The January/February issue of The Atlantic ran a piece by Caitlin Flanagan called “The Hazards of Duke,” about Karen Owen, a Duke student who produced a PowerPoint thesis detailing her promiscuous sexual activity with 13 of the university’s athletes. The allusion to the popular ’80s television series is more than incidental. The Dukes of Hazzard made light comedy out of a pair of moonshiners, while Karen Owen’s story involves blackout drinking that results in anonymous and sometimes painful sex. The subject of brutal sex was reprised in the same issue of The Atlantic in an article on Internet porn called “Hard Core” by Natasha Vargas-Cooper. In the piece, Vargas-Cooper describes a one-night-stand of her own that didn’t go well: “…in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, ‘Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.’” Needless to say, the old adage “if it’s been done, it’s been said, and if it’s been said, it’s been done” still holds true. There are parts of The Canterbury Tales
that will still shock if you read Chaucer carefully enough, to say nothing of Rabelais, the Marquis de Sade, Montaigne (who was quite candid on the subject of sexual dysfunction), Pauline Réage (aka Anne Desclos) and Pasolini (whose Salo is the ne plus ultra of boundary-breaking). But Vargas-Cooper points out that, in the past, acquiring graphic depictions of violent sexuality often involved a quest. At the least, you had to sneak into the house with your VHS cassette and succeed in not being discovered watching it on TV. But the advent of the Internet has made the most forbidden subject matter (coprophilia, water sports, asphyxiation, even necrophilia) available at the click of a mouse. Was the subject of the first article (the increasing casualness of rough sex) in some way the result of the phenomenon (the increasing presence of sex online) broached in the second article? Does the Internet give license to and even validate some of our more more aggressive urges, or were they always just well kept secrets? Did the horse precede the cart, or vice versa? Is the medium ultimately the message?
that will still shock if you read Chaucer carefully enough, to say nothing of Rabelais, the Marquis de Sade, Montaigne (who was quite candid on the subject of sexual dysfunction), Pauline Réage (aka Anne Desclos) and Pasolini (whose Salo is the ne plus ultra of boundary-breaking). But Vargas-Cooper points out that, in the past, acquiring graphic depictions of violent sexuality often involved a quest. At the least, you had to sneak into the house with your VHS cassette and succeed in not being discovered watching it on TV. But the advent of the Internet has made the most forbidden subject matter (coprophilia, water sports, asphyxiation, even necrophilia) available at the click of a mouse. Was the subject of the first article (the increasing casualness of rough sex) in some way the result of the phenomenon (the increasing presence of sex online) broached in the second article? Does the Internet give license to and even validate some of our more more aggressive urges, or were they always just well kept secrets? Did the horse precede the cart, or vice versa? Is the medium ultimately the message?
I've thought about this too, but it goes beyond exacerbating our sexuality. The question is relative to other morals and social norms. Does easy access change us? I think it does.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we are changed by degrees of access or our ability to conceil the activity. If I have unconventional sexual fantasies that I don't get to play out, it doesn't mean my sexuality is conventional. It would merely be unsated. Lack of practice doesn't change my underlying nature. It's obvious that people were sexually adventurous and violent since the beginning of time, as evidenced in paintings and writings. The local New York S&M scene was thriving in the 70s and is thriving still. The Columbia University has an official S/M club with whipping presentations (by a friend of mine). The FetLife on-line community only gives access to people that are seeking what FetLife has to offer. The TES association (official SM community of New York) has been in existance for decades - well before the advent of Internet. They still mostly conduct their business in classes and weekly meetings - in person. There never was any secret. You just had to look around. This also goes for the swinger scene. It was lively in the 70s and it's just as lively now. Promiscuity (male or female) was around for ages. Video games don'g make people kill people. People do that all on their own.
ReplyDeleteWe have two opposing viewpoints represented int the above comments, but where is the synthesis between these two classic positions?
ReplyDeleteCan there be synthesis with opposing views? Maybe our point of departure is only in degrees of lesser or greater access, but does that really change the underlying nature of people? Do people let their freak flag fly higher because of the internet? I am not convinced.
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