Sex weariness and sex sluggishness

[alice wellintown]

It would be a mistake, therefore, to equate the intensity of the
current glamour campaigns and techniques with any corresponding new
heights of a manwoman madness. Sex weariness and sex sluggishness are,
in measure at least, both the cause and increasingly the outcome of
these campaigns. No sensitivity of response could long survive such a
barrage. What does survive is the view of the human body as a sort of
lovemachine capable merely of specific thrills. This extremely
behavioristic view of sex, which reduces sex experience to a problem
in mechanics and hygiene, is exactly what is implied and expressed on
all sides. It makes inevitable both the divorce between physical
pleasure and reproduction and also the case for homosexuality. In the
era of thinking machines it would be surprising, indeed, if the
love-machine were not thought of as well.

Woman appears as a disagreeable but challenging sex machine in Edmund
Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County. But the hero, as an expert sex
mechanic, does a skillful job on a variety of these coldly intricate
and maxfactorized products of the assembly line. There may be some
relation between the fact that England, the first country to develop
know-how and industrial technique, was also the first to develop the
ideal of the frigid woman.

In Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, Kit, the heroine, is
fascinated by the ferocious little robot that is Sammy. She hates him
but is curious to know what it would be like to have this dynamo of
pep and drive roaring inside her. With situations of this sort we move
over into territory somehow allied to sex and technology but also very
closely related to destruction and death. There are some signs that
sex weariness may be a factor in the cult of violence, although
Wilhelm Reich, the psychologist, argues that it is a mere substitute
for sex in those who have acquired the rigidities of a mechanized
environment. This view is ably sponsored in G. Legman's Love and
Death, a study of violence in comic books and literature. And his book
certainly doesn't contradict anything said here. But there is surely
much to be said also for the view that sadistic violence, real or
fictional, in some situations is an at tempt to invade persons not
only sexually but metaphysically. It is an effort to pass the
frontiers of sex, to achieve a more intense thrill than sex affords.
There was certainly a good deal of destruction intermixed with the
pleasure ideals of the Marquis de Sade.

from Mecahnical Bride, McLuhan

The orgasmatron is a fictional device in the fictional future society
of 2173 in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper. It is a large cylinder big
enough to contain one or two people. The orgasmatron was made by
decorating an elevator in the home where the movie was filmed. Once
entered, it contains some (otherwise undescribed) future technology
that rapidly induces orgasms. This is required, as almost all people
in the Sleeper universe are impotent or frigid, although males of
Italian descent are considered the least impotent of all groups.

from Wiki, Sleeper