The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

Marcuse offers a more nuanced view of the sexual liberation of humanity than that of Reich. Some level of sexual repression is necessary for the maintenance of society. The problem is that the sexual mores of late capitalism, focused as they are on the maintenance of monogamy and the patriarchal family, are actually no longer as necessary as they once were. Thus, their continuation has more to do with the bourgeoisie controlling the proletariat than with the rational organization of society. Taboos and the concept of perversions are means by which the bourgeoisie demonizes any type of sexual behavior that threatens this control.46 And behavior deemed by bourgeois society to be perverted or deviant is therefore by inference actually part of the subversive protest against the status quo. Sex focused on procreation and family is the repressive weapon of bourgeois capitalist society. And free love and untrammeled sexual experimentation are a central part of the revolutionary liberation of society.