Everything is about sex: the true power of male desire
The Sublimation of the Sexual Impulse
There is a famous apocryphal quote ascribed to Oscar Wilde:
“Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
The accuracy of the first half of this observation is incredibly high,
especially when it comes to men.
The unrestrained sexual impulse in men is inherently dangerous
and antisocial.
If men were to act on these impulses indiscriminately,
it would lead to chaos, which is why society institutes
its severest social and legal punishments for such behavior.
For society to function, this sexual impulse must be
channeled into pro-social ends.
Sigmund Freud called this unconscious process “sublimation.”
It is the sublimation of this raw sexual impulse
that constitutes the drive to accomplish the difficult,
dangerous, and uncomfortable tasks upon
which human civilization is based.
While the term “libido” has become strictly associated
with sexual desire, Freud originally intended it to mean something
akin to “life force.”
The desire to have sex is essentially the life inside
of us wanting to experience more of itself.
Civilization and the Cost of Frustration
The genius of life is its ability to overcome death,
whether for the individual, the species, or life itself.
For most of human history, the forces obstructing existence
have been natural, and men have counteracted them
by building the technologies and structures of civilization.
The raw life force is sublimated into the work of survival,
producing the marvelous array
of strategies humans use to cheat death.
However, this entirely depends on a society’s capacity
to frustrate the direct expression of the libido
and channel it toward pro-social labor.
If you frustrate the libido too much or too little,
you invite social collapse.
Freud argued that this necessary frustration of the sexual impulse
is exactly what gives rise to the general anxiety
and unhappiness that plagues modern humans.
It is the inescapable cost of doing business
to maintain a civilized society.
If the libido is not frustrated enough,
the vigorous drive toward building civilization disappears.
Consider how a man feels immediately after having sex:
the overwhelming urge is to rest, not to build a road or write a novel.
The drive to do difficult, uncomfortable things requires
pent-up sexuality; civilization was not built by dissipated libertines.
The Impact of Modern Technologies on the Drive to Conquer
One of the goals of civilization is to reduce discomfort
and make life easier.
Our technologies typically aim to satisfy our desires more
easily, cheaply, and safely.
One such technology, inevitably invented by sexually frustrated men,
is p*rnography.
By making relief from sexual frustration cheap
and instantly available, society has inadvertently undermined
the fundamental drive to civilize and conquer.
While the idea of “conquering” is often viewed as problematic
and dangerous in the modern era,
that same foundational drive to conquer a nation is deeply
related to the drive to conquer one’s own weakness, vice,
and cowardice.
It is the exact same drive that transforms raw nature
into something useful and productive.
Thanks to modern p*rnography, the average man now has a larger,
albeit virtual, harem than King Solomon.
With such easy access to a solution for their sexual frustration,
many men are far less motivated to seek out actual women,
or more importantly, to overcome their own dissipated natures
to become the kind of men that women actually desire.
This relief from sexual frustration has mitigated productive
output—which simply would not be possible
if productive output had nothing to do with sex.
It is no accident that men who heavily overuse p*rnography,
or those few who can satisfy their desires instantly on demand,
rarely contribute much in terms of significant social value.
This leads to the striking conclusion that much
of human productive output is actually sublimated
sexual impulse, suggesting that almost everything we see built
in the world around us is, fundamentally, about sex.
