Wednesday 15 November 2017

Our Obsession

We do not live on an airy, cerebral and ‘spiritual’ platform from which we occasionally descend to conduct and wallow shamefacedly in the messy business of sex. We live and swim permanently in the element of sex. We are never out of it while we are alive. This is vital not least because sex is the currency in which human love is transacted and on which it depends and it is also the origin of life itself and allows the extension of our love into family.

To insist on the primacy of the cerebral and spiritual is to insist on a kind of puritanism which is remote from love. It is to consider the sexual side of our nature as, in some manner, beneath us and worthy of being looked down upon. Perhaps this explains our peculiar periodic obsession with the sins of paedophilia and harassment. These obsessions conveniently associate sex and crime and allow us to censure and castigate the dangerous sexual in ourselves by proxy. They 'prove' how perilous sex is and, for some reason, we need such an affirmation. Just a British thing?

No comments :

Post a Comment