Times of sexual utopia. We treat each other like characters in an erotic version of the Sims

It used to all be clear: close your eyes and think of England. What has modernity changed in the area of desire?

We should perhaps begin with the fact that a separate scientific discipline, sexology, emerged at the end of the 19th century. It has messed up a lot in the sphere of intimate life. Michel Foucault, in ‘The History of Sexuality’, writes that from this point on we began to approach sexuality rationally, as a certain activity that is present in the lives of all of us, but which needs to be normalised. Legal standards were created to take care of this. Attention began to be drawn to the economic aspects of sexuality, the connection between this sphere and politics. The narrative has been changed – it is no longer God who commands the populating of the earth, but each state must have some kind of population policy. Part of it is the sexual one, which tells us what forms of sex are beneficial to the social system.

And which are desirable in Western culture today?

I feel that any sort of sexual experiment accompanied by shopping. For some time now, erotic gadgets have become very popular. The vibrator has risen to the status of an everyday object. Women are encouraged to use it, creating an often humorous atmosphere around it. This can be seen in comedies, for example, where there is the figure of a woman who does not currently have a partner, so she satisfies her needs with a toy. This is functional at the level of a consumer society that relies on the sale of goods and services. On the other hand, we are encouraged to take an interest in sexuality and train ourselves in various ways. To challenge ourselves further, to demonstrate ever greater sexual prowess. It is important to learn. This expectation permeates relationships. Skills must be demonstrated. If someone does not train, they can fall out of the market where sexual partners are exchanged.

And does following it, training, trying, experimenting work for us or on the contrary, do we become more and more frustrated and think that there is still something ahead of us, we should experience something new, have more partners...? And as a result, we never experience satisfaction.

We are certainly being served up with an obsession with performance. The cultural sphere is exerting more and more pressure on people to constantly rise to the occasion, resulting in a lot of frustration. The more opportunities we are given for sexual self-development, the more toys we have to try out, orgasms to achieve, the more we probably feel that what we actually experience is not good enough. We have not tried hard enough, we are not educated enough, we have not put enough effort into the process of finding a partner that will always give us full satisfaction. Guidebooks promise us that sex can be great every time. That is more like a sexual utopia. Realism in this sphere would force us to treat sex as part of everyday life, which is very complicated and certainly does not revolve only around good sex.

We have easy access to pornography or various online sex sites. Everything is simple there.

Firstly, we must remember that the sex depicted in professional pornographic films is highly manipulated, that is to say, it is a kind of spectacle that is directed, with specialists taking part in it. The difference between on-screen sex and our everyday sex is about the same as between a football match between Manchester United and AC Milan and a third division football match. People who are professionally involved in sex work are athletes of a sort; they devote time and resources to shaping their bodies and skills. Then there is the issue of editing these films. On the screens we see a kind of stylised fiction made to impress us, to attract our curiosity. The lack of satisfaction from consuming porn or chatting in an erotic chat room stems from the fact that it’s an encounter between a person and a screen.

It’s quite common in modern times.

But we have not been programmed to derive sexual pleasure in interacting with a flat image. There is something sterile about the relationship between me and a body that excites me, but is just a flat set of pixels. The sexual satisfaction thus achieved is devoid of the envelope that co-creates erotic pleasure and is not physiological in nature. Ordinary sex has advantages – establishing a relationship, physical contact. This, of course, is also demanding and aggravating. When you enter into a relationship with another person, you become responsible for them. A porn film does not offer this. Real life is based on different principles, or at least it was until Tinder came along. It turned out that it is possible to choose real partners, just as the viewer chooses porn stars in Internet pornography.

Are you reducing Tinder to a sexual function? Don’t you believe in it as a tool for finding relationship partners?

I would very much like Tinder to fulfil the latter function, and I do not condemn the app itself. After all, it is just a technology that can be used in different ways. Many couples have met on Tinder and formed deep relationships. But the very principle of Tinder is based on controversial premises. The scrolling that takes place there is reminiscent of that which takes place on erotic sites. You are never sure if you have made the right choice. There could always be someone more appealing, after all. Tinder makes us permanently search and introduces a kind of uncertainty into our choices. We are tempted to look there again, to see if anyone new has appeared, especially when our relationship is in crisis. It is a window into a world of different options. The mechanics of the application reflect the cultural mechanism of the free exchange of partners.

Meaning? That we live in an age where getting attached to someone permanently is problematic? In your essay ‘Postmodern Eroticism’, published in 2008, you wrote that we live in difficult times in which we seek to maximise pleasure while slipping into cynicism, cold calculation and loneliness.

We live in a world where we are constantly attacked by stimuli, different messages, and the principle of action is the variability of sensations, experimentation. We are tired of this stream of impressions, we would like the peace and quiet in everyday life that a stable relationship with another human being can give, but the world does not allow us that. How can this be reconciled? I do not know. This is an individual issue. Some are more capable of balancing these needs, while others get lost in it.

And what does pop culture have to say about all this? It seems to me that some changes are taking place here. It used to be that the TV series ‘Sex in the City’ showed beautiful people in nice clothes and their attractive dates, then they made TV series such as ‘Girls’, where people were less perfect and their sex less successful.

We are making progress. Sexology has banished Victorian habits. The sexual revolution, the legendary research of Kinsey, Masters and Johnson showed what a complex area of our lives sexuality is. They made us familiar with sex and taught us to take it seriously. This stands in contrast to the commercialisation of sexuality, which is governed by mass culture, by corporate thinking about human life. We don’t want to watch the same stories about sex and over the last decade or so there have been a lot of series, books, academic papers that show sexuality from a less glamorous side. We discovered that we don’t have to rely on bodies shaped by a plastic surgeon, that normal people are also participants in erotic life. This is what more realistic stories get us used to, even if they sometimes carry a dose of sadness and show sexual problems.

So, even though we are encouraged to do unrealistic things, to participate in a strange sexual race, some positive changes are also taking place.

I believe that sex education is a very positive process. It allows us to increasingly accept diversity in the sexual sphere. This would not have happened without sexological research, but also without popular culture, in which different types of sexuality are shown as something that is part of our reality. Today, it is easier for people with unusual tastes to find their place in the sexual sphere than it was 50 years ago.

And can we desire something purely at all today, or – since we live in a system of consumer capitalism in which everything is designed, advertised – are the things and people we desire imposed on us?

It depends on how we understand desire. One can desire another person, power, salvation, objects, etc. In this view, desire is a kind of basic, biological force that drives our lives, and it is pure desire at the level of instincts, because it is characteristic of all of us, universal to the species. But man is also a cultural being, and at this level pure desire is out of the question, because culture shows us the objects of our desire and teaches us to realise them in a specific way. One could say metaphorically that it taints desire, for instance by commercialising it. Can we unmediated by consumption desire another human being because we love them? Can this universal force of desire be treated as love? Or put another way: does our contemporary culture make this possible? It seems to me that it does. This area has not yet been completely taken over by the market. I think there is still a place for pure relationships, they just require us to do work that is of a different nature than that on erotic performance.

What does this involve?

Cleansing the body and head, not pumping the ego. Minimising external influences. It is a bit like meditation. To cleanse the body and mind of the influences of consumer culture, which tries to pull us away from ourselves in order to sell us performances and products of various kinds, makes us relate to a phantasm rather than another human being.

Is this work even doable in the culture of narcissism we live in? We are constantly trying to ‘do ourselves’. Focusing on the other person is increasingly difficult.

I know, even on Tinder you have to have a suitably tweaked profile for someone to buy you. It’s an offer making us think about ourselves. How my presentation of myself will be received.

Well, people treat Tinder and interpersonal relationships in general like a game. They go on there to get a top-up, which always turns out to be insufficient.

The erotic life of modern people takes on the character of a game, we treat each other like characters in an erotic version of the Sims. We enter applications to acquire points. But is it even possible to actually win in this game? Computer games are governed by the rule of infinity. It’s about not wanting to leave the game. After all, even when you finish one, the manufacturer releases a second part. But then you become a slave to those mechanics.

So what is the rescue for us?

Why not just stop playing? Or maybe play, just ironically, keeping a distance from the game, looking not for victory – because it will never come – but for that moment when we are ready to let someone else win? It may be trivial, but it seems to me that pure desire, true love are not possible without at least partially giving up on oneself. It’s not about ‘being yourself’, but being with each other.

Professor Wojciech Klimczyk – sociologist and cultural expert from the Jagiellonian University, author of, among others, the essay ‘Erotyzm ponowoczesny’ [‘Postmodern Eroticism’]

Autohor: Patrycja Pustkowiak

Photo: pexels.com

The text was published in „Wolna Sobota” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 5 March 2022