Sex in Austerity: Personal Notes on Sexuality in the Modern Milieu

     A fiftyish female friend of mine is getting married soon as her friends and family are breathing a sigh of collective relief. This wonderful woman who was unfortunately widowed at a young age may not have found love again, but she will get at least its functional proximity. She can move out of the psychological ghetto many modern single women over thirty inhabit. She may not have the kind of love we dream of. Then again "love", the kind that fills our imagination, is largely delusion anyways as many people I know began to reason over the last few years. As a medical professional I can apply precise terminology to the phenomenon. Modern Western Romantic love is usually a case of folie a deux. Of course over time the delusions fade to overvalued ideas at most in at least one party. Historians believe that modern western romantic love is a fairly new phenomenon. What no one has questioned is whether it will soon become a thing of the past for most of us. The age of austerity has seen tremendous changes in sex and love. Oddly, it is the political left and leftists that are at the forefront of pushing these mostly devastating changes.

      Many modern Western women are starting to become secretly envious of their supposedly oppressed Southern sisters. I sat in a hip cafe in Haifa, Israel some years ago with another woman. She was quite a phenomenal woman. She was an Ivy League minted mathematician who had just graduated medical school and an under thirty beauty. She was any potential Jewish family in law's dream of a bride. "I think we should all just get married at 16...we should all just be forced to get married at 16" she lamented "life would go on, and we wouldn't have to worry about any of this...." Interestingly by “this” she was not referring to the alarming phenomenon of how modern romance wreaks havoc on biological clocks, or even new conflicts over gender roles. She simply couldn't take the annoying humiliation that was the 2000s world of dating. It was the year the market crashed worldwide, but economic problems came early to Israel, or for many people, simply never left. “Dating” had become so mean, many women long to return to the traditional norms they see in the peculiar premodern cultures existing side by side with their own.

     Pre-modern cultures often exist within postmodern realities. In this way Israel is no different from India or even many large megacities. If one looks hard enough in megacities one can find more traditional cultures flourishing. In New York City, for example, there are communities of Albanians, ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi Jews and Muslim Yemenites that all adhere to the strict dictates of traditional cultures in gender norms. The economic market may be up or down but women, married off early, have a certain place. Dating, to the extent that it even exists, is largely controlled by cultural elders and limited to a formal check of whether two people can stand each other. Dating, in these traditional societies, is certainly not about love.

     But what many contemporary women have come to realize is that paradoxically love is strangely elusive for modern women as well in spite of nearly endless dating. "Dating is different now" one of my hipper male friends told me with a smirk a few years ago. "You know you used to go to a movie, maybe a dinner...now, with the economy, people just stay in and have sex." At the time he seemed strangely thrilled about the lack of pretensions and romance in the new scene. He might not be laughing if he understood the creepy realities of sexless life that are becoming the norm for more and more people. Researchers as far back as Kinsey have concluded times of low earnings correlate with less sex. The seemingly endless barrage of worry in the press over supposedly increasing sexlessness and the supposed triumph neoliberal policies are intertwined in ways we are only beginning to understand.

   Female writers from all sides of the political spectrum seem to agree on one thing. Men, the brave heroes of lore, are by and large over. In their place have come a bunch of underemployed unkempt man-children who wonder why women are not falling all over them. Unlike fine wine, these brats do not improve with age. My aforementioned fiftyish friend told me that in her quest to find a husband she met lots of men her age who did not realize that they would not be forever twenty five. They were endlessly combing over hair that was falling out and swigging on beer, because they lived in an imaginary frat party for decades that had of course substantially widened their waistlines. Even the men who at some point aged as well as fine Bordeaux unfortunately seemed to have become angry vinegar. Ironically, it seems to have been their own power that ruined them. Secretly, many people have figured out that a lot of straight alpha-men single after their early thirties often become nothing more than cruel assholes in the dating arena. We have the internet to thank for clear insight into the sad workings of some such creatures minds. The internet is not disturbing because it is a home to weirdo outliers who make sport of women, the pick-up artists and professional womanizers who boast of their deeds online. What is disturbing is the window it provides into the callous attitude of everyday respectable men who should know better. The philosophy professor who proudly comments on how glad they are that they could marry a hot babe 15 years younger than themselves as if age or looks were most salient quality of his wife. The doctor who won't go on a date with a woman because she might have an imperfect lip based on her picture online. Years ago, I realized the insanity of reducing women to their looks was not all online, or even all in dating. As a medical student, I saw a female patient dying of ovarian cancer with a well-respected male gynecologist. There was little to be done medically beyond the palliative, but the doctor actively pushed consulting a nutritionist for dieting. The woman was at most 5 pounds heavier than I am- not thin, but not exactly dramatically overweight either. When I later questioned why the doctor explained that she had been a beautiful woman, and "some women, they get cancer, and they just let themselves go..." Indeed.  

  None of this nonsense is particularly new. Yet the age of austerity has brought on about two separate phenomenon that seem to amplify it. As Laurie Penny points out the mechanisms of financialized, globalized, late capitalism create a lot of profoundly disturbed men; ‘losers’ as she succinctly calls them. Secondly, precisely, in their spaces, the new spaces where these young men seek to reclaim control and own their destinies, a feminist revolt is both underway and under siege.  Locked out of the assorted wood paneled board rooms/temples of private power that exist on both the physical and symbolic highest floors of neoliberal power, young men created new spaces and repurposed old ones. They occupied public parks and cyberspace. But in questioning the power structure they perhaps inadvertently opened a Pandora’s Box of liberations never achieved. Movements related to Occupy have an elite leadership that was largely male, white and otherwise privileged; but the benevolence of this reality is openly questioned. Yet this new new feminism of questions really had no great answers for most women. Even some of the new feminism’s most radical thinkers accept certain oppressive orthodoxies. Laurie Penny joined Marcia Inhorn in an embrace of technology as liberating. Penny proclaimed that women were liberated by control over their reproductive lives. She therefore repeated one of the biggest gender oppressive myths perpetrated by the left. Unfortunately, in our brave new world, men not only seek to control women’s reproduction through regressive legislation, but also through technology itself. The “perfect” woman reproduces only if and when men in power over her, including her male partner, want her to. She is a worker-bee drone all day, and a private personal sex worker at night. Just as the new economy has produced men who cannot ever hope to provide enough income to support children, it has also produced a lot of “good girls” who will quietly simply not produce children. Never mind the medical issues it might cost her. Never mind the extreme marginalization she will face if she dares age past 30. Technology has only provided humanity with a new set of tools- in the case of sex and reproduction we now have some very imperfect tools to separate the two. In  spaces with power structures that favor men, it has become clear who will be empowered by the tools; and it isn't the average woman.

     While as a doctor I know various women react to hormonal contraception in various different ways highly dependent on their own biological make-up, I notice a completely nonscientific accidental survey of my friends produced a scary conclusion written nowhere in the little warning pages that come with packs of pills. Nowhere between warnings about the potential for blood clots, emboli and strokes did it mention what we have concluded amongst ourselves is a far more common side effect. The oral contraceptive pill makes you horny. No, certainly not everyone, and not at all times, but enough for many of us to notice and spontaneously discuss. The pill, perhaps coincidentally, turns you into the dream woman of the 2000s- primed and ready for sex, but without those pesky side effects that might require commitment, namely children.

       I never know whether to be believe I was lucky in some aspects of my first real adult relationship. Unluckily it happened a bit past when I had turned 30 so I was ready, and secretly hoping for a contraceptive disaster. An accidental pregnancy would have been perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. Unfortunately, I dated an unusual and conflicted man. “We are not putting you on hormones! I’d just rather not have sex…” he reasoned. Perhaps because he had lost his mother to cancer, he had a healthy fear of unnecessary hormonal interventions. I, of course, wouldn’t take it. I trotted off to the gynecologist’s office on my own, determined to be a better girlfriend. The gynecologist was a bit dismayed, but a couple visits later I had packs of stick-on patch hormonal contraception. My boyfriend left me in less than a month, but I discovered that I could enhance my performance...in the workplace. If I skipped menstrual periods at times of high demand, I was far more efficient. On the inside though, I was dying. My man had taken a new girlfriend about a week after he left me. I could have become the perfect prey for men who could smell low self-esteem, one ready for sex and unable to demand anything in return. If I had added anti-depressants to the pharmacological mix perhaps I could have “empowered” myself into being the uber-desirable woman of current sexist fantasy: chirpy and happy to have nonreproductive sex. The perfect woman in this fantasy never has moods, wrinkles or children; she has Prozac, Botox and the Pill. She is the true heir to the “girl power” the Spice Girls sang about while flaunting their young bodies in little more than underwear for commercial attention. Perhaps this phenomenon is part of what philosophers like Judith Butler are talking about when they speak of gender as performance. Most women secretly understand that just like the Spice Girls they too can cash in on a certain kind of sex appeal. Seen this way, women obsessed with their looks are not dysmorphic but realistic in a world that is sadly ever more transactional.

        But it isn’t transactional sex that most women, or men for that matter, seek in their personal lives. Most of us seek sex that is not completely devoid of meaning or context for biological, psychological, evolutionary and/or even spiritual reasons. But for far too many women now, there is simply no such sex on the market. Post austerity sex is simply “NSA,” meaning no strings attached, or a not at all, nonexistent, perhaps a distant fantasy memory at best. In this way many middle aged women remind me of a character in the Israeli movie Lost Islands. At the time I saw the movie my Hebrew was less than perfect but if I understood correctly one very young male charecture had been reduced to admitting more or less 'I haven’t had sex for so long, the last time I masturbated, I fantasized about the last time I masturbated.' The line was funny, but captured a moment that all men outgrow because sex is now more than ever a man’s market. I have watched in horror as many middle aged friends of mine, who looked closer to their biological age, navigated this cruel market. They went through long periods of celibacy punctuated by disappointing trysts with mean losers. Some of the more avant-guard hire male prostitutes. But if this is the meaning of liberation: to be able to also exploit other people in the most profoundly personal ways, to be just as callous as men, then I don’t want it.

     The behavior of some supposedly liberated women is embarrassing reminder of the historical inability of the oppressed to create liberation. The most liberated African-American slaves freed themselves to recreate the plantation structures of the old South in Liberia. Ashkenazi Jews crawled out of centuries of oppression in Europe to create a state that seems to become more oppressive to the ethnic other every day. I choose these examples because in this hyper-politically correct world I am only allowed to critique my own cultural background. I can say on the most personal level, we should know better…but we don’t. Apparently no one does. Decade after decade liberation struggles take on the sad aim of equalizing the ability to exploit others. Franz Fanon realized the future endgame of this phenomenon decades ago. Fanon was politically concerned with race in colonial context, but as a psychiatrist acutely aware of many of the power structure’s psychic and sexual dimensions. Since then the sexual dimensions have only been amplified by technology and globalization. Reproduction has become separated from sex into something that the ‘dirty brown people’ can do to service their colonial masters. Save of course "donating" the perfect (most often white) genetic material in high demand, a duty relegated mostly to poor women forced to sell their eggs in desperation. We have come more than full circle back to the days when poor women did disproportionate amounts of the actual childcare because they were the maids and nannies. Now increasingly they must actually donate the genetic material and carry the embryos of the rich too. Farms of gestating women in Asia can work as surrogates for the white queens of the North. The bodies of brown women in the global south also frequently become the testing grounds for reproduction related pharmaceuticals to be made affordable only to the Western woman. A combination of ignorance and arrogance are the ultimate guards of this sexist power structure. Behind the implied imagined power of the state and the capitalist lie real power: the power to violently crush opposition. But the baton alone cannot beat down the opposition. Empires are, after all, expensive to maintain, especially under neoliberalism when the taxable subject is becoming poorer by the day. The real maintenance of empires and hierarchies happens inside minds. The power structure is maintained so long as the limit of our collective knowledge and thus imagination stops before declaring us all equal humans with equally important if varied needs. Facts, like the fact that the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs are tested on third world populations who will get little benefit from them, are conveniently forgotten. Truths, like the truth that men are the primary if not only beneficiaries of reproductive technologies, go unseen and unspoken. The edge of the mainstream feminist imagination is total access to abortion, pills and condoms: the right to not reproduce. Reproduction is not so coincidentally is what many men, both bosses and lovers, now want us to not do.

         A few alpha females, like queen bees, have been awarded the right to sex and reproduction without apology. We watch TV vicariously living through the born rich who can live biologically natural lives. Who wouldn’t like to have been Chloe Kardashian and polish off workouts of a young body with some good wholesome unprotected fucking? But most of us modern ladies know the consequences of that most biological urge in this neoliberal late capitalist world include poverty. Even Marissa Meyer, who had the power to have a nursery built into her office while she simultaneously told work-at-home parents to throw the kids in childcare and live in their cubicles, had to wait until 38 to achieve such queen bee status. No one can yet imagine egalitarian scalable structures that would give us, the women of the 2000s, all the right to sex and motherhood without apologies, poverty and social penalties. The premodern structure that regulated these activities: marriage, is for contemporary women a privilege, not a right. We are condescendingly told by leftist men that we have been liberated from this patriarchal structure. As with the pill and abortion, the liberation is mostly, if not entirely, theirs.