Libido Dominandi
Libido dominandi means the desire or lust to dominate.
But I'm going to make this post about lust dominating us...and I feel like the latin phrase still fits.
It is usually used when talking about political power, rulers, governments and the desire that people have to control other people. Augustine wrote about this desire because it is a part of our fallen nature. The woman was convinced by the snake in the garden of eden to eat the forbidden fruit. And so, the sexual revolution began with women... Convinced to eat the forbidden fruit and open the gate to their supposed freedom.
Which is what this post is about. I think libido dominandi can also be applied to the sexual revolution.
The sexual revolution is usually spoken about as a liberation. People were supposedly being liberated from old religious rules, from traditional expectations, from marriage, from modesty and from sexual repression.
But liberated into what?
Sex did not disappear. Lust did not disappear. If anything, sex became much more important to our culture after it was supposedly liberated.
I have already written about the oversexualization of everyday life. Sex is everywhere. It is used to advertise things that have absolutely nothing to do with sex. Pornography is easily accessible. Movies and television seemingly cannot exist without sexual scenes anymore. Even people who do not want to participate in this culture are surrounded by it.
So were we really liberated from sex?
Or did sex become another thing that dominates us?
I think there is another part of this that is rarely discussed.
The sexual revolution did not only tell people that they should be free to have sex. It changed the way that we understand freedom itself.
Freedom used to include self-control.
Christianity does not teach that sexual desire itself is evil. Sex is not evil. Attraction is not evil. The body is not evil.
But Christianity does teach that our desires have to be ordered.
Wanting something does not immediately make that thing good.
That is an important distinction.
Today we seem to have reversed this. Instead of teaching people how to control their desires, we increasingly ask society to remove whatever prevents those desires from being fulfilled.
Marriage is a restriction. Modesty is a restriction. Pregnancy is a restriction.
Children can become a restriction.
Religion is a restriction.
Even our own bodies can be viewed as restriction when the reality of the body does not agree with what we want.
So about libido dominandi What happens when freedom no longer means controlling yourself, but controlling everything around yourself?
At that point you are not really talking about liberty anymore. You are talking about the domination of reality by the individual will.
We have gotten extremely good at controlling the natural consequences of sex between contraception and by killing our own offspring if contraception fails. Which it often does.
Sex has been separated from marriage. It has been separated from the idea that it produces xhildren. Sex used to have a foundation. In modern society. That foundation is no longer expected to exist.
Technology, unfortunately makes much of this possible.
And I am not arguing that technology itself is inherently evil. That would be too simple.
The problem is the mentality behind it. And how it is inherently used. You see technology is just a tool. Computers. Laptops, tablets etc. are simply tools that are often misused.
But anyway
We increasingly view anything that limits our individual wants as something that needs to be fixed, removed or overcome.
One can also talk increasingly about about how individualistic the sexual revolution has made people's worldview.
Sex is probably one of the least individual things a person can do. It involves another human being. It can create another human being. It creates attachment, jealousy, vulnerability and sometimes lifelong consequences.
Yet modern sexual morality has somehow reduced almost everything down to individual consent.
Two people consented, therefore why should anyone else care?
But is consent really the only moral standard we should have?
Something can be consensual and still be degrading.
Something can be consensual and selfish.
Something can be consensual and destructive.
Something can be consensual while using another person entirely for your own pleasure.
Consent tells us whether somebody agreed. It does not automatically tell us whether something is good.
This is another place where I think the sexual revolution failed.
It tried to remove older moral standards surrounding sexuality without really replacing them with anything substantial. And to note. I am talking about western society here. Nothing else.
Christian sexual morality places sex inside of something larger than pleasure.
Marriage.
Family.
Children.
Duty.
Sacrifice.
Permanence.
The modern view focuses much more heavily on the individual.
What do I want?
What makes me happy?
Why should I have to restrain myself?
Why should anybody be allowed to tell me no?
We see this same individualism in other parts of Western culture, but sex makes it especially obvious.
And ironically, this supposed sexual freedom has created an enormous industry that profits from lust.
Pornography is an industry.
Dating is an industry.
Sexual insecurity is an industry.
Our bodies are constantly being advertised, compared, altered and judged.
Women were supposedly liberated from old expectations only to enter a culture where they are expected to be sexually available, sexually attractive and comfortable with being sexualized constantly. We are expected to do things that are foremothers never dreamed of doing. While many of us have husbands that cannot and do not guard their own hearts from lusting after other women. Whether they see them in public or on a screen.
I don't see how that is liberation. In fact. That is a cage.
It looks like we traded one set of expectations for another.
And the woman who fought against this notion, has been labeled a prude. A hag. Everything that will shame her for having the self respect of guarding her body from wandering eyes, and exclaiming that other women should do the same.
The sexual revolution also seems to have confused restraint with shame.
You can believe that sex is good while also believing that it belongs within boundaries.
You can believe the human body is beautiful without wanting naked bodies everywhere.
You can believe sexual attraction is normal without believing every attraction should be acted upon.
Self-control is not the same thing as repression.
Actually, I think a person who is incapable of telling themselves no is less free than a person who can. Because with restraint comes the freedom to choose. Freedom has been confused with the expansive commodity of choice.
If your desires control you, how exactly are you liberated? What are you liberated from?
That is the irony behind libido dominandi.
The person who wants complete control over the world around them may actually have very little control over themselves.
We want nature to bend.
We want society to bend.
We want morality to bend.
We want the body to bend.
Anything except telling ourselves no. We shouldn't do certain things.
The sexual revolution looked at traditional morality and saw domination. We handed ourselves the rules that God had instilled in us to keep us healthy.
Yes.
People have abused religious authority. Women have been treated unfairly. People have been hypocritical about sex. Bad marriages existed before the sexual revolution and they obviously still exist now.
But recognizing those problems does not mean that every boundary surrounding sex was meaningless. That this was the case everywhere.
Sometimes boundaries exist because something is important. And this is true for sex. And for nudity.
Sex creates families.
It creates children.
It creates very deep attachments between people.
Something with that much power probably should have boundaries.
The sexual revolution promised to free us from the domination of old morality. It told us the old restraints were evil. Restricting our true nature. And in some ways that is true. We were restricted. But it was for our own good.
And I think it failed to consider another kind of domination. Or it was intentional. This was intentional.
We faim to mention properly the importance of
The domination of appetite.
The domination of the individual will.
And the prideful belief that if reality tells us no, reality must be the thing that is wrong is what got us into this mess.
Maybe real freedom is not getting everything that we desire.
Maybe freedom is being able to choose what you really want in life, and not what is promoted to you freely.
The sexual revolution may have misunderstood the location of the tyrant. It searched for the tyrant in convention, religion, marriage, and restraint.
A person liberated from every external master may discover that he has merely exchanged them for the mastery of his own appetites