I have a theory that the world is in dire need of more sex. “More sex?” you cry. “Aren’t columnists supposed to rail against the gross oversexualisation of society?” Yes, we are, so bear with me.
I started out wondering about the obsession with detoxing. At this time of year I am supposedly full of toxins. How can that be? I take an occasional drink, don’t smoke, and drink water from my reverse-osmosis-filtered tap until my pee runs clear. Chocolate is a once-a-month treat. I drink three cups of tea a day, but since tea has antiseptic properties, that can’t be bad. My only vice is a liking for sausage sandwiches.
Yet according to health supplements in newspapers and the advertising of the detoxing industry, it appears that my body is stinking and reeking with poison. If I would only submit to pill-popping, seaweed-wrapping and bowel-cleansing therapies, all kinds of miracles would happen. The chronic fatigue that envelops me would disappear. My skin would be translucent instead of grey. My vitality would return. (Actually I think that employing full-time staff to take care of my house and children would have the same effect.)
The spa brochures assure me that my moderate lifestyle isn’t enough to protect me from the hazards of simply being alive. For example, one company selling “colonic hydration therapy” (enemas) begins its pitch thus: “The 21st-century lifestyle, with its processed food, stress, environmental pollution and overuse of antibiotics, can feel like a triple assault on mind, body and emotions.”
Apart from that being a quadruple assault, this is the standard need-creation pitch of the detox world. They are not likely to say: “The 21st-century lifestyle with its plentiful supply of food, full employment, astonishing medical technology and flourishing leisure industry can feel like a triple (sic) assault on death, illness and chronic malnutrition.”
Personally I give frequent thanks that I live a 21st-century lifestyle, and I was extremely grateful for the antibiotic that cured a wretched chest infection last week. If you had to pick any time in history or any place in the world to live, Ireland in 2007 would be a pretty good choice. Would you prefer Africa in the 1980s? Europe in the Middle Ages? Ireland in the 1950s? This environmentally poisoned, time-poor, stressed-out world of 21st-century capitalist hell suddenly seems quite attractive when you consider the alternatives.
Nevertheless, many of us get up in the morning, look in the mirror and hate what we see. We feel guilty about the food we eat and what we drink. We hate ourselves for not doing more exercise or taking the right supplements. We constantly seek out battier ways of ridding our bodies of the poisons we are convinced lie at the root of our lethargy and unhappiness. By happy coincidence for the snake-oil salesmen peddling detoxing, the therapies also detox our bank accounts. But we are willing to pay.
Perhaps this is a symptom of our secular world. We’re still peasants in need of myth and hysteria to explain the inexplicable. People used to blame their miseries on astrological events such as the appearance of comets. When the great monotheistic religions took hold, sin took the blame for catastrophe.
Some of us have cast religion aside, but still look inward to find reasons for our despondency. In a world of moral relativism, we don’t seek to exorcise the devil, just the free radicals. God may have created the liver and the kidneys to deal with toxins, but still the alternative health industry sells us potions, wraps, herbs and even oxygen, imbibed through a tube at bars for a tenner a go.
You might think this is a recent phenomenon, but of course it’s not. John Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake, ran a sanatorium in Michigan to which weary and wealthy citizens travelled for grape diets and enemas in the hope of feeling energetic and happy again.
Kellogg was obsessed, not only with purging bacteria from one’s colon but with the abolition of masturbation. He was typical of a Victorian culture that devoted considerable energy to repressing sexuality, with the result that everyone was obsessed with it.
Thinking about Kellogg and his fanatical interest in clean bowels and pure minds, I wondered if there could be a connection with the determination to detoxify our bodies. Surely this is displacement of the need to detoxify our souls?
But, you may say, we don’t live in a world of repressed sexuality where such strategies are necessary. Really? Sex is indeed everywhere, but it’s a particular kind of sex. It’s all about visual imagery rather than sensuality. It’s aggressive and anonymous. It’s strutting coarseness instead of tenderness. It’s a sex that’s about getting what you need, rather than expressing love.
We’re surrounded by this pornographic mutilation of sex to which we can’t connect. We can’t look like the goddesses on telly and we can’t keep pace with the thrusting panting that masquerades as sex.
I think true images of beauty and sexual love have been oppressed just as thoroughly as in a Victorian society. Surrounded by the brutality of what’s called sex, we feel dirty, isolated and unloved. And so we feel the need to cleanse. It’s as if we’re raped on a daily basis, and we have to scrub ourselves clean of the filth that surrounds us.
Why else would we feel so dirty, unloved and horrible? Most people are good and decent, yet all we hear about is violence and crime. Most people are worth loving, yet we are trained to despise ourselves for falling short. There’s too much money involved in hating ourselves and we seem to have accepted self-loathing as a fact of life. So when you read in a brochure that your fatigue and mental weariness is the result of possessing a poisoned body, it’s easy to believe.
So I think we need more sex. The corny kind of sex that is about tenderness and love, the kind you can’t really talk about without wanting to cringe. Maybe if we could convince each other that we are fragrant and not poisonous, then we could counteract some of the marketing that tells us the opposite.
Knowing someone loves you and your body gives you faith in yourself. Maybe it would also give you faith in the wondrous ability of your internal organs to do the job for which they are designed.
As tempting as it may be to hose down my colon, I prefer to believe it is a sweet garden of biochemical perfection. The brochures can go in the bin.
