There was a column today in the Vancouver Sun by Andrea Mrozek, called “Thriving in a sexual economy,” which monetizes sexual relations between men and women, basically saying that women are the gateholders of sex (ie. they can have it whenever they want it; men get to have it when women allow it) and dole it out in exchange for “commitment, communication, and closeness.” Mrozek goes on to argue that, for various reasons, the market value of sex has gone. It’s so easy to get now, apparently, that men won’t pay for it with long-term commitments any more because they can get it for short-term commitments.
Cue the end of marriage, even the end of decent wooing. The answer, says Mrozek, is for women to band together and withhold sex a bit more until it commands a higher price.
This has all the elements of a great story – sex, strong emotions, people doing stupid things for what they believe are smart reasons, a push towards a new state of affairs.
But you know what? The withholding sex thing is overdone. It’s a traditional (and misguided) way for wives to signal their displeasure or power in that relationship. It’s also so sexist that I can’t stand it.
So how to use the same idea of withholding but twist it a little? Withhold hugs. In fact, create a protagonist or group of them (men? women? both?) who are fighting for something and decide they will still give their partners, existing or new, sex. What they won’t do is hug them or show them any tenderness at all.
Recall the Harry Harlow experiments from back in the 1950s, when Harlow found that, given the choice between a wire-frame “mother” with a milk bottle and a terry-cloth-covered” mother without, the rhesus monkeys would spend all their time with the latter except when eating. They were drawn to the comfort more than the food. And when the monkeys weren’t given the choice but were raised by either the terry cloth “mother” or the steel mesh “mother,” the latter developed all kinds of personality problems.
Of course, in the great continuing-tradition of animal experimentation, Harlow was only allowed to do his experiment on monkeys. In our story, we get to do it with humans. Just think of the carnage and messed up characters we could create.
And that’s as far as I’m going to take it. Create a character or group of them in a small town (or other isolated environment so the characters can’t escape the experiment), put in a situation or event which precipitates the decision to withdraw all physical affection, then portray the spin out.
