Word: modernes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what's love but a second hand emotion," modern man sings. Sex is where it begins and ends. Modern man doubts the existence of love, which is okay, because he is incapable...
...word love derives from the Greek eros, meaning longing. Love presupposes a recognition of one's own incompleteness; it is a passionate search for completion. Modern man, however, is satisfied with himself. He is endlessly instructed and has come to believe that one must, at all accounts, feel good about oneself--as an individual...
...there can be no Bacchic revelry for modern man: our sex must be safe. It is impossible to speak of safe love. Falling in love, like falling off a cliff, involves risks. Modern man dislikes risks. Love can't be made safe, but sex can. Modern technology helps out. It has succeeded in making sex safe and sterile. Just like modern man himself...
...NEED to qualify sex with safety is, of course, a rise of the proliferation of sexual diseases. These diseases are typically dismissed as accidental; perhaps, however, they are pregnant with meaning. Consider: underlying modern man's promiscuity is the notion of man's natural shamelessness. We have been taught that sex is man's sole and overpowering desire. Shame generally and Victorian conventions specifically are, the argument runs, radically unnatural...
...maybe this teaching is wrong. Maybe it's shame that's natural, not shamelessness. The modern effort to free man from shame would then be an effort to make him something other than what nature had intended. Sexual disease could then be said to be nature's scourge against shameless sexual promiscuity. But liberal orthodoxy prevents me from saying such a thing...