Sexual Revolution and Contemporary Culture: Liberated Eros or New Symbolic Control

摘要

Sexual revolution leads to numerous cultural shifts and transformations that were believed to deliver the subject of eros from the authoritarian oppression of patriarchal traditionalism and bourgeois puritanism. The article questions whether an affected individual becomes freer or finds him or herself in a new order of symbolic control. While the previous version of control rested mostly on external coercion, this new one is primarily built on inner desires imprinted in the subject by the ruling symbolic system. A social subject is formed so that the failure in sexual realization (as an object of desire or as an owner of this object) means the defeat of social realization as well, and the access to "liberated" sexuality requires accepting the rules of the economy of desire.