Traveling with a rock band will do wonders for your sex life. For a while, the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll life made it easy for me. The heavy-lifting of finding people and dating was removed by time constraints and by my close association with fame and celebrity, which is a surprisingly effective aphrodisiac. The funny thing about sex in an environment like that is how quickly it can become rote and formulaic. You meet some girl—well, you encounter each other, you both know why you’re there, and any pretense of a long-term relationship is thrown out the window. It’s just a temporary physical encounter, some more intense than others. Maybe that sounds great, and let me tell you, it is—but there’s also a dark side to it.
20,000 Days on Earth, the documentary about singer Nick Cave, frequently features him ruminating on various aspects of his life. In one, he speaks of the “drip-feed of erotic data,” or the early images and encounters that shaped his sexual life. Where does sexual desire begin? What makes us interested in this person rather than another? Why does the sight of one person’s body arouse us while a million others could walk by naked and we would be unmoved? I have no idea, but I can say I have been on a drip-feed of erotic data for a few decades now.
I came of age in the wake of the 1960s sexual revolution. There was an excitement about it—long-standing norms had changed, and it felt like the whole world had shifted. But not everything.
My parents used to read the Sun, one of Britain’s big tabloids that was big on celebrity scandals and short on real reporting. Any political news was essentially reduced to a witty slogan in order to keep the masses entertained, scandalized, and woefully uninformed. But the Sun’s real selling point for many years was the Page Three girl. Every day there would be a photo of some buxom, semi-naked girl from somewhere in mid-England. She would be splashed topless across an entire page every morning. Maybe the drip-feed began there.
In classic and predictable form, this was also the time when I stumbled upon my dad’s porn collection. Well, it was more just a few magazines stacked beneath his bedside table, mainly nudist magazines and an occasional Playboy. That transgressive exploration of prohibited adult material fueled my desire. The desire was already there, but these images channeled it into a patchwork quilt formed of clumsy childhood discoveries.
The pop culture of my upbringing added to data as well. The Page Three and Playboy girls were soon joined by Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, Jane Fonda, Joan Jett, Madonna, Suzi Quatro, and Charlotte Rampling. These avalanches of images came from everywhere, from the writings of D. H. Lawrence to Anaïs Nin to Japanese hentai. There were stockings, tattoos, bondage wear, fetishes. Once, my best friend’s girlfriend posed for a spread in a magazine called Mayfair; when we all celebrated at the pub, they called her Elvira the Witch. All these images floated in the cultural ether, shaping my sexual curiosity and nurturing my drives and desires.
Talking about sex is complicated, a clash of social norms and morals with stark carnal realities. It becomes even more difficult when you factor in religion. Much of my adult life, and therefore my sexual life, has been lived out under the influence of religious opining, most of it unhelpful and naïve. I’ve met many people who have been messed up sexually because of things they were told about sex through their religious environs. I don’t want to condemn religion wholesale for its opinions, but when it comes to sex and sexuality, the conversation is often little more than prohibition and demonization.
Sins of the flesh carry lots of currency. This stretches back to old views about dualism, prioritizing the ineffable over the material. We act surprised when someone violates a taboo and acts out of impulse, or out of a resistance to the status quo. In my late teens or early twenties, some friends and I visited a drag bar called Scaramouche in a nearby town. We were all curious about pushing our limits, those internal and those handed down to us. We were drawn to the bar’s taboo and illicit nature. The hint of scandal boosted the boring world we lived in. I never crossed the line from voyeurism to participation, out of fear and hesitation more than anything. That experience taught me early on that human sexuality is complex. Desire takes many forms, and while we create norms and operate within general parameters for most of our sexual lives, there are many deviating paths to choose from.
Religion is all about bodies. When our sexual lives come into contact with God, what happens? Are they compromised or intensified? A theology of sexuality, of flesh, of carnality is a theology of life itself, of life and death. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his 2009 book Nudities, writes that nudity has a theological signature in our culture, related to the story of Adam and Eve, who were naked and unashamed but had to be covered after the fall. Agamben links Western views on nudity, dress, and shame to that formative story of human brokenness and our attempts to cover up the vulnerability revealed by the actions taken in the Garden of Eden. A culture not raised on that tale of nakedness and shame might find itself with an entirely different view on the same issues.
Obsession with sex—or with particular views on sexuality and gender—seems to be one of the downfalls of the modern church. Its moral crusading against various forms of sexual encounters have only added to the disaffection many feel for Christianity. What’s the answer?
Maybe we should move away from prognosticating about sexual acts and begin again with love. Of course, no one knows love better than French philosophers. Alain Badiou suggests in In Praise of Love that any and all sexual encounters are ultimately an encounter with ourselves. “Sex separates,” he says; in the sexual act we are “in relationship with ourselves through another.” Badiou says focusing on love rather than sex might lead to a different understanding of the intersections of desire, and further deepen our experience of sex and love. Desire fetishizes the other partner, especially their physical attributes, but as Badiou says, “love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is consequently disrupted and re-fashioned.”
I write this in the heat of the #MeToo movement. Women and men across the globe have taken to social media to tell their stories of surviving sexual misconduct, abuse, and trauma, often inflicted by powerful men in politics, arts, religion, literature, or film. Numerous scandals have erupted as these accusations work their way through our social and political fabric. The list of toxic things that have gone undealt with for decades— sex, power, misogyny, manipulation, and more—grows longer every day.
Some say the sexual revolution of the 1960s is responsible for all of this. I am not so sure. The answer is not more conservative views about sex, but more radical ones. The sexual revolution attempted to liberate sex and sexuality from its prior strictures and boundaries. Things changed certainly, but like many of the revolutionary ideas that permeated the counterculture, they never fully took hold. #MeToo shows the need for a radical rethinking of sexuality. Old binaries and male-driven power dynamics are hopelessly and dangerously outmoded. As notions about power, gender, and identity shift, so too must our views about sex and sexuality.
Along with that, we also need a radical reinvention of love. Only when we have exposed the myths about sex and love at the core of our culture can we hope to find new ground on which to walk. In The Radicality of Love, philosopher Srécko Horvat explores the tension between twentieth-century revolutionaries and their resistance to and fear of love. He charts the sexual revolutions that attended various revolutionary movements in our recent history and the suppression of them that followed soon after. Revolution is love and love is revolution, Horvat argues. But all too often revolution is also about power and control, overthrowing one oppressive power in the name of revolution only for that revolution to fall into the same power traps. Love is about refusing particular kinds of power—power that dehumanizes, controls, and abuses. Revolution is also about energy—as is love and sex—and revolutionaries need to direct their energies into their causes, not into affairs of the body or heart. In this way, sex and love become dangerous to the success of a revolution, hence the ensuing repression.
In The Radicality of Love, Horvat also writes of the challenge when love and sex become habit and routine, and when our views become accepted without reflection. All of this precludes the true sexual revolution. Horvat concludes his book by using the Christian image of the trinity to outline a relationship between individuals and revolution. Love is nondirectional but relational between all three elements of the trinity. He claims, “God is revolution and love coexists between them all.”