Sexual liberation has produced de-sexualized sex reduced to physiological function

Evidence

When Casanova called a woman unprejudiced, he meant that no religious convention prevented her from giving herself; today the unprejudiced woman is the one who no longer believes in love, who will not be hoodwinked into investing more than she can expect in return. Sexuality, the supposed instigator of all the bustle, has become the delusion that was earlier comprised by abnegation. As the arrangements of life no longer allow time for pleasure conscious of itself, replacing it by the performance of physiological functions, de-inhibited sex is itself de-sexualized. Really, they no longer want ecstasy at all, but merely compensation for an outlay that, best of all, they would like to save as superfluous. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 180

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s standing theme of de-inhibition as merely another form of unfreedom; contradicts the common emancipatory reading of sexual liberation. — connects to: Freedom of pleasures independent of sexual development stripped sexuality’s explanatory power. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4203; Voluntary effort destroys the trance female desire requires — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 958; Mechanized environments shrink erotic experience down to localized sexuality. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 327 (+2 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: the paradox that de-inhibited sex is de-sexualized — how free-market ‘liberation’ voids pleasure while pretending to grant it.