A Paradigm Slip
Technology’s incessant progress disrupts the polarized narrative of sexual liberation and control: it is not supposed directionality of the power that machines channel which constitutes their relevance, but it is that that they channel at all, at an ever gathering speed. From the railroad to the refrigerator, from the lithograph to the MRI, and onward into today’s era of intelligent machines—the buzzing drones and apps that populate modernity’s psychic space—evolving apparati have theoretically paved the way for greater individual and collective freedom. In some ways, this argument certainly holds; but without a correspondent evolution in inward technologies of navigation and love, material wealth leaves us more abstracted, detached from the wisdom of our ancestors, our traditions, and our bodies. We other Victorians have never dealt with the crises of selfhood that informed that earlier era, we have splintered it into ten thousand and one pieces. Instead of compassionately caring for the Western psyche’s sociosexual wounds and coming to a place of integration, our mass culture is one of deflection, denial, outburst and regret. Sex is commonly called a commodity, and it was one molded in the schizoid mind of capitalism.
At the Drive-in
Reading the Motion Picture Association’s regulations for risque content published in the early 1930’s shines a light upon process by which an industry’s framework became peeled apart from the flow of power which passed through it. In the case of the movies, that flow was especially dense, for it was images and narratives themselves, the very stuff out of which we construct meaning in our lives. As is the tendency of hierarchical frameworks, the MPA attempted to lay down inflexible and immutable laws regarding the depiction of sex in film. From reading accounts of young women’s relationships to film not even a decade hence it becomes clear that not only had the agency’s restrictions been ignored, but that the cinema had evolved into a primal scene for encounter with a sexuality that was hardly imaginable to those whose world did not encompass it. The Victorian strictures that first acknowledged the sexual other and then demanded that it not be presented or glorified could not keep up with a culture lusting to look. It could not keep up with the camera’s penetrating gaze, and the audience’s receptive eyes.
And so a generation of girls grew up with a notion of necking, of ‘showing boys a good time’, that was in large part informed by the mediated images arriving through film. There was no national conversation, no revolution in values or ethics, that spurred this shift: there was fantasy being imposed upon reality, and there was the dissonance that predictably arose in its wake. Let us imagine for a moment what it is to be in the theatre. Swaddled in darkness, munching on processed convenience goods, with eyes affixed to the symbol-rich story swooping by. It is pure disembodiment, utter fantasia, a marvel of technology. And yet in the absence of connection to the sources of meaning that have provided for humanity from time immemorial—the rites of spring, the shared bed, the archetypal narratives of myth—this illusion becomes more solid than the gizmos of the kitchen, the lies of the office and the airtight abstractions on the supermarket shelves. Life becomes a spectacle, and sex becomes a good.
