SEX ACCORDING TO MAÏA
At the last Technological Innovation Fair in Las Vegas (Nevada), which was held in January, a Norwegian manufacturer revealed its brand new sex toy: the Handy, a masturbator for men capable of producing 600 back and forth movements per minute. . That is to say ten round trips per second. Is it too much? Too much ? Can a penis go up in smoke? (Answer: no.)
At the risk of pushing open doors, sexuality resembles the world around it. It reflects its values. The performance of porn actors recalls the performance of athletes, the power of sex toys evokes the power of smartphones. The Stakhanovist rhythm of the Handy translates the imperatives of the moment: always faster, always stronger.
However, nothing guarantees that a maximum intensity produces more explosive pleasures. We could even suggest the opposite: the pleasure is all the more intense as we take the time to wait, to increase the excitement, to be charged with sexual energy. But of course, all of this requires emotional investment and patience. What our lives saturated with obligations and solicitations do not always allow.
So let’s ask the question: does our accelerated daily life condemn us to high-intensity sexuality – many partners, strong gestures, fast paces? And if so, would we lose the low-intensity pleasures – the caresses, the breath, the touch?
This concern already crossed the writer Paul Valéry, during a conference given at the University of Annales in 1935: “Our body is subject to perpetual trepidation; henceforth he needs brutal stimulants, infernal drinks, brief and coarse emotions, in order to feel and to act. I am not far, in the presence of all these facts, from concluding that sensibility among the moderns is on the way to weakening. Since it takes a stronger excitation, a greater expenditure of energy for us to feel something, it is therefore that the delicacy of our senses, after a period of refinement, becomes less. » The full text was published in 2021 by Allia editions, under the title “Le Bilan de l’intelligence”.
“Weak Signals”
Paul Valéry was not the first observer of the decline in sensitivity… And he will not be the last: a contemporary philosopher like Hartmut Rosa asks the same questions in his work on acceleration.
In fact, this acceleration exists in the area of sexuality. Vibrators have grown in power – just as pornography has grown in volume, and the endless rewriting of Kama Sutra gained in number of pages. This evolution is not linear: sex machines or sperm orgies, which had their heyday twenty years ago, no longer interest many people.
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