27.3.25

Liquid love

 

Today, sexuality no longer epitomizes the potential for pleasure and happiness. It is no longer mystified, positively, as ecstasy and transgression, but negatively instead, as the source of oppression, inequality, violence, abuse, and deadly infection.

The entitlements of sexual partners have become the prime site of anxiety. What sort of commitment, if any, does the union of bodies entail? In what way, if any, does it bind the future of the partners? 
 
The fading of sociality skills is boosted and accelerated by the tendency, inspired by the dominant consumerist life mode, to treat other humans as objects of consumption and to judge them after the pattern of consumer objects by the volume of pleasure they are likely to offer, and in ‘value for money’ terms. At best, the others are valued as companions-in-the-essentially-solitary-activity of consumption; fellows in the joys of consumption, whose presence and active participation may intensify those pleasures. In the process, the intrinsic value of others as unique human beings (and so also the concern with others for their own, and that uniqueness’s, sake) has been all but lost from sight. Human solidarity is the first casualty of the triumphs of the consumer market.

Zygmunt Bauman
1925 - 2017