May 29 2007
Sex, Soma and Brave New World
“Did you know that women don’t like to have sex with small wee-wee’s? Here take this miracle pill! It’s a phase. You’ll grow out of it.”
“Hey, baby, check me out in my newest, skimpy, tell-all panties… for $19.99 a month you can watch me do all kinds of sexual acrobatics! And for an addition fee, baby, I can make a house call. See you soon!”
“Erectile dysfunction? Ask your doctor for the perfect pill. Don’t let ED screw up your sex life.”
“Keep your local drug dealer, I mean, physician on speed dial if your erection lasts more than 4 consecutive hours. You might need to be rushed to the emergency room…”
“Plethoravitus. Guaranteed to enhance your sex life for up to two weeks. Side effects include, nausea, projectile vomiting, irradiated skin, bleeding, diarrhaea, weight loss, and other nondescript symptoms. Not all effects from daily ingestion are known. If you suddenly hear strange wispy voices from nonexistent people, please contact your nearest priest or preacher, as medical doctors and paramedics can no longer help you.”
Does any of this sound familiar to you? It should. Every time I get on MySpace, every time I flick on the boob-tube, every time I scan the magazine racks… hell, I can’t buy a stick of celery or an apple without being bombarded with sex ads. As you wait at the check-out stand you might notice this familiar caption on a “teen” magazine, “5 Sexual positions you’ve never heard of.” Or how about this one, “How she likes it in bed.”
From all the lascivious, you’d almost think that people are walking the streets conducting impromptu Bacchanalias, or are dosey-doing their partners round and round… and round. No doubt some people are screwing around more than a shaking bug-eyed Chihuahua in heat… and I’m not talking about the weather. I dearly hope they are a minority of a minority…
At times it feels as though we’ve stepped into Adulus Huxley’s Brave New World. The book had the Alphas and the Betas, we’ve got the terms Winners and Losers. The book has Soma, we’ve got anti-depressants. The book advocates sex with many partners in order to control the population, we’ve got our advertising firms saying the same thing on all levels (they leave out the control part though).
The particular similarity between modern reality and this book that gets me the most is Soma. When I read this book back in Middle School, everyone in my classthought this whole thing was strange. Pop a pill and feel better instantly? We just couldn’t wrap our minds around it. Just what the hell does Soma mean?
A few years later anti-depressants were introduced into the general public. It’s not used just for mental cases, you understand. In fact, when they were first introduced, they had a very narrow medical application, and it was supposed to be taken for only a very limited time. Now it’s used by parents who want to control their kids. It’s used by adults who want to block out all feedback from the world. It’s rather like the effect of alcohol but without the hangover.
Suddenly, you look around and you see hundreds of people everyday walking around with glazed-over eyes, like freakin’ animated zombies, and you’d swear you’d just entered the Twilight Zone.
Feeling out of it? Take a Soma. Feeling down because you’ve just fought with your girlfriend/boyfriend? Take a Soma. Can’t cope with work? Take a Soma. You wanna just numb out the world and not feel anything. Take a Soma.
Roughly ten years after I first read the book, I get it now. The Soma is everywhere and no one wants to see it. Tom Cruise made a few disparaging remarks about people’s Soma and they took the most famous actor in recent memory and flushed his sorry butt down the tubes. I mean, how DARE he mention my anti-depresssants! The OUTRAGE!
Of course, what most people don’t want to know, refuses to know, is that anti-depressants make people become suicidal… even while on their “medication”.
So methinks this pleasant civilization of ours will have a rude awakening at some point. I don’t know what it would mean when half the entire US population will go off this drug cold turkey. Addicts act very erratically when they’re skeching. And the supply of Soma will end eventually…
Don’t worry about it ending. They’ll just replace it with Crystal Meth after the gov legalizes drugs and becomes the drug cartels.
Ha! If they replace the anti-depressants with Crystal Meth, we’d have ourselves a very strange 72 hours until it wears off.
Crystal meth has an almost never ending addiction cycle if it is pure. I think the control issue is far superior to anti-depressants. Maybe we’ll do marijuana like the Dutch did. Then, well you asked before how could the Euros fight the Islamic Jihad in their homes. Easy. Addict them to Crystal Meth, use such drugs, hard and soft, to control the population. As Rome used gladiatorial games to control the population.