Weaponized Sex

As I continue to read 1984 by Geroge Owell, one occurring theme throughout the story is how the government prohibits freedom to derive pleasure from sex. The Party (government) in which the protagonist Winston lives in desires power and control of the citizens. One way the government does this is by removing the independence that one gets from performing sex on their own accord:

The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.

To kill the sexual instinct would remove one of the primal instincts that humans possess. To be in control of the most uncontrollable aspects of a person puts them in ultimate submission. The Party realized this long ago, and therefore implemented strategies such as the perpetuation of chastity through The Junior Anti-Sex League, a group dedicated to keeping people sex-free. As the story goes on though, Winston realizes an even more disturbing aspect:

There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.

The Party didn’t just extinguish the sexual passion and aggression, they transformed it into a tool to rally up their citizens. On the level of psychological manipulation, they are bottling up its citizen’s sexual energy, and only allowing them to expel it during times of fear, hatred or otherwise. The Party must have realized that eliminating the human sexual desire was impossible, but on the same time, understood the power it could have over its people if it were to be packaged differently. And the Party is all about power.

This idea – sex as a form of weaponized control – also appeared in a Black Mirror episode that I recently watched. {SPOILERS UP AHEAD] The episode titled “Men Against Fire” shows a world in which soldiers posses highly specialized technology which aids the soldiers in finding and killing genetic mutants. Just like the government in 1984, this one deceives the soldiers: the technology masked the fact that the soldiers were killing normal humans in a mass genocide. Even before the exposure of this fact, soldiers were rewarded sexual fantasy dreams if they killed any of the “mutants.” As a driving force to kill and let out this aggression, the government bottled up the soldier’s sexual desire. The unaware soldiers began to associate the slaughtering of these “mutants” with pleasure and release, only encouraging the government’s goals and agenda.

Both these pieces show an entity that gains power through control of a human’s sexual instincts. It’s scary to think how such a feeling of independence and pleasure can be manipulated on whim in these futuristic societies. Although our current society (especially in the US) doesn’t have a bar on sex, there is definitely a sense of marketing manipulation tied to it. Advertisers uses subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) marketing campaigns for clothing, beauty supplies, even car commercials centered around sexual hotness of the models. By using this tactic, they hope the consumer associated their product with sex, or ultimately, pleasure. This would incline the consumer to purchase said product – a seamless control. As we look at these futuristic societies, it’s important to compare it to modern society, for we may not be as far away from this reality as we would like to think.