The Paradox Of Sexual Freedom

TITLE: The Paradox of Sexual Freedom CHANNEL: Augustus DATE: 2025-09-13 ---TRANSCRIPT--- As a grad-school psychology student I like to read a lot of “old” literature,
and I was surprised to find that an astonishingly underrated thinker and psychologist Rollo May
managed to predict this trend back in the 60’s. He outlined the 3 paradoxes of sexual freedom
that I want to present here, and how they ended up causing young people to abandon having sex. In Victorian times, when the denial of sexual impulses, feelings, and drives was the mode
and one would not talk about sex in polite company, an aura of sanctifying
repulsiveness surrounded the whole topic. Males and females dealt with each other as
though neither possessed reproductive organs. Then, in the 1920’s a radical change occurred.
The belief became a militant dogma that the opposite of repression – namely,
sex education, freedom of talking, feeling, and expression – would have healthy effects,
and obviously constituted the only stand for the enlightened person. In an amazingly short period,
we shifted from acting as though sex did not exist at all to being openly obsessed with it.
This change was dramatically experienced in therapist’s offices. In contrast to repressed
Freud-era patients, people started to come for help for the opposite. A great deal of activity,
a great deal of talk about sex, but the patients would complain of lack
of feeling and passion. The curious thing is how little most were enjoying emancipation. The first paradox is that enlightenment has not solved the sexual problems in our
culture. To be sure, there are important positive results of the new enlightenment,
chiefly in increased freedom for the individual. Most external problems are eased – contraception,
information on technique, the normalization of discussing sexual life and seeking to improve it
without guilt. External social anxiety and guilt have lessened (compared to Victorian times) and
dull would be one who did not rejoice in this. But internal anxiety and guilt have increased. In some
ways these are more morbid, harder to handle, and impose a heavier burden upon the individual. The
question shifted from simply would you or would you not go to bed with someone, but can or can’t
you, in a performance sense. The challenge shifted to personal adequacy. Though we might agree that
the second question places the problem of sexual decision more where it should be, we
cannot overlook the fact that the first question is much easier for the person to handle. The fear
has shifted to not being good at making love or not being good enough for a second time. In past
decades you could blame society’s strict mores and preserve your own self-esteem by telling yourself
what you did or didn’t do was society’s fault and not yours. But when the question is simply how
you can perform, your own sense of adequacy and self-esteem is called immediately into question,
and the whole weight of the encounter is shifted inward to how you can meet the test.
Many adolescents, understandably anxious of their sexual freedom, repress this anxiety (because one
should like freedom) and then compensate for the additional anxiety the repression gives them by
attacking the parental authorities for not giving them more freedom. What we did not see in our
short-sighted liberalism in sex was that throwing the individual into an unbounded and empty sea of
free choices does not in itself give freedom but is more apt to increase inner conflict. A second paradox is that the new emphasis on technique in sex backfires. There seems to be
an inverse relationship between the number of sex podcasts and the amount of passion experienced
by the persons involved. Certainly nothing is wrong with technique as such. But the emphasis
beyond a certain point on technique makes for a mechanistic attitude toward lovemaking, and
goes along with alienation, feelings of loneliness, and depersonalization (all
these rampant in our society). The lover becomes superseded by the computer with
its modern efficiency. It is not surprising then, in this preoccupation with techniques,
that the questions typically asked about an act of lovemaking are not, was there passion of meaning,
but how well did I perform? We live in an age of tyranny of the orgasm. I find myself wondering,
why do we have to try so hard? What abyss of self-doubt, what inner void of loneliness,
are we trying to cover up by this great concern with grandiose effects? When we cut through all
the noise about roles and performance, what still remains is how amazingly important the sheer fact
of intimacy of relationship is – the meeting, the growing closeness with the excitement of
not knowing where it will lead, the assertion of the self, and the giving of the self – in
making a sexual encounter memorable. Nowadays, we are more wary of the tenderness that goes
with psychological and spiritual nakedness than we are of the physical nakedness in sexual intimacy. The third, and biggest paradox is that our highly vaunted sexual freedom has turned
out to be a new form of puritanism. We can define this puritanism as consisting of three elements: a
state of alienation from the body, the separation of emotion from reason and the use of the body as
a machine. In our new puritanism, bad health is equated with sin. Sin used to mean giving in to
one’s sexual desires; it now means not having full sexual expression. Our contemporary puritan holds
that it is immoral not to express your libido. For example, a woman used to feel guilty if
she went to bed prior to marriage; now she feels vaguely guilty if after a certain number of dates,
she refrains. The Victorian person sought to have love without falling into sex; the modern person
seeks to have sex without falling into love. Many of us are deathly afraid of our passions
unless they are kept under leash, and the theory of total expression is precisely the modern leash.
This can be seen in the depersonalization of the surrounding language. Instead of going to bed,
we get laid or instead of making love, we have sex and so on until the only word left is ‘fuck’,
entirely forgetting that these different words refer to different kinds of human experience. With all that we have noted it is no wonder that there is a diminution of feeling and that passion
has lessened almost to the vanishing point. This diminution of feeling often takes the form of a
kind of anesthesia in people who can perform only the mechanical aspects of the sexual act very
well. We are used to a statement like “we made love, but I didn’t feel anything”. Young people
can no longer get a bootlegged feeling of personal identity out of revolting in sex
since there is barely anything left to revolt against – and someone like Bonnie Blue is an
extreme example of how far the line is. Those who are not that far out have only one thing
left in their power to revolt against – sex (and eventually identity) itself. And there we go; the
problem has come full circle since Victorian times and we are back to square one, unable to deal with
the problem of sex. This is another and surely least constructive aspect of the new puritanism
we talked about: it returns, finally, to a new asceticism. And so, contrary to popular belief,
we seem to be hurtling into, not a multi-sexual, but an asexual society. The real issue underlying
this revolution, one that many refuse to face up to, is not what one does with sexual organs
or sexual functions per se, but what happens to man’s humanity, our humane, life-giving qualities. Well, the answer to that question is way beyond the scope of this video. If you are interested,
Rollo May in his fascinating book “Love & Will” tries to solve this
exact problem and most of my essay is adapted straight from it. I will leave
a link to it in the description. Thank you for watching, see you next time.