The unfettered experience. Its the zipper, stupid. But, does promiscuity necessarily involve forms of immorality? Is there a value in promiscuity if it is located in the pursuit of ideals? .Promiscuity in a Western context seems to have a negative line. There has always been a hypocritical attitude toward promiscuity which in itself is a phenomenon worthy of exploration. In the Western tradition, love tends to be mistakenly treated as exclusive because it is erroneously though of being possessive as in property; a reflection of certain economic values especially with regard to the transfer of property. In this respect it is a threat to monogamy since it endangers a central and sacred institution.
The bug for Western values is that repetition is essential. This pursuit of a new partner is a necessary occurrence. Promiscuity on only one occasion is logically incoherent and impossible. A lack of judgment or a mistake, superficial perhaps, but not promiscuous. Also the two parties must be adults. Finally, and most decisively, promiscuity is non-committal sex. The lifelong relationship may be of more intrinsic value, but the longing for a love that is eternal means that for some of the people, some of of the time, promiscuity may be a good thing.
All this is exaggerated, when promiscuity and its pornographic subtext is applied to politics. Pornography of a purely sexual nature seems to have little or no effect on society or morals. But, political pornography is quite another matter. It seemed to begin with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette with the kinks portrayed as a fumbling and impotent and Marie as insatiable and wanton, breaking the line between political pornography and political smut. A difference between court gossip and the mass market political pornography which can be seen as more dangerous for the society in which it burgeons; it tends to represent a widening chasm between the governors and the governed.
…Back in the hey-day of the Jefferson Airplane the jargon of the day revolved around such terms as non-possessive relating and free-love; promiscuity was not on the consciousness radar. In looking at all the paradoxes when there is a separation between sex and relationship it usually turns towards the issue of defense against the dangers of intimacy.
When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies
don’t you want somebody to love
don’t you need somebody to love
wouldn’t you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love ( Jefferson Airplane )
Yet, we know that promiscuity is completely reconcilable with monogamy. The two can be said to stalk each other, each is the shadow of the other, the alter ego. One is the uxorious lust of the heart whilst libertines yearn for a mythical for peace and quiet.Each sees Arcadia in the other. So, there is a lot of competition and bargaining between these archetypes since people want to justify the choices they have made. All relationships, regardless of composition, seem to involve power issues and carry the potential for the abuse of power. But the inherent antagonism of monogamy and non-monogamy is useful as it performs a function of welding together the discourse without arching over it. They are said, according to Andrew Samuels, to be linked by their defensiveness against the other: monogamy defending a weak ego and low self-esteem, promiscuity as a response to what is perceived as a confrontation with intimacy. Perhaps both are an escape buffeted by societal winds of what morals actually are.
Jonathan Kay:“For the last 35 years, I’ve been outing politicians,” Mr. Flynt tells me after I led with a question about Strauss-Kahn. “He is typical. One trait these men have in common is they all have huge egos, and they have to feed those egos through sexual conquests. It’s the same with guys like [New York Governor] Eliott Spitzer. All those guys — I’d start investigating them because of something I heard and then you always dig up stuff that’s even worse.” Read More:http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/06/04/jonathan-kay-larry-flynt-porns-morally-honest-man/
The rapture between the sheets.Sometimes, it is said that libertine sexual behaviour can be understood in terms of mystical experience in which overwhelming physical attraction produces feelings of awe and wonderment and trembling. It is said there is a sort of god aroused: a primitive, raw, early, elemental God which could be called the unfettered experience of the divine. This idea of a mysticism between people is one by which contemporary theology is captivated. “There is no point at all in blinking at the fact that the raptures of the theistic mystic are closely akin to the transports of sexual union” ( Richard Zaehner) In literature, D.H. Lawrence fashioned a creation myth out of sexual intercourse in Sons and Lovers in which the erotic projection had a life of its own, innate kinetic movement unhooked from the will: “His hands were like creatures, living; his limbs, his body, were all life and consciousness, subject to no will of his, but living in themselves.”
ADDENDUM:
Samuels:After all, Reich, one of the sources for mid-twentieth century shifts in the sexual, became too much for Freud as much for his sexual ideas as for his political ones. I am sure Reich was right to suggest Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents (1930) specifically contra himself – and, let us add, as Heuer has suggested (personal communication, 2008), against Gross as well. There is a contemporary temptation to indulge in a knee-jerk rejection of what Wilhelm Reich said in 1927 in the introduction to The Function of the Orgasm: ‘Psychic health depends upon . . . the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act.’ What Reich (and others such as Roheim and Marcuse) were doing was to elaborate, with great ingenuity, some implications of Freud’s theories of psychosexuality that supported the idea that politics and sexuality were ‘intimately bound together’, in Fisher’s (2007, 238) felicitous phrase. Hence, Fisher goes on, we tend to forget that, alongside his championing of sexual expressiveness, Reich (with varying degrees of support from Freud) advocated the rights of children and mothers, supporting legalized abortions and contraception. Read More:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ppi.179/pdf
Read More:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/20/977751/-There-is-no-upside-to-puritanical-politics
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Kenneth Rexroth:For the Kabbalist the ultimate sacrament is the sexual act, carefully organized and sustained as the most perfect mystical trance. Over the marriage bed hovers the Shekinah. The Glory of God is revealed in the most holy of duties, and new souls are reborn into the sacred community of Israel. There are other notions — reincarnation, light metaphysics, worship of the planets and the moon, the latter identified with the Shekinah. (When Hasids dance in the public parks of New York under the new moon with their hands over their heads, they are showing her her stigmata, found in the lunes of their fingernails, and celebrating her as their Great Mother.) Read More:http://www.cddc.vt.edu/bps/rexroth/buber.htm