the school’s communiqués and I do remember being told off for mentioning certain body parts at home that I had learnt at school that day. I can only reason that the folks thought this was what it was like in every ‘English’ school.
It’s a long shot, but there could be an explanation for why my old school taught us about sex so early. I very innocently absorbed what we were taught like it was any other lesson, and had no idea of the taboo or special importance attached to this common and vital human act. When I, like the eager geek that I am, passed on my new found knowledge to my friends, I didn’t understand why I was doing something wrong in their eyes. I don’t want us to be flippant about sex, far from it. Learning early on how sex makes babies will far from trivialise it. Better kids first hear of it in this disinterested scientific way, as a natural and biological fact of life.
But of course, thanks to the pornification of our culture, there’s no way to stop children learning about the most misogynistic and grotesque kinds of sex through online porn at the worst and Hip Hop music on a more prosaic level. The phenomenon of pornification has become so depressingly endemic over the decades that when I was growing up I thought that’s just how the ‘West’ was. Rather than just the product of a liberal capitalist democracy I thought this was part of the rituals, rites, and lifestyle of actual western culture and what you had to do to be part of the club. It was like living with Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s little wonder, then, that we harboured the characteristic fear and loathing of the West and we learned to hate and fear this aspect of the west very early on. ‘Boyfriend’ was another unspeakable word.
What to everyone else was just an unfortunate side effect of the otherwise positive move towards sexual freedom in the ‘60s was to us a justification for an extremely repressive attitude to sex. And here’s where it gets really depressing. Take a culture, like mine (Arab culture), which is already virulently anti-sex and place it in the midst of a field of free-loving hippies, and it will incubate and fester. My parents suddenly found themselves awash with justifications for their restrictive mores. It’s hard to challenge their ideas of sexual purity when to them the only alternative is a lurid, orgiastic fuck-fest.
As society becomes more sexually explicit, something weird had been known to happen. The shameless advertising industry has seized on the fact we have greater sexual freedom to make a quick buck and have so far gotten away with touting the basest sexual and gender stereotypes because that’s what sells. So what we get here is extreme irony. Wanting to get away from our sexually repressive past, we’ve established greater freedom with which large chunks of society appear to be freely adopting the tropes of our sexually repressive past. Studies have actually shown that kids who consume this kind of sex in the media inherit more traditional views of gender.
I say freely adopt, but those who get the raw end of the deal, and let’s face it, it’s the women, are under immense pressure to play along. Men are also under pressure…to lose their virginity. Sensitive men who don’t make it their life’s purpose to sexually conquer the female race, or men who just find it harder to compete, are singled out as freaks and pariahs. But it’s the pressure on women that’s worse because it’s not just easier to scrutinise them and their sex lives, but they’re under pressure to perform a ridiculous and paradoxical juggling act. They are expected to look like porn stars, while acting like the Virgin Mary.
A terrible feedback loop is occurring where advertisers are overselling sex, if you like, and in turn young people are becoming influenced by this and pressured to conform to this high standard of sexual prowess. And so ultimately sex does sell because you’ve made it sell. Not only are we, thanks to irresponsible marketing, reverting back to repressive sexual attitudes, but the simultaneous over-sexualisation of our culture is sending traditionalists like my parents and Christian Americans into a defensive frenzy. So, while sections of society are happy with their freedom to sexually indulge and experiment, other sections of the very same society are subject to suffocating honour codes, while their cousins in America suffer from the similar purity codes and vulnerable teenagers continue to be under pressure to become virtual porn stars. I think sometimes I can be too liberal and turn a blind eye to the lurid sexualisation of all things around me. I justify it by simply dismissing it as crass, but I think it’s high time we complained en masse to ASA and Ofcom about this.
Posted by Rumbold on June 27, 2009 at 8:50 am
Good post- but how does one deal with the sexualisation of culture without ending up like Saudi Arabia.
Posted by houriya on June 27, 2009 at 1:34 pm
It’s difficult to argue whether it’s simply the sexualisation of culture that is the problem, or pornification. They are not the same thing, but rather one is general while the other is specifically sexist towards women. The problem then becomes how to tackle sexism in our culture as brought to us by the porn industry.