Sex, Lies and 50 Shades of Crap.

Now that the '50 Shades of Grey' film has been released, commented on, mocked and critiqued, let's hope that they won't make the sequels and we can go back to watching mindless car chases and shootouts and cops and robbers and superheroes.

As we should have worked out by now, Christian Grey is a controlling a$$hole and Anastasia Steele is  a naive twerp, and she may imagine that she can 'fix' him but we all know that life doesn't work that way. This little E L James fantasy of an impossibly rich and young and handsome man with a perverted idea of relationships was even panned by the perverts themselves, the BDSM folks, who called the relationship between Christian and Anastasia for what it was- not a consensual relationship between whipper and whippee, as it were, for kicks, but an unequal and exploitative relationship, NOTHING LIKE what BDSM is all about, oh dearie me. Whatever.

It was a crap book (I only read the first one and that was enough bad writing to last me a while, thanks) and I ranted about that already, and good luck to Ms James who has made pots of money, so I hope that shuts her up for a while.

Meanwhile in the real world, the Royal Commission continues to expose horrific stories of institutional sexual abuse of children at the hands of adults. Unequal and exploitative relationships whose currency is power and sex; hard to know if it's more about one or the other. The whole subject would make a maggot retch.

Then I turn on the TV late at night and I see ad after ad for 'Adult Matchmaker' websites, which seem to be about 'swingers' more than anything, and now there's the Ashley Madison site. I could not believe my eyes when I saw what that was about; it is a website devoted to cheating on one's spouse. 'I'm looking for someone, other than my wife!' happily sing several young and hunky men while browsing their laptops and tablets. The latest one has groups of zombies in their dead relationships, while one living, beautiful person is on the laptop, reanimating her marriage, they would have you believe, by arranging an extra-marital affair. 'Life is short, have an affair!' says the message on the screen.

It goes without saying that all the cheaters and swingers are young and good-looking and it all looks like such fun and excitement. Instead of the tawdry, tacky, immoral and pathetic crap that it is.

Every technological advance that human beings have ever come up with has immediately been pressed into serving the human libido. From the first time someone thought to carve pictures into stone, it didn't take long for the depictions of the hunt to become depictions of 'fertility rituals', i.e. people doing the nasty, usually in groups. Sculpture.Woodcuts. Etchings. Painting. Printing. From the first time Monsieur Daguerre invented photography, it was used to create pornography. Ditto almost immediately after invention of cinema were the first sexy movies made. And so has it been with the Internet. Every generation thinks that it invented sex, but as a whole, the human race has always been obsessed with sex and titillation and prurience and perversions of every kind, many unimaginable to most people, and you do not want to start researching this on the Net or the cops will come knocking on your door. Not to mention, you will wish that you could scrub your brain and then go to the mikvah just to try to purify yourself from the schmutz. That's how I felt when I read the Marquis de Sade's 'classic', Justine. (Compared to that, '50 Shades' is a silly little joke. Well, it's a joke anyway, but you know what I mean.)

There is an apocryphal story somewhere of a rabbi despairing of the state of the world, who fervently prayed one night for G-d to remove the sex drive from the world, as it led to so much sin. And when he woke up in the morning, the birds weren't singing and the flowers weren't blooming and everyone was walking around sad and dejected. So he realised that the libido did have a purpose and asked G-d to return it back to how it was. And the birds were singing again etc.

But I feel that rabbi's despair. When I see the depths to which people will sink because of the desire for sex and the will to power, so often intertwined, and how people will throw away their marriages, families, children and friends, will betray their countries, will risk public opprobrium, humiliation and loss of office, for 'a bit on the side' - Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the so appropriately named Anthony Weiner and his 'sexts', Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his dalliance/rape of a chambermaid all spring to mind- I am just sickened. Surely we are better than that. I would like to think that most of us are. I would like to think that even though we are all in the gutter, as Oscar Wilde famously said, that some of us really are looking at the stars. But so many are just looking at stupid dirty pictures on their smartphones.

But then, I ask myself, what can you expect from a species that shares 97% of its genes with Pan Troglodytes - the chimpanzee.

Here's hoping the other 3% can redeem us.