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Sexual Malaise and Apathy in Middle Class America??? Can You Believe an Academic Writing about Sex?  

PacificEros 68M
1276 posts
7/14/2010 11:49 am

Last Read:
8/7/2010 2:57 pm

Sexual Malaise and Apathy in Middle Class America??? Can You Believe an Academic Writing about Sex?


Camille Paglia, a professor of humanities and media studies, has opined in a recent Op-Ed piece for The New York Times that a "sexual malaise" or "apathy" appears to have sunk over the country."

She finds this malaise particularly affecting middle class America and claims it emanates from an "anxious, overachieving white upper middle class." She further explains that the "real culprit" for this malaise or apathy origins from a 19th century "bourgeois propriety" that tamed or repressed a more bawdy, vibrant, earthy embrace of sex that she believes existed in an era that stretches from the ribaldry of the Renaissance and the more agrarian world of the 17th and 18th centuries.

She also claims that only the "New Ages" movement has "preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution," which she locates in the Jazz age of the 1920s and the liberatory transformations of 1960s America.

She also blames more particularly the "careerist technocracy" of "white collar America" and the "elitist schools" that are "feeder cells" for this white collar world.

Damn, I wonder if she's ever been on a college<b> campus </font></b>outside the library and a classroom and at night. Indeed, she strikes me as fulfilling the steretoype of an academic who knows only about sex from what she reads in books and newspapers or interprets from watching movies (I think she missed watching "Sex in the City" and "The Real Housewives of New Jersey").

Of course, her claim that the "modern sexual revolution" today lives only through the "New Age" movement completely ignores the world we know about through AdultFriendFinder and other sites serving the Lifestyle movement or phenomenon.

What I love about a place like AdultFriendFinder and other such sites is that it does serve, in my view, an underground world that is keeping alive the eros and ethos of a modern sexual revolution: particularly a cultural reshaping or redefinition of "sexual morality" for women. Sometimes, in a phrase that MadamTori taught me, "shift happens."

Prof. Paglia further claims that the "malaise" stems from a suppression of physicality among men as the modern day workplace is dominated by intellectual labor rather than physical labor and at home men just serve as "cogs" in a "domestic machine commanded by women."

So, guys, how many of you feel you are "cogs" in a domenstic machine?

So, gals, how many of you feel your men are cogs in a "domestic machine" under your command?

So how many of you feel that "white collar work" and middle class ambition and propriety are repressing and desexualizing the contemporary American man?

Do you also think the elemental power of sexuality has waned in popular culture?

On the one hand, I sympathize with Paglia's lament that a more vibrant embrace of a Dionysian world seems to have given way to order and regime of Apollo, but I have find that part of a action-reaction cycle of cultural history, with American culture still in some degree of counter-reaction against the liberatory transformations of the 1960s, which I do see as a time of lifting the lid and tearing off the bra of a tamed, too repressive sexuality.

But thanks to the internet, I see more than the stirrings of a shift of sexual morality and ethos particularly for women in their forties and fifities, with women claiming more freedom and opportunity for pursuing their own visions of sexual pleasure and freedom both inside and outside the context of marriage.

Maybe some white-collar, middle class men are uncomfortable handling this liberation, but I always believe more liberation from women will always ultimately be a benefit to men as well as to women...and lead to more perfect unions between men and women...even if the nature of that union is not defined or restricted to a monogamous ideal.

In any case, I'm curious to see bloggers, male and female, respond to the claims of Paglia's essay.

Maybe we should extend an invitation to her to atend the blogfest in St. Louis.


No Sex Please, We�re Middle Class
By CAMILLE PAGLIA, professor of humanities and media studies
June 25, 2010 Op Ed in New York Times

WILL women soon have a Viagra of their own? Although a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recently rejected an application to market the Drug flibanserin in the United States for women with low libido, it endorsed the potential benefits and urged further research. Several pharmaceutical companies are reported to be well along in the search for such a Drug.

The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects, is necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country. But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?

In the 1950s, female �frigidity� was attributed to social conformism and religious puritanism. But since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, American society has become increasingly secular, with a media environment drenched in sex.

The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare�s plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm.

Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution. But concrete power resides in America�s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.

In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of . But it�s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There�s no mystery left.

The elemental power of sexuality has also waned in American popular culture. Under the much-maligned studio production code, Hollywood made movies sizzling with flirtation and romance. But from the early �70s on, nudity was in, and steamy build-up was out. A generation of filmmakers lost the skill of sophisticated innuendo. The situation worsened in the �90s, when Hollywood pirated video games to turn women into cartoonishly pneumatic superheroines and sci-fi androids, fantasy figures without psychological complexity or the erotic needs of real women.

Furthermore, thanks to a bourgeois white culture that values efficient bodies over voluptuous ones, American actresses have desexualized themselves, confusing sterile athleticism with female power. Their current Pilates-honed look is taut and tense � a boy�s thin limbs and narrow hips combined with amplified breasts. Contrast that with Latino and African-American taste, which runs toward the healthy silhouette of the bootylicious Beyonc�.

A class issue in sexual energy may be suggested by the apparent striking popularity of Victoria�s Secret and its racy lingerie among multiracial lower-middle-class and working-class patrons, even in suburban shopping malls, which otherwise trend toward the white middle class. Country music, with its history in the rural South and Southwest, is still filled with blazingly raunchy scenarios, where the sexes remain dynamically polarized in the old-fashioned way.

On the other hand, rock music, once sexually pioneering, is in the dumps. Black rhythm and blues, born in the Mississippi Delta, was the driving force behind the great hard rock bands of the �60s, whose cover versions of blues songs were filled with electrifying sexual imagery. The Rolling Stones� hypnotic recording of Willie Dixon�s �Little Red Rooster,� with its titillating phallic exhibitionism, throbs and shimmers with sultry heat.

But with the huge commercial success of rock, the blues receded as a direct influence on young musicians, who simply imitated the white guitar gods without exploring their roots. Step by step, rock lost its visceral rawness and seductive sensuality. Big-ticket rock, with its well-heeled middle-class audience, is now all superego and no id.

In the 1980s, commercial music boasted a beguiling host of sexy pop chicks like Deborah Harry, Belinda Carlisle, Pat Benatar, and a charmingly ripe Madonna. Late Madonna, in contrast, went bourgeois and turned scrawny. Madonna�s dance-track acolyte, Lady Gaga, with her compulsive overkill, is a high-concept fabrication without an ounce of genuine eroticism.

Pharmaceutical companies will never find the holy grail of a female Viagra � not in this culture driven and drained by middle-class values. Inhibitions are stubbornly internal. And lust is too fiery to be left to the pharmacist.

Camille Paglia, a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts, is the author of �Sexual Personae.�

christylovesfun 51F  
16880 posts
7/15/2010 11:16 am

I thought this was a really strange piece of writing.

What basis does she have for her claims, that working class people have more satisfying sex lives, for one?

Also, I don't like her reframe of the Apollonian/Dionysian constrast. There is nothing in America's current cultural malaise that is remotely like Apollo.

Also, as necessary as the women's liberation movement was, and as great as the sexual revolution has been for some, confusion surrounding both of these movements chokes America right now. Every woman (and man) has to figure out what sexual liberation means for her/himself.

Far too people have actually done that work. Is it because of prudishness or prigishness? Maybe sometimes. Maybe, though, there are other reasons at work.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. For vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish. ~~ from Antony & Cleopatra


Mariana_Trench_ 50F
4396 posts
7/14/2010 4:10 pm

I think, with respect, I see validity of both your points of view. For the sake of this essay and your request, I will say why I agree with Paglia (to the extent that I do.)

First, you should consider that of ALL of AdultFriendFinder you are fraternizing in blogs (whereas I have spent a great portion of my AdultFriendFinder 10 years of membership, in chatrooms). In blogs we find as a whole a community that leans towards being defined more as: those of liberal politics, feminists, white collar/academics, and where dwell a high precentage of outspoken, well-read women of the sort you are praising. HOWEVER, on AdultFriendFinder as a whole we find a wide range of identities and ideologies. A greater portion of those who chat in the rooms are middle class to lower middle class, blue collar- maybe a ratio of 50/50 there (white collar upper middle class vs middle class/lower middle class/blue collar.) Many in the chat rooms (and many who simply use AdultFriendFinder to send and receive mail) are much more representative of the following demographics:

a. young men who are in a sexually unsatisfying relationship seeking to cheat on their gf/wife (who perhaps do not want to drop or divorce her, because she 'looks' and 'acts' how a woman should...and he is terribly insecure and unable to think for himself or use reason to determine that just because a woman looks/acts a certain way does not mean she will make you happy or be good in bed...often quite the opposite)

b. older men who are in a sexually unsatisfying relationship seeking to cheat on their gf/wife because they are now bound into the relationship by financial connections/difficulties and/or children. Again, if he had been true to his desires when he first meet this woman he would not be married to someone he did not have sexual compatibility with...and certainly not feel obligated to stay because of children or a mortgage or a reluctance to pay child support

c. middle aged/older men who are in a sexually unsatisfying relationship seeking to cheat on their gf/wife because they find her unappealing because she has gained weight and/or lost her sexual desire after childbirth

(not going to get into the women but many are the logical counterparts to the above)

Now, sometimes the man is right and the woman is truly intolerable, and I can sympathize with his desire to cheat on her...but I still can't get past (for myself, not judging others) the cowardice and dishonesty that I seem to encounter over and over. If a man is not happy with his sex life/spouse/partner, I can appreciate that. People grow and change. I can not appreciate, however, the double standard madonna/whore complex that I see embraced. Which is: I will date or marry this woman who is not good in bed or has a low sex drive, but I will not date or marry a fat/short/tall/skinny/black/Jewish etc. woman who may be MUCH MORE COMPATIBLE in bed, because my bourgeois upper middle class white society tells me via Glamour Magazine, Sex in the City, GQ, Playboy, every movie ever made by Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock...etc. etc. WHAT a GOOD WOMAN is and HOW she looks.

So I hope my rant in response to your post made sense?

MT


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