From 1984:
“When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you 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?”…
…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 (p. 133).
Part of me wonders how much the history of the church has used sexual repression in order to exact social control over its members, and over society in general. This should not be levied against only the obvious forms of repression in rather medieval practices of chastity, but seems also to point to the repression of sexuality in theology and ecclesiology today (sexual gluttony of the so-called “30 Day Sex Challenge” notwithstanding).
There does seem to be an intimate connection between the repression of desire and social control. The question is not how we can repress our God-given desires, but how we can redirect them in a way that supports human flourishing. This would be the opposite of social control, but the use of sexual desire in order to advance human freedom. But how often is this said in theological and ecclesiastical circles, but remains only a mask for programs of social control? Does maintaining our orthodoxy thus amount to another version of the thought police?
1Looney
on Mar 20, 2008 at 8:40 pm:
Drew, the term “sexual repression” looks like a technical term begging for a definition. Do you have one?
2Drew
on Mar 20, 2008 at 9:26 pm:
I am using in the sense of the passage from 1984, “by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force”.
3Looney
on Mar 20, 2008 at 9:39 pm:
OK. When I was an undergraduate, my girl friend returned to her home country and told me she didn’t want to see me again until I had my master’s degree. Would that constitute “sexual repression”? My powerful instinct was bottled down and turned into a driving force that compelled me to work hard and finish my degree faster …
4Drew
on Mar 20, 2008 at 10:45 pm:
Not in the same sense I am thinking. That was something you chose. If you have read 1984 it is not so much of a choice as an assumed condition of life in general. The same is true for many who will assume that a given orthodox position must be true. The question I am asking is if maintaining orthodoxy is the same thing as social control or thought police as it were.