Sex & Death

"Sex sells," and as the newspapers say, "if it bleeds, it leads." If "sex sells," then what exactly is it selling? Long ago in some distant foggy memory I had read or heard about the idea of anchoring ideas to specific emotional states, and how movies create and release tension through pictures and music/sound effects. So, I decided that sex was a pretty strong emotion, and payed attention to what it was being anchored to. Turns out the answer, more times than not, is death. Many, many times, a scene of death precedes, follows, or runs parallel to a scene of sex, flashing back and forth between the two scenes. Sex is selling us death. But is it a mythological subconscious archetype linking death to regeneration like winter leads into spring, or would that be too optimistic an appraisal of the magick being worked in the Holy Woods of Los Angeles?

Sex & Death from ViolatoR on Vimeo.

Most sex and death scenes happen in "cop drama" type shows or bad movies, neither of which I own, so I made due with what I had which should be sufficient to support that I'm on to something here! I left out of this video a scene from 1996's Crash because it didn't fit so well. However, this film depicts characters who have linked sexual pleasure to the excitement and fear of car crashes, and to the mutilation of the human body, as well as the mechanization of a repaired body, held together by pins, stitches, and other medical apparatus. Is there an intended or unintended side-effect of this movie trope which, over time through repetition, causes people to feel violent when thinking of sex and feel turned on when thinking of violence? Something to keep our base instincts overstimulated and to leave little room for higher instincts to come into play. I was flipping through my dad's old copy of the Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and on the inside of the cover he wrote: "Deprived by science of the capacity to make moral choices, Alex becomes a “clockwork orange,” something mechanical that appears organic."

Despite the possible programming usage of Sex & Death, it does represent a duality of types, since all things that are created through sexual or creative energy will dissolve away in a type of death at some point or another, as Osho and Joseph Campbell pointed out.

For the French, an orgasm is la petite mort, the little death. Wikipedia calls it a "spiritual release that comes with orgasm," presumably as a metaphor for the release of the spirit at death.

While traditionally left unnamed, the 13th tarot card of the Major Arcana featuring a Grim Reaper, or similar character, is named "La Mort," (Death) as seen in the popular Rider-Waite-Smith tarot. La Mort is an easy anagram of Mortal, which would indicate life, and thus a duality of life(sex/generation) and death hidden in the card. Also, L-a-M-o-r-t contains L-AMOR-t, and amor means love, as seen in the phrase Amor vincit omnia, "love conquers all" (even death?).

Here's some stuff I forgot to add when I published this post, just more random Sex & Death stuff:

"Ultimately, I have to come to terms with the fact that all my songs are either about sex or death. I'm increasingly distrustful of any songs that are not about one of those two subjects." - “JT” of JT & The Clouds

11 craziest sex related deaths in history.