::::::::
25 years on and billions of dollars down the drain, leading scientists are now being forced to ask this question: Is it time to give up the search for an Aids vaccine? This was the headline at the London Independent Newspaper and web site last week. The general consensus of the scientific community being it is no closer to a vaccine now than at the very the beginning of it's research. With the Aids pandemic continuing and growing across Africa, India, China, and in the West where the effectiveness of existing drug therapies is said to be ebbing, that leaves many millions exposed to a future without even an imaginary hope of a cure. Nature has outwitted reason and that may mark an ominous 'tipping point' of a new, dangerous sort.Ask how many politicos or celebs one can name just in the last year that have fallen prey to their covert sexual activities. How many more have betrayed their partners for a fantasy bought and sold on almost any city street corner? When the New York governor recently resigned over his use of a prostitution ring, a common cartoon was of a naked man with a sign over his genitals marked 'Brain'. That characterization is too close for comfort. However loyal a man may be to a wife or partner on the outside, inside there is a raging civil war going on for control of his ethical mind and conduct, which obviously doesn't always succeed is holding the high ground. However a man's sexual member may excel at its biological function, hormones responding outside his control and innate to his nature, were never designed for fidelity or moral discrimination. And performance is a 'relative' misnomer.
"Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest, has been hit by the global credit crunch so badly that it has issued a memorandum to senior executives telling them that brothel visits and adult channels in hotel rooms cannot be claimed on expenses". With this example consider that the porn industry, including all sex trade and trafficing activities, both legal and illegal, probably accounts for many more times the sums of money going to Aids and all medical research combined. Even as we are learning, throwing money at a problem isn't what solves it.
Also include in this calculation, broken homes and marriages that infidelity causes, unwanted children and overpopulation, all sexual abuse, rape and other sexually transmitted diseases, contraception, abortion and early links to testicular and prostate cancers, degenerating DNA in sperm, implications for the immune system and even female vaginal conditions; with such huge risks and costs to human well being, both individually and culturally, one might think such overwhelming evidence would give pause to start seriously questioning an often predatory, male sexual response and a woman's acceptance of it, as a valid expression of anything other than what it is? Is confusing the biological imperative we call sex for a spiritual expression of Love little more than intellectual prostitution or the 'sleep of reason'?
One of the first insights into the deep emotional if not moral confusion, mostly unspoken, are the almost uncountable number of volumes that can be found at any large bookshop on 'improving' marital/sexual bliss, intimacy and performance, by any number of self proclaimed 'expert' apologists.
So great is humanities dishonesty with itself, its cultural sentimentality and politically correct hypocrisy over issues of sexuality, we prefer to ignore the darker reality of our own human nature. Any official, scientific or psychological questioning of this basic instinct, to find anything other than eulogises rather then critical scrutiny are far and few between. And religion never had anything to offer this relationship but pretensions. But as most of these fields are dominated by men who have long buried this corruption under the illusions of rational thought, dredging up questions of human nature itself are uncomfortable to say the least, especially when changing human nature isn't on any scientific horizon, however some may dream of it. So unless there is a God who decides to change 'natural law' [that theological expression for sexual response] one might ask what's the point? Well, only when we clearly recognize the nature of a problem can we begin to imagine and search for the solution. Where ever that might lead us?
But cracks are beginning to show that first appeared long ago. While the first twelve hundred years A.D. in Europe saw a roman church preoccupied, even as it is today, with sexual expression and repression. From France in the twelfth century came the first shoots of romanticism and the cult of courtly love, but like all of that genre throughout the rest of history, was usually engaged in selling fantasy, a sort of early literary porn. And while these trubadours [storytellers] spread the word of enchanted high passion to medieval elites, back on the farm, human coitus looked more familiar to its surroundings. But if the seed of an idea was indeed planted, it still remains dormant in the soil of the human heart, but even without fruit, it succeded in giving expression to a new aspiration to rise above that lower nature continuing to this day, which so many men and women have felt when coming together for the experience of Love, however disappointing this union may ultimately prove to be.
While human nature hasn't changed, marriage has somewhat evolved. But beauty hasn't conquered the beast, a frog is still a frog. However religion or secular romanticism try their best make a silk purse of a sows ear, that lower human nature is always waiting in the wings to cause problems. Sanctity is always more truly reflected by the inner resources two individuals bring to their relationship than the mumbo jumbo of high religious ceremony. One only has to consider that fairy tale, no expense spared wedding and its sorry end for the English Prince and Princess of Wales to demonstrate that neither title nor money can secure a noble, holy love, fidelity or happiness. From its earliest formalization, what started out as a contract which treated woman as little more than property [not unlike slavery] and 'rights' of coitus to insure inheritance, today for the most part, at least in the West, we have lost the property part, but 'rights' of coitus are still defined within marriage contracts by both religious and secular laws. Now the property being fought over when a failed relationship is dissolved is mostly about booty rather than bodies. Yet however sincere the aspiration, this union founded upon an act bought and sold in the marketplace cannot be fully spiritual, but remains, carnal, bestial and material, what some atheist biologists would call 'a remnant of our evolutionary past'. Such origins must also represent a degradation of ethical/moral perception or potential?
It is this material tag to our sexual nature that marketing continually exploits with such effect to pick our pockets, sexualizing the whole of culture in the process. Selling sex is very big business. Whether from Madison Avenue, Hollywood or bollywood, crooners or rock and roll, romantic fiction and sexual fantasy remains an insatiable staple. But like fast food, there is little nutrition for a soul with artificial flavors and cheap ingredients. In fact, if Freud is remembered for anything it will most likely be for the tools of advertising psychology rather than resolving any contradictions within the human mind, which as far as I can tell, looks a failure on par with the search for an Aids vaccine! Lots of expensive therapy, no certain solutions.
That most modern romantic fiction is sold to women, my offer some insight in why their expectations of intimacy so often ignore male reality. Love is blind! Consider a few lines from the pen of Guy De Maupassant [1850-1893] from his short story: Useless Beauty. "What a Hell, all her youth, every hope of success, every poetical ideal of a bright life, sacrificed to that abominable law of reproduction which turns a normal woman into a mere machine for maternity". or "What is there as a matter of fact, more ignoble and more repugnant that that ridiculous act of reproduction". or again, "that woman often forgets the contact she is obliged to submit to. Those among us who are powerless to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God."
Of consider the even earlier wisdom of Jane Austen, [1775-1817] whose much more guarded and circumspect examinations of relationship run throughout all her novels, and left her single her whole life, rather than succomb to the biological and cultural tryanny of her day.
But if the early bird does get the worm, then the final word may come from the Bard himself with this verse from the Shakespeare [1564-1616] poem Venus and Adonis, who may have best expressed the internal conflict between mans lower nature and higher aspiration of love, but as yet without any means to ends.
Call it not love for Love to heaven is fled
Since sweating lust on earth upsurped His name.
Under whose simple semblance man has fed,
upon fresh beauty blotting it with blame,
which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves
as caterpillars do the tender leaves.
Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
while lusts effect is tempest after sun.
Love's gentle spring doth alway fresh remain,
lust's winter comes ere summer half be done.
Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies,
Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies.
The is an old adage that says: All is fair in Love and War. That dubious link is becoming ever more tragic. Who ever thought they would see the day when going on a date might be as dangerous as the battlefield? The rules of this game have played us false. The sexual balance sheet is in deep deficit and with no future Aids vaccine forthcoming it must be time to question the game itself? Unless humanity can discover a way to stop chasing its evolutionary tail, we are very likely to see the numbers dying of Aids outnumber those dead from war and conflict, or even a pandemic on a scale not seen since fourteenth century Europe, when plague wiped out half the population. The world is getting desperate for hard, practical solutions that work; when and if we're ever honest enough to begin questioning ourselves, the greatest solution of all might very well be for human nature itself!
