Polyamory?
‘Surely one of the pleasures of monogamy’, writes Miranda France in a bracing review of three recent books about sexual liberation (?), ‘is knowing that your partner isn’t having amazing sex in a boutique hotel while you’re taking out the bins.’ I’d call that a definition of happiness by minimal criteria. Still, her frank emphasis on pleasure is rather a relief in the context of these putative accounts of desire in the twenty-first century, which seem to be marked by joylessness. The trend they chronicle isn’t catching on among the young: ‘More and more young people are opting for sexit. Where centuries of prohibition failed, society has finally found the way to dampen teenage appetite: sexual saturation.’ France’s reading, basically sympathetic, certainly not moralist, is thought-provoking. It shines a torchlight up what is evidently a cul-de-sac, indicating a cultural, social, anthropological and indeed theological task: that of rediscovering and showing what desire is for.
