Germaine Greer’s ‘Sex and Destiny’

There are two schools of thought when it comes to la petite mort; those who believe that sex weakens, and those who believe that it “frees up”. Germaine Greer, in her acerbic style, dismantles both positions, exposing them as self-fulfilling prophecies:

sex religion, like all others, relies upon self-fulfilling prophecies. To the faithful, who believe that orgasm will release tension, make all potentialities accessible, dissipate discontent and aggression and stabilise the ego in its right relation to the world, all these are achieved when the sacred duty is discharged. Those who rise from orgasm sad or angry, disappointed or bored, are themselves at fault. They have held something back, harboured deep scepticism: they are the self-destructive […] We now sneer at those people who believe that to come was to spend some vital substance which ought to have been treasured and husbanded like a savings bank balance, whether they be our own forebears or members of an alien culture; even though many of our culture heroes tell us that sexual abstinence enhances their performance, we assume that such a rule cannot apply to us. We no longer believe that psychic energy discharged as orgasm is withdrawn from some other activity. Rather we hold firmly that physical fitness and spiritual power depend upon keeping the circuits unjammed so that the bio-currents flow freely. None of these ideas is susceptible of empirical proof precisely because each relates to a self-validating self-image. When we believed that masturbation was debilitating, it probably debilitated, and guilt and fear of exposure contributed the neurasthenic indications considered to be symptoms of the activity