Whatever Happened To Sex

By Paul Craig Roberts

October 19, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Western civilization is in collapse. Every public and private institution in every western country, with the sole exception of Iceland, is corrupt. Government at every level is corrupt. The courts and judicial systems are corrupt. Justice is nonexistent. The financial systems are corrupt. The media is corrupt. The corrupt corporations continue to maximize their profits by destroying the environment and by replacing domestic workers with foreign ones. The income and wealth continues to gravitate to the One Percent.

Even sports, which once consisted of games played for fun, are corrupt. Participants in every competitive sport have to be drug tested, whether a skier, a bobsledder, a football, baseball, basketball, or hockey player, a boxer, a bicyclist, a distance runner, a sprinter, a high jumper, a pole vaulter, or whatever. Sports were corrupted by money. The rewards for success are so high that people sacrifice their personal integrity and cheat in order to obtain the money, just as government officials and regulators betray their constituencies in order to be rewarded by special interests who profit at the expense of society.

But not all corruption is financial or money-motivated. Spiritual corruption is even more dangerous as it erodes the character of people. Once people’s concerns do not go beyond themselves and their own feelings, a culture is dead. There has always been betrayal between husbands and wives, but not on the mass scale of today when vows play second fiddle to one’s personal desires. Another way of saying this is that keeping one’s vow or one’s word is no longer an important desire or contributor to self-esteem.

Consider something as ordinary as sexual relations between the genders. Sexual intercourse is one of the most common activities in which people engage. Yet there are those who go up the wall when the subject is mentioned. The prudery is silly, because the sexual relationship between a man and a woman is the foundation of society. Civilizations have protected the relationship in marriage, the basis for procreation and enculturation that perpetuates the society. What we see today is a growing seperation of the sexual relationship from its social purpose and the loss of parental control over children to the state and outside forces. Indoctrination replaces enculturation.

It is dangerous for a society to neglect erosion in its basis. The subject is too large for a column. This article deals only with the disassociation of the romantic element, with its implication of love and commitment, from sex. An article in Cosmopolitan, a women’s magazine, testifies to female liberation from love and commitment by casual sex.

I remember when sex was romantic. Apparently those days are gone. Today sex is about two people (or more) getting each other off. Sex has been reduced to an orgasmic act. The Ashley Madison website, where wives and husbands sign up for extramarital sex with strangers, testifies to the purely orgasimic character of sex today.

Another article in Cosmopolitan explains sex as “fun. If it weren’t we would never bother leaving the house to meet new people to have sex with and we’d all just masturbate instead.”

Years ago in a waiting room I picked up a copy of Cosmopolitan. The cover story was “How to get your man hard and keep him coming back for more.” At least it was normal sex, if denatured. But we have moved on. The October 9 digital issue of Cosmopolitan has an article by a “former escort and current dominatrix who specializes in balloon fetish play.” She calls herself “an adult play faciliator” and “the type of work I do is much broader than just BDSM or fetishistic type stuff. I specialize in helping people to open this part of their sexual selves, and be playful and creative.” She puts them inside giant balloons. Balloons are “erotic and playful” and “a very friendly catalyst.”

Playboy magazine has announced that it is ceasing publication of photos of nude women. The ubiquity of pornography has destroyed the thrill and excitment of the female body and made such images “passe.” Men are being desensitized, and the female body is losing arousal power. Perhaps this explains why there is a demand for a dominatrix to put couples inside giant baloons as a method of stimulating sexual arousal. The role of the imagination in stimulating male arousal is apparently a thing of the past. Men have seen too many images of women engaged in sexual activity.

Women experience “the gift of orgasm” more readily through clitoral stimulation than penetration. To faciliate oral sex, women have abandoned pubic hair. They look like little girls with big boobs. Perhaps this “innocent” look has contributed to the perverted sexual interest in child porn and child sex trafficing.

Feminism taught women promiscuity so that no man wants to marry them, because so many of the wedding guests have already slept with the bride.

Promiscuity brought female empowerment. The woman can be on top and set the pace, while the man restrains himself by thinking about distracting subjects. If he can last long enough, she can get off and think he is a fantastic lover.

The emotional side of sex with its components of love and commitment, if still present, is in the background. Sex is about pleasurable physical feelings, which is why we leave “the house to met new people to have sex with.” This is a bigger change than people realize. The young don’t even know what has been lost. Today a girlfriend is a convenience. You don’t have to go to a brothel.

People still get married, but the percentage is declining for economic and divorce court reasons and because of the availability of sex outside marriage. Moreover, in the marital bedroom there is no dominatrix with a giant balloon to help to get you off. Today the people most interested in marriage are homosexuals, lesbians, and transgendered. Marriage is a way of legitimizing themselves and what would once have been called perverted sexual preferences.

Economic adversity has brought older women increasing competition from younger women, who advertise their availability to older men who have the financial resources to help them with college tuition, student loan debt, car payments, utility bills and apartment rents. Perhaps it is this development that has led to the websites where older women advertise that all they want is one night stands. Younger women move away from young men because the men have no financial resources. Perhaps this is the reason for the enormous amount of youthful male homosexuality, a sexual preference that in my day was either very well hidden or as rare as a unicorn.

If the point is simply to get off, it doesn’t matter who or what you do it with. A robotic sex doll has been created that talks dirty, has simulated female genitals, and is programed with sexual movements. A male sex robot can’t be far behind.

Perhaps Americans will cease procreating, which might save the planet and its remaining animal and plant life from habitat destruction. Who’s to say the world wouldn’t be a better place without us.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.