According to many leading environmentalist and progressive intellectuals, we have entered an age known as the Anthropocene, an age in which the processes and dynamics of the earth have come under the influence of human activities and technology as much or exceeding the natural processes which have controlled earth’s ecosystems and its climate for billions of years. This, however, beyond being a scientifically gaseous concept, misses other processes and features of the human condition that have, in truth, altered the earths environment; not its biological, but its moral, ethical, and spiritual environment, to an extensive degree, and in only a very short space of time.
The age we have entered is not the Anthropcene, but what, to coin a useful neologism, I might term to Eroticene, an age in which human sexuality has come to dominate human life, cognition, perception, awareness, and culture to a degree never before seen in western or any other civilization known to us at such scale and to such a degree of intensity.
True, phases of such infatuation with sex and sexuality have come and gone through many historical cycles (the book of Mormon tells us as much) among a number of ancient peoples, but the Eroticene is different, not only because of the scale and reach of such dynamics (they are, in modern times, global, not local or regional) but because of the presence of what we may call a postmodern sense of the destabilization and disorientation of all sense of normative moral, ethical, logical, and historical points of reference able to orient moderns within any stable moral, ethical, and settled conceptual reference frame.
It is what Jean Francois Lyotard thought of as the undoing of any metanarratives of any kind centering and orienting human beings in the universe. This was the postmodern condition, and a condition from which there was to be no escape. In only a matter of decades, the sexual revolution, a project begun in the thirties, accelerated in the fifties, suddenly breaking out from academia and obscure think tanks into the mainstream of American and western culture in the sixties, and then maturing and becoming a new homeostatic cultural normal in the seventies, thoroughly and permanently altered the way men and women see themselves and each other, and from this, and as we have seen so recently, the foundational understanding of the core institutions and elements of civilization: marriage and family.
Over the years, the acronym “LGBTQ” has swelled to become, in perhaps its most expansive manifestation, “LGBTQQIP2SAA,” adding queer, questioning, Intersex, Pansexual, Two-Spirit, Asexual, and Allies from other sexual orientations, including heterosexual.
This state of affairs has come from a cross-fertilization between several main currents of Cultural Marxism and postmodernism within a contemporary cultural context characterized by general, broad-based affluence and leisure, mass communications technology, and an omnipresent popular media/entertainment culture that delivers psychological, emotional, and carnal catharsis twenty four hours a day in endless variety, at dizzying speed, and without interruption.
The result of the confluence of these conditions with the overt, aggressive, and relentless ideological, philosophical, and political attacks upon, hostility to, and subversion of the entire range of normative Judeo-Christian cultural ideals, norms, mores, and boundaries mediating human relations, and most importantly those mediating and conditioning sexual relations, that blossomed from the late sixties through the middle seventies, was the creation and nurturing of a cult of eroticism of almost unimaginable tenacity and virulence that has left a permanent, disfiguring scar upon the culture as a whole and, in one way or another, upon virtually each and every individual within it, while the bleeding, ulcerous tumor from which that scar came continues to eat away the tissues and organs necessary to the moral viability of anything approximating a “civil” society in any substantial sense of that term.
In the end, as we stand today athwart the complete and celebrational revision and redefinition of marriage, family, and gender from their very nucleus to every aspect, consequence, and implication of these institutions, and as the next sexual revolution, transgenderism stares us in the face and demands its own pounds of legal and political flesh, and as, following Judith Butler and other modern travelers to the farther reaches of human sexual shores, we now are asked to see sexuality, gender, and sexual identity as not only socially constructed, arbitrary impositions on a sexual tabula rasa and artifacts of systemic social conditioning, but as flowing rivers of sexual perception and creative “self-crafting” encompassing a kaleidoscope of known, possible, and perhaps as yet unknown “sexualities.”
We have come to a fork in our civilizational road at which we must choose a path, as we cannot go back to the yellow brick road of “liberation” and “freedom” that led us to this point. Sexuality, sexual expression, and gender are fluid, plastic, unstable, impressionistic, and capable of entering into any number of hybrid multiple self-identities and orientations, or perhaps into a lifelong exploratory chrysalis encompassing boundaryless and unique transformations unhindered by any idea of “normativity” or of any idea that sex and sexuality have any specific meaning, purpose, or ultimate ontological axis around which human beings can achieve a proper understanding of just what sex is and how it is to be handled.
This era, then, the Eroticene, is post-heterosexual, post-homosexual, post-bisexual, and post-queer. We are now in the age of weresexuality, and weresexualism is pansexuality that is not only pansexual, but intrasexual; one’s sexuality can shift, transform, alter its expression and focus, and become something it wasn’t a moment ago before the moon was full. “LGBTQQIP2SAA” is weresexualism; it is a sexual lycanthropy in which one “sexuality” begins taking on the attributes and features of other “sexualities” while experimenting (one can be, not only bisexual, but “bi-curious”) with yet others in one’s journey of sexual self-discovery and authenticity. Men become women, women become men, boundaries shimmer and evaporate, no center holds, and weresexuals walk among us, bearing a letter or multiple letters within the gelatinous realm of “LGBTQQIP2SAA” The sexual revolution began by extending boundaries, and has ended by erasing them completely. Weresexualism is the result; a body or gaggle, more precisely, of “sexualities” that are, like marriage has now become, anything we want them to be. One sexual pill now makes us small, one makes us tall, and some make us believe, like the Mad Hatter, updated for modern tastes, that we can can be as many as six impossible genders before breakfast.
The presence of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ on the earth in the latter days cannot, and is not intended to, take back or restore the standard and accepted norms and civilized understandings of generations prior to the baby boom generation, nor, in my view, is there any point in speaking of “taking back” the country in any political or cultural sense, at this juncture. What we can do, on the other hand, is waste no time and avoid no sacrifice in being the “hunters” mentioned in Jeremiah 16:16 and the “Fishers of men” Jesus called his apostles and all the members of His church in the last days to be. We can do all we can to gather Israel – the Lord’s sheep who will hear his voice and come to him when they hear it – while time remains and the doors of the wedding feast remain open. We can gather the elect from every nook, cranny, crevice, warren, den, and cubby hole of this world, bring them to Zion, to the priesthood, to the ordinances of exaltation, and to safety and peace. We can man the lifeboats, and prepare to abandon ship as well, as there is no need nor reason to go down with it “after all we can do.”
Babylon will fall, and “great” will be that fall. We must therefore be, as all the scriptural references seem to me to indicate, not just outside of it, but well away from it, to a safe distance, outside its “blast radius,” if you will, when the walls come tumbling down. Weresexuality may be the last phase we will witness of the sexual revolution before our civilization’s moral carrying capacity is exhausted. Or, there may be more nameless horrors to come (which will, have no doubt, eventually have names, and inevitably, acronyms). Whatever the case may be, no matter the madness we see around us, within the gospel and within the restored church of Jesus Christ, among the saints and among the authorized legal administrators of gospel ordinances and blessings, and among the Lord’s servants, the prophets, we can find safe harbor from any storm.
And brothers and sisters, ladies and gentlemen, or dear readers whomever you may be, a storm is indeed coming.
Latter-day Conservative in the Fullness of Time 