I tend to believe that people confuse "free love" with affordable sex. Love itself can never be free because it costs to love and love not shared equally costs the most.
Unlike the grace offered to all by the democracy of love, the aristocracy of sex has never been so kind. Sex is brutally Darwinian in its selection, it spurns the less fortunate while favoring those most blessed in wealth, looks, vanity, strength and youth.
Sex is all about affordability. Those who have more, get more, because they can afford more. Those who have less, pay more to get less. It says much of us, a society whose celebrity is currency that we pay the wealthy of Hollywood to propagate an attitude of "Free Love" when sex is so affordable for them and so dreadful expensive to everyone else who pursues sex rather than love.
© Greg Schiller, 2007
Author: Greg Schiller
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Comments: 41
I'll agree that "free love" and "affordable sex" are two completely different things. The concept that love is never "free" could probably be argued, though. If you receive more than you spend, do you come out "ahead" - or have you still spent something that was worth more when you had it?
What prompted these thoughts were some mindless statements by Angelia and Brad fleeting by on the televison channel E. I reflected on how their wealth and attractiveness rendered their attitudes shallow.
True love is always free. Freely given, freely received. It does not require cost or commitments, but rather is a joy to gift, and if the love is not returned, then there is no loss, for it is the act of loving itself that is its own reward. We tend to get hung up on needs and wants when we speak of love instead of realizing it is a spiritual condition, and not a physical one. People speak of 'free love' in reference to open sexuality and this is a mistake of identity in labels. Free sex is often given/shared with a loving heart, but it does not necessarily constitute true, heart-gifted love.
Our society is quite obsessed with sexuality and the images that conditioning has made us look to as a desirable focus of our reproductive drives, for the urge to procreate with a match which would have the greatest chance to carry on into future generations is what mankind has sought since awareness of choice became reality, with power, health and vitality all provoking positive stimulus to our instincts. Beauty and strength, however, are found through an individual's personal experience and make-up, for we may be beset by the commercial images of sexuality everywhere we look, but it is the immediate realities of interpersonal realtionships that are the bottom line to our species continued propogation.
A very interesting and thought provoking article, Greg!
Michael, I think you did a nice job of distingushing sex from love, which is too rarely done.
Greg, I'm a little startled by your concept of: "If you receive more love than you give the value of love to you is diminished so in the end, you have turned something very valuable into a commodity." I'm having a really hard time thinking of love as a commodity, and thinking of relationships as purely economic. Love, to me, is never wasted. If you give more to one person than you get back from that person, it is not wasted. Relationships that attempt to maintain balance sheets strike me as likely to fail.
I hope I've simply misunderstood your analogy??
Not just the sex industry and the media, but nature as well. The very essense of natural selection is that wealth and attractiveness will win out over time. Natural selection is all about more to the haves, and less to the have nots. Among humans, the wealthy and the attractive can dabble in sex as recreation all they want, they can afford to.
Love is nature's antidote to its own harshness.
Sometimes, I would agree that love without reward is the greatest form of love, but at the same time, without contradiction, loving someone without being loved in return, hurt (costs) the most.
Am I to infer that the old days, when divorce was illegal, spared us all the immorality we suffer through today? Perhaps limiting marriage to a man and a woman was not hateful enough. Maybe we should go further and protect the institution of marriage by making divorce illegal.
People do terrible things in the name of love, of sex, of freedom. They also do terrible things in the name of protecting virtue. We could stone to death a few fornicators as the Taliban were wont to do.
The more we strip away the emotional and metaphysical trappings of sex, the more likely we are to believe, as biologists and cynics do, that all sex is just evolutionary processes at work.
If we believe that, as highly intelligent mammals who create complex social organizations, we can resist the pull of strictly biological motives and processes, then we can also believe in sex that doesn't involve some type of economic trade-off as well.
By observation, we can all see that those with more economic ability (i.e., money), can overcome biological barriers and have more sex than that to which they would normally be "entitled" (through strict Darwinian selection).
But there is also the flip side, the one in which incredibly unattractive people (from a biological AND economic perspective) fall in love and procreate too.
Of course, both of these examples are purposely extreme, and most certainly represent the thin tails of the normal distribution of these matters.
Regardless, this is an interesting set of thoughts that I'm sure will bubble up some equally interesting reactions.
Now I'll go read the comments...
It strikes me that "wealth" in the economic sense is merely an intellectual rationalization of biological suitability, i.e., a richer mate is better able to care for our offspring, and therefore, more likely to result in passing along our (my) genes.
Interestingly, it is only in the modern world that wealth can be this proxy. In earlier, more primitive times, wealth was also biologically attractive, but for different reasons. Rich people were more likely to have security, i.e., men with swords, at their disposal.
Today, security is still in short supply, but people in the "First World" probably don't measure a mate's worth by his ability to kill tigers or protect his spouse from terrorists. That seems to be a function of governments in the modern world.
Regardless, muscles and athletic prowess in men, and large breasts and wider hips on women are still biological pointers for evolutionary success. So, not surprisingly, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are both attractive, not for their wealth, but because they look like they'd be good mates.
Sex usually works its way in there somehow, but money does not.
I would hope that we would not remedy darkness by blinding ourselves with light.
This has always been the case, in all species, yet Darwin identified the bias toward the young, wealthy, strong and attractive and in all things those who are favored by bias are the most enthusiastic supporters of that which brings them more.
It seems to me that people of social conscious would be just as concerned about the costs of sex to the least of us as they are about the distribution of other forms of wealth.
One need go no further than any mall to see how hard kids work to increase their currency and how much marketing is directed at exploiting their desires.
I would think a healthy society would continually trump sex with love.
Wasn't "free love" just a generic kind of hippy sentiment from the Sixties? I'm curious why you decided to write about it.
Nature has been at its business with life for 3.5 billion years, I doubt that we are as exempt as we might fool ourselves to be.
One of the things to think about is that there are many forms of strength. As you suggested when mentioned communication and intimacy there is the wealth of being intelligent and articulate -- all wealth is not money.
However, fate is not so kind to distribute any form of wealth evenly. Intelligent people tend to have more material wealth. They tend to be more communicative and articulate which translates into an ability for intimacy and awareness of their partners.
In the end of it all, I still hope that people will think about the commercialization and marketing of sex, and rethink the pressure that kids are under to perform sexually and to be sexually attractive.
There are positive signs and we should be applauding them like the media campaigns Dove is running see Campaign for Real Beauty
You too!!
My oldest was 11 when we finally brought a television into the house. Why did we do it, because my children's dunder-head father wanted to watch the Vikings........
beg to differ--
sex might be free, but rarely love.
if you love anything, you pay a deep price for it by and through sacrifices, harship, dedication, discipline and loyalty-- and all of this can be very expensive in emotions, money and self-esteem as well as time and personal losses.
I've never known love to be free as by nature it demands commitment and personal investment...
and as for the 60's being only free sex, that's nonsense too. I knew as many people who were deeply committed to each other and were never married and much more faithful and loving toward each other than those who were--
cliches are nice, but often they simply mouth facile opinions.
I agree that eugenics is abhorant, but in many subtle way we practice it without being conscious of it; that was one point in the article.
Exactly. Love may have its own rewards but it still costs the person who gives it.
We often tend to rush to extremes and be bi-polar about things; if something is not this then it must be that.. These is a tendency to deny the massive collateral damage of the sexual revolution because of the fear that to do so negates the positive effects of social change.
Contradictory truths often occupy the same space at the same time. For instance, I suggested in the article that those who have more are more favored by sex and those who have less are not. One of catastrophic effects of the sexual revolution resulted when the "free love" favored by the articulate and affluent filtered down into poor neighborhoods with a vengeance. In the census tract where I was a child, nowadays, over 90% of the children do not live with their biological fathers resulting in poverty and violence. When I lived there the neighborhood was relatively stable and peaceful, the number then was 25%. Delving for more nuance, one can look at the quality of life in a typical suburb today where 25% of the kids do not live with their fathers and NOT see the same social and economic harm that the children in my old neighborhood suffered at the same level of fatherlessness, the difference is economics..
These things need thinking about, but they need free thinking, free from the old prejudices and free from the newer prejudices.
I think your article over simplifies love... and sex... If we were to look at sex as just an activity then we are also reducing ourselves to just another species inhabiting this planet and thereby reducing our entire history and traditions and religion to somethinig insignificant...why go to the trouble of exercising our minds and creating civilisations and science and language only to go back to thinking that we are just another species inhabiting the planet???
As for money and power being the attractions... well if sex is just an activity then the chemicals in your body have a lot more to say about it than our material achievements....
In the neighborhood I grew up in, poverty and unemployment were almost absolute. Among black men, the rate of unemployment was higher than it has ever been and the quality of jobs was the lowest. Yet, families were intact at a rate comparable to white affluent suburbs today.
That says a great deal about change in culture and very little about economic change. If one accepts that economic stress breaks apart familes then one would expect the Great Depression to be hardest on family formation and the affluence of the 1960's and 1970's to be the most nurturing.
The numbers run counter to those trends. What follows the trend line is not economics, but changes in attitude.
I would hope that we can all agree on the need for a compassonate society and a strong safety net, we need to also realize that culture and values play a major role in how effective, or ineffective our social programs are.
There is however a danger of doing that in the poisoned arena of today's politics.
I would hope that we could use literature to speak of common experience without bashing each other with the politics of details
One of the things my father used to do during supper table discussions was to let us kids passionatly argue a position with another sibling then he would say, "okay, now you two switch sides".
Switching sides not only tempers our understanding but it also can strengthen the foundation of our ideas by understanding the opposition.
Though there are the two different words, "amor gratis" would be used likely instead of "amor libre," that second one doesn't make much sense in Spanish.
Anyone else have an interpretation of that phrase in another language?
Some of you, Greg included, are talking about love as something given and received -- that paradigm of understanding is what comoditizes it. Love is neither given nor received, not ever. It is a state of mind, the definition of which is indistinct in our individual minds as well as across our cultural group-think.
I'm still a young man, only 36, but in my experience, to the extent that this even makes any sense, love _is_ free. Sometimes it's a comfortable state to be in -- deeply so, and sometimes it hurts like hell. But that doesn't mean that it costs. That just means that we're social.
"Sex is brutally Darwinian in its selection, it spurns the less fortunate while favoring those most blessed in wealth, looks, vanity, strength and youth."
Huh? I see above where you've explicated this, but I'm not getting it. You can only support this through self-reference, I think. How do you explain poor, ugly, weak and old people having sex? And more importantly, what are you saying about the connection between the two? It seems like you're strongly implying an anti-sexual attitude, but I'm not even sure.
I think that everything you're saying is too vague for my simplicity to grok.
I used the word "favor" because that is the word that comes right out of Origin of the Species. Neither Darwin nor I suggest that the disadvantaged do not have sex, which is suggests is that over time sex favors those who have more.
That is just the way it is.
I do not see the world as bi-polar where one must be pro, or anti without nuance.
Hope for a good prostate and Viagra when old then.
Show me? Demographics seem to show lots of people of low socioeconomic status reproducing. I know that doesn't mean that they're having more sex, but it's some degree of evidence that they're having plenty. What's the evidence that they are not?