DISCONTENT AND UNDERSTANDING A deep source of discontent in our culture is gender polarity. Since the 1960s, or perhaps the 1920s, we have been pleading for new erotic freedoms which break decisively with the inherited wisdom of our culture that lifelong monogamous heterosexuality is desireable for both men and women. Some, if not most or even all, of those who came of age in the 1960s have seen male sexual drivenness, obsession, at the core of our culture. Hemingway and Fitzgerald had described it with middle class acceptability and Henry Miller with a radical toughness never seen before. We have seen a psycho-social mutation of culture away from Judeo-Christian restraint to a new secular religion of permissive eroticism. -Ron Price with thanks to Andrew Brink, Obsession and Culture: A Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction, Associated UP, London, 1996, pp. 195-204. Obsessively driven sexuality may be the single most powerful, driving force at work in our lives, in our urban jungles, in our world contracted into a neighbourhood, the commercial promotion of sexuality and its promiscuous edges in an overmothered psycho-class. And this poetic creativity becomes an affective control system, lifting mood by the exercise of inventive powers. Apocalyptic sexuality is no source of personal freedom, only a place for the ambiguities of attraction, fear and inhibition, acute moral discomfort, morbid symptoms and overmastering id-driven wishes. But I find a type of what is it??.....understanding here in these great powers of the solar plexus. Ron Price 16 November 1997
