Note from me:
Before you begin reading this is a thought piece written from the safety of England. I cannot even comprehend how it might feel in places where climate change has made lives unbearable and in war zones where life has been upturned. This is from my own context and the atmosphere around me that I can comment on.
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In a study by Schwartz in 2001 who wrote ‘Everything you know about sex is wrong’, he asked ‘How do you want to die?’ and 80 percent of the candidates (both men and women) said that it would be through: ‘Making love or having an orgasm’. When are normal day-to-day existence is threatened, of which we have many in 2022, we crave to be alive more than ever. Our fight and flight response has been triggered. What feels more alive than feeling pleasure, having sex? Today I want to discuss whether our sex drives will be stimulated even more by the fact our mortality is at risk and that maybe we now we have even more courage to ‘do. Is sex now a means to get rid of terrifying feelings of fear, vulnerability, and sadness. Or, conversely do we lose the time, energy, and feeling for doing such a thing when the apocalypse is so imminent and danger is now at many peoples doors? I will also talk about ways to conquer this disillusionment and join the sexy fight for survival.
I asked the Wasitgoodforyou community yesterday whether this whole apocalypse rain cloud that has become extremely heavy this march, has influenced your love and sex life. Just as a side note (as a fellow march Pisces), why does march keep on being the month where the world falls? Covid got extremely real then with words of ‘lockdown’ which really wasn’t a ‘love lockdown’ ringing in our ears in March 2020. I am already looking forward to next march with shaky interpretation. Then it will be the ice caps! I digress, as I always do. Going back to what you all said about how this has impacted your sex lives, I must write a little thought piece and offer my empathetic condolences as well as really think-through writing. Does sex enable survival or at least help us escape death?
Someone wrote: ‘‘In a bizarre way, I walk through life with much more lust’ as the ‘sex may be the last enjoyable time spent’’. Are we really beginning to think that some moments are our last or are we being a little dramatic? If you are a Guardian reader the first page is painted red which borders all the topics about the Ukrainian war. Red is the color of lust and increased blood flow, however, it is also the colour connoted to anger, blood, and danger. In some maddening way maybe overseeing the war from a distance causes us to see danger as two-fold: the dangerous red, and lusty red.
Does danger make us feel like we are closer to our primality, our base needs, our desire for physical touch, our need to get going, our need to feel, our need to live? Have you ever masturbated and know someone is coming up the stairs and you finish really quickly all of a sudden because the danger is getting closer and closer? Is that an analogy that works in this instance? During the First World War hundreds upon thousands of young men queued up in front of brothels. Some of them were aware that they would die on the front in the coming weeks, so a few moments of pleasure would calm them down. I feel like I would just be really dry. I would be no man's land. No going over the front. Sex and apocalypse maybe work, but whether it's the sex we really need or the sex for the right reasons is a whole other kettle of fish.
Obviously, those who are fleeing, those who are living closer, those who are oppressed by this don’t even have time to ‘be’ as they are so fearful for their lives. One of the Wasitgoodforyou followers who came from Ukraine says that ‘she can’t remember the last time she thought about sex, and can’t remember what pleasure felt like.’ Maybe these moments are so overwhelming in the modern world that your brain cannot even comprehend good feelings.
If you are like me, on the edge of the conflict, watching the news but being unable to really see the physical trauma of war apart from the media, do you feel in some sense like you are stuck in this very slow sinking sand? You maybe don’t feel any effect of the apocalypse yet but you're just waiting for it. It may be nuclear, mass flooding, or the refugee crisis, but you’re waiting all the same. Helpless. Are you also blinking, shocked that these things actually may happen? You feel helpless yet again. 10 years ago I had just started writing a sex blog, full of idealism about breaking down taboos, unaware of the fact that my future was about to be at threat. My brain is so full of questions and shock that my body is not able to think also.
As much as the war has become a huge emotional and physical trauma and sadness, that has given us another existential threat to live with, it is the threat to the environment I fear the most and that is the thing that sometimes leaves me dry in the sheets. When you are anxious, you have higher levels of cortisol (the main stress hormone) and they suppress the sex hormones that impact desire. Climate anxiety is a real thing and the particles that anxiety exists within diffuses heavily through my generation. The amount of times I have heard ‘well we might not be here tomorrow’, has surprised me a lot this year. The amount of times I have personally questioned my need to breed, which was the future I had been certain off for so long, fills me with forlorn sentiments. Is it ironic that now in the atmosphere of fourth-wave feminism where the role of women has finally escaped being just about procreation and now we have the freedom of equality (almost, and within my context), we now should feel shame about breeding, or worse, that the environment will affect women much more than men. There is so much to feel scared about that we might as well pour a glass of wine and shut our eyes to escape. You wonder why hallucinogens have become popular again, the last time they were ‘in’, was when there was a threat of nuclear war in the cold war era!
How do you feel sexy through all this then? How do you lust, how do you retain sinking deep into that sand and stop forgetting your curves, your zones, your fleshy glorious linings?
You fight. You stay battling. You breathe deeper. You love hard. You don’t lose hope. You find organizations that can help. You smile at those people around you. You love yourself. You find organizations that can help. Fuck to feel alive again. Don’t feel shame for living while you arerscared of dying. Don’t feel shame for needing to escape. You stay committed. Maybe its not your sex drive that is increased but your drive. full stop. Your drive to be human for humans. For that, I offer something you can do to sponsor your drive:
I will continue by giving you an organization that you should care about, one that has helped my feelings of vulnerability and will help yours. If we stand for something, if we commit to something maybe we can move further and further away from the terror of imminent apocalypse.
Join 'The Commitment' so that your sex can turn from ‘end-of-the-world sex’ to ‘we-can- be anyone in the future and keep on doing this forever’ kind of sex. 'The Commitment' is your vote for a healthy planet and a healthy you. You commit to the vote and 'The Commitment' takes your vote to local politicians and then 'The Commitment' enables the politicians to make green policies for the planet because you are what gives them power. As unsexy as it sounds, it is the politicians that have the power on climate policies that will really direct this apocalypse back to just being in the movies. We must give politicians a powerful reason to act on the climate and the natural world.
If you make the commitment that is one example of how you can fight to stay sexy, fight to stay loving, and fight to stay alive!
SIGN IT HERE:
https://www.thecommitment.uk/
Thank you and look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Eliza x
