A major subject—and one as old as humanity itself—is before us today: Love, Eros and Sex.
The occasion is what we used to call the “marriage market”: the spectacle my eyes have been watching on the beach of Chora, one of the many “capitals” of a Greek island where, for years now the same like-minded group, we have spent the Fifteenth of August together.
Boys and girls of the much-discussed Generation Z, parading as though on a catwalk, displaying their sexual attributes for all to see. Bare thighs, mostly, either completely bare or barely covered by the almost nonexistent shorts worn by the girls. Among the boys, backs and abdomens—six-pack outlines, even if only faintly visible—are emphasized by shirts deliberately designed to reveal them.
I have had the advantage of professional experience: I have spent “a lifetime” in classrooms alongside these generations and those immediately preceding them, at the same age. And today I have the additional experience of daily “friction” with another member of that unruly Generation Z—my son.
I mention these details in advance to forestall the disrespectful comments I can already hear, especially from those whose argument begins and ends with the supposedly devastating question:
“What is the senile old man talking about now?”
My answer, though perhaps I am under no obligation to give one, is this:
Yes, I am gradually becoming an old man—even if I do not particularly feel it. But I consider this achievement of age a considerable advantage in itself.
Senile, however, I am not. Nor do I feel senile.
So what you are about to read is written with both knowledge and experience.
And what, exactly, is this new—and at the same time exceedingly old—idea I am bringing , as though carrying an owl to Athens, and presenting it here in installments?
It is this:
Sex, in its plural and non-monogamous form, is natural and therefore moral and entirely acceptable.
Love and Eros have sex as one of their cellular constituents. Companionship comes later, followed by monogamy. But none of these necessarily presupposes the others.
Monogamy, in particular, is a choice, not a natural imperative.
If there is a form of natural morality in this entire web of human sexual relations—a morality rooted in instinct—it is polygamy.
The way in which the need to satisfy the sexual instinct is presented as something that must take place through Love and Eros is, to put it plainly, more a form of social coercion—a kind of “brainwashing across generations.”
A condition, in other words, that deviates from nature.
We therefore reproduce below passages from earlier writings of ours, in support of what will undoubtedly be regarded as our “heretical” views.
We begin with a text entitled:
NATURAL OR SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS
(BUT DISTORTED)
1. EROS—MONOGAMY—POLYGAMY
September 5, 2014
“…After the fifteen-minute interrogation, I sat there, thoughtful and frowning, reflecting on the poor female taxi driver, who, from early childhood to the early thirties she seemed to be entering, had seen and heard it all.
She had seen her father kneeling before her furious mother, swearing that he had never cheated on her with Loula, the hairdresser, and that the whole thing had been a… misunderstanding—regardless, of course, of the fact that the womanizer’s oath was nothing but a fairy tale.
She had seen the elderly confessor at the monastery her mother had taken her to until adolescence, threatening her with exclusion from Holy Communion and, later, with Hell itself, should she dare touch herself in her private parts or commit the great sin of having sex before marriage.
She had had an orgasmically frustrated schoolteacher advising her that, in order to enrich her soul—and her vocabulary for essay writing—she should begin devouring illustrated fairy tales featuring pink princes descending from mountaintops on white horses to carry Cinderella away on their noble backs.
Later, in high school—if she had made it that far—there was the overwrought philologist dissolving into tears and secret sighs whenever he recited Sophocles’ famous words from Antigone:
Eros, unconquered in battle… Eros, who falls upon those who possess wealth, who keeps vigil upon the soft cheeks of a maiden, who roams across the sea and among country dwellings…
Or perhaps there was the literature teacher swooning as he recited passages from the “immortal” Romeo and Juliet, that eternal hymn to Love and Eros, written by the Englishman this time—Shakespeare, himself hopelessly, and they say countless times, lovestruck.
Now add to all this, by the time she reaches the age of thirty-five, the thousands upon thousands of hours spent listening to love songs. The thousands of meters of timeless films starring Martha Vourtsi and Aliki Vougiouklaki. The “oka-loads” of popular magazines she has read—and may still read—with stories of love, passion and madness, all of them ending with the same injunction:
‘Listen to your heart. Do whatever it tells you.’
For example: leave even your infant children for your new lover. It is… honorable and moral, because it is Love and Passion!
An unprecedented, unbelievable brainwashing.
A genuine rape of the soul and the mind was inflicted upon this little girl—and upon millions, billions of other girls and boys throughout the world, in every age.
How could she endure it? How could she ever free herself from the psychological compulsion of Love, Eros and the monogamy that supposedly follows them—imposed upon her as something she had to believe in, until her head was a boiling cauldron, convinced that sooner or later, inevitably, ‘Love would come and change her life forever’?”
We wrote in DROMENA on December 26, 2011, in an article entitled:
LOVE—EROS: A PRODUCT OF SOCIAL “BRAINWASHING,” NOT A NATURAL INSTINCT
The “lover,” precisely by virtue of being in love, acquires the right—in his own mind—to regard the other “lover” as a possession, as a piece of property.
Indeed, he diminishes, within his own consciousness, or relegates to secondary importance, the value of the other “goods” he possesses. He is therefore prepared, even, to sacrifice them for the sake of his “love.”
For a rational person, however—for someone in possession of his faculties—this transformation is nothing more than what specialists might call a neurotic condition. It drives him toward the gratification of dark and primitive aspects of the Self, where individualistic and selfish instincts take precedence.
This unnatural transformation may indeed lead him to sacrifice even his life for the “lover,” while at the very same time he cannot imagine sacrificing his life—or even bothering in the slightest—with the needs of his fellow human being.
He gives ONLY and EVERYTHING to one particular person and for one particular purpose.
The others simply do not “exist,” or their existence becomes secondary.
The “dark object of desire” becomes an obsession, a madness, an absolute purpose. It isolates him from his social environment and from the common social and political problems of humanity.
Even the natural need for plurality and for changing one’s “partner” is strangled, while the sexual instinct is permitted to operate only through the possession of the “property.”
He is consumed by absolute passion and guided by nothing but that passion.
He cannot rest unless he is certain that his fellow captive will not “escape.”
Psychologists would say that, in such a case, we are witnessing an unnatural hypertrophy of the EGO.