With obesity rates ever climbing and sex becoming ever present in commercials, it is not hard to see that American culture (and European culture as well, if I’m not mistaken) largely regards the body as an object to be used and abused at the hands of one’s own personal will. There is, to put it poetically, a war going on; a kind of rebellion of personal will against one’s own body. Men and women alike say to themselves, “I am going to do such-and-such thing or engage in such-and-such activity and I don’t care what the body tells me about it.” They hope to enslave the body to their own will.
I find such a state of affairs - such a rebellion - to be entirely unwarranted. The body is not only necessary but integral: necessary because, from what we can see, without a body we do not have a will, and integral because the status and shape of that body affects the status and shape of the will. Psychology, as I have said so many times before, is deeply and profoundly connected to one’s physiology. Rebellion is rather a poor response to something so integral to your existence, wouldn’t you say? Being rather a graceless traitor to a loving lord?
But don’t just take it from me. Take it from the actual results of the rebellion. They - that is, the rebels - tell us that they have succeeded, and that the body is conquered. The sexually promiscuous tell us that their wills have been freed from the shackles of the body, and that they are finally able to please themselves using their body according to their will, now unfettered by any so-called “biological precedent”. They present themselves as war-heroes, victorious in their noble rebellion. That is not what I see.
Even a cursory study of modern rhetoric gives one the sense that one must obey the bodily desire for sex whenever it should rear its head. If my body creates in me the urge to have sex with the girl at this club the moment the opportunity arises, I had darn well better do it, or I’ll be lying awake with regret all night. It doesn’t matter what I really want or what I think is best for me. My actual will - my genuine ability to choose - is taken and replaced with whatever my body desires at the present moment. It is not in the question whether or not I am going to have sex when the natural, bodily urge to do so emerges. What we see here is not the will’s domination of the body, but the body’s domination of the will.
Thus, in a kind of cruel and poetic irony, the very goal which the rebels set out to accomplish is reversed and heaped back on them. The rebellion has failed; the defending side is victorious. Man’s attempted domination of his body has resulted in the body dominating him. The sexually promiscuous tell us that they are rulers, but the words of the society which they built betrays them. They must have sex whenever their body wills them to do it. They do not have the power to stimulate some bodily impulses and ignore others. They are all sail and no rudder.
It would seem, then, that it is the pious man - the one who accepts what the body tells him about his identity and resolves to save his virginity for his wife - who is in control of his body, and the sexually promiscuous man who is blown about by its every whim. At the very threshold of human identity, there is paradox. The idea that one can “dominate” the body in the sense that they can divide it from their will and then use it as a kind of tool is farcical and only creates the reverse effect. By contrast, willful submission to what the body tells oneself about their identity is also a form of domination over the body. Attempts to dominate the body in terms of identity only result in loss of identity and day to day enslavement to the body’s impulses. But submission to the body in terms of identity results in identity gained, and ultimate self-domination over body, will, and everything in between.
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