04 April 2019

Quote for the day -- sex gone sour

"Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism.  It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible.  What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:  'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything.  They can't bear you to feel like that.  They want you to be bursting with energy all the time.  All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.  If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'

"That was very true, he thought.  There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.  For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?  The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account."

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

o o o o o

Think about it.  Authoritarian religions, and authoritarian political movements like fascism and communism, are almost always sexually puritanical, prudish, and repressive.  This is not a matter of chance.  It's because of something very fundamental that the enemy intuitively understands.

5 Comments:

Blogger Mary Kirkland said...

Well now that's something to think about.

04 April, 2019 14:06  
Blogger Debra She Who Seeks said...

If they can control sex, they can control anything. You're right -- it's a feature of every authoritarian religion or regime since the beginning of time.

04 April, 2019 15:58  
Blogger Sixpence Notthewiser said...

Correct. That’s why totalitarian regimes use religion as a weapon to control sex (Brunei) that’s why the religious right is trying to destroy everything the past administration did for lgbtq rights and reproductive rights. Ugh.

XoXo

06 April, 2019 06:18  
Blogger Jimbo said...

This says a lot about the Evangelicals and the Fundies, doesn’t it? But, the irony is their absolute obsession about sex. Ancient Pat Robertson is obsessed about it and how many fundy preachers have been caught with boys or extramarital affairs, etc.?

06 April, 2019 15:41  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

Mary: It's a point that's widely applicable.

Debra: Notice how it was also true of totalitarian communism in the USSR and China.

Sixpence: Brunei is a nasty example. And they certainly want the US to go back to those days.

Jimbo: Of course they have sexual impulses themselves just as all humans do. So they're inevitably driven to become hypocrites.

07 April, 2019 03:01  

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