One of the funniest things I like watching on YouTube is the collection of reactions people have to the underground short video known as "2 Girls 1 Cup." People who have seen that sickness know exactly what I am talking about and probably feel a bit of vomit rising in the back of their throats. The reaction to the video ranges from shock to vomiting. It is really sick shit. Basically, it is a video of a girl defecating into a cup followed by the girls eating and swapping it from mouth to mouth along with vomiting. It is one of the most disgusting things you will ever see. The vileness of the creation begs a certain question. How do people get off to this?
Things like "2 Girls 1 Cup" come at the end of a progression of perversion. Sex and the enjoyment of it is 90% mental. People may find this hard to believe, but they shouldn't. Everyday, millions of men and women satisfy themselves with nothing more than a hand and their own imaginations. It can become so intense and pleasurable that many of these people abandon physical relationships with real people to indulge themselves constantly in a fantasy world of porn. They would almost certainly pursue these things in reality if they could, but things such as laws, morals, and the lack of willing partners makes the pursuit highly problematic for these people. Still, many of these people are able to pull it off.
Because sex is such a mental thing, it becomes a province of the realm of ideas. Basically, sex becomes a subject of philosophy and strategy. If that sounds like an erection killer, it shouldn't be. Many of the sexual practices and fetishes that happen today can trace their philosophical origins to the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis was a debauched hedonist who advocated an unrestrained libertine lifestyle. This lead to him meeting with adversity and prison, but he probably enjoyed himself there as well. De Sade's writings are deep in the idea of the destruction of values and a reordering of reality purely on the dictates of personal preference. This destruction creates a thrill in the destroyer, and this thrill is what I call "desecration."
Sadism is enjoying the humiliation, degradation, and destruction of another human being. Its flip side--masochism--is merely enjoying one's own humiliation, degradation, and destruction. It really doesn't matter whether you are on the giving or receiving end because the thrill is the same. The pleasure comes from the absolute debasement of humanity. This is desecration. It is taking something holy and precious and shitting all over it. These acts of perversion create a thrill as the desecration occurs. It is very exciting and stimulating. Then, it isn't. It stops being fun and becomes just ho-hum. This is the hedonic treadmill in action. What is thrilling today will become boring tomorrow.
Going down the path of desecration creates momentary pleasure followed by boredom and numbness. In order to get the same thrill again, new levels of depravity must be reached. This requires greater acts of depravity, destruction, criminality, and violence. It gets to such an extreme that sex itself is abandoned in favor of just pure fucking evil. This is where monsters come from. This descent into evil is best captured in de Sade's work The 120 Days of Sodom which catalogs a complete descent into the perverse and the profane including torture, mutilation, and murder. That work is sickening, but it faithfully details the slippery slope of desecration. It is a work of fiction, but there are people who have actually done the things described in those pages. Some people may defend de Sade as some sort of hero of freethought, but it is my personal belief that he would have indulged himself in the most criminal of the acts described if given the chance.
The irony of desecration is that it is pursued for the sake of pleasure but ends in boredom and numbness. It is a dead end. People can either continue on the path to becoming monsters, or they simply abandon the path altogether to have relatively boring vanilla sex lives. This is a shame because it doesn't have to be this way. If desecration leads to exhaustion, boredom, and despair, it should stand to reason that consecration will lead to its opposite.
Desecration is where you take something holy and destroy it. Consecration is where you take something ordinary and make it holy and precious. It is the opposite of de Sade. Sex in the consecration mode is done as an act of love and devotion. It is where you celebrate the beauty and goodness and specialness of the other person. This path does not suffer from the hedonic treadmill. The pleasures increase and become more intense. As safety and trust are built between two partners, the passion increases. They find delight in one another. They see the things they love about the other and celebrate those things. This is the sort of thing that classic artists and poets captured in their work.
Desecration is nihilism as sex. It leaves you empty and dark. Consecration is beauty and devotion and love. It leaves you filled and loving life. Consecration has been lost in our times as internet pornography proliferates. The contemporary religious answer is to condemn all sex, but this condemnation merely cedes the sexual realm to the perverts. This abdication results in sexless religion on one hand and profane emptiness on the other hand.
Sex in the proper and flourishing context is a recognition of what is special and praiseworthy in the other person. It is not hedonistic but eudaimonistic. This is one of the great ironies of existence. The path of hedonism results in less pleasure. The path of virtue results in greater pleasure. The greatest and most sublime of sensory experiences are reserved for those who do not seek pleasure.
This idea of consecration is what we know simply as romance. Romance is gone from our time. It is silly to write poems about a beloved or paint their picture. Such notions and motions are an embarrassment now when even husbands can't find one decent thing to say about their wives. Virtue has been reduced to merely the size of breasts and butts and mechanical performance in the bedroom. Wives and girlfriends now try and compete with porn stars with cosmetic surgery, Brazilian waxes, thong underwear, and being willing to do depraved fucked up things in the bedroom. Women don't help themselves by catering to these desires. They merely debase themselves and become less special or lovely in the process. We live in an age where whores are now our queens, and we honor them by shitting on them. This is where we get "2 Girls 1 Cup."
The path of consecration begins quite simply. Find one good thing in the person you love and celebrate that thing. That's it. This will lead to a virtuous cycle as you find another thing and another thing. Consecration is taking something ordinary and seeing the beauty and specialness in that thing. And this is no mere mental thing. A virtue is what it is. And if it is special to you, then it is special. This act of consecration has the ability to spark romance across distances and rekindle romance in relationships long thought dead. This practice of consecration is also what keeps love alive across the years.
We have lost this consecration in our times. We have people who beat and shit on each other, but we can't find the humility within ourselves to find the goodness in another person. We can discuss the varieties of anal sex and bestiality, but we can't tell someone we love them. We can tell someone they are sexy, but we can't tell them that they are beautiful. These are hollow empty times we live in. But we merely have to see the beauty all around us and in each other to get it back.
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NOTES
1. Marquis de Sade
2. The 120 Days of Sodom
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