Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
I like to compare sex to electricity. It’s about polarity and energy. Good sex flows freely, requiring a plus and a minus. The plus and minus of sex are dominance and submission. Kink is not just something of the BDSM scene, but is part of every person’s sexual desires. Inequality is the driver of lust and pleasure, UvA’s brilliant sex scientist Gert Hekma taught his students for decades, until the stronghold fell to politically correct intolerance.
Read more about the role of inequality in sexual desire and horniness (Excpreszo, 2015):
Horny inequality makes you top or bottom
Anyone who gets to know Amsterdam’s gay sex scene – with all its apps, saunas, darkrooms, clubs, parties, chills and cruising areas – knows how shabby sex must be for most straight people. Kinky, sleazy, role play, group, public: discovering all that and throwing off all the shame and guilt is so liberating. It is not only delicious, but also essential for human personal and spiritual development. Trying to confine sexuality in a monogamous marriage and in a bedroom, and with only good equality and vanilla as an ideal: it is inhumane and criminal. It is a way of squeezing and destroying the core of man – well, a thoroughly sexual and kinky being. Monogamous marriage is, at its core, an expression of patriarchal trauma: a way to fill inner emptiness with dependence on another (see also AGTRT-BA4 and AGTRT-BA23).
Read more about how the Netherlands, too, is still struggling with sexual emancipation (Sociology Magazine, 2015):
The Acceptance of the Gay and the Whore
Nor can sexual lust be pushed away at all. All those crackling urges deep within us come out anyway, but distorted and obscure in the form of cheating, coercion, violence, rape, pedophilia, etc. So let’s please give sex a place in a healthy way then, instead of pushing it away and suppressing it. Moreover, when people do not live out their desire for dominance and submission comfortably and safely in sexual play, they become authoritarian or, on the contrary, slavish toward their fellow human beings in everyday life. The driving force behind every authoritarian and totalitarian regime is pent-up and repressed sexual energy.
Read more about the dangers of suppressing human sexuality:
Liberation from totalitarianism can only be achieved through sexual liberation
Sexual energy with all its polarity just needs to get out. But the question is how. There is clearly much to learn from the Amsterdam gay scene. How to do it, but also how not to do it. The sexual infrastructure for gays in Amsterdam is great and the possibilities are endless. Few taboos remain. But those who look closely see a horrible dark side. Sex has become a must for many gay men. They need it for recognition and relaxation. Sex takes up so much space that there is less and less room for love, intimacy and connection. What is sold as freedom is, in practice, far too often addiction. Amsterdam’s gay sex scene has become a blanket under which trauma, grief and loneliness are hidden. So this too is an expression of patriarchal trauma (see AGTRT-BA6), just like monogamous marriage, but less prudishly designed.
Learn more about gay men’s struggles with trauma:
Healing their trauma is vital for gay men
So how should it be done? Is a middle ground possible between the stifling and hypocritical monogamous heterosexual marriage, and Amsterdam’s disconnected and uprooted gay sex scene? There certainly is, but what that looks like is not entirely clear to me either. We will have to explore that together. Fortunately, I see many people experimenting with that as well. Sex ultimately serves social connection. It has always played that role in human contact. It is a “resource” that we exchange to forge bonds, build trust and knit our communities together. In other words, it is a way of shaping love.
Learn more about the changing role of love, sexuality and gender in today’s society:
Sexuality and gender will be radically reshaped in the near future, and monogamy will be less and less the ideal
The kind of community in which man with his beautiful androgynous core thrives best is horizontal: with respect, freedom and reciprocity as shared ideals. It is up to us to rebuild that kind of community, and to give sex a healthy place in it. The transition to a new world outside patriarchy, requires a new handling of sexuality. Its polarity must be given ample space, without pulling people into a destructive web of sexual violence and addiction. Giving all sides of sex open and liberal a place in our midst so that people can develop safely: that is what we have to do.
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