Sex and Deviance

by Guillaume Faye

  Such are the intellectual roots of the sexual confusion with which we are familiar. We are struck by the naïveté, superficiality, and sociological ignorance of these celebrated ‘thinkers’. Their procedure was identical to that of Lysenko: a dogmatic discourse disconnected from reality and fiercely hostile to the natura rerum [nature of things –Tr.].[5]

  It is not only sexual misery but also emotional and familial poverty that we are faced with here. Individual emancipation and freedom seem to produce, by a dramatic inversion, isolation and incarceration in the ego.

  But the most extravagant thing about this whole project of ‘sexual liberation’ is that it did not even succeed in defining and systemising its own concepts. This ideology did not even manage, for example, to identify the central ideas of transgression and perversion. Exactly how far could the liberation of individual desire be taken? There was never any clear response.

  Indeed, since sexual freedom was to be total, since there were no longer any ‘bourgeois norms’, no natural regulation, and since the emancipation of individual desire was to take precedence over everything else, why not allow paedophilia, rape, incest (already defended and glorified by movie director Louis Malle), bestiality, sexual torture or murder (a recurrent theme in Sade, an author greatly admired by the theoreticians of sexual liberation), and so on, ad infinitum?

  This ideology has shown itself incapable of drawing a line between the normal and the deviant, the permitted and the forbidden, the acceptable and the harmful, the licit and the illicit. By the same token, the ideologues of sexual liberation also posture as apostles of the Rights of Man — Leftist dogmatism requires it. But the contradiction is insurmountable: for freedom of desire without restraint, proclaimed as a right, automatically causes harm to others. This is illustrated by paedophilia, along with the spread of AIDS.

  On this last point, the contradiction I mentioned has become as plain as day; for everyone knows that the male homosexual ‘community’ has contributed to the explosion of this viral illness, thanks to the active encouragement male homosexuality has received across the entire West since the 1970s. Now, it is radical homosexual associations (usually tied to the Trotskyist extreme-Left) which have caused the biggest ruckus in favour of increasing funding for AIDS research and for opposing any ‘repressive’ measures against the above-mentioned ‘community’ and even against any official prophylactic control, described as ‘discriminatory’. One gets the feeling that the AIDS virus is a sort of ‘fascist agent’ which attacks homosexuals in order to punish them. In reality, the AIDS pandemic is the direct, logical consequence of the ideology of sexual liberation, especially of its promotion of male homosexuality — not to mention the irresponsibility and anarchic hedonism of homosexuals.

  By rejecting the very idea of order, this ideology turns against itself. It makes a pretence of defending harmony, freedom, and the end of oppression, but ends up constructing a world that operates according to the law of the jungle, the law of the strongest or most perverted. The implications in the political domain are the same as in that of sex: since desire and freedom without restraint constitute an absolute ideal, why thwart the impulses of the criminal or the tyrant? Isn’t the terrorist free to gratify his impulses, as well as the cannibal and the child-killer?

  We find the same contradiction when it comes to drugs. In the 1960s, this ideology considered taking drugs a human right, a form of liberation — in short, it was considered in the same light as sex: an absolute individual right to pleasure. Unfortunately, enormous problems of public health and criminality resulted from the consumption of narcotics, problems with no clear solution (as with both AIDS and paedophilia). The spread of AIDS owes a great deal to unbridled tolerance of the ‘gay’ phenomenon. This emancipatory ideology completely lacks any principle of responsibility. In all domains, its promises of happiness result in unhappiness, an unhappiness for which it stubbornly refuses to take responsibility. Yet this dominant, pseudo-emancipatory ideology continues to impose its unjust and hypocritical egalitarianism in the name of a phony liberation — it continues with the pitiless and totalitarian repression of all who do not follow its errors.

  By its excess, by its folly and deep misunderstanding of human psychology, the ideology of sexual liberation risks a very severe return to that against which it originally rebelled: it provokes a rebirth of the thick-headed puritanism by way of reaction. It is provoking a counter-offensive, a real sexual repression much more serious than that of supposed bourgeois repression. The massive intrusion of Islam into Europe, with its cortege of subjected women, obsessive and rigorous discipliarianism, separation of the sexes, and machismo is the disturbing sign of this swing of the pendulum. Already in France, an increasing number of girls — mostly of immigrant background, of course — are having their hymens re-sewn to ‘regain their virginity’ before marriage. We have come far from the dreams of sexual liberation.

  The Illusion of Virtual Encounters

  The child of the sexual revolution and also of the Internet is the explosive growth of ‘dating websites’ (80 percent sexually oriented, 20 percent explicitly pornographic) and social networks. They have replaced the traditional type of direct meeting and cruising, and theoretically they offer a multitude of opportinities for meetings of every kind. However, the results are disappointing. Why?

  Because the virtual can never replace the real.

  The Internet sites (Facebook, Meetic,[6] and thousands of other sites) are based on a virtual and simulated second-hand sex through a screen interface. The first encounter is not natural; it occurs in solitude, in front of a machine interface, and everything else flows from there. Dialogue in front of the screen falsifies and misguides the rest of the relationship, because it suppresses the direct emotion of the first meeting and establishes the relationship on lies, even if these are involuntary. The accident of the first meeting — in a bar, at a party, an office, a friend’s house — is replaced by calculated effort in front of a cold screen. Imagination supplants reality. Romanticism or desire are transmitted in computer files. Psychologically, a contact receives a certain bias if it originates from a computer search. If you later happen to meet the person, you understand quickly that she does not correspond to the electronic persona with which one chatted.

  Moreover, time spent trying to find a mate in front of a screen comes at the detriment of older and more concrete and human forms of seduction, less rationalised but more effective. Sexual and emotional relationships elaborated over the Internet have neither the density nor the fleshy taste of real seduction. Here once again, we are witnessing the unfolding of a false liberation without real effect. The virtual sociability of the Internet has about as much depth as a flat screen.

  Moreover, it is simulation and lies that characterise these relations, first of all because of the general swindle inherent in all ‘hot’ sites which tempt their users to dream without these fantasies resulting in anything concrete, since the goals of such websites are commercial. The same goes for all the countless ‘telephone sex’ numbers.[7] Most of the men and women (who are often disguised) who click and surf around these sites have no intention of really meeting anyone, but merely of amusing themselves in front of their computer screens. The cold computer medium plays the role of keeping people from actually acting.

  The conjunction of sexual liberation and the Internet had the opposite effect to what was intended: it has simply increased sexual solitude. Bars are going out of business or closing at ever earlier hours; dance halls and discotheques are drying up (nightclubs are five times less common today than in the France of 1980[8]), matrimonial agencies are locking their doors, and so on. Real places for meeting and socialising are gradually giving way to a vain and anxious search in which each individual is alone in front of his screen contemplating a scene with as much density as a ghost: such is sexual liberation.

  [1] Christopher Lasch (1932�
��1994) was a vehemently anti-liberal American social critic and historian. Originally a neo-Marxist, his political perspective later evolved to fuse the Marxist critique of capitalism with cultural conservatism. –Ed.

  [2] In a bookstore at an American airport, I was surprised to observe that magazines in the adult section were sealed in a black plastic wrap which hid the cover. Surreal.

  [3] Free — but not ‘liberated’ in the sense of a free/liberated slave.

  [4] The X-rated film industry originated in the United States and Sweden at the end of the 1960s. Today the industry is largely dominated by American production companies. Over three-quarters of pornographic Internet sites are American. And it is in the United States that one finds almost all the anti-vice leagues dedicated to outlawing such sites. Pornography and puritanism go hand in hand.

  [5] The French intelligentsia is familiar with the media celebrity of impostors like Camus, Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, B-H Lévy, etc., while real, innovative (but politically incorrect) French thinkers like Julien Freund, Clément Rosset, and Jules Monnerot are little-known in France or abroad (except in Italy, the country of intellectual curiosity) despite the pertinence and depth of their analyses.

  [6] A dating and chat site in Europe. –Ed.

  [7] False advertising (which never really punished) is the norm in the entire audiovisual and computer industry, including among companies partly owned by the state. The telephone and Internet are at the centre of this institutional swindle whose watchword is: ‘it’s free!’

  [8] Another reason for this phenomenon of disappearing meeting spaces, especially discotheques, nightclubs, and popular festivals is the increasing insecurity of nightspots, something which sociologists know but never admit. This, obviously, is due to uncontrolled immigration.

  Chapter 6

  Sex and Perversions

  Sexual Obsession and Sexual Impoverishment

  A spectre haunts contemporary Western society — the spectre of sex. Sex has become its central theme. Sex is present as a transversal recurrence, that is, it appears in force and enters all domains, well beyond the field of eroticism strictly so-called — a sexual preoccupation that has overstepped its natural bounds and now informs all communications media, of all genres. This is rather strange, because the genetic nature of men has not changed. The explosion of sexual imagery, spectacle, and discourse since the middle of the twentieth century is related to the birth of a virtual sexual world. It can perhaps be explained by a decline in real sex, or more exactly, by an isolation of sex from other forms of behaviour, as if sex were disconnected from life. The present hyper-sexualisation of society is the exact counterpart to the puritanism of the nineteenth century. The sexual obsessive and the puritan are two sides of the same coin: they put sex at the centre of everything on account of their own frustration.

  Despite co-education and the general diffusion of sexual and pornographic spectacles (greatly multiplied by the Internet), it is very difficult to know whether actual sexual relations are more common or occur earlier than before. In any case, the idea that modern Western man has more sexual relations than his ancestors has been discredited by several historical sexological studies. The psycho-sexual obsession which characterises Western societies (the recipe for sexual fulfillment which invades with which one is bombarded via the media from adolescence to old age, not to speak of omnipresent sexual imagery) might lead one to suspect that we live in an age of sexual impoverishment, where great masses of bachelors bear the yoke of sexual frustration, fantasy, and loneliness. It is the classic phenomenon of compensation: if you are constantly bringing a subject up, it is because it is problematic, and one may suspect that something is lacking. People only speak repetitively of what is missing.

  * * *

  Sexual hypertrophy is a factor in self-destruction and sexual pathology. Western societies have gradually, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, replaced naturally experienced forms of sexuality with forms dominated by artifice. This is the consequence of sexual over-representation, the omnipresence of sex in all discourse and media spectacle and in our social surroundings, with each having been systematically invaded by what can only be called a general sexual obsession.

  This obsession has greatly changed the nature of sex, causing it to pass from the status of integrated behaviour to that of spectacle or problem. Let us try to enumerate the various domains that have been occupied by this sexual obsession. We may distinguish three cases: pornography, media sexualisation, and therapeutic sex.

  The pornographic industry is very lucrative and its global revenue continues to grow, thanks especially to the Internet.[1] Like home care, this is an industry which does not experience downturns. Pornography has become trivialised to a point that would stupefy earlier generations. Anyone can get access to audiovisual pornography, half of which depicts perversions. The time when sex shops were places of discretion has long since passed. X-rated night-time programs or Internet sites (films, photos, meet-ups) are consumer products, as accessible as yogurt on supermarket shelves. In the pages of large-circulation adult magazines, a profitable industry has arisen: personal announcements for sexual encounters (by telephone, instant message, or on the Internet) with women or men, or telephone services for listening to sex acts played by actors. Obviously, the promises of ‘encounters’ are entirely false (except sometimes in the case of prostitution networks), but the swindle does not discourage those who like to fantasise.

  We should note that pornographic magazines (like sex shops) are in decline, dethroned by the possibility of having audiovisual products delivered to your door. What is striking, therefore, is the combination of the total accessibility pornography and its anonymous, trivial, and probably frustrating character, since it never results in real satisfaction. A sexuality of fantasy and masturbation has replaced one of satisfaction and adventure.

  The pornography industry in its many forms rests upon the monetisation of fantasy: it creates a need without satisfying it. Some may think that pornography — sex as spectacle — is a sort of compensation for all who are sexually frustrated and, in the end, a positive thing. This is as if one were to say that anti-depressants were a solution to depression, when the real solution is to fight the causes of the pathology further upstream.

  We should also mention that pornographic films and images, available to absolutely everyone including adolescents, diffuse a very primitive, un-erotic, animalistic and immediate, artificial, and frustrating vision of sex often centred upon rape fantasies. There is no need to mention how devastating the effects can be, especially on young Muslim men.

  What is striking about pornographic films is that they are, with few exceptions, entirely un-erotic. To speak colloquially, they are not a turn-on. The sexual grammar is poor, immediately proceeding to the act; the camera angles are fixed and repetitive. Is this calculated marketing, or do these films reveal the poor erotic imagination of their makers?

  Probably both. The pornographic film, for its makers and its audience, reflects fairly well the sexual sensibility of our age. This supposedly liberated age knows no erotic refinement. In pornographic films, the sexual act resembles the copulating of pigeons or shrieking apes. There is no rise in sexual excitement. The recipe of the strip-tease has been abandoned. The actors annoyingly proceed straight to the act.

  On the other hand — and this fact is fundamental — a significant part of the X-rated industry legally offers spectacles of perversion (by Internet or on VHS) which are almost as common as classic, ‘vanilla’ heterosexual videos. We should also note the frequency of interracial scenes, usually involving Africans and Europeans (on these subjects, see Appendix E at the end of the book).

  * * *

  We also observe the introduction of sex (non-pornographic, but often just barely) in areas where one would think it irrelevant, above a
ll in advertising. The suggestive use of women’s bodies in the promotion of the most varied products, from perfume to clothing, to food, to automobiles, has been getting increasingly common for decades. The suggestive use of the male body is also frequent, with a view to the homosexual market. The advertising business has taken to sexualising its messages in all areas.

  The same goes for films, television series, and novels. Not only do the shabbiest possible sex-stories enter more and more into dramatic plots but directors cannot refrain from showing various soft-core scenes of copulation, even without dramatic necessity. This phenomenon took off in the 1970s. Of course, as you might expect, male homosexual whims (increasingly present in productions) are expressed even in prime-time. On the network France 3 recently, a ‘creative’ made-for-television film (with socio-artistic pretentions, as always) was broadcast in the early evening, in which a male police detective falls in love with a male forensic scientist. Scenes heavily suggestive of fellatio and body-to-body embracing between the two fortyish actors (one with a prominent belly, the other slender and bearded) were broadcast for a family audience. Such an anti-aesthetic voyeurism is surely the sign of pathology on the part of those who made and who broadcast the film.