Objectify This

I’m still in the process of cleaning out my room after college. Bear with me — I know I graduated (ahem) more than two weeks ago, but I also am doing a deeper cleaning than I’ve done in my room since, well, I was about eight, apparently.

I recently came across a Valentine that local archaeologists date to approximately 1993, based on the Kidpix-like illustrations and the signature, “Chris”, (names may have been changed to protect the now-strangers) which indicates that it was made by a boy who later went on to demonstrate a magnetic interest in me that resembled the emotional habits of cement.But the illustration (not pictured) does feature some truth: over the caption, “Modern Day Cupid,” the intrepid young artist Kidpixed a Schwarzenegger-like man, shirtless and in sunglasses. His accessories are diligently labeled for greater clarity: “heart gun,” “heart bullet belt,” “heart grenade.” There’s no monologue, but Chris hit the nail on the head in many ways: his Cupid is about to shoot, devastate everyone, and then intone “Ah’ll Beh Bahck.”

Some would argue that this is nearly visionary, given our generation’s understanding of love. In his recent article “Let’s Not Get to Know Each Other Better: Why Spoil Great Sex by Dating,” in the Fashion and Style section of the New York Times (which is also home to the paper’s nod to monogamous love, including hetero and homosexual marriage announcements) Joel Walkowski argues that dating is, well, out of date. Although he ultimately concludes that this only a short-term strategy, he wraps up his article by stating “I believe that, despite what it may seem, we [ie my generation] appreciate the ways of love and affection but are simply waiting for them to take over. We might dally in the land of easy sex and stilted text-message flirtation, but deep down we crave the warm embrace of all-consuming love. . . I do, anyway.”

Yet it is hardly true that we’re the first generation to balk at the power of love, or stilted tradition, however you look at it. As Otis Redding (hot, above) sang, “don’t you mess with Cupid,/Cupid, he’s not stupid.” Love is notoriously soul-crushing, and that’s only if you’ve got the pleasure of finding the real thing. Not finding love is just as bad. Ah, how romantic, Marina, you’re saying.

Yes, but love itself is also, to many, the absolute best high of life. Our culture of fear has taught us the dangers of being in our country all of the time: soon after 9/11, we were told –Everyone watch out, we’re on orange alert! But don’t panic, because we’ve been on orange alert for three years. We’ve never had green “Guarded: general risk of terrorist attacks” or blue “Low: Low Risk of Terrorist Attacks” security alerts, meaning that the five-tier rating system is, in reality, a three-tier system telling us to freak out, worry, or be concerned.

Over at Counterpunch, Kurt Nimmo argues, in his article “Let’s Call Bush on his Bogus Terror Threats: The Propaganda of Anxiety” that the prolonged severe, high, and elevated alerts have caused the increase in anxiety and paranoia in the U.S. public. There’s a lot of evidence to support his claim that the National Threat Advisory Color Chart has been used to manipulate public sentiment; the only time that the alert level was raised, in 2004, was in an election year, when Bush was making a bid for reelection. Since the public is never informed of the criteria that comprise each level of risk, the Color Chart serves to indicate that the government knows what the level of terror threat is, a questionable proposition given the nature of terror, creating a power dynamic based on the implied ignorance and subsequent dependence of the public on the government. It’s not hard to guess that this increase have then made the U.S. public easier to manipulate and control. But how, exactly, has that been manifested?

In “Let’s Not Get to Know Each Other Better,” Joel Walkowski notes that “For my generation, friendship often morphs into sexual encounter and then reverts to a friendship the next day. And it’s easy as long as you don’t put yourself on the line or try too hard. Don’t have a prospect? Check Facebook. Afraid to call? Text. With so many avenues for communication, one might expect an onslaught of romantic soliloquies, but that isn’t the case. Casual is sexy. Caring is creepy. You don’t want to show your hand, and you certainly don’t want to fall in love. At least until you do, and then it’s too late.”

Thus, fear permeates the sexuality of today’s youth: we engage in a frenetic, bait-and-switch method of dating to disguise our intentions, our fear of falling in love (and then, presumably, into a disaffected marriage and coffin) and our fear of not falling in love, and thus only into said coffin. (Sorry, I know that this keeps getting unnecessarily bleak. It must be because I’m reading Sylvia Plath’s journals.)

This has lead to a new social invention: polyamory. It’s this idea I’ve talked about before that suggests that ideally, long-term loving relationships do not need to be monogamous, because they should be built on trust, friendship, and negotiation, and on the rejection of possessiveness, jealousy, and restrictive social and cultural standards.

The polyamorous suggest that one should even take pleasure in the idea of one’s partner with someone else, a term that they call “compersion,” or the opposite of jealousy. In other words, the polyamorous have learned to accept the fear that their lovers are loving other people, and to turn that energy from anxiety into, in the best cases, sexual excitement.

Polyamory can help lovers recognize sex as a sacred communion that transcends cultural constrictions, and the beloved not merely as an object of love, but a subject as well. It seems like a fairly good idea to try to stop living in fear of the heart-grenades of modern Cupid. Yet whether or not polyamory is necessary to this release of fear, it’s clear that an increasing openness about sex is the key to an understanding of sex partners, and thus the sexes themselves, as equal.