The Art of Being Free by James Poulos

Author:James Poulos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Sex

“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” This mantra, allegedly first uttered by Marilyn Monroe and so expressive of our sense of the foundations of sexual romance, has swept the internet with an intensity reminiscent of an STD. You probably still can’t survive a session on Tinder without having it pounded into your head—and heart. If you’re of the most appealing age to advertisers, chances are good you’ve had sex with at least one person who’d tell a pollster The Mantra describes them pretty well. For more than a few women, it has become a hallmark of self-regard. But although few will admit it, it’s equally applicable to guys, who are equally at sea in the awkward, crazy, needy, and passive-aggressive individualism that defines our sexual—and social—situation.

In today’s awkward, paranoid world, where “How are you?” might always be a pickup line, The Mantra preemptively strikes at unwanted acts of autonomy. What it really says, by this point in this book, is all too familiar.

I am crazily; I am selfishly; I am melodramatically.

DEAL WITH IT.

Of course, the most revealing thing of all about this revealing quote is that it wasn’t actually uttered by Marilyn Monroe, everyone’s favorite doomed romantic. It’s apocryphal—yet another phony attribution that emerged anonymously from the depths of the internet, our collective half-consciousness. Somewhere deep in our souls we want it to be true that Marilyn Monroe said exactly the thing that construes our powerful performance of shared powerlessness as a unique personal entitlement. (Turns out, the way it speaks to us is yet another dispiriting reminder of how interchangeably insignificant we really are.*) Marilyn is one of our few national authority figures in sexual culture—naughty enough for Lady Gaga to reference in the song “Government Hooker” but nice enough for the Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Part Norma Jean, part Marilyn Manson, she’s up there with Lincoln and Einstein in the apocryphal quotes department—but alone among giants in representing our sense that inescapable craziness only seems to expand our possibilities for sex, romance, and intimate partnership. The reality sends us zinging away from melodramatic performance, toward the no-drama Seinfeld-and-chill refuge that’s also a popular touchstone in dating app world.

How could Tocqueville possibly shed light on our sexual predicament today? Simple. It’s fueled by the same social logic that shapes all our mores, habits, feelings, and beliefs in the present age. And it shows how what seems to be an ego problem is actually something much different—and more solvable.

FUCK IT

In our ordinary language, there are few more popular and useful ideas than that something is fucked. If we like to imagine that civilizations still connected to the ancient world of honor have many different words for the same thing, like Eskimos with snow, we ourselves communicate our contemporary democratic selves by using the same word for many different situations—perhaps any different one.

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