Adolescence

Of all the conformity-inducing cards in the conspiracy’s deck, sex has to be the ace. At least the conspiracy subversion of sex, because the whole thing is not what it should be.

It shouldn’t be like this! This should be a blissful period in your life, a celebration of the beautiful changes in your body. Your discovery of erotic touch, the reciprocal joy of giving pleasure. But already the two dimensional mental-props built into your the minds of your peers, your environment and your own stupid pointless conformity, have all but ruined it’s beauty and sublimated it’s allure into ugly, stupid, greed and pointless petty oneupmanship.

Sex, titillation and eroticism are powerful riptides of hormones and they control the way you think. They have to, they’re bound to, they’re genotomically destined to it. Such a massive explosive pressure can’t be contained by the conspiracy. So it subverts it, bends it, irrigates it to it’s own more calm, controlled and colourless conscription.

Like slack, you want it so the conspiracy takes it. Locks it up behind moral guidelines, hierarchical stereotypical castes, petty tradition and the instance that only they can tell you when it feels right. Well DUH! Who told you how to feel? You listen to them over the screaming incessant call of your own body! They say it’ll feel wrong, and so even though it feels right, you hold it back. It seems like the right thing not to, even though it feels like the right thing to do!

With sex all locked up for their approval, their censor, their greedy desire for power, they can teach you that some things increase your attractiveness. If only your were attractive enough, then the conspiracy rules — their own rules — won’t apply.

They offer you an impossible lottery, and you greedily, unthinkingly chase it because everybody else is.

There are other ways to do this! You just know I’m gonna mention the yeti, who live a similar life in the dark, hidden Himalayan shadows as the bonobo chimps do out in the moist swamps of the Congo. Sex is not a weapon for them, their conspiracy doesn’t teach them to keep it safe, trade it for something, rank their peers by it. It’s not currency, they give it away and they get more in return!

Is that “better” than false monogamy, than sexual repression, than homophobic attacks, than rape, than keeping things behind closed doors, than rejecting half of everybody as ugly, then driving an economy with pent-up frustration, than using sex to sell beefburgers?

Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, but you didn’t even think about it. And even if you did, what can you actually do about it? You’ve already given up hope by adolescence, by the time the hormones curse through your brain-veins with the force of a tsunami, the conspiracy already has it’s flood defenses in place. The canals of stereotypicism, the flood planes of grading, the levys of hand-me-down peer pressure.

Where do the irrigation channels lead? Where exactly, flowing with the peer-current whichever way you’re pulled, do you end up for all of your adolescence? They make everyone want the best, but with their narrow definition of best, almost nobody can get it. So you buy badges, you buy fashion, you buy the right newspapers, sandwiches and branded breakfast cereal. Lottery tickets in the trendy fashion and style sex-jackpot. It’s a rollover week, everything half price! Does it help? Do you get the best? Is “the best” even real, or just a copied conspiracy con?

Oh yeah, they subvert your passion, your love, your non-conforming beauty. They dim your individual eccentricities, dull your innovation, dilute your creative thinking. They turn your desire into power and money and you just figure it’s okay, because nobody else is complaining. Well, nobody sane.

They have you, you’d do whatever they want, you’d be nice, you’d like the right things, think the right things, do anything they tell you to do. And what do they tell you to do?

They tell you to sacrifice a third of your life to maintaining their machine. Wake up early every day, and toil for the money you need to buy the car you need to get there, the place you need to live near to, the love and pride of your friends, family, and other co-conspirators. They make you get a JOB!

On To Chapter Five