The Problem With American Women: The Commodification of Sexuality in American Culture

Of course I realize that this title was going to attract your attention.

But if you’re expecting a misogynistic rant about my failures to attract American women for sex, love and money while listing an arbitrary itinerary of American female failings (heads not flat enough on top to rest a beer on; always changing their minds from what I want to what THEY want; too busy working, taking care of children, cleaning the house, running errands and cooking to dress up in lingerie and give me a poll dance [double entendre intended]), then you will be sadly disappointed.

What James Thurber endearingly referred to the war between the sexes is a significantly different battlefield than in his age of single income affluence when women couldn’t own property without the consent of their husband or father or older brother.
Economically, socially, politically, psychologically and most importantly, sexually

My age grants me the memory of what there was before what there is now.
My adolescence coincided with the 70s, the decade in which the formant of social and technological changes of the 50s and 60s came to fruition into permanence in the 70s.

Readily available contraception, nascent computational technologies and the emancipation of the African American all spread ripples that were waves of change, like an asteroid had struck and plunged into the center of the collective, American cultural pool. African Americans and their other than colored allies, strode the lunch counters,school buses and schools that had been violently forbidden them.

The British adoption of the African American sound and its subsequent export back to America via the Beatles, the Stones and other blues based white boy bands infiltarted the American psyche.

Elvis Presley no longer played n*g**r music that stirred the white youth into sexual frenzy, but now was seen as performing classic Americana, to the extent that Richard Nixon invited him to the Whitehouse and made Elvis a federal cop.

Through the 70s I saw women becoming bus drivers, cops, doctors, lawyers, business women. I saw black faces on my colored TV. And the emancipation kept rippling. Homosexuality became Gay.

Mexicans became strikers, fighting for a decent wage.

Asians became Kung Fu fighters, although their star had to be David Carradine not Bruce Lee. Movies became the subversion of the times. Altman, Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen, et al chronicled the narrative of change and their audiences applauded in self-recognition.

But in many ways the change in over half the human population (51%) was most significant of all. As women regained their economic power through wider employment and enterprise opportunity coupled with their control over their reproductive rights, the right not to get pregnant from having sex, our society as a whole began to shift it’s world view.

The feminine became mainstream. Women were taken more and more seriously by men, not just as objects of desire and potential child bearing mates, but as agents of agency and volition all their own.

The masculine was being checked.

This however was no bed of emancipation roses.

With women gaining more social power, many men felt that the power of their patriarchy was under threat. Many men embraced the reality of neater, gentler, more considerate and nurturing values infecting the mainstream of alpha male dominance. But many more did not. As women gained prominence as agents of their own agency, many men began to begrudge the loss of their sex toys.

If women were less and less beholden to men for their economic and social status, then why should they continue sleeping with them or bearing their children?

So with the positive social changes came the desire to maintain control over what was being lost. What was being lost was the masculine dominance and control over the feminine. In response, men began to alienate themselves from the very people that they loved and wanted to be close to. The perceived loss of power trumped (pun intended), the loss of intimacy.

This was manifested by the explosion of the porn industry in the mid to late 1970s.
If women no longer submitted their sexuality, their reproductive volitions to men, then men needed to extract what it was that they thought they desired in women: their image, their sexuality, their allure.

Americans are the most effective industrializers of human commodities since Nazi Germany created their factories of death.
Capitalism has always been about two things: the assignation of value to market demand and second, the exploitation of labour for the sake of “surplus value” i.e. money, Capital.

Capitalism means money, the value of which supersedes all other human values as the ultimate measure of humanity.

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In true American Consumer Capitalist fashion, America created the porn industry on an industrial scale, hiring women in the thousands to perform to male ideals, to submit to masculine desires.

Men, having lost the intimacy of their gender dynamic could now afford to “buy” the fulfillment of their assumed entitlement, their deserved desires. Even before the internet, (which ultimately bankrupted the porn industry by making imagery, the sound and motion of performative sex free), porn pervaded every corner of male culture.

If you are a woman or don’t know this already, you need to understand that every man you have every met or will meet, including your partner, your father, your uncle and your sons have masturbated to pornography until climax.

This is a fact, not merely my opinion.

There are no men who don’t use porn as a tool of literal self relief.

The problem of course congeals because porn is not sex; or rather it is feigned sex, performative sex. The actors who are hired to expose themselves, to engage in the myriad of soft to hard core scenarios that are delivered as commodities, don’t necessarily enjoy what they are doing. They’re doing it for the money, not the pleasure.

Of course, as in any acting, some performers are more fully immersed in their roles than others but the fact remains that without money, there would be no porn.

Pornography is the ultimate commodification of human beings.

I write this not as a Puritan (who have their own sexual problems). I write this as a partaker (seldom and less and less), but nonetheless a user of pornography.

I have watched pornography with women who claim, at least to me, that they enjoy it. But mainly they say that they enjoy my enjoyment of it. The more turned on I am the more turned on she is: and that’s the crux of the dilema.

Pornography is NOT sexuality, it’s not sex; it’s fake sex.

When fake sex begins to replace real sex we begin to lose our discernment of humanity on an emotional, visceral level.

There is no way I can make love, have sex with a woman without completely surrendering to my empathy for who she is as a human being. I want to use her for my own gratification, yes; but I equally want her to use me for her gratification. I desire her to desire me. The more she desires me,, the more desire I feel for her.

In pornography, fake sex, all the desire is one way.

There’s the object, commodified, paid for and thus acquired and then there’s the recipient of the product’s desire, who has paid for its delivery.
There’s no collaboration, there’s no carnal dialogue, no exchange and no empathy.
There’s no sex, really.

It’s Important at this Juncture to Address the Metaphysics of Sex and Sexuality.

The sexual act, when engaged in, is one of the most powerful psychological/emotional and physical behaviors that human being experience. Speaking phenomenologically, as a participant (rather than an observer), the human body undergoes dramatic physiological and chemical variance when sexually aroused and when engaging (again, NOT observing; ENGAGING) in sex.

Biochemically, the body’s hormones trigger a radical change to the body chemistry and psychological experience and behavior of the participants. When we are aroused it feels as if another force is acting through us. We lose our inhibitions and surrender to our senses. We are consumed by our desires for another’s body.

We become more in and connected to the moment of our gratification.

We become simultaneously emotionally charged and emotionally vulnerable. When we are with someone we trust, someone we have affection for, our emotions are hightened and stimulated into a state of adoration.

It is no coincidence that we culturally refer (across all cultures, by the way), to the sexual act as ‘Making Love’. Because it is precisely Love that we are experiencing during this hightened state of transcendental arousal.

Moreover, our senses become dilated, our focus dissipates into a primarily sensory experience. Our sense of time alters, even space appears to contract to the realm within reach of our senses.

As we reach orgasm we lose our normal sense of self and can experience the melding of one into two and then into one. Most of all, we experience pleasure and ultimately ecstasy.

On an experiential level, good sex is psychedelic, reminding the body and mind of our natural lack of separation from the place and time we are in and who we are with. The spiritual value of good sex is better explored by the Hindus and the concepts of Tantric sex which really amounts to treating sex as a meditative activity, an active Yoga of mind, Spirit and mind.

Good sex is curative.
It relieves us of our daily suffering we have grown numb to. It relieves anxiety and fear, it grounds us in our own bodies and minds. But most of all, it connects us to another (or others) through a transcendence of our senses into a higher state of awareness.

Sex is the LSD anyone can take any time and still go to work the next day (or same afternoon).

Sex is so good for us, for everyone that of course, like LSD they had to make it illegal!

Or if not strictly illegal, controlled by the church, by the state and by the inhibitions of guilt and shame that were taught to us. Taught? Brainwashed, more exactly!

All of us have been abused into associating sex with shame.

Because nature wants us to fuck, urgently, imperatively; and nature must by every and any means, be controlled.

Good Sex is the key to the survival of our species. The primeval drive to procreate is so powerful that it even supersedes the mind’s normal self awareness of causality and consequence. We don’t give a fuck, we just want to fuck and that is where the social context steps in.

Such a strong, spiritual nay metaphysical, force that affects every aspect of the human’s being really can’t be controlled. One’s sex drive can be regulated, restrained even, but ultimately the force prevails or the subject becomes ill.

Sexuality has always threatened organized society precisely because everyone knows it can’t really be controlled.

The Bonono chimpanzees of Africa, our closest biological relatives on the planet spend most of their day fucking, when they’re not eating. Bononos fuck everyone, males fuck males, females fucks females, fathers fuck their daughter, sons fuck their mothers. A tribe of Bononos are a virtual ongoing orgy. Even when they’re not fucking, Bononos will engage is mass masturbation behavior especially when feeling anxious or fearful of predators.

This is what nature provides and what nature wants.

Now humans, on the other hand, have developed complex social labyrinths determining status and pedigree based mainly on language and power.

So the less Bonono and more human people became, the greater the need to control sexual behavior. Taboos evolved. Some pragmatic, such as the incest taboo; but others less so, like the pervading Victorian era myth that good women didn’t want to have sex.

With the advent of the so-called Sexual Revolution facilitated by the mass availability of the pill, as well as the misunderstanding of the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s study of the sexual habits of Polynesian people, sex once again began to assume its default position within human behavior. So ofcourse, the powers-that-be needed to exercise firmer control over what cannot ultimately be controlled.

The tragedy of the Human Comedy is that we always try to control what cannot be and should not be controlled.

Capitalism in its neurotic quest to commodify everything, conquered sex by commodifying it. By deconstructing the blessed act into it’s sensory components that could be sold piecemeal. Like a corporate takeover that strip mines a successful company for its assets. American Capitalism pornographies sexuality, made it an observer’s obsession rather than a participants spiritual celebration.

By disarming the subjective participant into an observer, our modern society is able to regulate our sexuality, determin fresh taboos and grant licence to what was previously prohibited as long as it can be sold for profit.

Thus homosexuality was allowed to be Gay.

Because Capitalism is an international conspiracy to dehumanize our species, the commodification of our sexuality is not contrained to American shores. It’s just much worse and more intense here.

American women especially, have been subjected to the most abusive dimension of this dehumanization. I speak from the personal experience of having lived in half a dozen mainly European cultures, having married an English woman and courted many a non American woman. (Well not MANY, but enough to draw an accurate comparison).

The American woman, having more recently reached a level of economic, ediucative and social emancipation (but still not paid the same amount for the same job as her male counterpart), determined to seize the reins of her own sexuality. And compared to the early 20th century, have seemingly succeeded in doing so.

Reproductive rights and women’s sexual health are currently political issues for the presidential election.
The great Sigmund Freud made his reputation and foundation of Psychoanalysis based on treating bourgeois (upper middle class) women for the affliction of “Hysteria”.

Hysteria was a common diagnosis in the early part of the 20th century and medical doctors all through Europe received the wives of welathy industrialists to cure them of this mass affliction. Brutal practices such as ECT and even lobotomies were applied to “cure” these poor, afflicted women.

The symptoms of Hysteria were depression, listlessness and non submissive behaviors. If a woman argued, then she might be suffering from Hysteria and rushed to an institution to be cured.

But one of the foremost symptoms of Hysteria as reported by the husbands of these unfortunate women of the time was seeking sexual attentions from their partners.

Yes!

Wanting to have sex with her husband, to surrender to that primal state of natural human being, was considered at one time a sure tell sign of hysteria and thus remedied by electric shock, ice water plunges and even lobotomy!

As I write this I shudder at the mere thought of the extremes of human cruelty and callous indifference.

Fortunately, Freud’s approach was to actually listen to his women patients and when he wasn’t prescribing them cocaine, he wrote down their words, their confessions into his famous case histories that eventually were the foundation of his “talking cure” and theories of child sexuality.

His daughter Anna Freud furthered her father’s paradigm-shifting approach and founded the field of Child Psychology, studying and reporting the effects of sexuality on our natures and happiness as adult individuals.

Freud famously posed the question “What do women want?” and ultimately through years of interviews and research, answered his own question.

What we all want, Good Sex!

So what’s the problem with American women?

They have been co-opted into the business of sex to the extent that they have begun to commodify their own sexuality and sell it to men. Not as prostitutes, although there are plenty of both male and female versions of this. No, they have begun to deconstruct their own sexualities as components to be observed, not loved, not actually fucked, but seen to be sexual..

They have harnessed the sexualities of alienated lonely, pathetic men into a market force that they can supply. Only Fans is just the latest example of this. American women have countered the tyranny of the patriarchal gaze by consciously manipulating it for their material gain. Emancipation has become self-slavery.

Sex is now a power struggle as to who dominates who, commercially, transactionally.

Instead of connectivity, of intimacy and shared sensualities, sex for the American woman has become transactional. ‘What do I get out of it?’, is as strong a calling as nature’s pull. Stronger in the form of manifesting neurotic behaviors such as manipulation, salesmanship, intentional confusion and chaotic communications.

Since sex is now a transaction, the only question becomes who gains the most?. Pleasure and fulfillment are secondary considerations. Intimacy, even Love, a fairy tale you grow out of to join the “real world”

Surely this is true of European women as well, I hear someone saying.

Yes, but not so much so in my experience.
English, French, Italian and Spanish women are no more promiscous than their American counterparts. However, in general European women know what they want, know who they want and don’t want it from and are much more comfortable in their sexuality as well as expressing it than American women are.

American women seem at times to be almost afraid of their own sexuality, afraid of losing control, of surrendering to lust. This is by no means healthy!

Whereas Europeans just don’t make that big a deal out of it. They enjoy sex because they know it’s good for them and if it doesn’t work out, c’est la vie; there’s always other experiences with better partners down the line.

In Europe sex is treated more like a fine meal.

Necessary for healthy living and worthy of enjoyment. Bad sex, like a bad meal is to be avoided and hopefully not repeated. But you don’t know until you try it, right? Just taste a little, you might like it.

Good sex, like a good meal is literally a divine experience, a jubilant celebration of the senses (btw, anything accompanied by the right wine is a ticket to paradise).

I have enjoyed meals in Paris bistros, Greek tavernas, Italian Tratorias thate can only be described in transcendetnal terms.

Likewise I have loved, made love to, had love with women of Europe that will adhere to my memory like a childhood. Respectful, tender loving moments that will never escape me.

Unfortunately, outside of the adolescent fumblings of highschool and early college, I have yet to experience the same level of encounter here in my native land. I attribute my failure to connect as an aspect of Capitalist culture. I cannot bridge the transactional nature of American sexuality; to me it all seems like a verision of pornography or even prostitution to me; an impression which has been reinforced most recently when a woman friend of mine suggested I hire a professional sex worker to share intimacy with.

I was genuinely shocked as if it had been a male friend, I could have understood his clumsy solution. This friend knew me and yet her choice of assistance was to suggest I buy the services of a sex. I am MUCH TOO CHEAP, to ever consider this as a practical option. Besides why wouldn’t the woman PAY ME, for my « services »?

My friend was a well intended American woman, a peer who seriously suggested that my path to sexual fulfillment could be purchased and transacted rather than pursued or danced for.

I can only conclude that the sexuality of the American woman has been seriously compromised by a cultural and societal appartus constructed by men but now reinforced by women. This apparatus generates sexual neurosis and ultimately dehumanizes and devalues the most powerful and wonderful experience people can give each other.

So What’s Your Solution, Sherlock?

Well, not cocaine.

Far be it for me to prescribe remedies for societal ills; even my arrogance has limits!

I would fall back on conversation. People need to start talking about sex a lot more, especially to the people we want to have sex with.

A lot more.

The social rituals are still too complex. When I first met my future wife, we had sex the same night we met because we were both attracted to each other and trusted each other enough to act on our desires. My beautiful daughter Olivia is a product of unbridled, unihibited sexuality as she was and continues to be the best thing in my life.

Men, being stupider than women, need to be less coy and less aggressive at the same time. We need to learn to ask for what we want without acting like petulant children when refused. We need to cultivate a taste for the sensual, not just the sex; everything surrounding and leading up to and following the act, not just the act itself. We need to learn how to be better lovers, not technically but emotionally.

Remember you men reading these words, the number one cause of female mortality in the US, more than disease, more than accidents is men. So just keep in mind that women have just cause to be wary of us.

And women: you lovely, lovely, horrific creatures must learn how to celebrate your sexuality, not as a tit for tat transaction, but as something for yourself. Something you enjoy in itself for it’s own sake, not for status and/or material gain. Women must learn to be joyful participants, equal partners in the sensual dance of lust and desire.

Learn how to clearly signal what you want from a man. Remember, men are stupider than you are, so make sure your signals are clear and obvious. SPELL IT OUT that you want to fuck when you want to. Protect yourself, of course, but when you trust a man and trust your own desires, surrender to the power of your libido.

You have nothing to lose but your inhibition and your neurosis.

Learn how to fuck with gusto, with tenderness, with celebration. Embrace the moment you can step out of your daily concerns and like wild Bonono chipanzees be animals for a night (or a day, or an afternoon or the entire weekend).

Celebrate the Body Electric!
And have no expectations. Sex happens in the moment not in the anxiety of the future nor the nostalgia of the past. Keep your emotional baggage to the size where it can fit comfortably in the overhead locker of you flight. Then buckle up and fly baby, fly!

I guarantee that you will be happier, healthier and free from the constraints and manipulations of commodification. You will become your better self by embracing what is most precious about being human.

Have a divine meal of an other, feast on the sensuous pleasures you can unfurl from within your own sacred being and discover within an other.

Don’t feel guilt or shame or poker-player gaming, feel joy, scream out loud, laugh, cry and be free.

For what it’s worth that’s my advice.
I leave you not with my words but that of Patti Smith’s:

“Love is an Angel Disguised as Lust”

thanks for reading and have A Great Flying Fuck!