One minute scrolling profiles on Grindr and you will notice straightaway pictures of headless naked torsos with emblematic nicknames such as kinkyboy, sleazysessions and sex&chems. But is this contemporary world so sexually seedy when it comes to be turned into real life? Sometimes the reality is ‘worse’ than the promises, because today this compulsion to a general ‘libertinism’ is in fact transforming the deepest meaning of the word perversion.
It happened once, twice, three times, and every time was the same plot, played by different actors. You meet someone for sex, chasing the promise of ‘hot-sessions’. The guy is sexy, and horny and kisses your lips as if you were the the best man in the whole world. He is clearly very horny, but when the preliminaries-time ends you want to go ahead, claiming the sleazy session that was offered by his nickname, and you put your hands in his pants finding his penis unashamedly soft. It did not get hard and it will not get hard at all. The key word for that is “mephedrone”, a synthetic drug that became quite popular in UK after 2008. Meph, amongst the others effects, makes you extremely horny but makes you unable to have an erection. So it happens that majority of the gays that take it become pure bottoms, not by vocation but just by curse. Meph is a sneering drug, like a mirage in the desert: you see fresh water, and you run to drink it, then you find out that was just an image and nothing else.
The sarcastic, rather than tragic, nature of mephedrone can be seen as the ultimate example of the way in which today’s sexuality is fading away. One wants to enhance enjoyment to a point that coincides with the very lack of enjoyment itself. Even the meaning of words is undergoing a radical transformation. Sleazy and seedy stopped working as adjectives end became almost nouns. In the cases that I described they don’t describe qualities of sex because sex in these cases does not occur anymore. So the sleaziness promised on Grindr lives a lonely life because it is unable to go hand in hand with the word sex.
Perversion today, thanks to capitalistic products as mephedrone, is not a subversive-yet-appealing thing to share with a partner, but is becoming the very obstacle of sexuality itself. This is the bad side of a society based on libertinism and liberalism. One is almost tempted to bless institutions like the Catholic Church that, with its obsession about sin, puts around sexuality an aura of forbiddenness that makes sex desirable and appealing. Sex in itself, with no need for any drug because sin is enough to make it enjoyable. Is it then possible at all to get rid of the overwhelming restrictions imposed by culture and still enjoying at best? The question in this case seems even more important than the answer, and the answer, this is my personal opinion, does not coincide with mephedrone.
This post was written by a RWL Guest Blogger – Giuppy d’Aura has a BA in film studies, an MA in History of Cinema and is currently completing a second MA in History and Culture of Fashion, at LCF. Writing about fashion, cinema, sex and lifestyle is what he really enjoys the most. He considers himself a provocative, feminist and queer thinker (or terrorist, if you prefer). Hates politically correctness and prefers to go wrong rather than embracing a weak opinion. He recently wrote (with Nadia Saccardi) a poster presentation about Versace for the conference “Subverting Fashion”. Giuppy writes for several online platforms, including Against and [In]Tangible. (Image via Melies The Bunny‘s Flickr photostream.)
