Part 3: Sexualization of the Revolution
How, then, did we come to conceive of sexuality as identity?
It is not difficult to see how the idea of personal authenticity and the focus on the inner psychological man captured the imaginations of the 19th century Romantics like William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley. They chafed under what they perceived to be the oppression of traditional Christian morality as expressed in the church, and drew a link between sexual freedom and human freedom in general. But they still thought of sex as primarily an activity we do rather than a fundamental component of who we are as human beings. How, then, did we come to conceive of sexuality as identity?
Trueman holds that the man most responsible for this shift in thinking is Sigmund Freud, and this in spite of the fact that his theories are generally rejected today. What Freud offered the modern West was a myth?something onto which we could latch in order to make sense of the world, and it really doesn’t matter if it is true. “The myth is the idea that sex, in terms of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment, is the real key to human existence, to what it means to be human,” says Trueman. This myth is attractive to those who have already accepted the idea of the psychological man and that authenticity is the most important human virtue.
Freud noted that sexual pleasure provides the most powerful experience of happiness and satisfaction, and therefore man should make the pursuit of sexual gratification “the central point of his life.” But this puts us at odds with civilization in general, because sexual codes prevent individuals from experiencing uninhibited sexual satisfaction (the most basic drive) and therefore true happiness. And this drive was not exclusive to adults, for Freud believed that children were inherently sexual beings.
Instead of sexual desire beginning at some point in life, say at puberty, Freud and his contemporaries in the later 19th century believed that children were sexual from birth. If children are inherently good and innocent until corrupted by social influence, rather than corrupt from birth as the Bible teaches, then sexual expression in children is natural and not to be discouraged. As one Freud biographer wrote, “A masturbating child was envisaged, from this new perspective, not as a savage creature whose evil instincts had to be tamed, but as a prototypical human being in progress.”
Sexual expression may change as the child grows and develops through different stages, but the central goal remains the same: the achievement of sexual gratification by which comes true happiness and the most authentic humanity. This means, in the final analysis, that no civilized man or woman can be truly happy (or really even authentically human), since civilization demands that we curtail our personal sexual desires. And yet we, as a society, dream of the ideal man or woman who is fully satisfied, by which we envision someone who is constantly indulging his or her sexual fantasies.
While Sigmund Freud did not invent these ideas, he certainly popularized them and gave them a veneer of scientific respectability. This has allowed Western civilization to embrace and develop them further. One key development was the marriage of the ideas of Marx and Freud in the first half of the 20th century. Marx taught that human history was the history of oppression, especially as seen in economic systems. For Freud and his disciples, oppression came in the form of sexual codes and is primarily found within the traditional patriarchal family. It is the family which passes on moral principles from one generation to the next, and so the family is the basic unit of oppression.
William Reich sought to combine the ideas of Marx and Freud, and he saw the traditional family as a kind of training ground for willing subjects of fascist ideologies. He said, “the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later.”
In a chilling passage, Trueman summarizes Reich’s view of the conflict between the traditional family and a free society:
Reich also believes that the state must be used to coerce families and, where necessary, actively punish those who dissent from the sexual liberation being proposed. In short, the state has the right to intervene in family matters because the family is potentially the primary opponent of political liberation through its cultivation and policing of traditional sexual codes.
p.237
And so the definition of abuse, for which the state is compelled to intervene in family matters, has been changed. Instead of focusing primarily on the well-being of the body, we now think of one’s psychological well-being. “And,” Trueman notes, “once oppression becomes primarily psychological, it also becomes somewhat arbitrary and subjective.”
When a baker refuses to make a custom cake for a gay wedding, or a florist refuses to design arrangements, they are not causing physical injury, starvation, or economic hardship. Yet our society has deemed that they are inflicting psychological harm and are therefore guilty of political oppression and subject to severe social, economic, and even in some cases legal penalties. It is no longer enough to simply allow consenting adults the freedom to do as they please in their private lives, because sex has become a public activity, a significant part of how we think about and communicate individual identity.
The public interest, it is believed, is served by increasing government influence in the private sphere. Trueman explains it succinctly:
The sexual education of the child is simply of too much social and political consequence to be left to the parents. After all, it is the parents as those in authority who actually constitute the problem. The family as traditionally understood needs to be dismantled.
p.239
These ideas, first argued by Reich in the 1930s, have now become mainstream. If sexual gratification is identified with happiness, then the most happy society is one which allows for a maximum amount of sexual pleasure. Political freedom is directly linked to sexual liberation. This helps explain how sex, that most private and intimate of human relations, has become a pressing matter of public interest.