OpinionSex This article is more than 10 years old

Sex is everywhere you look, but the semiology of smut never changes

This article is more than 10 years oldSuzanne MooreAll this public banging on about sex is joyless. People who really enjoy each other just get on with it

Deeply unsatisfactory sex, let's be having you! I am sure I am not alone in feeling rather "had" by the simulacrum of sex that contemporary culture is whacking out the whole time. Being pounded away at by sexual imagery – Miley Cyrus's crotch or tongue in my face, supposedly snigger-free TV where people have sex in a box, glossy imported dramas such as Masters of Sex, endless discussions about "pornification" and the badness of the internet – may be having the desired effect. Permanent semi-arousal leads to a kind of numbness in which everyone just clicks on the next image/sex aid.

Frankly, I am bored. If in public sex must be cosmic, non-stop and ever-present, this leaves many absent in their own private sex lives. Miley is still young and enthusiastic about the possibilities, even if those possibilities are fake. Self-objectification is not new. What is amazing is our collective staying power. Are we still shocked? Does this woman know what she is doing? Is she being exploited? Is it all just a laugh? Is she that totally made-up thing: "a role model"?

The semiology of smut remains fairly unchanging: pasties, thongs, fetishwear-lite, simulated masturbation with the most unlikely of objects. Someone then always steps in to say this is just playful and not to be mistaken for real sex. I have no idea what "real sex" is and even less after reading the Mumsnet thread of the bedside 'penis beaker' (a dunking cup for hygiene purposes that has caused much merriment online). Yet so much of this sex talk is joyless. People who enjoy each other, simply do. It is those who bang on about it that are most suspect.

This suggests that culturally we are not fulfilled at all, as we bang on about it the whole time. Don't mind me, by the way: I am just a voyeur, a casual observer with one eye on the peep show that runs all around me. There are variations on the theme. If a woman has chosen to get naked then she has "control"; if she has been coerced, then we move uneasily from sex to power. And what is played out constantly is still always a succession of women, of bodies, mostly female, blurring into each other. The constant is that they are always up for it.

As if to counter this imagery we have to have ever more ridiculous conversations about "real sex". We worry about the "sexualisation" of children as if children have no sexuality. We still have not dealt in any way with high-profile sexual abuse cases of last year and the way girls were not believed and still aren't being heard. Liberals are never really that liberal, believing that sex education is the answer and with that must go "relationship education". Thus, sex is acceptable in a loving, coupled-up relationship that goes on for ever. Do we believe that our children experience the world this way?

The premise of a show such as Sex Box is educational – though I would rather watch Monkey Tennis. Still, we must pretend this is the grownup way to talk about sex, as a kind of health-and-safety issue. People must communicate, read the manual, use sex as superglue to keep them bonded. Above all, they must keep trying. Put it on your to-do list; feel desire, be desired. The work ethic kicks in hard with serial monogamy. Whatever sex means – nothing or everything or possibly anything in between – we cannot order our sex lives as we like, by sheer hard emotional labour. As Adam Phillips says of our erotic lives, working at it acknowledges that "something is already missing". How, he asks, can one arrange a dream?

Yet we try. We force together sex and love. Desire may require distance, not domesticity. Intimacy may involve independence. Familiarity breeds adultery but still it is assumed we must all work towards the climax of loved-up eternal coupledom. Even if it involves the dreaded 'penis beaker'.

The decoupling of sex from love, or from holding a household together, or from the bringing up of children, would indeed be a liberation. But such an idea is not part of "sex education" and remains a heresy for those of faith, though the secular belief in this idea too is fairly devout. Those who achieve this win, I guess. Most of us muddle along, numb, confused, underwhelmed and overwhelmed at various points in our life.

Which is perhaps why the saturation of sexual imagery right now produces the opposite of desire. What remains taboo is any idea of release. The constant fantasy of female desire grinding itself down manifests so often with women as slaves to the idea of desire itself. Sexual freedom as it is enacted at present has never looked more do-able or more conformist.

No wonder then, those of us of imperfect mind and body will go elsewhere for our passions. I am thinking: outside the box.

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