The Neoliberal Trojan Horse

‘The violation of human connection, and consequently the risk of a post traumatic stress disorder, is highest of all when the survivor has been not merely a passive witness but also an active participant in violent death or atrocity.’ – Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery

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One of the oldest tricks in the book is destroying an adversary through exposure of deviancy or sexual misconduct.

For the last 2000 years, the pernicious doctrine of original sin, humanity has been living in purgatory just for being. This in itself, I believe, is one of the root causes of humanities trans-generational trauma. Besides the social and economic attacks on our societies and realities, modern culture also twists the core of every individual’s sexual identity.

In the free market, human sexuality is treated as a business opportunity. It is commodified and sold, repackaged, and refreshed. In mass media culture, human sexuality is not a free-formed thing. What influences our sexual identities and preferences is rarely called into question. These ideas form the core of this essay and are what I refer to as ‘the Neoliberal Trojan horse’. I am the one of the billions of test subjects in this global experiment, and I have experienced the negative effects on my physical and mental well being from being exposed to the dominant cultures version of human sexuality.

As a young boy, I—like millions of other boys—was told that I had to take, by force if necessary, what was mine to be taken. I heard “funny” stories about female friends being raped when unconscious from alcohol.

Even before this, Hollywood had sown the seeds of patriarchy and misogyny. The sound of Faye Dunaway screaming in Little Big Man still resounds in my brain. The sight of Marlon Brando sodomizing a sobbing 19-year-old Maria Schneider will forever haunt me. As I write this, I am struggling with a variant of porn addiction. I abstain. I relapse. I abstain. I relapse. My sexual desire is completely at odds with my values and beliefs. That distance between my ideals and my behaviour causes a vacuum that can never be filled. This is the Trojan horse. Sexuality has been made horrific and violent, and the gap that exists lets all manner of degradation seep in.

I know how this behaviour makes me feel, so I can guess that others must feel very much the same. I know that this—male sexuality shaped and twisted by pornography and pornographic mass media—has become the norm even though it is utterly repugnant. I know that the figures for rape and violence against women and children are beyond comprehension.

Online pornography is so powerful because it reinforces the dominance of the dominant culture by manipulating our innate limbic response. In my case, I have spent hours scrolling through dating apps. I have lost days and weeks. I have felt my body enflamed and sore from constant synaptic stimulation. When the addictive behaviour begins, it feels as though a virus has been activated in the same way a computer virus can disrupt the normal functioning of a healthy computer system and I am left helpless. My latest relapse was by the far the most virulent to date. I was left in a state where I had to take anti-inflammatory painkilling tablets for the pain in my testicles. When I am in the grip of the addiction, I do not think of the women I message as human beings with flesh and feelings; they are physical representations of my pornographic desire. Sometimes, I realize what I’m doing and my brain attempts to regain control and I message with dignity and respect. To my despair and disgust, this doesn’t happen often.

Up until yesterday, although engaging in the above behaviour, I hadn’t watched pornography for over 4 months. The socially engineered compulsion had managed to convince the rational part of my brain that if I wasn’t watching pornography it would be OK. This is of course ridiculous.

So, what are the influences that the dominant culture exerts on the sexuality of the modern human (especially males)? The first thing it does is it conflates violence and sex. This is essential as violence is an essential facet of the dominant culture – we take with violence, we take the land, food, water, air, and sex with violence. How else are we going to take it. In this mind-set, the form of a young child or woman is as much as an exploitable resource as air, rivers, and non-humans are.

The next step is to take ownership of sexuality and use it for its own ends of commercialization and propaganda. Sexual propaganda and pornography has long played a key role in wartime, further reinforcing the conception of sex being connected with violence. But we are never told that every minute a women or child is raped. It is to this end that the dominant culture seeks desperately to completely sexualize the modern child and facilitate their continued exploitation at the whims and dictates of the omnipotent free market.

Human love has, in so many ways, become about violence. Children are taught this. I was taught this. We all are taught this because it makes us vulnerable and susceptible. The dominant culture holds our vision of love; it owns our sex, because it knows that this is the core of what it means to be human. It denies and forbids us authentic experience while forever dangling it just out of our reach. It uses it to sells us things we don’t want and yet think we need. It uses it to sell us the idea that it is going to give us back that thing it stole from us in the first place and like terrorized and traumatized kidnap victims, we believe them. What other choice do we have?

This is the dominant culture’s Trojan Horse. School children are being bombarded with pornographic imagery online while being exposed to agenda-driven political programmes on the redefinition of gender so as to annihilate women as a social and political class altogether.

I do not remember giving my consent to this. Do you? Pornography is the vehicle through which the modern male is initiated into the neoliberal version of reality. It is the window through which he is able to view his humiliation, degradation, and severing from nature. There is nothing whatsoever that is natural about online pornography. It is the ultimate corruption of what it means to be human.

Once you have been socialized to be aroused by cruel sex acts carried out on the bodies of strangers, much damage has been done. We do not learn about love, we learn about sex, specifically violent sex, and violent sex has become the prevalent norm in the dominant culture. This experience removes and isolates us from our everyday life and fuels the war against women and children. The Home Office now records data on homicide victims and the relationship of the victim to the principal suspect and the sex of the victim. In short, we are keeping a record of violence visited upon women in -so-called ‘civilized’ society. No wonder the dominant culture is attempting to annihilate the legal definition what it means to be a women through identity politics. How can there be a war against women if there are no women and if biological sex is redefined?

The language of patriarchy tells us ‘to fuck’ in order to subdue, to control and dominate. It doesn’t say anything about love. For the dominant it is all about exploitation and love has no place; shame, guilt, fear dominate our sense of attachment to others, the natural world and ourselves. So, rape becomes a legitimate weapon of war and for this the dominant culture has militarized sexuality.

Men are victims, but we must accept our role as perpetrators of violence against women and children. Men collectively benefit from this arrangement of power, despite our individual struggles and hardships. Our work is twofold. First, we must unlearn these toxic lessons—a lifelong task—and rebuild an authentic and healthy sense of sexuality, affection, and love. And second, we must take part in the broader political struggle against patriarchy, sexual violence, and militarism.