DrugBuyers.Com: The Politics of Pain.....Very Important

Quite a quote! For despite our technology and its ability to make our life easier, we are just as unhappy inside as we were when we did not have the present abilities ... Everywhere you are surrounded by images of happiness and success TV sitcoms and Hollywood happy endings and Calvin Klein billboards and celebrity faces staring at you from virtually every magazine cover and tabloid front page. Of course bad news gets lots of attention, but only after it's been sensationalized (or demonized or trivialized) by the mass media that is, after it's been stripped of its relevance to most people's lives; sensibilities get so deadened in this way that a basketball game can be more involving than watching a city get blown up. This kind of unhappiness does little to disrupt the veneer of happiness that envelops our society. Consider, for instance, the misery contained in these facts: we now have the longest work year of any industrialized country in the world. The average American married couple now works 6 weeks more each year than it did in 1989 (and 15 weeks more than it did in 1979). What's left of life after a 50- or 55-hour workweek and another 25 to 30 hours of unpaid work at home? People are worked like machines and run into the ground until their hearts stop or their minds snap. And, for all that sacrifice, they have less and less to show for it, as living standards fall and the class divide broadens into a chasm. It almost goes without saying that most people are condemned to mind-numbing (and eventually soul-destroying) jobs, which nevertheless they're terrified of losing. And family life, which used to be, at least to some extent, a haven from the misery of the outside world is now more likely to be itself a source of pain and distress that is often emotionally devastating.

If happiness comes from things, if every relationship is determined by its cash value, then what becomes of love? It too becomes a thing to be possessed. Outwardly we live in a sexual cornucopia: everywhere (ads, TV, movies, the Internet, magazines) there are images of bodies young, seductive female ones shoved in our faces. No image is too graphic to be portrayed, and the more taboo the behavior, the trendier it is. Since the 60s, a major shift in attitudes has taken place, a pendulum swing from puritanism to a much more "liberated" sexuality. And what could be a more palpable manifestation of the happiness of the American dream than this easy access to the pleasures of the flesh? But the change is much more superficial than it looks: underneath, there is still the same sexual misery that prevailed in earlier, more puritanical times. That becomes evident from a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that 43% of women and 31% of men in America suffer from sexual dysfunction. Again we confront some staggering numbers, as disturbing as the ones on mental illness. For all the apparent freedom and openness about sexuality, nearly half of all women and a third of all men aren't having any sex at all. Some of this is due to physiological problems, but a major factor is emotional distress, and the main causes for that, the study found, are stress due to deterioration in economic position and sexual trauma, i.e., rape or abuse suffered in childhood. Or, to put this another way, the cause of this distress is violence both economic and sexual that leaves its victims so badly mauled that they are left sexually numb. In general, the study finds a "strong association between sexual dysfunction and impaired quality of life," which is an important point because it underscores that, contrary to all the fetishism, sex doesn't exist in a vacuum: either it flourishes as part of a fulfilling life or else it is mangled (or repressed entirely) as part of an "impaired" one. And this in turn suggests that as bad as the figures in this study are, the reality is probably worse because there are a lot of people who, while they aren't sexually dysfunctional in a clinical sense, are still deeply unhappy in most aspects of their lives including their sexuality.