Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: How did sexual relations become so brutalised?

By Dilip -
Our lunch was despoiled, but hey, we got to hear about, for free, dramatised scenes of modern sexuality – dirty talk, instrumentalised bodies (in all senses), violent male imaginings, and the unutterably dismal severing of sex from love and affection... Louise Mensch has been up and about revealing the savage misogynist invective and rape threats whizzed over to her by unseen internet trolls. Many women in public life, including me, are similarly hounded daily. (My stalkers are particularly keen on female genital mutilation.) We all assume that these abusers are cowardly, only able to intimidate because they are anonymous and that it is all in their dingy and damp little minds. Not so. Those men at the restaurant felt no qualms at all about freely sharing their most perverse reveries. I can't describe them here without a sense of violation. Of course that makes me laughably prudish and uncool.

Every civilisation, every age has been fascinated by and written about sexual skills, tricks and desire, including sadomasochism – think of the Kama Sutra, Justine, or The Story of O. I even have an old erotic manual written by a randy old Muslim sage. Quite a turn-on, I can tell you. But somehow, without any of us really noticing, secret human fantasies, internal monologues that can excite and ignite desire were turned into masculine weapons of virtual terrorisation and now are altering sexual norms and expectations, absolutely for the worse, perhaps forever. When sex became freer and less socially controlled – a necessary, progressive change – it sadly became devalued. Many in the West seem to have got bored with it. Too much, too soon, too easy...


Around universities, female students' drinks are regularly spiked with drugs and we know figures for sexual assaults and rape are appallingly high. And yet many of today's women not only participate in female debasement, they validate, even glorify it... And then along comes Fifty Shades of Grey, by EL James, a nasty S&M trilogy, already a best-seller.. the heroine, 22, knowing and "strong", chooses to surrender to an older man, to welcome pain he inflicts and his total control...Violent sex is now actualised and merchandised, spread through society, impacting on loving sex, marriage, family life, respect, women, and men. One day they will look back to our times, as we do to the orgiastic, unfeeling Romans, and wonder what happened and why.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-how-did-sexual-relations-become-so-brutalised-7718546.html

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