Lost in the Cosmos

and is in fact specified by Christianity as its opposite. Thus, pornography is something new in the world, having no parallel in ancient, so-called pagan cultures. Accordingly, there is little if any difference between present-day promiscuity and that of, say, the Victorian era. The so-called sexual revolution is nothing but the legitimizing of the secret behavior of the Victorians and its extension to women.
    (e) Western man is promiscuous because something unprecedented has happened. As a consequence of the scientific and technological revolution, there has occurred a displacement of the real as a consequence of which genital sexuality has come to be seen as the substratum of all human relationships, of friendship, love, and the rest. This displacement has come to pass as a consequence of a lay misperception of the physicist’s quest for establishing a molecular or energic basis for all interactions and of what is perceived as Freud’s identification of genital sexuality as the ground of all human relationships.
A letter to Dear Abby:
I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him. *
    (f) The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one’s own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection! Yet not really amazing, for only if the abstracted ghost has an erection can it, like Jove spying Europa on the beach, enter the human condition.
    (g) It’s not that complicated. It’s simply that people nowadays have too much money and time to spend and don’t know what to do with themselves and so will try anything out of boredom.
    (h) Why go further than the orthodox Judaeo-Christian belief that monogamous marriage was ordained by God for man’s happiness, that the devil goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, and that as a consequence modern man has lost his way, has not the faintest notion who he is or what he is doing, and nothing short of catastrophe will bring him to his senses. At the height of a hurricane, husbands come to themselves and can even embrace their wives. During Hurricane Camille, one Biloxi couple, taking refuge in a tree house, reported that, during the passage of the eye, they had intercourse for the first time in years.
    (i) No, the explanation is biological. Man is undergoing a mutation in sexual behavior which will in the end, like the tooth of the saber-toothed tiger, render him extinct. Since most of the emerging varieties of sexual expression—homosexuality, anal and oral sex—do not reproduce the species and therefore have no survival value, the species will become extinct.
    (j) None of the above. It has always been so. That is to say, the sexual behavior of humans has not changed. Therefore, there is nothing to explain.
    ( CHECK ONE OR MORE )

    Thought Experiment
    THE LAST DONAHUE SHOW

    The Donahue Show is in progress on what appears at first to be an ordinary weekday morning.
    The theme of this morning’s show is Donahue’s favorite, sex, the extraordinary variety of sexual behavior—“sexual preference,” as Donahue would call it—in the country and the embattled attitudes toward it. Although Donahue has been accused of appealing to prurient interest, with a sharp eye cocked on the ratings, he defends himself by saying that he presents these controversial matters in “a mature and tasteful manner”—which he often does. It should also be noted in Donahue’s defense that the high ratings of these sex-talk shows are nothing more nor less than an index of the public’s intense interest in such matters.
    The guests today are:
    Bill, a homosexual and habitué of Buena Vista Park in San Francisco
    Allen, a heterosexual businessman, married, and