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- Perhaps more than anything I’ve written on Medium — and this is not saying much — The End of Sex provoked reader-response; not a negative or critical response, but almost like people felt compelled to keep writing after I had stopped, as if I had not gone far enough, as if the topic of the loss of eros was personal them — as indeed, I imagine it was. What this ridiculously small size hints at, is the disjunction between media characterizations of sex in America (Trump vs Feminists! Jessica Chastain vs Harvey Weinstein!) and how people actually feel, think, desire. Media does not provide nuance, yet, media seems to be all we have; our culture communicates via talking-points that we do not believe in, or even respect.
- We’re left with media — with the media discourse — however, because we don’t have any other kinds of discourse left. The term ‘mass culture’ had such power for the 20th century critics for this precise reason: because they saw that the diversity of American intellectual life was being destroyed. At this point, it’s destroyed, past tense. It’s gone. We really only can debate sex in extreme terms. Whether we’re reading academic feminists or Trump on Twitter — the problem is we’re reading Twitter and not Tolstoy (or any other great writer that allows me to alliterate).
- An insistence on classics is neither conservative nor reactionary — it is radical; the most radical means of disrupting the epistemology of the present is to embrace the epistemology of the past. It might not seem so sexy, but if we’re tired of the way we’re talking about…
