I don't know if I mentioned it already before, but I really love watching TEDx talks. So today surfing in YouTube I found the following TEDxJaffa talk by Ran Gavrieli.
The talk got me thinking a lot what I think is one of the greatest issues in our contemporary society, which is the eternal confusion between Love and Sex, and the predominance of the latter over the former. It may seem like a very unimportant problem, and it is certainly not a problem that worries many people, but I think that solving it can change radically our society, the way in which we relate to each other and to ourselves even.
Amsterdam is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been in, with its canals, its ancient houses, the smell of marihuana in the air (especially near the center), the tulips, the windmills, the Concertgebouw. It is also a city that is famous for all its business around sexuality, which ranges from sex shops and XXX cinemas to the Red Lights District, where I understand you can pay €50 for 15 minutes with a prostitute.
Walking around this neighborhood and seeing so many women there, behind glass windows, siting down, barely dressed, texting someone on their phones, without a smile on their faces (why should there be one, anyway?), and then all the men outside, smoking, looking at them, choosing, choosing, as if they were pieces of meat or apples or something like that, but not women, I thought how is it possible that we can just reduce other human beings to less than objects, just tools for our own gratification.
The prostitutes in Amsterdam
The whole idea of paying for sex is, to me, a brutality, because it is reducing sexual desire to the level of the other bodily needs, like defecating, when, in my opinion at least, sexual desire is one of the driving forces of humanity. Sexual desire in this way is very closely related to romantic love, although I wouldn't go so far as to call them the same thing. It is what makes us approach another person, and want to be with them the rest of our lives, it is like an arrow that points from us to a person in particular. This is one of the deepest and most honest feelings we can have, when we feel attracted sexually to someone, we cannot fake it, we cannot help it either, it just happens. And, usually, when we feel sexually attracted to someone, we also begin to feel emotionally attracted to them as well, we feel happiness when being close to them, we want to know everything about them, we want to make them smile, we want to love them and feel loved by them. The sex is, in a way, the logical conclusion to all this, a fulfillment of what was being built since the first encounter.
What, unfortunately, happens many times, is that we seek sex, we seek pleasure, just for itself, or as a way to feel power over someone or over ourselves. The idea of sex as a kind of economic transaction comes to mind, having sex with someone in order to obtain some kind of benefit from them. This is completely the opposite of what I previously described, and when the first leads to happiness and fulfillment, the second one leads to suffering and death in every way. Porn and prostitution derive from this search for empty pleasure, because they turn sex into a product, something that you can quantify, that you can attach a value to. If you pay €50 you can have sex with me for 15 minutes and we will do this and this, if I like it (which is very unlikely) I might make you a discount. For €15 you can buy a DVD of a 15-year-old girl having sex with an older guy. There is variety, there is a wide selection of products that you can buy. This is the great brutality, this is what is unnatural: to turn sex into a mere transaction, into a product, into something you can control and quantify.
In the end, I think the problem is fear as well, as it always is. When experiencing strong sexual feelings, we realize that we cannot be alone, we, in a way, see the void of our loneliness in space, in the world, because sexual desire is not intended, originally, to be satisfied by masturbation (this does not mean that I think it is a bad thing), but shared with someone else, so that both can be satisfied together. When we feel this desire, very deep inside ourselves we are afraid of loneliness, because we realize our own frailty, we realize how much we need this other human being in our lives. we cannot cope with this fear, so we recur to substitutes for it, we pay other to satisfy us, or we look for anonymous encounters, or we deny it altogether and profess chastity. As a race, I think we are very good in inventing excuses and half-solutions to our problems, because we cannot be bothered to go through all the work of actually finding the solution that will end them. We are also very good in condemning that which we do not understand, and we certainly know very little about sex.
I think the solution is very simple, although it is sometimes very difficult to realize because of this mindset that I just described, that leads us to either avoid the problem or seek stupid easy solutions. We just need to be honest with ourselves, to always remember that what you feel is the most important thing, that in the end what we desire is not a satisfaction of some bodily need but a deep and fulfilling connection with another human being, a relationship that will make us forget that we die, that our lives are meaningless and that our planet is less than a speck of dust in the universe. What we need is not sex, in the end, but love, a love that makes us immortal.
I leave you with this really cute short that I saw a while ago and came back to my mind while writing this:
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