Erotic Love and the Totalitarian State
by Nicholas Zinos, The Imaginative Conservative:
With the publication of Brave New World in 1932, a brave new vision of human sexuality emerged. How prescient author Aldous Huxley’s vision was has been confirmed by the increasing technological interventions in the area of the procreative power of the human species. These movements are well-known: nearly universal use of contraceptives or self-inflicted sterilization; laboratories dedicated to conceiving a child without any sexual act at all; genetic screening and selective abortion; and the list goes on.
These types of technological interventions at the time that Huxley wrote his book were hardly practicable, but were certainly feasible as a theoretical premise. How much Huxley thought his prophetic novel would actually become reality is anyone’s guess, but there is no denying that he saw things clearly even in the early 1930s, primarily that sexuality and procreation would be completely separated from one another. The classes of humans in Brave New World are strictly divided into the sterile (freemartins) and the fertile, and rigid rules regulate the behavior of each. Although sexual acts are strongly encouraged by the Government for all peoples (zealous promiscuity is the ideal), it also holds a monopoly on the procreation “industry.” The fertile segment of the population are expected to take regular doses of contraceptives stored in their Malthusian belts, and eventually their ovaries will be harvested for use in the Hatchery and Conditioning Centers.
This dystopian vision leads to a number of ironies intrinsic to the society that Huxley portrays. For example, on the one hand sexual promiscuity is encouraged at the earliest ages by directing children to engage in “erotic play” with one another. Those who refuse or feel uncomfortable about it are gently but firmly told that this is a normal and necessary part of their education. The purpose of such instruction is to normalize the children to eroticism so that it becomes as mundane as eating, exercising, or sleeping. The goal of the Brave New World is to empty the sexual act of its uniqueness and almost sacred character, and thus its power and dynamism. Why? It seems clear that true sexual attraction, and hence love, especially conjugal love, is an immense barrier to the social order that the Government desires to establish, because it creates exclusive relationships—husband and wife, parents and children—which threaten the stability of the perfectly-planned technological society. Authentic sexual relationships lead to marriage and families, the ultimate bulwarks against all totalitarian regimes.
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