Essay in English I

PASSABLE SEX FOR THE THIRD MILLENIUM?

(PART I)

Essay written in 2000

Andy Warhol said the best thing to do about sex is not to do it. Seemingly, Bill Clinton didn’t hear this wise advice, but he is definitely not the only one running occasionally into trouble because of the shifting barriers between our cultural limits and biological instincts. But what future presumptions or prognosis can we learn from the bubbling discussion about the position of sex in our culture and society?

If we accept that we are in literature already deeply in the post-modern period, and that in the social sciences we recognize even a post-feminist era, isn’t that over-typed Clinton-Lewinsky affair an example of the post-sexual revolution age?

In the fifties, humankind learned to have sex without children. In the seventies, people began to learn to have children without sex. The nineties indicate, that soon we will get used to sex without a partner.

THE EYES SAY ”YES, BUT...”

We live in a peculiar time. We are surrounded by erotic challenges, but not everybody has his extra study (or say, hallway to the bathroom, neither not very romantic places) behind one’s official workroom and secretary who is confidentially slipping one attractive visitor by another. On the contrary, the majority of the population has no time even to sigh for sexual adventures. It is no wonder then of British women-mothers that asked about their preferences to relieve stress, 60 per cent put a hot bath in the first place, while one out of four said a drink is the best cure, and sex ranked surprisingly third. Exhaustion of potential sexual partners caused by the every-day marathon of tasks is evident.

We are familiar with portrait of over-exhausted husband, who is always away from home. Also an emancipated woman is now coming to play this role. Will these two ever find the time and the power to enjoy a truly genuine sexual act? Let them run through their week of work duties and family stresses, the desired moment arrives for them to finally meet in bed. Here the next section of the hurdle track called “successful life” waits for them. The information boom has done its job and nowadays, couples making love are subject to a demand for a race of orgasms accompanied by complicated sexual gymnastics. The sex came to another stress in long list of another already appeared.

Already in 1991 The British Daily Mail published an article under the headline ‘Women at War’. The article was illustrated with two controversial photos of the same young woman. In one of the photos, she was in the role of a ‘career girl’, in the other; she was portrayed in the traditional female role or homemaker. Nowadays, the first girl apparently prevails. The fact that she has no time to bear and bring up children could have been expected. Statistic figures in the above-mentioned article show that four-out-of-five educated working women aged from 18 to 24 say they refuse to bear the responsibility for a family.

The sexual revolution of the 60‘s eradicated the first taboo of human culture, made nakedness a common-place, and turned the mystery of sex into a commercial that fills shops. Subsequently, feminists began an assault to free women of the burden of their traditional role, Betty Friedan says. But before the envisioned ideal could be reached, a problem appeared how to combine a professional career with the fact, that according to Friedan that “women are humans that give birth to children”. It has been shown, for example, that drug abuse among children rises with decreasing time they spend under their parents' watchful sight. This makes latch-key kids high-ranking candidates for narcotics use. A woman struggling for a career and at the same time, for a harmonious home, is subject to an inevitable series of problems. Along with her ever over-exhausted husband, she too became harnessed by that man-propelled mill of accelerating human civilization. Will these two ever find the time and the power to adorn with a truly genuine sexual act their cohabitation, which was established so long ago by the mythical prototype for human couples, Adam and Eve?

(To be continued)

Translation by Peter Duba, edited by Jerry Weir and Tom Reynolds