E. Michael Jones - Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation & Political Control

Sexual Liberation and Political Control

Sexual Liberation and Political Control

E. Michael Jones

St. Augustines press South Bend, Indiana 2000

Copyright 2000 by E. Michael Jones

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of St. Augustines Press.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Jones, E. Michael.

Libido dominandi : sexual liberation and political control /

E. Michael Jones, p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-890318-37-X

1. Pornography-United States. 2. PornographyPolitical aspectsUnited States. 3. SexPolitical AspectsUnited States.

4. PornographyHistory. I. Title HQ472.U6 J65 2000

363.470973dc21 99-051925

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves,

Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke;

John Milton, Samson Agonistes

Since Internet knows no place, it doesnt really matter where it happened, but just for the record I was in England when I started getting e-mail messages from Lisa and Heather. At least, I think thats what their names were. They wanted me to check out their hot web sites. Just as there is no place on the Internet, the names dont mean much either. The important thing was that I was getting unsolicited solicitations for pornography. Spam is, I think, the generic term for this unsolicited material. The pornographic variations are known as blue spam. I was planning to protest to CompuServe and ask them not to make my name available to these agencies when I got some blue spam from CompuServe itself, offering its own pornographic services. Quis custo-diet ipsos custodes? What sells itself as an e-mail service turns out to be a pimp. The situation I have since learned is even worse with AOL, according to one subscriber to that on-line service, who spends each day clearing his electronic mailbox of hundreds of such solicitations. In the recent court case challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act, CompuServe signed an amicus curiae brief supporting the pomographers. Predictably, given our judicial system, the three-judge panel in Philadelphia handling the case found the CDA unconstitutional. One of the judges opined that just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of unfettered speech.

The world liberty coming from one of the regimes mandarins is a dead giveaway that what were really talking about here is bondage. What I would like to propose here is a paradigm shift of simple but nonetheless revolutionary (or better still counter-revolutionary proportions) by saying what should be obvious to anyone who has visited these web pages and who has had Heather or Lisa ask for his credit card number, namely, that pornography is now and has always been a form of control, financial control. Pornography is a way of getting people to give you money which, because of the compul

sive nature of the transaction, is not unlike trafficking in drugs. Unlike prostitution, which is also a transaction benefiting from compulsion, pornography is closely bound up with technology, specifically the reproduction and transmission of images. Just as the history of pornography is one of progress (technological, not moral progress, of course), so the exploitation of compulsion has been explored in more and more explicit form during the past two hundred years of this revolutionary age. What began as the bondage of sin eventually became financial control and what became accepted as a financial transaction has been forged into a form of political control. Sexual revolution is contemporaneous with political revolution of the sort that began in France in 1789. This means we are not talking about sexual vice when we use the term sexual revolution, as much as the rationalization of sexual vice, followed by the financial exploitation of sexual vice, followed by the political mobilization of the same thing as a form of control. Since sexual liberation has social chaos as one of its inevitable sequelae, sexual liberation begets almost from the moment of its inception the need for social control. That dynamic is the subject of this book.

It is no secret now that lust is also a form of addiction. My point here is that the current regime knows this and exploits this situation to its own advantage. In other words, sexual freedom is really a form of social control. What we are really talking about is a Gnostic system of two truths. The exoteric truth, the one propagated by the regime through advertising, sex education, Hollywood films, and the university system - the truth, in other words for general consumption - is that sexual liberation is freedom. The esoteric truth, the one that informs the operations manual of the regime - in other words the people who benefit from liberty - is the exact opposite, namely, that sexual liberation is a form of control, a way of maintaining the regime in power by exploiting the passions of the naive, who identify with their passions as if they were their own and identify with the regime which ostensibly enables them to gratify these passions. People who succumb to their disordered passions are then given rationalizations of the sort that clog web pages on the Internet and are thereby molded into a powerful political force by those who are most expert in manipulating the flow of imagery and rationalization.

Like laissez-faire economics, the first tentative ideas of how to exploit sex as a form of social control arose during the Enlightenment as well. If the universe was a machine whose prime force was gravity, society was a machine as well whose prime force was self-interest, and man, likewise, no longer sacred, was a machine whose engine ran on passion. From there it was not much of a stretch to understand that the man who controlled passion controlled man.

John Heidenrys history of the sexual revolution, What Wild Ecstasy, is one more example of whiggish history - this time, whiggish sexual history.

In fact, all histories of sexual liberation are whiggish. The moral of each piece of this genre is either People everywhere just wanna be free or, to give the feminist variant, Girls just wanna have fun. That Linda Boreman Marchiano, AKA, Linda Lovelace found getting beaten and raped during the filming of Deep Throat not much fun is beside the point. The dogma that needs to be promoted here is that sexual license is liberating, and that the quest for liberation is its own justification, so even if a few people get hurt (or killed) in the process, it was generally worth it after all.

Heidenry lays his metaphysical cards on the table at various points during the book. At the very beginning he tells us, for example, that this ... is the way we were from about 1965 on, when the particles of revolt and enlightenment coalesced into a sexual Big Bang. We have here, in other words, the classic Enlightenment explanation of everything. Just as the entire physical universe in all its grandeur, beauty and order is really nothing more than the random motion of discrete particles bumping into each other, so every social movement from economics to sexual liberation is essentially the same thing. The same explanation that George Will applies to the economic order, John Heidenry applies to the moral and sexual realm. Instead of atoms, we have atomistic individuals; instead of gravity, we have passion as the great motivating force, and instead of an orderly universe explainable by the laws of physics, we have society reconfigured by social movements like sexual liberation. This is how it is; in other words, the big picture. People everywhere just wanna be free and what gesture could encapsulate this freedom more than, say, masturbating to the dirty pictures in Hustlerl