Lust and Freedom: How a disconnected society has created a mutant sexuality
By its nature, this piece is probably most relevant to the more or less straight men who read this blog. And even then, perhaps only to some. Having said that, I hope it can provide some insight which is relevant to our shared human experience generally.
Choose your scenario:
A woman [/insert gender according to sexual preference] walks down the street. From a distance, you discern that there is something sexually appealing about her. How she moves, how her clothes hug her body. Something inviting, almost tactile. Your eyes flit between some unfixed point ahead and her face, hoping to get a clear glimpse of her, as if there were a way of taking her in, whilst avoiding eye contact, because though you want to look at her, you feel there is something vaguely shameful in your looking. As she passes you, you turn around to see her from behind, and a stifled longing spreads out from your throat and down throughout your chest. You are left with a sense of lack, of being denied something, and you wallow softly in this for the next few moments until something or someone else distracts you.
Alternatively:
You are lying in bed. It is Sunday evening and the week ahead looms drearily as you try to suppress it from conscious awareness. You scroll a dating app on your phone, unconsciously projecting your dissatisfaction onto the disembodied faces that reel out before you. Your disgruntlement rises as the women fail to meet your impossible criteria, because your criteria are essentially that these disembodied heads somehow immediately and comprehensively neutralise the nagging existential dread you are experiencing. As such, you are increasingly drawn to the more meretricious and cartoonishly voluptuous profiles, as your mind turns entirely towards the pursuit of desire to mask the growing sadness.
Do either of these scenarios sound good?
Obviously not. They’re both clearly rubbish. In the first, the protagonist is lost in a world of false imaginings and longing, of self-constructed suffering based on the failure to acquire something that was never feasible nor required in the first place. (Not that women should be regarded as objects to acquire; rather, this is speaking from the acquisitive mentality of the lustful mind). In the second, the protagonist is on a kind of treadmill of distraction, but as with all forms of distraction, the undesirable emotions are not actually avoided but simply displaced in more harmful and toxic ways.
Do either of these scenarios sound familiar to you?
I realised that these are scenes I have lived out more or less subconsciously throughout most of my sexual life. And I don’t think I’m alone.
I have always had a kind of captive relationship with lust. For so long, I have unquestioningly followed its dictates, essentially taking it as given that I am defenceless before it, considering it as something primal and wild, which will express itself in some base form or other. I have downed tools whenever an opportunity with a beautiful woman has arisen in my life, regardless of whether there is any actual connection or not. And for most of my teenage years and much of my early 20s I watched porn on a daily basis, (and at the risk of TMI, it would be dishonest not to say that I still very, verrrrry occasionally do) often finding myself down lust-fuelled rabbit holes that would lead me to viewing behaviour which contradicted who I wanted to be and be seen as.
Indeed, lust has, in one way or another, been the primary reason for the collapse of all of my relationships, whereby I end up looking through the endlessly fascinating, rich and beautiful being I am in a relationship with, fixated on the mirages of the other women I could be with.
But if I cannot enjoy the presence of the woman in front of me now, how would it ever be different in future?
This is the first reason to recognise and begin an attempt to gain a little distance from lust. Because, as with all unchecked desires, it keeps us chained to some ever-receding moment of satisfaction that never comes.
But before going into why else lust could be problematic and what the solutions to this might be, I want to investigate what exactly lust is as experienced in modern society, the role it plays and what it looks and feels like.
I think in order to understand lust, we have to understand how intimately tied in it is with sexual shame. In the West, we have inherited a post-Christian society which abnegates the body and its natural urges.* Essentially, according to this narrative, the inclinations of the body are shameful, base and immoral, and the good life is one which obeys the dictates of the mind, which are arrived upon not through instinct but reason, which in turn is a reflection of the mind of God. (This is the prevailing reading of Genesis 1:26 — Man was made in God’s image).
And this is exactly the problem. There is no real problem with lust per se, which in its most basic sense is just the arising of sensation in the genitals [are you getting hot too?]. The real problem with lust is that the way in which we tend to experience it now is really some kind of grotesque and cancerous mutation of this initial bodily impulse, exponentially refracted through the distorted sexuality of society at large.
That is, we have been cut off from our natural and personal relationship with our bodies and sexuality more generally, only to then be drip-fed a sexuality which emerged from this place of disconnection and shame.
This results in a transactional and generic sexuality to which we become more and more addicted the more disembodied we become. Because the more disembodied we are, the more disconnected we become from ourselves and one another, and so the more we become products and objects to one another, to be bought and sold, used and disposed of. Experiencing this disconnection, we long to feel something, and dimly intuiting the prospect of union and connection through sex we grope after it in our confusion. But sex viewed through this lens of disconnection and separation can only ever alienate us more from each other, since it was engaged in to fill the lack in me rather than to celebrate the connection that is already there.
What’s the game here? In whose interests is it for us to be kept on this cruelly self-exacerbatory path?
Well, the point is that, sex, as they, sells. Ohhhh how it sells.
Let’s imagine another scenario:
A car glides smoothly up a mountainside, winding up an epic, narrow path. A self-satisfied smile spreads across a man’s chiselled face before the camera cuts to his hand squeezing the gear stick suggestively. He lunges into the drive of a cosy, womb-like cottage, an elegant woman draped in flowing silken robes lolling seductively in the doorway, awaiting his return.
Peugeot — the Ride of your life
Sorry, did you mean the car or the woman? All I can tell is that I have an erection and seem to be unconsciously getting my credit card out, while a raspy, tender voice whispers in my mind:
This could be you!
Me? I think. Me like sexy woman. Sexy woman like car. Me don’t like car. But me like sexy woman. Me buy car.
Whatever the product, this is the formula. Position your product next to sex, so that what you are advertising is really sex and not the product, and let the primitive mammalian brain do the rest of the work for you.
Because the easiest way to hijack our attention and get us to act in an unconscious way that may not actually make any sense when we think about it (wait, buying that Peugeot 206 never did get me laid!) is to target our sexual desire. Sex sells because we are hardwired — read: unconsciously conditioned — to want it.
So what conclusion does a society based primarily around profit maximisation and reducing humans to automata whose value revolves primarily around their ability to consume come to?
PUT SEX IN EVERYTHING!
Want to eat this melt-in-the-middle chocolate pudding? This sexy disembodied voice from Mark’s and Spencer’s will probably fuck you if you do!
Want to fly Qatar Airlines? Moral propriety stops us from saying it explicitly but, oh look!, here’s an incredibly attractive yet oddly dead-eyed woman that you can sit next to if you buy a ticket!
Want a coke? Coke answers all of your wildest dreams, because well, Coke is it! (If It isn’t necessarily sex, that’s fine. It is whatever you want it to be. And you want it to be sex.)
This is so destructive because it creates an errant feedback loop between our internal biology and our external environment. Being constantly inundated with sex and innuendo, we are constantly held captive to our desire. We briefly expunge our longing, either through purchasing sex-adjacent products — the car, the chocolate pie — or through some sexual act itself, which feels ephemerally pleasurable, and therefore sends our systems the signal that we should get more of this good stuff. We seek it out more, so society responds to this increased demand by selling us more, in ever more absurd and flagrant ways. Again, these desires are not really our own, but rather some productised substitute which hoodwinks our disembodied and therefore inauthentic selves into thinking it’s our desire.
Moreover, over time, what is initially sold to us as sex becomes something else entirely, embedded in the very fabric of society, spilling over into how we generate a sense of identity and belonging within that society.
If we return to the scene painted at the very beginning and insert an (admittedly stereotypical) bunch of laaaaaaaaadddds in place of the protagonist, we see how this works. The event of a passing woman becomes a kind of competition for who is most flabbergasted by the woman’s attractiveness. Each member of the group cranes their necks back, mouths gawping ostentatiously, before exchanging pained looks with one another which superficially say, ‘I bloody would!’, but are really a primitive signalling for some kind of validation or approval from the other members of the group. That is, the experience of lack and longing has been sublimated into one of group belonging and acceptance.
As a teenager I was sexually curious, having feelings for both boys and girls my age. (There is still shame around saying this publically, even though rationally there is no reason for this. Another indication the body stores information the conscious mind doesn’t have immediate access to). But as anyone with any remotely queer sexual inclinations knows (growing up in any generation before Gen-Z perhaps), an awareness of these inclinations is immediately and directly intertwined with an awareness that these feelings will result in your ostracisation from the main group, your ejection from the safety of the herd.
And so the less brave amongst us go about ingenious ways to suppress and deny these inclinations to fit into the prescribed mould that society has laid out for us. (The evolutionary explanation here is that ostracisation was equivalent to death throughout most of human evolution, humans being social animals, thus it is one of our most primal and pervasive fears, which we do anything to avoid).
These days, I have no sexual inclination beyond towards the opposite sex. Where did those initial desires go? Did they just disappear? Surely not. Surely they were repressed, masked over because my more profound desire than sex was one for group acceptance.
This desire for group acceptance meant that society at large was able to co-opt my very sexuality, the very personal and natural inclinations of my own body. What I am proposing is that this happens on a vast and global scale as we all strive to fit into whatever the fuck normal and acceptable is. And so it is no wonder so many of us are so lost and cut off, because we continue to obey the dictates of urges which are not even our own. Or rather, we obey the dictates of a desire which is a re-fabrication of our urges for one thing — group acceptance — into our urges for another — sex (and deeper, connection).
Instead of lust per se, we have lust as product. And because lust as product is sold to us at every turn, captivating our attention through its gaudy imagery, we remain distracted from a deeper analysis of ourselves and what we truly want.
To return to the example at the beginning again, lust entails a narrowing of focus, which is to say a narrowing of one’s world. That is fine once in a while, but when it is a perennial distraction which is as distracting and pervasive as possible by design, that is a problem. One’s vision but also horizon of interests becomes restricted to the pursuit of an object, which not only results in an objectification and productisation of the world around you but prevents you looking towards more beneficial behaviours. It distracts you from deeper, more long-term goals and leads to acting in ways that lack integrity.
Most destructively, by keeping you hooked on some disembodied liminal state-of-being, of always nearly but never quite having (even the sexual act itself as normally pursued fixates around a vanishingly brief moment of climax), it takes you away from yourself and what you truly want.
Aside from my usual arm-flailing condemnation of the palpable and obvious rottenness of society at large, I think it’s important to bring these things to light so that we can begin to become aware of the trap so many of us have fallen into, and then begin to plot a way out. As G.I. Gurdjieff said, you must first realise you are in prison in order to escape.
So, what is the route of escape?
Well, as with anything, after noticing something, we then explore it. To use another quote, often misattributed to Viktor Frankl, ‘In between stimulus and response lies a space, and in that space lies our freedom’.
Lust sends a very direct and clear signal to the body: you want this. Go and get it. But just as you should not eat every time your belly rumbles, or go to sleep any time you feel a little tired, you do not have to do what lust says. You, as ever, are in the driver’s seat.
This is the space I have been exploring, by taking a step back and asking myself what I really want:
Do I really want to keep playing out this pointless and vapid story over and over again?
Would I even want to have any form of connection, physical or otherwise, with some random woman passing me in the street? Or is she not just a kind of cypher invested with my fantasies, which are always Quixotic and unrealisable anyway?
Do I really want to be a hostage to this cycle of constant longing, which is not only superficial and empty, but also prevents me from forming more meaningful long-term relationships, because I cannot see the soul behind the tits?
What are the more natural and authentic urges which might emerge if I can begin to slowly loosen the shackles imposed on me by a society which wants to keep me distracted and compliant?
Our sexual conditioning runs deep, both biologically and socially. Total liberation and escape from lust is not feasible or even desirable (lust is also fun and necessary for a good human life, in the right time and place).
It should be clear then that I am by no means advocating the repression of sexual desire. What I mean to advocate instead is in fact a more embodied relationship towards one’s lust, where it is seen and experienced within the body for what it is, and then acted upon accordingly, with a little more choice.
At the same time, I am not going down the root of proposing some kind of bacchanalian sexual revolution where everyone practices pan-sexuality, fucking the first thing that comes into their mind at any moment, under the preconception that our true sexuality is entirely invisible to us due to the depth of our conditioning and must be forcefully coaxed out. If that’s where your investigation of your body leads to, then go for it, but the reality of what sexual liberation looks like is extremely complicated and not something I am in any way an expert on, nor do I have the time to get into it here.
What is important is rather to treat the cause and not the symptoms, which is body disconnection itself. I hope that by becoming more aware of this story of lust which we are sold, we can reconnect with the natural inclinations of our bodies, whether that be towards sex or rest or play, and experience the innate and automatic joy that arises. That through creating a space to listen to my body, what it wants may rise up, beyond contrivance or coercion.
In a sense, I find myself surprised to be writing this. I am still extremely disembodied, all cerebral concatenating, as this article probably makes clear. But this is a commitment at least to begin this process of reconnection, to the body and heart and natural desire. In fact, it’s what I will be dedicating the next year to.
Right now, I am just exploring within this new space that has opened up. Making little decisions a little differently. I deleted my dating app, not because there’s anything wrong with dating apps, but because I didn’t like how I interacted with them. And when I see a beautiful woman in the street, I am no longer furtively glancing at her out of the corner of my eye, but rather being aware of this inclination whilst opening my attention out to the street that I am on. Suddenly, the world opens, from this narrow slit centred around lack and longing, to this wide-open space of awareness, freedom and possibility.
Thanks for reading!
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*There is a long and complicated history behind this, but essentially the early Christian forefathers were big fans of Plato, who is the abstract (read: disembodied) Philosopher par excellence, with his emphasis on a perfect and incorruptible world of unchanging forms. This led to a rejection of the body in favour of the mind, which culminates — via the Enlightenment — in the rationalistic, disembodied, disconnected society we have today.
