A new development in the field of sexuality. The orgy is over, liberation is over; it is not sex one is looking for but one’s ‘gender’, i.e. both one’s ‘look’ and its genetic formula. People no longer oscillate between desire and its fulfilment, but between their genetic forumula and their sexual identity (to be discovered). This is a new erotic culture. After a culture based on prohibition (‘What are your prerequisites for sex?’ — ‘The door has to be locked, the lights have to be out, and my mother has to be in another State’), this is a culture based on the questioning of one’s own definition: ‘Am I sexed? What sex am I? Ultimately, is sex necessary? What does sexual difference consist in?’ Liberation has left everyone in an undefined state (it is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are). After a triumphalist phase, the assertion of female sexuality has become as fragile as that of male sexuality. No one knows where they are […]
Pushed to its logical conclusions, this would leave neither masculine nor feminine, but a dissemination of individual sexes referring only to themselves, each one managed as an independent enterprise. The end of seduction, the end of difference, and a slide towards a different system of values. An astonishing paradox emerges: sexuality might become once again a merely secondary problem, as it was in most earlier societies, and be eclipsed by other stronger symbolic systems (birth, hierarchy, asceticism, glory, death). This would prove that sexuality was after all only one possible model among many, and not the most crucial.
— Jean Baudrillard, America
