Even liberated sexuality is absorbed into the system of exploitation

Evidence

Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams—a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told—sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. It could not be said of any of the sexy women in contemporary literature what Balzac says of the whore Esther: that hers was the tenderness which blossoms only in infinity. This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 340

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the attention/consumption purpose: freedom and oppression produced by the same mechanism. — connects to: Mass culture has absorbed the erotic outsiders who once provided irregular bliss; The courtesan’s physical freedom masks a total economic dependence on masculine desire — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1687; For Beauvoir, erotic flourishing requires prior social and economic liberation of women. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 114 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Erotic desire fundamentally resists social regulation and institutions #complicates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 406
• Sexual liberation has produced de-sexualized sex reduced to physiological function #qualifies (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 180