Those who think that the relation between industry, sexuality, and reproduction is far-fetched should recall the birth policies of countries obsessed with industrial growth. In what was communist Romania, workers were needed to do what there were no machines to do: to produce for the benefit of the owners of the means of production. To a similar end, the Soviets handed out medals to mothers of many children. The government structure, bearing the characteristics of literacy, clashed with the harsh pragmatic framework existing in the former communist countries. The result of the clash was that women avoided birth at all cost.
Ahead to the past
Longer life and the ability to enjoy the fruits of industry altered attitudes towards sex, especially reproduction. Sexuality and marriage were postponed to the third decade of life as people acquired more training in their quest for a better life. Children were no longer a matter of continuity and survival. After decades of denying the strength of nature's drive towards self-perpetuation of a species, today we again recognize that sexual life starts very early. But this realization should not have come as a surprise. Juliet's mother was worried that Juliet was not married at the age of 13. Beyond the realization of early sexuality, we notice that adolescents have multiple sex partners, that the average American is bound to have 37 sex partners in his or her lifetime, that prohibitions against sodomy are ignored, and that half the population is involved in group sex. Statistics tell us that 25% of the adult population uses pornography for arousal and another 30% uses contraptions bought in sex shops; 33- 1/3% of married couples have extra-marital affairs; the average marriage lasts 5 years; the open practice of homosexuality increases 15% annually. Incest, bestiality, and sexual practices usually defined as perverse are reaching unheard of proportions. It's not that changes in sexual experience take place, but that practices known from the earliest of times assert themselves, usually by appealing to the literate notion of freedom. As with many aspects of the change human society undergoes, we do not know what the impact of these sex practices will be. Probably that is the most one can say in a context that celebrates permissiveness as one of the highest accomplishments of modern society. Such changes challenge our values and attitudes, and make many wonder about the miserable state of morality. We already know about the cause and physical effects of AIDS. We do not even know how to wonder what other diseases might come upon humanity if the human relation with animals moves in the direction of bestiality. "Is this the price we pay for democracy?" is asked by people accused of having a conservative leaning. Enthusiasts celebrate an age of unprecedented tolerance, indulgence, and freedom from responsibility. But no matter to which end of the spectrum one leans, it should be clear that these considerations are part of the pragmatics of sexuality in the civilization of illiteracy. Shorter cycles are characteristic not only of production, but also of sexual encounters. Higher speed (however one wants to perceive it), non-linearity, freedom of choice from many options, and the transcendence of determinism and clear-cut dualistic distinctions apply to sexuality as they apply to everything else we do.
Although it is a unique experience, impossible to transmit or compare, and very difficult to separate from the individual, sex is widely discussed. Media, politicians, and social scientists have transformed it into a public issue; hypocrites turn it into an object of derision; professionals in sexual disorders make a good living from them. Sex is the subject of economic prognosis, legal dispute, moral evaluation, astrology, art, sports, and so on. One should see what is made public on the World Wide Web. Highly successful networked pages of pornographic magazines are visited daily by millions of people, as are pages of scientific and medical advice. Questions referring to sexuality in its many forms of expression increase day by day. Questions about sex have also extended to areas where the sexual seems (or seemed) excluded-science, technology, politics, the military. For example, the contraceptive pill, which has changed the world more than its inventors ever dreamed of, and more than society could have predicted, has also changed part of the condition of the sexual. The abortion pill (with a name-RU486-that reminds us of computer chips) only accentuates the change, as do many scientific and technological discoveries conceived with the purpose of sexually stimulating the individual or augmenting sexual pleasure.
Emancipation-social, political, economic, as well as emancipation of women, children, minorities, nations-has also had an impact on sexual relations. As such, emancipation results from different pragmatic needs and possibilities, and reflects the weaker grip of literate norms and expectations. Emancipation has reduced some of sexuality's inherent, and necessary, tension. It freed the sexual experience from most of the constraints it was subjected to in a civilization striving for order and control. Still, individual erotic experiences have often culminated not in the expected revelations, stimulated by the use of drugs or not, but in deception, even desperation. This is explained by the fact that, more than any activity that becomes a goal in itself, sexuality without the background of emotional contentment constitutes individuals as insular, alienated from each other, feeling used but not fulfilled. Lines of a similar sway were written by opponents of sexual emancipation, and as a suggestion of a price humans pay for excess. These lines were articulated also by firm believers in tolerance, free spirits who hardly entertain the thought of punishment (divine or otherwise).
Concerns over human sexuality result from the role of scale and the erotic dimension. Within a smaller scale, one does not feel lost or ignored. Small-scale experiences are constraining, but they also return a sense of care and belonging. The broader the scale, the less restrictive the influence of others, but also the more diminished the recognition of individuality. In the modern megalopolis, the only limits to one's sexual wishes are the limits of the individual. Nonetheless, at such a scale, individuality is continuously negated, absorbed in the anonymity of mediocre encounters and commercialism. The realization that scale relates not only to how and how much we produce, and to changes in human interaction, but also to deeper levels of our existence is occasioned by the sexual experience of self-constitution in a framework of permissiveness that nullifies value. The human scale and the altered underlying structure of our practical experiences affect drives, in particular the sexual drive, as well as reproduction, in a world subjected to a population explosion of exponential proportions.
The entire evolution under consideration, with all its positive and negative consequences, has a degree of necessity which we will not understand better by simply hiding behind moral slogans or acknowledging extreme sexual patterns. No person and no government could have prevented erotic emancipation, which is part of a much broader change affecting the human condition in its entirety. The civilization of illiteracy is representative of this change insofar as it defines a content for human experiences of self-constitution, including those related to sexuality, which mark a discontinuity in sexual patterns. Sex dreams turn into sex scripts on virtual reality programs within which one can make love to a virtual animal, plant, to oneself, projected into the virtual space and time of less than clear distinctions between what we were told is right and wrong. Telephone sex probably provides just as much arousal, but against fees that the majority of callers can hardly afford. Less than surprising, lesbians and gays make their presence known on the Internet more than in literate publications. Discussions evolve, uncensored, on matters that can be very intimate, described in titillating terms, sometimes disquietingly vulgar, obscene, or base, by literate standards. But there are also exchanges on health, AIDS prevention, and reciprocal support. Gay and lesbian sexuality is freely expressed, liberated from the code language used in the personal columns of literary publications.
Freud, modern homosexuality, AIDS
The godfather of modern homosexuality is Freud (independent of his own sexual orientation), insofar as sexual expression remains a symbolic act. Homosexuality, evading natural selection and eliciting acceptance as an expression of a deeply rooted human complex, is part of the ubiquitous sexual experience of the species. The fact that homosexuality, documented in some of the earliest writings as a taboo, along with incest and bestiality, predated Freud does not contradict this assertion. Homosexual Eros has a different finality than heterosexual Eros. The extent of homosexuality under the structural circumstances of the civilization of illiteracy is not only the result of increased tolerance and permissiveness. Neither is it merely the result of freedom resulting from an expanded notion of liberal democracy. It is biologically relevant, and as a biological expression, it is projected into practical experiences constitutive of individuals, men or women, acknowledged as different because their practical experience of self-constitution identifies them as different. Their experience, though necessarily integrated in today's global world, has many consequences for them and for others.
While research has yet to confirm the hypothesis of structural peculiarities in the brain and genes of homosexuals, the specifics of the self-constitution process through practical experiences in a world subject to natural selection cannot be overlooked. Genetics tells us that the borderline between genders is less clear-cut than we assumed. Be this as it may, homosexuality takes place under a different set of biological and social expectations than do heterosexuality and other forms of sexuality. It is an act in itself, with its own goal, with no implicit commitment to offspring, and thus different in its intrinsic set of responsibilities and their connection to the social contract. But for this matter, so is heterosexuality under the protection of the pill, the condom, or any other birth control device or method, abortion included.