Some things won't change in the new millennium; sex is one. No matter which technological babels we scale, whether we take on new surgically-adlibbed genders or get hooked to libido-altering pills and soft-metal orgasmatrons, we'll still have to live with a few highly potent and demanding erogenous zones, we'll still mostly  imagine our ways to intense physical pleasures, and we'll still get what we give. If there's a nuclear holocaust, the few decrepit humans who survive will be fucking senseless, and if there's a second coming, the pious souls who enter heaven will practice eternal ecstasy. Beyond that basic continuity, our future is androgynous, amoral, interactive, glossolalic—apocalyptic in the sexiest sense of the word. In futuristic narratives, sex is invariably stiff (a bloodless chore needed for breeding or for manipulation), cerebral, profoundly sterile. But such predictions never convince me, because there'll always be human clusters in caverns and forests shining in mottled light while sounds of sucking, of sliding flesh and of orgasm float through the darkness. There'll always be villagers whose main entertainment, release and delight is relentless copulation. Throughout history, sex is the common denominator, our collective language. Conflicting nations, faiths and manias—all the categories our obsession for taxonomy has defined to keep us apparently controlled—converge at the libido. Sex is the most commonplace miracle, and I don't mean the obvious miracle of birth. I mean the indescribable moment when we transcend our limits and hang-ups, and we become one with God. Sex unites us with the cosmos, the origins, truth. The Puritans demonized the body because they resented its mortal cage that theoretically/ kept them from being God; they consoled themselves with the idea that bodyless they'd be eternal, thus setting down the outlines of our universal hubris and loneliness. But institutional sexual oppression is breathing its last, as we've begun/and it's time to reclaim our sexuality and redeem ourselves from our history of contrition. Ever since the fall of communism, there's the sense that the next revolution will take place on an individual, spiritual level; some say there'll be a new—sexualized—Christ who'll sweep through the world and turn it upside down. I certainly think we can will it to happen. So I believe that in our lifetime, religion will be a fertility rite again, Catholic priests will marry, housewives will swap dildos like recipes, and de Sade's Philosophy In The Bedroom (a logical and delicious vindication of unrestrained lust) will grace every home. Yahweh and rampant intercourse won't be incommensurable opposites, but expressions of the same numinosity. Laws will consecrate our right to fill any consenting hole. No one will misinterpret 'no' for 'yes' (an outcome of the enforced modesty that made women equate male approval with forced sex), and rape will be extinct because sex won't be a power trip. The ownership of women and minors that once made consensual sex immoral, will be immoral. The average citizen will recognize sex as a meeting point for boys and girls of all hues and creeds, a communal celebration of life, rather than the awkward carrier of lifelong traumas, unwanted pregnacies, AIDS et al. There'll be no widespread abusive incest, amputee sex or necrophilia—no predilection outside the realm of play. In repression, aberrations flourish, taboos become aphrodisiacs, promiscuity becomes insurrection. Danger is sexy when we associate excitement with the forbidden and use fear as a turn-on. Can we imagine an all-permissive world as sexy? We better start. In the future, the forbidden, by not being forbidden, will not arouse us. Sex will be a shamanistic communion. When sex is abundant and uncensored, when our society approves of it with the fervor the Greeks once had, when our Gods start fucking like the Greek Gods did, the fear of sin, the shame of sluthood, the denial of responsibility and the resulting humiliation and rage will cease. The JudaeoChristian dualism of spirit and flesh, of pure and vile, of natural and perverse, of procreation and pornography will dissolve. America's schizophrenia about sex—the abyss gaping between Prosac-bred, ultra-rational, anal-retentive Dr. Jekyll-USA and sex-crazed, freebasing, bloodthirsty Mr. Hyde-USA—will be bridged. We'll each make up our life like a work of art, out of sheer imagination and desire.
Ours is a cockteasing generation?versed in antiseptic condoms and Toys'R'Us sex. Our sexual "identity" hasn't stabilized, and the good news is it may not. Strutting our short-range attention spans, we prefer to sample. We enjoy stripper joints, massage parlors, sexuality camps, video orgies and tiny MUDs?costly, staged, simulated sex. We fuck in metaphor, upholding a tradition perfected by saints. Sublimation has been the decade's way, but it's getting old. Already, supermodels bore us; we want flawed lived-in flesh, burning and shuddering and unadorned, unfamiliar. We want sex objects to be subjects that we can get lost in. The future belongs to radical intersexes, all those who're defying definition. Pervasive polysexuality will render our neatest labels and fixed divisions obsolete. The next phase of the sexual revolution will be the shift from the homo-hetero dichotomy to an inclusive kaleidoscopic perversity, where the word 'pervert' will be sunlit and proudly worn and one will say "I'm a pervert" like they might now say "I'm a father." Dirty words will lose their alchemical power to intimidate. Children will study sex. Video sex will be ubiquitous, turning sex arcades into relics of bygone eras. Female ejaculation will be run-of-the-mill. Overpopulation, sperm banks and in-vitro walk-ins will divorce sex from procreation.
Some of my personal fantasies will come to pass: gravity-free sex in orbitting sex-shuttles, sex on the moon, and even sex with extraterrestrials (the updated E.T. will be a libertine, and no one will propagate any more the absurd notion that we'll gradually get bigger and bigger heads and smaller and smaller cocks). Postmillenial eroticism will be open and incoherent, permissible and transgressive. Unless it's my own wishful thinking, we're moving away from governmental and dogmatic control of the body. Of course, I may be talking utopias. For all I know, in thirty years the death penalty will be due punishment for abortion, civilians who fornicate more than thrice weekly will be caned, net sex will only be known to a handful of hackers, and sodomites will live in catacombs. With the Christian Coalition guiding Newt's politics of oppression, it's not unimaginable. If I argue otherwise, it is not because I think the world is essentially sane. Rather, it's because of this frail, needy, unduly maligned body we live in, which gets hungry and thirsty and horny no matter what. The individual body doesn't care about trends, persecutions or terminologies of wrong and right. The body is the universal levelling rod, the bottomline: we all eat, sleep, fuck. It's the only democracy I know of. Without the body, our arrogance would be boundless, our giantism would run amuck. That's why I trust in the future. And I see no use predicting a future if I can't take the opportunity to shape it. In a mystical sense, which is all prophecy is, I'm hoping to create a tomorrow by naming it.
|
