Anarchy Bang: Introducing Episode 22: Sex

From Anarchy Bang

Early 20th Century Anarchists, like Emma Goldman and Emile Armand, yearned for a new sexual liberty: polyamory, bisexuality, nudism, and fluid gender, if desired. This impulse did not come from a shallow hedonism, but from the understanding that sexual freedom is needed for so many decisions about our bodies and how we relate to one another.

Why are these ideas so relevant a hundred years later? Sex takes place in the utopian/direct, individual/communal space that includes our tendencies greatest dreams and biggest failures.

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There are 17 Comments

the perceptions of sex have far outstripped an ability to keenly articulate what we want, or better: what we need.

the proliferation of always-on vicarious access to sex has distorted a whole generation’s expections. is anyone having sex anymore? the allure brings a lot of talk, and speculation more than the doing. the doing is awkward, because bodies are awkward. people obviously have kids, so some deed is being done. but, i think they like the idea more than the execution. people i know with kids can’t stop telling me to have them, that i will want to have them (even though i’m trying to scrounge up $$$ to get fixed) some day, they don’t get along with their partner or their children. sex can bring stalemates, and bring out mediocrity. the idea of sex seems to be seen and interpreted as pain for a lot of people, and they become addicted to misery, whether of incel or dead bedroom.

i do like how folks like dale carnegie and john gray have tried to hep us get into each other’s heads and understand/contextualize the rhythms of our inter-relationships along being able to read and feel out signals of emotional spatial needs. i’m afraid the proliferation of social media is making us too narcissistic to actually come together and work out practical matters...

what happens to people’s sexualities under feudalism? this is where we’re going. and it’s not just sublimating sex in the form of a god-king. our interiors are being mapped, language privatized. emotional responses are being weaponized, politics a narrow logic of war. what will sex look like under this lens?

there’s a word that also needs to be said about aging, and all of the hormonal disruptors from sleep, diet, exercise. so many endocrine disruptors are still in the food supply (umbilical cords still register ddt, even though it was outlawed ~42 years ago). testosterone rates have been dropping. aging males should definitely be doing weekly squats/dead lifts sessions. 66% of the US diet is: white flour, industrial seed oils, sugar. it’s pro-inflammatory. we’ve really gotta confront hormetic stressors from inside to outside, and honestly manage the deep pain behind this post-truth era of emotional fascism.

Is what has been mystifying me lately. I can see that a few more "physical" persons are having sex, tho my feeling is that so many people especially since the '00s have been self-disciplining to a point of abolishing fucking from their lives in a way that Christians would have never dreamed of.

People more openly talked about their bodily functions than post-puritan times. I feel like now adays sexual relations are often weird and awkward, I've been fairly sex free over the past 6 years, in part because I can tell when its gonna be awkward if I go for it...

And yeah, I totally agree with what was said above about the disconnect between fantasy and reality.

Sounds like you have a good understanding of functional alternative stress theory. There really does need to be an anarchic libertarian orientation against petrochemical medical machineology. At the end of the Matrix trilogy it was understood that some people did not want to be in the machine while some people did. There will have to be something like this that happens in the context of medical machineological leviathan if there is to be no outright wiping it out(which I don't see happening).

Im into that pessimism as a response to sex positivity. There was an essay in black seed maybe last summer that hit it and one in lies journal. Maybe a direction to go in for a bit.

But Id also be happy hearing details of Aragorn's sex life and if the Atassa scandal has put a damper on it. I can imagine it was hard to get laid with your tent all spicey.

why is hedonism described as shallow here?

finding pleasure where one can find it in this miserable human world can be a deep conversation and enjoyably complex experiment.

sex for the "mere" pleasure of it - without moral impairment, unleashed from procreative mandates, torn from power dynamics, and perhaps most of all, economic motivation (much wider than mere porn) - is probably more rare than we might think.

but, perhaps the @bangers have a different definition they operate under.

Pointing out that cheap thrills are cheap isn't much of an argument, in my view. Hedonism shouldn't care when people point out that it's meaningless since that's the whole point, isn't it?

If you want complexity and meaning, seek it out and/or construct it. If you want to smash joy directly in to your veins, all power to the cheap thrills! Only a problem if you confuse one for the other.

Because it's a crutch for lack of self-content in life? If you're not pleased about your own life maybe that's why someone's constantly looking for pleasure? There lies the shallowness, I think... in how you constantly need to fill up the boredom of your own void.

I get that in this world, epicurian content, no matter how simply and accessible it is, seems like an ideal.

The search for pleasure - which tends toward a desperate, or "filling up the boredom" is not the same as FINDING pleasure wherever you take a moment to see it already there. To see pleasure rather than duty or misery (unless you find those pleasurable, of course).

Yeah, well, you're talking about the same distinction between hedonism and epicurism I was referring to.

if you think that desiring pleasure is (always, or even mostly) a result of boredom, you appear to have the shallow perspective there.

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