william burroughs- sexual conditioning

Sexual morality in the Western world is based on the Bible and especially on the teachings of St. Paul, which attempt to impose the standard of sexual behavior for all people everywhere and forever. These teachings are now dead and unworkable. Dead since the pill has separated sexual pleasure from reproduction. Dead since overpopulation has made reproduction something to be curtailed rather than encouraged. Dead since experiments have shown that sexual desire is a matter of stimulating certain brain areas and that such stimulation is purely arbitrary.

Admittedly, homosexuals can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman—or to an old boot, for that matter. In the same way, heterosexual males can be conditioned to react sexually to other men. And who is to say that one is more desirable than the other?

The latter-day apologists of St. Paul who call themselves psychiatrists and sociologists have nothing to recommend them but their bad statistics. Here is Dr. Charles W. Socarides in a letter to Playboy (June 1970):

“Five hundred million years of evolution have established the male/female standard as the functionally healthy pattern of human sexual fulfillment . . .”

The human species is not more than one million years old, according to the earliest human remains so far discovered. Other species have had a longer run. Three hundred million years have established a big mouth that can bite almost anything off and a gut that can digest it as a functionally healthy pattern for sharks. Several million years established large size as functionally healthy for dinosaurs.

What may be functionally healthy at one time is not necessarily so under altered conditions, as the bones of discontinued models bear silent witness. But sharks, dinosaurs and psychiatrists don’t want to change.

The sexual revolution is moving into the electronic stage. Recent experiments in electric brain stimulation indicate that sexual excitements can now be produced at push-button control. Experiments in autonomic shaping have demonstrated that subjects can learn to control these responses and reproduce them at will, once they learn where the neural buttons are located. Just decide what you want to be excited by and your local sex adjustment center will match your sex waves and provide a suitable mate of whatever sex while you wait. It is now possible to provide every man and woman with the best sex kicks he or she can tolerate without blowing a fuse.

Any candidate running on that ticket should poll a lot of votes and bring a lot of issues right out into the open.