S2 EP4 - Lust

[Music] This is Steven Fry's Seven Deadly Sills. [Music] Episode 4. Lust. Here we are. Lust. Lust. Lust. Lust. You've been looking forward to this one for ages, of course, you have. Pride and an avarice are overly well, but they're too proud of being abstracted into dry generalities. Last, last, last is, is particular. Lust is inside us. It churns and swirls and growls and howls in our deepest recesses. There appear to be more synonyms for us in our language than for most words. Lustful, lurch-less, licentious, lascivious, libidinous, licorice, lute, loose, lubricious, liberty. That's just those beginning with L. Must be something to do with lapping and licking lips. There's preroyant, debaught, disillute, wanton, fast, impure, unchaste, conchupacent, intemperate, dissipated, degenerate, sinful, depraved, crude, goatish sensual, promiscuous, carl-randy, horny, raunchy, pervy, naughty, nasty. Lust, lust shames us, it thrills us, it drives us, it defines us, it's wicked, it's personal, it's secret, it's private, but maybe it isn't going to be private for very much longer. In the old days, they had the rack to stretch you out to determine the truth of your wickedness. Although desperate confessions of blasphemous lusts might come screaming from you, the world knew in its heart that admissions of sin extracted under torture could hardly be relied upon. After the rack, as Oscar Wilde neatly noted, there came the press. Now secrets could be extracted by research, dogged pursuit, or rifling through personal trash, long lenses, phone hacking, and the bribing of acquaintances. But the salacious gossip, pervade by journalists and paparazzi, was hardly more to be relied upon than confessions wrenched from poor souls under threat of outer defay. No, the armor of personal privacy was still hard to pierce and depravity, hard to prove, unless a person's inner lust was driven to outer actions that could be pointed at photograph and shared. The lust inside an individual's head was still secret and hidden from the world. But now we are closer than we've ever been to a world without secrecy. You only have to leave your laptop open, having neglected to hide your web cache and browsing history, and "ouch". Mother, girlfriend, boyfriend, child, all might be able to see where your lust has taken you. It's like that horrible scene in your dreams where you won't naked into a meeting or restaurant. Tweets and photos and other acts of social media in discretion continue to forces all out into the open. As so many have discovered to their cost, social media messages never die, and one careless tweet can expose something deeply personal that may just humiliate or shame us into eternal flight from the world. Many people are unaware, even now, that the details of exactly who they follow on social media are open and readable, easily tracked by outsiders. "Minister, why do you follow @AsianNimFet on Twitter?" "But that's nothing." We've all heard the alternately over-eager or darkly pessimistic talk of the coming wave of AI, bio-augmentation, and brain-machine interfacing. This coming revolution is commonly expressed as an existential threat to the workplace in reality. We might consider the threat it poses to the play space and the inner recesses of ourselves. It won't belong, really it won't, before we all gleefully dive into technologies that will, for example, let us engage with and operate devices by thought alone. We won't be able to resist such a thrilling future, but think how susceptible that will make us to having our brains hacked. I know it sounds scarily futuristic and an extreme scenario, unlikely outside science fiction, but a future in which our own brains go online and get plugged into the matrix is really not very far off, and if history teaches us anything, it is that whatever is online can always be hacked. For example, malevolent spirits, bad actors, brain hackers, cowboy or corporate may soon be able to unlock a very unholy grail indeed and be able to see the actual pictures in our heads or a rendered approximation of them. Imagine if someone could see the pictures that flash through your mind when you masturbate. We will never be able to hide the wicked thoughts inside us ever again. You doubt me, with fear and horror you doubt me, but your wicked thoughts can already be tracked in your computer by someone who really knows how to follow the breadcrumbs you didn't know you were leaving, the trail of lustful drool shall we call it, so it really isn't that great a step for them to track not the computer on your desk, but the one between your ears. Everyone will excitedly sign up to brain machine interfacing technology because of the power and ease and fun and function it will bring, and rather than arrive with a fanfare and role of drums, it will creep in incrementally, as all such technologies always do. Like Facebook and Google, it'll emerge as a fun, benevolent, young and vibrant service. Like them it will be nominally free, funded by advertising, never evil, always on the side of the angels. As with Facebook and Google, we won't even notice how pervasive and world-changing it all is until it's too late to retreat. The advertising algorithms those two giants have now can eavesdrop and survey you in truly creepy ways as most of us are already beginning to be aware or should be. Automated code bots read our preferences wherever we go. In the physical space they track our phones in the real world, in cyberspace they track our every move in the virtual one. The moment we consent to the excitement of brain machine interfacing and those excitement will be irresistible as new technology always is, is the moment we submit to having our darkest, deepest thoughts read, recorded, and if we are maliciously hacked, transmitted for the world to see or stored curly away for the purposes of blackmail and extortion. There is a credible way of tracing the history of technology as the history of the assault on the sanctity of our own thoughts. Ironic, isn't it, that it has taken us all these centuries to shake off the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresence of God, peering into our minds, seeing our darkest secrets and judging us, only to invent omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent machines to take God's place and return us to the status of frightened medieval peasants, quivering in the pews and crossing ourselves because we know the judgment and damnation are just around the corner if we aren't very, very careful. And how well we know the price of judgment and damnation, we already watch celebrities and politicians and others crash and fall a new one almost every day. They are damned and cast into outer darkness because their thought crimes have broken the surface or on account of actions or the expression of ideas that are held to be blasphemous and heretical according to our contemporary shibboleths and orthodoxies. And pfft, they find themselves redacted from the world and from life and history. There's democracy for you. The internet gives us, John and Jane Citizen, more knowledge and access to more goods and services, the near-own Napoleon or Frederick the Great could ever have imagined. And now it has given us some of that tyrannical power too. Just as Roman emperors, despotic rulers, popes and dictators have always with a swift downward jerk of the thumb, banished, excommunicated, executed and exiled poets, orators and thinkers who displeased them. So now we, with a swift click of the mouse, can banish, excommunicate, executed and exiled those who vex our us. The sins, the blasphemies and heresies of the 15th century seem quaint and silly to us, but will the blasphemies and heresies of our own time appear any less absurd to future generations or outside observers? It's time to remind ourselves of the meaning of the word moral. Moral, morease, morality. These are not words that describe what is permanently good or bad. They describe what is thought to be good or bad at any given time. Morals are customs. They're not universal ethical standards that hold true at all times and in all places if, indeed, there can be said to be any such standards. In George Washington's day, it was, for example, deeply shocking, immoral and wrong to have sexual relations with one of your own gender, indeed it called for capital punishment. But it was not immoral or wrong to own slaves. O Tritton, O Tramur as the French put it, different times, different morals, different customs, different manners. The branch of philosophy called ethics tries to cut through the societal taboos, the customs, the biases, the morality of a given time and scrutinise what is crucially and consequentially good or bad shorn of our prejudices and instincts. For example, many people think it immoral for a brother and sister to cohabit and enjoy sexual relations with each other. But if they're of age and the brother has had a forsectomy, for example, then the one convincing objection, the chance of a malformed or compromised fetus, does not arise. Even less if two sisters or two brothers or a father and son of consenting age or mother and daughter of consenting age had a sexual relationship. For same sex, incest could never produce offspring, impaired or otherwise. What then is the true ethical objection to incest if the risk of inbreeding can be discounted? And yet our contemporary social and cultural moral antennae may vibrate distressingly if we confronted a real life example of a father and son living together as lovers, for example. It would surely be wrong to ascribe our objection to a deontic fixed inner moral law. We would have to ethically unpick our objection and see it for what it is, a taboo peculiar to our tribe based on years of tradition, biblical instruction and social prohibition. In fact, incest is perfectly legal in plenty of Western countries. France, for example, and in America, Rhode Island DC and New Jersey do not outlaw incestuous relations between consenting adults only into familial marriage itself is prohibited. When we hold a thing wrong, we have to wonder whether we think it wrong because, as in the case of incest, we are so used to the taboo that we cannot shrug it off or whether we have scrupulously examined the good or bad of an action and its real ethical meaning. But these are actions and behaviors can a desire be evil or wrong. I'll return to that in a moment. When I was growing up, the word moral had in truth only one connotation, a sexual one. When somebody was described as having loose morals, being morally lax, immoral or of loose moral fiber, it was code for what used to be euthanized as liberty and propensities. It meant that they were probably living in sin or promiscuous. What we might now call a serial shagger. In our medicalised world of syndrome and disorder, we might now even go so far as to describe them as victims of sex addiction. It is unlikely that we would today at any rate use the language of morality to describe sexual promiscuity. In a period as short as my lifetime, a person's morality or moral compass is now more likely to refer to financial impropriety, bullying or bigotry than to behaviour in the bedroom. For the most part, we would say that this is the result of a finer ethical apprehension of the world. Others might argue that we have replaced one set of prejudices, one set of ethical assertions, one moral code with another, no less arbitrary and overbearing. We now believe that suppression, prudery, guilt and shame are more harmful sins than the sin of lust. But we cannot know what future generations might think and how harshly they will judge and mock our certainties. President tells us that we can be fairly sure that almost everything we tweet or cheerfully exchange by email or WhatsApp today will be accounted darkly immoral and bestially wrong in the years to come. "Hey, hope, it was ever thus? Meanwhile, what of what goes on inside us?" "We lust. We all lust. We know that this is not the same as love. Love is fine. Noble spiritual and clean. It is an ideal. It can find expression in sensual, physical acts of union. Of course it can, but it is far from limited to those. The Greeks had different names for different kinds of love, filial for friendship and loyalty as in anglophile or philanthropy. Storage for the tenderness and affection felt between children and parents, for example, agape, spiritual love and eros for sexual, physical love and lust. We get our word erotic from eros, of course. Never before in our history have we had so much access to free and unapologetically explicit erotic imagery, writing, photography, film, graphics, devices and soon automata of an android or robotic kind. It is as if the current generations, those born after 1990s say, are the subjects of an enormous experiment whose results we can only guess at. Will the young, brought up in the world of poor and harb and its kin, have a fresher, healthier, easier approach to the erotic in life, less neurosis concerning the sexual side of their natures? One could reason that this should be so. Or will they grow up desensitized in need of more and more intense details realistic and extreme imagery at worst might it lead to greater impulses to objectify, to take unasked, to molest and rape? Others might reason that this should be so. Only careful research and honest empirical analysis will tell us one way or the other. At the moment I'm noticing studies that appear to show young people now have less sex than the generations before, whether that's because they're scared of relationships or so burdened by death or so wanked out by their online jauntings I can't tell. But I return to the question I just asked, can a desire be evil or wrong? If a desire, a fantasy played out in the mind, has no consequences, other than perhaps the frustration of being unrequited and unrealized or being made so public as to be an embarrassment to the object of that desire, then how, you might argue, can it be sinful to lust? We know Jesus said that a sin committed in the head was as bad as one committed in fact that to look lustfully was as bad as to commit adultery or as he puts it in the authorized version that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. He had a solution for that. If they write "I offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee, for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell." Most of us would surely reject such a notion of a thought-crime and ask Jesus to get some fresh air and have a word with himself. To us, the only likely sin in looking at a woman lustfully would be to do so in such a way that she couldn't help noticing and which would discomfort or threaten her. That would be a crime, according to contemporary moral thought and feeling, but to criminalize thinking doesn't fit the consequentialist tenor of our times. How can it be as bad to think of stealing a car, for example, as actually to deprive a person of one? Or thinking of punching someone in the face? Surely, as Shakespeare has character say more than once, thought is free. Of course, we must face the truth that the lust that urges us to engage in pornography as a viewer of content does have consequences. By watching free pornography in particular, you are contributing to a current crisis of dwindling income for porn actors. Do listen to John Ronson's superb podcast series, The Butterfly Effect, to get a sense of this available where you found this podcast. In the same way that a coke user is contributing to the violence and corruption in the narco. So, by using online porn, you are contributing to all the variants of deleterious consequence, blowback and difficulty that are experienced by sex performers around the world. And that, of course, is just adult consensual pornography. We know of the unspeakable harm done by what seems to be a bewildering and depressing upward trend in child pornography and those impressed into sexual slavery around the world. You're listening to Stephen Fry's "Seven Deadly Sins." I'll be back after a short interval. The jury is still out on the question of whether porn harms the consumer of porn, whether it "vitiates" their soul for one of a better phrase. In the same way, it used to be thought to "vitiate the body," cause blindness, terrors and brain-softing and so on. If you're a parent, no matter how broad-minded and contemporary and outlook, what you do when it first becomes apparent that your beloved baby child is now grown up enough to masturbate. The signs are unmistakable, under the bed on the sheets in the nightstand drawer or bedside table, devices, bottles, tissues, stains, smears. I needn't go on. We've all grown out of the "kinsie era" fear of self-abuse, detrimental to the mental health and moral fibre of the masturbator, but surely any parent, no matter how liberated, is bound to wonder and fret just a little. If only I could just check their browsing history. I hope they aren't looking at anything too extreme, too violent, too weird, too out there. Even if you were convinced that they only masturbated to legal and non-violent images and ethically sourced porn, and God help us there probably are sites and services that can guarantee such a thing, even if you were convinced that no model actor or performer was in any way harmed, distressed, humiliated or mentally damaged by participating in the scenes your young one watches while playing with her or himself, even then, you would worry as any parent must, whatever their own lurid sexual history, you would wonder if this jerking off was somehow harmful to the soul and psyche of your child. We can be as logical, rational, objective and intellectually scrupulous as you like, but when it comes to those we love, it is hard not to feel confused, self-contradictory and inconsistent. And there are new taboos that are purely of our age, new morays. We are not only frightened of the urges of our own bodies, but the price we pay for making an error in gender politics, when trying to understand or even describe those urges is now so high that we find it safer to fall silent. So many things are, quote, "not okay," unquote. To those who have reassigned their gender from male to female have the right to call themselves women. Do men need or feel they need pornography more than women, for example? If so, how much of that is biological and how much acculturated? When men are sexually aroused, there is an obvious, unmistakable physical expression by way of blood rushing to the penis in the form of a hard on, often with accompanying viscous but fluid pre-com weeping from the eretra. I am assured that there is a similar complementary oozing or increase in moisture levels in female genital areas. There is an old, hard-assed businessman's phrase which is silly and irritating like all business jargon, which makes a point pithily. Stiff prick knows no pride. It is used as a metaphor for what it expresses is the obvious but easily forgotten fact that you cannot choose what your body responds to. In films and other cultural media, comedy, horror and the erotic, all share the strange gift or curse. I have been able to elicit a physical response that comes unbidden. In a comedy you make loud exhalations and vocalize noises that we call laughter. If you have ever stood at the back of a theatre during a comedy and watched an audience simultaneously lean forward and bark with laughter, you will know what I mean. It is a remarkable sight. Actually, I knew someone who worked at the Savoy Theatre in London when Michael Frayne's noisy's off was playing and she told me that every night there would be plenty of urine-soaked seats to be dealt with. So the physical response to comedy can go beyond laughter. You really can wet yourself. The same results could be monitored during the screening of a horror film. The audience screams, gasps, gulps, cries or does a squirt when the mad murderer leaps out of the wardrobe. And when it comes to erotic cinema, you don't need me to remind you that willies and clits shift quiver and stiffen areas, juice up, breathing alters, pulses, quicken, etc. I am frank about the physicality here because I want almost to tickle you and not into a rousal but into its opposite state, into wrinkle-nosed outrage, distaste, shock, annoyance. Why do we get so disturbed, embarrassed, shamed, cross-prurient, prudish about genital matters? Why it makes no sense? Let's call upon that alien species so useful in debate, the Martians. There they are, looking down on our planet and our goings on. And what do they see? On one side they see shameful daily examples from our species of torture, cruelty, deceit, abuse, violence, murder and destruction. On the other side they observe that nature has granted us earthlings, for the purposes of our procreation and recreation, a marvellous set of sensations that arise from flirting and fondling, sliding and writhing, caressing and messing, stroking and poking, spurting and squirting, they give us blissful quantities of in-dorf-infead joy and satisfaction. And the result can be babies. It's a wholly good and wonderful system, our Martian would think. They are astonished, however, when they focus in more closely and start, like good alien sociologists, to make notes of our language and its rules, customs and taboos, they are baffled to discover that to us, words that refer to this marvellous, slippery, bodily stroking and poking, are outlawed, banned, taboo. The same with any words that describe the excrement, the essential expulsion of the non-nutritive elements of the food that sustains us, vital to our existence as they are, we forbid their use in polite company. Fuck shit, whenk tits, ask, can't cock dick piss, come pussy, jerk off, etc, etc, etc. Absolutely not. But humankind can happily say, sorry I'm late, the traffic was murder. How killingly funny! Oh, such a cruel weight for my results, it was torture. How can this be wonders the Martian shaking his little green head? Murder, killing, cruelty and torture are terrible things. What's wrong with Cox, Cunston, come for heaven's sake? It makes no sense. Well, we can all think about how this has come to pass in our long history. We complement ourselves that we are thinking, sapient beings with reason and moral compasses and the ability to sift and wean ethical issues, that we have somehow lifted ourselves up from the base, the best deal. If we cannot but recognize that no matter how clever our language, culture and social structuring, no matter how finely tuned our faculties of aesthetics and reason, we remain in our depths, violently boiling cauldrons of chaotic hormones and wild animal urges that cause us shame, no matter how much we rationalize them. Everything that we deem animal in us, perfectly natural, hominid, primate mammals as we are, knocks us off the golden, apologian purches that we falsely believe ourselves fitted for. Defication and sex are especially troubling to our self-image. Defication we can forgive as long as its sights and smells are cunningly hidden and slushed away. We know that everyone from the queen to Tom Cruise has to poo. Last we find harder to systematise into special rooms, porcelain and plumbing. Like pooing, lust becomes the subject of jokes, snickers and giggles and as with pooing any public manifestation can become a matter of instant humiliation, the juices from which we are composed are always to be hidden. But we know our bug bears fetishes and taboos on this subject go back a long, long time. and that few if any human societies are entirely free from them. The question is not, are we all subject to irrational shame, but whether the deboos under which we live have a point? Do they express the wisdom of the collective unconscious that recognises lust to be harmful to the individual and its group? Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, of course, wrote this famous verse. "Lose thoughts at first, like subterranean fires, burn inward, smothering with unchaste desires, but getting vent to rage and fury turn, burst in volcanoes and like etna burn. The heat increases as the flames aspire and turns the solid hills to liquid fire. So sensual flames, when raging in the soul, first officiate all the parts, then fire the whole, burn up the bright, the butious, the sublime and turn our lawful pleasures into crime." We could say today, or at least most of us in the West probably would, that for us the only conditions under which pleasures can be turned into crimes would be when consent is not sought or given. Children are clearly not competent to consent, nor for that matter are animals, those with severe mental or cognitive impairment, nor those whose competence to consent is compromised by spiked drinks and the like. Otherwise, these days the law rightly does not interfere in carnal matters and the public's long, wrinkled, hypocritically disapproving nose is barred from the bedroom. Adultery is no longer a crime. The word "fornication" has no meaning in our age, but that is not to say that in our free world of free love, we're not made painfully aware that there can often be a heavy price to be paid for being light with love. Those who play away from home, who cheat on or deceive the one to whom they have bound themselves will know how heavy that price can be. Every morning to wake up with a feeling like hot lead leaking into the stomach as one surveys the disaster one is made of one's own and others' lives. Anger, the pain, the humiliating squabbling details, who's going to pick the children up from ballet and taicwondo, who's getting the house and the car, the distressing burden placed on the loyalty of friends? Why couldn't I keep my cock in my trousers? Why couldn't I keep my legs closed? What was I thinking of? No wonder we assigned slimy, slithery demons. To represent our most destructive and self-destructive actions. As puck rightly observed, "Lord, what fool these mortals be?" Incidentally, when I said that all the pleasure was given us for the purposes of procreation and recreation, you might have thought, "No, Stephen, procreation only. As an old gayer, you may like to believe it's all for the purpose of recreation, but let's be honest, it's for reproduction, not for lustful delight." It's like saying food and drink is only for sustenance, cuisine, baking, wine, all those are not why we have food. Sex and sustenance are the necessities that make life possible, but the paradox of living is surely that it is the extras, fine food and pleasurable sex that make life livable. Food ends up in the toilet bowl and lust writes its crude messages on the bedsheets and our juices betray our real selves, which reminds me to tell you an only slightly relevant joke. I can't help myself. So, as you have to begin every joke, so President Trump, right, was working up by staffers and security one cold February morning, not long ago, in fact, was this year. Out on the snowy south lawn of the White House was written in large, clear letters, Donald Trump is an asshole. When Trump looked at the window and saw this, he was furious and sent for his security staff, and they had disturbing news. Sir, if you look closely, you can see that the letters are yellow. That message was, in fact, pissed into the snow. What? Yes, sir. And test results just in show that the urine is that of the vice president. Oh, no. Not Mike Pence. Mike hates me. I come to a Donald Trump, you might know just, sir, it's worse than that. How can it be worse than that? The V has pissed a nasty, nasty message about me into the snow. Yes, sir, but we have determined that the handwriting is "malanious." You got it. Whether you laughed at it or not, it's worth ending with the thought that of all the sins, old and new, last also happens to be the one that we find the funniest. As children, it's poo and weeweas and bums and whilies that send us into delirious giggling, of course, but that's just standing in for what will become the great subject for humor for the rest of our lives. Our sexual natures. The gap between the often pompous self-regarding and upright citizen and the surging chemicals and roaring hormones inside them, the disconnect between what they say and what their sexual organs make them feel and do is so enormous that only laughter can bridge it. Also amusing, as the porter in Shakespeare's Macbeth and T.S. Eliot noted in their own ways, is how between the desire and the performance their falls are shadow. Viagra and Cialis are there to help men overcome this. They have transformed the porn industries, you can imagine. Anyone can perform in front of the camera now. The producers no longer rely on unusually gifted actors who can always get wood. But technology, while increasing our access to sexual material exponentially has also increased our vulnerability to exposure. Stories of behaviour, celebrity comics getting their coxote and jerking off without having been asked to, actresses and politicians having their private photo collections hacked, rumours, revelations, revenge porn. In the field of sex there are planted many, many landmines. And as with all the deadly sins, this change in our moral outlook are ethical standards. The undrempt of technical access to sexual material, the medical solutions to impotence, to impregnation and to disease protection have all arrived at once and made the path from lustful thought to lustful action as well lubricated in every sense as possible. But with no concomitant set of rules to guide, limit or direct our actions. However harsh, arbitrary, unfair, pure-autannical and despotic, we may think the moral outlook may have been in the past. It did at least give us very well-established codes of behaviour, etiquette and manners. These were followed doubtless reluctantly, resentfully and fearfully, but they did at least give a clear structure and direction to our lives. These days we're all playing tennis without a net, without a service called, without tram lines, without a baseline, umpires or line judges, but in front of a bigger crowd of jeering, hooting, mocking spectators than ever before, everything we do is public. No wonder we're also bloody angst-ridden. Freedom is wonderful, of course it is. But like all animals born into and entirely habituated to captivity, when the cage door opens, and the wide spaces of lawlessness, independence and freedom beckon, many of us turn round and crawl shyly back into the cage. It's the only home we've known. It's safe there. We know our bounds, it's cramped and confining, but it's what we know. The unregulated wilds are just too frightening. If we can only snuggle into the straw and play privately with ourselves, everything will be fine. Well, thanks for listening. I hope you all have plenty of water-soluble, guilt-free, stain-free fun, until we meet again to look at envy. Don't forget to tweak me @stivenfri with the hashtag #7deadlysins, the seven as a number, if you'd like to contribute thoughts for the final wrap-up bodysode. You've been listening to Steven Fry's #7deadlysins. Grateful thanks to our composer, Guy Fahley. The show is produced by Andrew Sampson and Norman Goodman. Additional episode information can be found at stevenfry.com/bananaskins. This has been a Sam Fry limited production. [BLANK_AUDIO]