In Oscar Wilde’s story ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ the antihero makes a Faustian pact in which he keeps his beauty while a portrait of himself ages and also displays all the twisted marks that his debauched lifestyle makes on his soul. In the end Gray’s vanity and immorality conspire to destroy him. Wilde’s character had ultimately attempted to cheat nature and failed.
In a similar manner the antihero of Joris-Karl Huysmans “poisonous French novel”, ‘A Rebours’ or ‘Against Nature” rebelled against the boring trappings and limited thrills offered by petit bourgeois society as personified by 19th century France and embarked on a journey of his own to create an artistic and ascetic capsule in which he can escape the vileness of the world that surrounds him. In the end though his decadent lifestyle threatens to overwhelm him and he is forced to return to the mainstream in order to survive. Again the natural order of things quietly triumphs.
Fast forward a century and the ascetic obsessions of these writers and the angst ridden guilt and poetic desperation of their heroes to rebel against the norm seem almost quaint. Indeed their adolescent yearnings for sexual relief among the painted and seemingly exotic prostitutes of bohemian Paris. or in the forbidden embraces of their own sex may seem tame by today's standards but at the time these stories shocked and scandalised. Indeed Oscar Wilde’s hints at homosexuality during his trial and the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ were testament to how underground talk, and knowledge of, sex was at the time. Wilde, had in fact, like his creation, gone against nature and as such he would pay.
Now the natural order has again been tampered with, though not, on this occasion by angst-ridden fops clutching glasses of absinthe in their trembling hands, but by the far more deadly forces of political correctness, or cultural Marxism as its becoming known as. Over the last decade an army of lawyers and civic busybodies has been intent on sweeping aside any vestige of that bourgeois world order so loathed by Wilde and Huysman’s creations. Now any budding rebel with a liking for the wild side can witness almost any sexual perversion or depravity in seconds on the internet or for real should he or she so desire. Most drug’s are easily available and human behaviour is now all but devoid of restraint and morality, anything goes in fact.
The denial of gratification or limitations on personal desire have, in just over a century, moved from seeing a renowned writer like Wilde imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’ with another man to seeing that same sex act enshrined and protected in law. Likewise lesbianism, transsexuals, same-sex marriages and a whole plethora of other sexual acts which were until recently deemed perverse, or existed only in the twilight world of pornography or were at best known but unmentioned are now discussed openly and even taught to school children. Six year olds can now seemingly describe the three F’s; fisting, felching and fucking better than they can perform the three R’s; reading, writing and arithmetic, such is the wonder of our modern education establishment.
The liberal lefts obsession with the propagation of human rights and sexual rights no matter at what cost to society has now removed the fun and thrill of illicit sex and moved it from the bedroom, where it belongs, into the realm of officialdom, lawyers and bureaucrats. Now what a gay man does to another man’s bottom or what someone else may think of such activity is proscribed by law, people can be arrested, not, as in Wilde’s time, for committing an act of indecency, but conversely for thinking or saying out loud comments or statements that maybe deemed derogatory of that once, ‘indecent’ act.
Gay rights, along with women’s rights, have in fact championed and set the tone and tempo for all other rights legislation since the UK legalized consensual sex between two men in 1967. Originally an act of genuinely liberalism to remove an unjust and unwarranted criminalization of a small number of homosexuals, ‘gay rights’ have since been used as a sledgehammer with which to bully and cajole the wider society firstly to accept and tolerate a minor sexual proclivity, then secondly to champion and promote it as a lifestyle choice and finally to offer it as an alternative to the male / female relationships so beloved of nature.
Now the sexual act is almost irrelevant as its ‘rights’ obsessed supporters have sought out other sexual causes and variants to add to their orgiastic lexicon of rights legislation. Reading almost like a Karma Sutra for the politically correct sexually minded almost no sexual act or minority group is excluded from the liberal lefts great rightsgasm except of course straight, bourgeois, for which read middleclass, society. For this despised group who taxes fund this liberal lasciviousness and who must grin and bare it for fear of prosecution when their children come home clutching copies of the latest copy of ‘Same Sex, Safe Sex’ or
a pop-up guide to fellatio, there are no rights only wrongs.
Human rights, sexual rights, race rights, religious rights, age rights, gender rights, disability rights, fat rights, slim rights, children’s rights, animal rights, criminal rights, asylum seeker rights, immigrant rights, ugly, low IQ, semi-human, thieving non-entity, welfare dependent all-my-life rights. In fact any rights accept those for the indigenous mainstream population are now enshrined in law like some new ten commandments, though these are written not in blood, or hewn from stone but scrawled in semen like the ejaculatory musings of the sexually obsessed. For the world that Dorian Gray or Jean Des Esseintes, the anti hero of Against Nature, sought out in the dark and forbidden recesses of their cities red light areas is now establishment policy, and protected by law.
Many would argue that this is a good thing, that the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for being homosexual or that societies previous Victorian attitude to sex and sexual freedom was both harmful and damaging to society. Further many would see sexual repression or self restraint as harmful and to many it was, but like many aspects of life it was also the natural balance between desire and denial that kept families and the wider society intact. Now in our new, rights-enshrined, fisting, same-sex, burka wearing, disabled, fat-friendly, ethnically aware, carbon-footprint reducing, multi-ethnic, religiously tolerant, tree-hugging liberal utopia we have championed human pleasure, decadence and gratification over family, stability and abstinence.
And now that the world that Jean Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray sought out is here in reality would Oscar Wilde relish the rights enshrined pleasures on offer to him or would he recoil in horror from the vileness of a culture that promotes anal sex to children and champions the rights of transsexuals and gender awareness over families and the laws of nature? Would he, in fact, do as he did before and get on the ferry to Dieppe in France and leave England for good?
I think he would. He might get intimate with a sailor on route, but that is his business, and his alone, it is not the right of the state, of lawyers or of a collective army of shrill, liberal left activists determined to enshrine every illicit sex act in law as a right. There is after all nothing more unappetising, unarousing or unerotic than someone demanding that you have sex when you don’t want to and yet that is what the state is doing. It is turning illicit fun sex into licit, civic duty sex, and who wants that? Not nature. And nature, long term, has a tendency of winning...
