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

by Carl R. Trueman

This message—that sex is all about the individual and what personal satisfaction and pleasure he or she can derive from it without reference to the other—is consonant with what we have noted concerning the rise of psychological man and the therapeutic society, in which happiness is an inwardly directed sense of personal psychological well-being. One does not have to read Freud and Reich to be persuaded of that view of life. One can simply watch porn—or, indeed, the myriad sexual plotlines of countless movies, sitcoms, soap operas, and even commercials. If freedom and happiness are epitomized in sexual satisfaction, then pornography becomes a medium, perhaps the obvious and certainly the easiest and least personally costly medium, of liberation and fulfillment.