War Or Amour? A French Take On The “No Sex” Trend

-Analysis-

PARIS — We’re making less and less love. A recent Ifop survey shows that the rate of sexual activity in France has fallen to a level not seen since 1970. Only 43% of those surveyed have sex every week, compared to 58% in 2009. The situation is even clearer for young people: more than a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds have not had sexual intercourse in a year, five times more than in 2006. France is therefore in line with a global trend: “no sex.”

The most astounding aspect is the litany of positive comments on this evolution. Abstinence and masturbation are said to be forms of self-appropriation, expressed in all manner of neologisms.

I suggest a more literal interpretation: we have entered a neo-Puritan era. The flesh is frightening.

Frozen pleasure

This neo-Puritanism is even more disturbing because it is accompanied by an avalanche of words and images about sex, which has never been so universally present, so easily accessible or so openly discussed. French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault had already noted this paradox in his study “The History of Sexuality.” The contemporary “discursive explosion” is by no means a liberation.

While love is on the wane, war is on the upswing.

On the contrary, as Foucault explains, the proliferation of discourse on sex tends to analyze, regulate, normalize and politicize what was previously intimate. By constantly naming and commenting on the most diverse practices, we freeze and judge them in the very name of tolerance. Sexuality then falls under the grip of a power that, while more diffuse, is no less intrusive. Desire is moralized, identities locked and pleasure frozen.

While love is on the wane, war is on the upswing. We see it close at hand, at the gates of Europe and around the Mediterranean. Every day we hear tales of barbarity that we thought were reserved for historical fiction. We’re talking about it in France, where the army is preparing for the prospect of high-intensity conflict, and the state is officially organizing itself for a “war economy.”

Warlike political discourse

It has even become a metaphor for public action. French President Emmanuel Macron, who once went to “war” against COVID, now wants to “rearm” in every possible way — not only militarily, but also civically, demographically, and legally. And the International Committee of the Red Cross tells us that more than half of millennials believe they will experience a third world war.

It is hard not to imagine on a link between the fall of love and the imaginary of war. Writing Civilization and Its Discontents in the early 1930s, Sigmund Freud was concerned about the sexual repression necessary for the emergence of civilization. He felt that his era had taken the restriction of physical love to extremes. By restricting instincts and sublimating passions, society was gripped by a sense of discomfort that could at any moment turn into a death drive.

Freud’s conclusion could be written in 2024: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.”

Maybe the hippies were right 

So what’s to be done? Freud suggests letting Eros off the hook to defeat Thanatos. He repeated this even more explicitly in his correspondence with Albert Einstein a few years later, published under the aegis of the League of Nations at a time when fears of a new world conflict were mounting: To avoid war, to curb destructive impulses, the first priority is to rehabilitate love.

It’s not the birth rate that needs to be boosted , it’s sex.

“Everything that generates sentimental bonds among people must react against war.” Today’s much vaunted masturbation just won’t do. Eros needs a flesh-and-blood partner to carry out its peacemaking functions.

It’s not the birth rate that needs to be boosted — that’s an old bellicose reflex of leaders who want cannon fodder. It’s sex. The type of sex that is as free as possible from the codes of male domination, consensual and consenting, but no less intense, varied and free.

For old straight couples and young adults with fluid sexuality alike, there’s only one watchword: make love, not war! What if the hippies were right after all?