Arendt and the Perplexities of Sex

I had this thought a few days ago while taking a showing: sex is significant like human rights are inalienable. Bear with me.

Recently, a girl and I who’d been “getting to know each other better,” i.e. dating, stopped getting to know each other better over a difference in our respective valuations of sex. Basically, she valued it and I didn’t. Or, she thought of it as QUITE SIGNIFICANT and I thought of it as the physical/emotional equivalent of meeting somebody’s parents, i.e. important, but not one of those thresholds beyond which there is no turning back (which is how she thought of it, in a nut shell). So we stopped getting to know each other better and decided to just be friends. I think it’s going to be for the best.

What does the above story have to do with human rights? Well, do you think that we’re all born with inalienable rights, rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the freedom to buy whatever we damn-well please, and that nobody can take these rights away from us? Are you the sort of person who gets seriously pissed when you think about China’s (or America’s) human rights violations? If you are, then you share something in common with those thinkers of the late eighteenth century--Thomas Paine, J.S. Mill, the writers of the U.S. “Declaration of Independence” and the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”--who came up with the idea of inalienable human rights.

If you are the sort of person who gets pissed when you hear about China’s or America’s human rights violations, then your name is probably not Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a philosopher and political theorist writing during the mid 20th century, was intensely interested in what she labeled the “perplexities” of the rights of man. As a youth, she bore witness to the first World War and its aftermath. Then the second. WWI taught Arendt that stateless people don’t necessarily have inalienable human rights (she was particularly interested in the problems surrounding what we now call refugees). WW2 taught her that citizens, too, don’t necessarily have inalienable human rights (she was herself a German-born Jew who underwent the process of de-naturalization). On the basis of what Arendt witnessed and experienced during the two World Wars, she concluded that human rights are not inalienable, that they can in fact be taken away from us quite easily, and that we actually need a state-body to guarantee them for us if they’re be anything more than empty words. Arendt writes, “The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable--even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them--whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state” (“The Decline of Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man,” The Origins of Totalitarianism, 293).

What does the above have to do with the significance of sex?!? HERE WE COME, FULL CIRCLE!!! Sex without a relationship is like a human rights without a sovereign state: pretty much meaningless. What is the significance of sex outside of a relationship? Sheer desire, acted upon. Nothing more, nothing less. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen it. Because I’ve had it. And ain’t nothing wrong with a little desire, acted upon, but if that’s all there is to your sex, well, you know how that feels the day after: EMPTY, if you’re lucky (and yucky, too, if you’re not). What is the significance of sex within a relationship? Well, I’ll tell you this, it’s one of the richest experiences life has to offer. How do I know this? Ditto.

How does all this relate to my initial story? Well, the girl that I was getting to know believed sex had something like an inalienable significance, whereas I don’t. 

All of the above is/was mostly just a thought which I had, in the shower, a few days ago, and perhaps it can't be anything more significant than that: a few-day-old shower thought.