Life Under Compulsion by Anthony Esolen

Author:Anthony Esolen
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781504018302
Publisher: Open Road Español

Itching Powder for Sale

EPIC SEX!

GET IT, GIVE IT, AND GET IT AGAIN!

—From the cover of a recent issue of Cosmopolitan magazine

The magazine cover splays the truth out naked before our eyes. There’s no person there, no one who needs love, no one sad or shy or confused. There’s no warmth, not even in sin. Human eros, as opposed to the urges of a brute beast, bears the intimations of eternity, of a love that does not fail. But this does not rise to the level of eros. It hardly rises to the level of natural hunger. The degenerate rich in the days of the Roman Empire would binge and purge and binge, for a sickly pleasure in eating and for distraction from the emptiness of their lives. The cover encourages the same bingeing and purging, get and give and get … what? Some undefined object. “Pick me up, open me,” it whispers, wheedling. “I hide the secret of epic sex!” The adjective, once filled with literary and human meaning, is empty, to be filled with that subhunger, that terrible desire for something, anything, to desire.

That is what prurience is all about. It is, literally, the instigation of an itch. It doesn’t have to be about sex, but in our mass marketing, sex is the most common virus for the inception and the spread of the rash. The itch brings no joy. We know that when we are scratching some scrofulous dermatitis, we’d be better off not scratching. But we can’t help ourselves. To think about the itch, without scratching, would drive us mad. It is why Dante, cunning psychologist, punished the petty bunko artists with a never-subsiding itch, the sufferers raking their flesh as if they were scraping the scales off a pike. They feel a ferocious moment’s relief, burning in frustration. The prurient cannot move an inch without the tickle, the prick, the bristle.

He says, “I won’t scratch that itch! I won’t think about it. I’ll count to ten.” But none of those tricks work. It is the colossal failure of some (not all) calls to abstinence, when there is nothing grand or beautiful beyond to stir a noble human longing. The call to abstinence, detached from the deepest human realities, is nothing more than a call not to scratch the itch. It acknowledges the itch. It reminds us of the itch. It allows the itch to creep. It permits the prurience of magazines, library books, advertising campaigns, politicians, video games, all the little spikes and prickles of a consumptive economy, coughing and coughing. Then it says, “In all these other ways you may debase yourself. You may scratch here, here, and here, yes, a little to the left, ah yes, but not here.”

Nor are our schools any refuge. They are the insanatoria where the law of the itch is taught. They lace their textbooks with the oil of poison ivy. “Protect yourself from these diseases,” our children are advised, because they must yield to the disease they have already caught.

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