Sex, Death and brat girl summer
Examining consumption through personal identity and relationships, celibacy and how abstaining can lead to enrichment.
La petite mort, or little death, is a curious expression that can be dated back to 1882 when the French first used it to describe an orgasm, a sensation that concerned the loss of consciousness that comes with a post-sexual encounter. At the risk of proposing a kind of existentialism that is entirely sentimental, this brief loss is not also true of death or sex but life itself. In reality, we are shaped individually and collectively by ‘little deaths’ that occur with a quiet harshness. It is undeniably understandable that the search for identity produces an insatiable hunger that results in frequent but superficial transformations in a brief amount of time. The ‘little death’ here is not small at all. In reality, we often abandon our present selves for an illusory future and sacrifice depth for speed.
If our attention spans are declining, we risk losing the ability to perceive and notice truth — whether political or personal. Slowness and self-restraint seem to be the unglamorous antidotes to a hyperactive life. Both reject fulfilment through mass entertainment in favour of taking stock of yourself without artificial cues. Places and objects and people are fleeting birds in late-stage capitalism that are intensified by the dopamine drug social media provides—there are no longer fixed markers of identity but instead constant opportunities to discover who you are or could be through TikTok trends, products and celebrity culture that now involve lifestyle influencers who use marketing to sell a life that could be yours.
A digital screen alienates you from real-life experiences, primarily due to these authentic experiences being arbitrarily aestheticised into nonsensical categories (#coastalgrandmother #downtowngirl) meant to deliver a semblance of meaning and recognition of a shallow type. To be a person is an art of empty iconography, beautiful but utterly devoid of an inner life. In contrast, in Japan, wabi-sabi teaches the belief that things become more beautiful as they age. Time enhances the quality rather than eroding it, which is hardly the attitude of capitalism, where profit and mass production, efficiency and productivity obliterate the natural flow of time. The era of over-consumption has revealed that our minds and bodies are in decay and in desperate need of nourishment that moves beyond the personal branding of self-improvement disguised as a plea for perfection. Knowledge acquired through aesthetics and consumption focuses on the appearance of a subject or object rather than the ethical or moral value it provides. This is no truer than in the cautionary ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, where succumbing to one’s impulses, desires, and aestheticism led to self-destructiveness because free will was lost to instant gratification.
This aestheticism of gratification has possessed the way we love and desire — love in consumption is in collapse, a lottery game in Dante’s circles of hell where each circle has tickets at varying costs, depending on your tax bracket or sanity. The normalisation of hookup culture remains insistent even amidst a sex recession. Dating apps and the modern economy have made sex an industrial complex. This functions as a two-headed beast of competition and dissociation, where competing for attention is a visual sport above all else. The success of sex is dependent on the frenzied quantity of bodies floating like plastic bags, polluting the sea of power and choice. Indeed, the idea of power has enabled women to be active participants in their own pleasure in so far as it has ostensibly given women the ability to choose their sexual partners, where enjoyment and satisfaction are merits alongside consent and safety. However, this choice is still made within the structure of patriarchy, and the logic of this system functions within the mouth of capitalism - and its gnashing teeth display casual sex to be ripe fruits to wholeheartedly bite into.
There is a dubious premise at play here—that no emotional attachment to sex and relationships is preferred because it’s a source of empowerment or control. Yet bodily autonomy is not merely about sex but about choosing how you wield your body and where your energy lies. Dating apps are soldiers of patriarchy because hookup culture still benefits the men to whom we give our bodies; the exchange cannot be equal if it’s done in haste as a disposable form of pleasure. In ‘1984’, Julia, the male protagonist’s love interest, maintains that the ‘sex impulse was dangerous to the Party’, and so the roles we play through sex become rooted in solipsism if we ignore the repercussions of engaging in an institution that, at the core, monopolises the choices we think we are making in earnest.
Questioning the purpose of participating in sex is less about moralising the value of an experience concerning a heterosexual paradigm but more so about examining the patterns pleasure can provide us with in relation to our diverse identities. The hypersexualisation of female bodies, predominantly Black and minority bodies, was the last wink given by the sex-positive feminism of the second wave, and it ascertained that female sexuality should be liberated wholly and exercised freely. Nevertheless, sex is not the only measure of intersectional feminism and ‘positive’ has become conflated with over-consumption. Can we be in control of the sex we have if it’s done in objectification?
In Greta Gerwig’s ‘Lady Bird’, love is ‘attention’, and that blossoming affection Christine, the protagonist, has for Sacramento was cultivated deliberately over a lifetime. This is where celibacy becomes an alternative rooted in self-awareness and willingness to examine past heartbreaks, relationships and lifestyles to choose from a position of security and strength. Enforcing a boundary allows you to reclaim your romantic life by shifting it into a realm of contemplation if you feel that dating has become emptying and numbing. Self-worth can be nourished by valuing other modes of self-knowledge, like exploring movement through running or swimming.
Abstinence is a rational response to the frantic buzz of being pulled in a thousand different directions on a daily basis. Silence can be enriching because it’s rebelling against the harsh demands of your body as an instrument for maximised utility. Instead of walking to the train station or the Tesco aisle bingeing podcasts on 2.5 speed, plugging out of the matrix of stimulation legitimises your presence in your body as enough in those moments alone. We may never know if our minds are bombarded with wild birds clawing for any second of attention. As Virginia Woolf exclaimed, ‘It’s an odd thing, silence. The mind becomes like a starless night […] We never give sufficient thanks for this entertainment.’
Munyah is a Law student interested in language, culture and politics. You can follow her on Instagram and Substack @caveofelaf
