Michel Houellebecq has always possessed a gift for presenting the absurd realities of modern life in the West in satirical prose. It might even be incorrect to call his stories satire as such, as they are—grimly—too close to the real world for us to be able to tell the difference. Maybe that is just the mark of an exceptional satirist. A perfect representative of this talent is his 2001 novel Platform, which follows the Parisian Michel Renault as he blows his father’s inheritance on sex tourism in Thailand after he is killed by a Muslim foreigner. He falls for a woman there, and offers to help her failing tourism business by making “Aphrodite Club” escapades as part of the vacations her business offers. The plan goes swimmingly, with Westerners scrambling to experience these glorified brothels, until a Muslim terrorist attack ends their enterprise, her life, and the novel. As one review cleverly put it, it is a novel that “plunges the reader into a moral universe where normal people feel sick, and sick people feel normal”. There is the encapsulation of contemporary woe.

Houellebecq’s novels almost universally contain a loathing of modern sexual attitudes and habits, and Platform is no different. Sex is everywhere throughout the events of the novel, and every character is described in some sexual act or context. Yet very few of the characters involved can ever be said to even enjoy true romance. It is even more bleak for the young Asian women who serve as the “meat” for this industry, who much like the rest of the developing world’s attitude towards production, trade their youthful and natural beauty for the speculatively-valued fiat bills of gluttoned “investors”. They do not mind the arrangement, and the tourists are not burdened in conscience by the implicit exploitation. All sex and all tourism is just exploitation—how was your one-off Tinder dinner-and-fuck any different than hiring a prostitute? Sex is just a part of life, or rather now a life-less and thoughtless rehearsal of it, and in the novel this malaise guised as a vacation package is in fact the only possible conclusion of modernity in regards to sexuality. In a world absent of transcendental values (or even immanent values), occupying oneself with such “motions” is the only lifeline between man and a longing to be killed.

Suggestions have been made that we are inching ever closer to the carnal debauchery of the Weimar Republic, and on some days it is difficult to find a way to disagree with the sentiment. It is not merely the “demonic” nature of it all that is such an affront, but how bizarre it is, these “motions” the masses—we—occupy ourselves with. There is no need to kickstart anyone’s memory here, we all have a few images seared firmly within our skulls. Mine just happens to be an obese latinx doing cartwheels at a family-friendly drag show, OK? Moving on from this. The common assertion today, in response to a world where streets are littered with pamphlets to LGBT-friendly Aphrodite Clubs down the block, is that matters of sexuality have gotten completely out of control… so perverse and so unimaginably ill, that only the cleansing fire of Cotton Mather can save us now.

The reaction is only natural. Disgust is natural, and here it is more than appropriate. Something has happened, and we are left with Renault’s world where love seems impossible. However, it is an incorrect diagnosis which in a strange way does not treat the disease with the level of contempt and sadness it truly deserves in the deepest cultural and spiritual senses, well beyond the mass-distribution of studies plotting a linear regression between porn consumption and erectile disfunction. We risk prescribing an adult circumcision for a metastasizing ass-cancer here, the blind but energetic return to the pulpit and the Good Book placed upon it to rewind us back to when these ills did not exist, whenever or wherever that was the case.

Enter such would-be doctors, who I have taken to labeling as the “Youth Pastor Right”. We all have fond memories of these well-meaning but utterly unimpressive stewards of Sunday morality, who were always sure to remind you of the demonic trappings of Avenged Sevenfold and amethyst crystal bracelets. For the most part they were normal people, but the archetype they took on—instructed to do so by more senior “Brothers”—was nothing short of an overbearing harridan. Perhaps they were truly embodied by the Holy Ghost of the jealous god, seeing as how every guidance or tutoring came in the form of a “thou shalt not”, only with a meek passive-aggressiveness unknown to the Almighty but intrinsic to the suburban expiring bachelor. I liked my youth pastors despite this, really, we had great conversations with them, my family and I, on our Saturday porch as they inquired if we would be taking the church bus tomorrow. Those meetings ended after they ran over my dog in my driveway on the way out. Anyways. I now assume your familiarity with this archetype.

The political right has no shortage of these youth pastors, identifying when the culture strays too far from the comforts of Vacation Bible School. They operate in the same ways and take on the same mission as actual youth pastors, seeing themselves as intertwined cultural and moral shepherds for the young. It just happens that our youth pastors are reading Sam Francis and de Maistre, learned a thing or two about the Jews from Dostoevsky. They identify a number of demons they wish to exorcise in this holy “culture war”: public secularism, abortion/IVF, UFOs and the CIA,—paganism!—which they are currently identifying as Beyonce’s “black girl magic” (see page 38 of Lucas Miles of TPUSA's Pagan Threat for proof I am not making a snide fantasy here). Yet the bulk of this opposition, this natural disgust, is directed invariably against the accusation of hedonism.

“These days openness about sex has gone too far”, you were once asked on that silly astrology called a Political Compass quiz—strongly agree! How could you not? Somewhere in the West there are two faggots blowing each other off on the street while children watch from the windows above, if not right now, then certainly when the Harvey Milk NGOs set out in June. I have seen women offer themselves up for the aforementioned exploitation, with increasingly creative and demeaning ways to be paid for it. Everyone is watching porn. I’ve been personally asked to stop posting images of transgender surgeries on minors where a patch of flesh is sewn on to a little girl’s crotch to simulate the weight and presence of a penis, so I won’t do that here. This is clearly the most sex-obsessed, most perverted people to ever exist and it is time to throw mankind in a mass nunnery until it comes back to its senses, yes?

Upon closer inspection, no, it is in a way worse than that. “Were it so easy”, Keith David once said. We do not have a hypersexualized, Bohemian culture of hedonism where men and women appear too intoxicated by the flower of Spring to participate in society at all. As a matter of fact, we exist in perhaps the most utterly asexual or even anti-sexual culture that has ever existed, in which every drive or instinct related to natural sexual behavior is pressed and winched out its rightful existence. Imagery of nudist protests, puff pieces for “sex workers”, or homosexual & transsexual instruction manuals for children only depict the darker, perverted side of our illness. If Dionysus walks this Earth, he has assuredly been wired to an IV pole in a Toronto MAID ward.

It would be preferable in a sense to have the hypersexualized culture that critics paint with superlatives, but we have only a culture which pretends to be sexual in any true sense. I should remind you, the same culture which parades fat retards in dog collars and gimp suits on Main Street is the same one that throws 20 year old men in jail for brushing a woman's hip without a notarized affidavit. As D.H. Lawrence put it, these perversions of a genuine, life-affirming sexuality are “the secondary life of the circus dog, acting up and showing off: and then collapsing.” Pornography, hook-ups, gay marriage laws, men in dresses… none of these things have anything to do with “an overabundance of sexuality”; this is a category of counterfeit expressions of something that has been taken from humanity and forgotten—mental illnesses aside. “Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself”, a prophet once said; I see no reason to exclude sexuality from this metaphor. To reframe the problem more simply, we do not have an overabundance of sexuality but have forgotten what is even “sexuality” in the first place.

Gen Z is far and beyond the most underfucked generation to live today. In 1989, the percent of Americans under 30 who remained virgins stood at 10% for women and 7% for men. Today that figure stands at 17% for women, and 27% for men. Twenty-seven percent!—and that was before COVID. Perhaps this is the result of a pervasive trend to limit and punish genuine sexual activity at every turn, from both the demands of a new feminism and the catechism of an old order. Every sexual interaction and theme must first be parsed through a bureaucratic checklist which seems constructed explicitly to debase it into an inauthentic, pathetic mating ritual fit. Only here can we find the dual-absurdity of a culture that is plastered with the technological litter of dating and hook-up apps, which promote short meetings that can be revoked of one’s consent after-the-fact and entered into criminal proceedings! What we have is almost the precise inverse of what is meant by the charge of “hedonism”, ours is a culture which utterly stifles any true expression of love or sexuality as discomforting and “weird”. If there is anything today’s masses hate, it is the shattering of aloofness by the hands of raw sincerity. That diagnosis alone is enough to tell you we do not have a society overrun by animalistic passion. More accurately it’s just sick, if not dead entirely, and completely afraid to live for itself. That’s not hedonism, that’s nothing, that’s illness.

This brings us back to the youth pastors. Their syllogism is natural and simple: too much sexuality, do less of it. No more grinding in the club. Cover yourself modestly. Delete the apps and go to church. Once all of this nonsense about “sexual drive” is bottled back up and we complete our puff-chested condemnation of “horniness”, then we can get back to raising the fertility rate and buying our wives sundresses and books on Hügelkultur. Even for what is seen in Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body as the most liberal, or rather life-affirming stance on sexuality Christendom has begrudgingly managed, we are still instructed to never “desire”—for to desire one is to dehumanize them!—and elsewhere firmly reminds us to avoid a practice of natural family planning which results in the “lowering the number of births in their family below the morally correct level.” That is their Final Solution to the OnlyFans question. As a result, this reaction removes all matters of sexuality from the private and public alike in an over-zealous quarantine, incinerating the leprous and the immunized all together. What little can be said about this regrettable—sinful!—act of concupiscence driven by our animal bodies is that it may come with the gift of family and children. It is a reaction which bowdlerizes the vitality of antiquity with the placement of a fig leaf upon the body, mandated by the priest to not “excite one's lust”. It is an awful silence over all of these matters held into strict compliance by the Panopticon of a youth pastor's ire. It is an assault on life and the body itself, despised and feared by the mind as but a rebellious stumbling block—such is the root of all conceptions of “obscenity”.

The youth pastor embodies that mocked character of Lawrence's in Clifford Chatterley, the astute, well-mannered, morally upright entrepreneur and family man who is bound to a wheelchair from his soldiering. Despite all of his quality, he is sexually impotent. He doesn't know how to be a man in the body, outside of his social and financial duties. He doesn't know woman-in-the-body either, outside of her duty to be a wife and provide children. Thus, his wife finds ecstasy in being plowed in the woods by a different man who does, and Clifford finds himself sobbing in the breasts of his elderly Magna Mater caretaker. An important warning here, but the youth pastors of Lawrence's time kept this book censored for decades. When the youth pastor finds himself pressed between the breasts of a scolding and commanding Mater such as Mrs. Bolton, they conclude rather immediately yet shallowly that the proximity of the breasts is the problem. They have not assessed that the reason why this situation ever came about in the first place was actually a complete collapse of sexuality, the real thing.

One good example of how these White Shariah calls to prayer can become entirely counterproductive is the obsessive tendency to render all of sexuality down to the “act of procreation”. Just the other week, one article here titled (slightly erroneously) Your Marriage Does Not Need Sex espouses this rather explicitly in stating, “procreative intent, not emotional craving, creates sexual intimacy”, and “men are buying [the lie] that men need sex”. Here, all of the passion of love, romance, and the bodily union at the heart of sexual emotion—all sexual emotion, even for animals, and therefore we can speak of this as a “metaphysical” concept if you’d like—is erased and squashed under the mere desire for a household. Not only will people never buy this, as it is contrary to good sense and mere service to eunuch “Patristics”, but it does not even address the idea of love to begin with. Rather, it sidesteps it as an uncomfortable and regrettable act of desiring at all—the original sin of concupiscence—that brings the joy of family into existence.

Klages in On Cosmogonic Eros prefaces the title’s use of that god's name instead of “love” through a weaving analysis of the numerous types of love, part of which gives us an interesting concept for the topic at hand. He makes note firstly of a distinction between an “inclination” (neigung), and a “drive” (trieb)—with an inclination assuming a passive, static preference for an object, and a drive assuming a non-negotiable motion towards an object. This is why, he says, we may speak of a “drive to revenge” (Rachetrieb), but never an “inclination to revenge” (Racheneigung). “Drive” may alternatively be interpreted as “instinct”, had it not lost its image of motion in the English tongue. From here, Klages gives us three distinct types of “driving love”: the drive to unity, the drive to devour, and the drive to sex. The unifying-drive is represented by the maternal instinct between her and her child, as the mother wishes for an inseparable unity with her child… separation inflicts physical pain upon her. The devouring-drive seeks a unity of its own, where one wholly consumes the object of love, hence its association with “the love of wine”. The sexual-drive, or Sexus, is the pure, bodily/animal instinct towards the sexual act itself.

It is here Klages is rather specific about something of great utility to our discussion: the sexual instinct is not the mere “drive to procreate”. The animal knows nothing of “procreation”, only his bodily craving to act in such regard. Worse, the confusion eliminates the sexual instinct entirely, replacing it with that maternal instinct that Lawrence made poor Clifford a victim of! This is a result of confusing real, natural drives with human, mental desires. He explains:

It would be a deliberate falsification to call it a “procreative drive”. Again, procreation is a possible consequence of sexual activity, but it does not lie as the goal in the experience of sexual excitement. The animal knows nothing about it, it is exclusive to man. Thus, it is not the animal in man that is driven to mating for reasons of procreation; rather it is his intellect which accompanies the actuation of the drive with the thought of procreation and with desires directed to it. […]

[S]ometimes, the male places his sexual drive in service of the interest of the preservation of the species, and this might be his “drive for procreation”. On the other hand, if a woman desires children, perhaps even a whole flock of them, then she has, as a rule, subordinated her sexual drive to her maternal drive, and this could be her “drive for procreation”, which therefore bears no resemblance to the male’s desires for the preservation of the species! This example shows irrefutably the abysses one get into when confusing real natural drives with human desires and thinks it to be permissible to deduce them from the imagined consequences of their activity.

—Klages, On Cosmogonic Eros (pp 12-13), trans. K.J. Elliott

It is here we begin our analysis as to what a healthy, natural “sexual drive” looks like, and how it operates within society. Firstly, the sexual drive is not a drive to procreation. Let this be a simple rule, and remember specifically that adopting such an equivocation completely subsumes the sexual instinct into something else entirely. We can expect nothing short of that result in a moral structure that insists upon the sexual instinct being beaten down within the confines of a woman’s ovulation window, tracked ever so neatly on a calendar app. Secondly, we see the perversion of involved in a more broad category of terms detailing sex as being a means to some other end: sex-worker, safe-sex, sex-education, sex-tourism, sex-therapy. The true nature and meaning of sexual instinct and activity is lost in each and all of these perversions. Genuine sexual intimacy can only be pursued for its own sake, otherwise it might as well not exist.

I must additionally be careful here and say that I am not advocating for the scornful tossing of wedding rings into the Seine in order to bury an antiquated institution, or anything of this sort. We are navigating between two absurd and ridiculous extremes at the present. How stupid are we as a people to find ourselves stuck with either divorced eunuchs or OnlyFans subscriptions? Do you see that genuine, personal intimacy driven by and from the body is utterly lacking in either case? Marriage, like procreation, is not the driving force in of itself but a culmination of the sexual drive… Lawrence referred to intercourse as “the blood-marriage” for a reason, implying that through this intimacy a sort of marriage is already completed, a union between two bodies. Marriage today is merely the State certifying what the mind has learned from the body, at least in the ideal case. For most normal people it will never be dignified to that level.

I do not know what a truly, purely, hedonistic society would look like—one that exists only to satisfy and pleasure itself—but surely it is preferable to the laughable psychosis that we have today. I have a Turkish friend who once remarked to me that he spent “all of the Summer of 2019” prowling the streets of İzmir performing mouth-sodomy on unsuspecting women, and while I was fiercely critical of his decision to not wait for cooler weather I can pronounce a level of preference for this over the muted asexual-fertility of today’s deacons… at least here the body is heeded for its wise council, and the instinct is obeyed.

So no, I am not going to shout at women to cover their breasts on the street and work diligently to get the prostitutes back into the pews. I am not going to submit to the shrieking performances of youth pastors who seek only to wage their own little Holy War against life itself. We have enough of this already today, do we not? We must cease striking poses and making performances for such things. The bureaucratic mind has tyrannized the body on this issue more than any other, and both have suffered from the disunion. I am interested only in the self-realization of man as the animal, the self-realization of woman as the animal, and the passionate and bursting clash of two unstoppable forces that inevitably comes as a result. The beauty of this should be celebrated in ways that make sense, not locked away in fear of “demons”. Only when this is allowed to flourish again can we even begin to speak of how best to organize society around the realities of human nature.

The youth pastors will fight this to the knife as they do with every other issue. It would not be the first time this inability to see the world for what it is or do anything about it other than appealing to this-or-that portion of Deuteronomy has only harmed the cultural and political momentum of the right. (You may notice that the right-vanguard in France or Germany doesn’t seem to have these issues.) Their job is not to push you through to an ideal victory, but to glue you to the floorboard and pray that Progress doesn’t have its way with you. Again, a noble intention, but on this charge of “hedonism” particularly this group is offering itself nothing but a laundry list of performative nonsense that seeks only to validate its own cultural presence—something it craves today more deeply than anything else. It must be recognized that there are more possibilities beyond what is presented as merely inside the church and outside of it, both for this issue and all others of this nature.

The problem is far darker than any imagery of “mass demonic possession” can ever illustrate, at least here it can be said that people are frenzied by some forcible compulsion. People today are nothing, they feel nothing, they are anhedonic above everything else. The solution is therefore not a further assault on the body and its drives, but an exuberant ignition of it and its passions. Knowing what that is, then we may one day begin to negotiate with it.