The Future of Sex

“And while we increasingly strike our touch screens, we forget how to touch our beloved ones.” – Byung-Chul Han

The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles - a British survey from 2014 - states that people in the most prosperous countries of the world, these days have less sex than a few decades ago. Despite the omnipresence of sex in advertising and the media, ’it’ happens increasingly less in our relationships. Whereas we used to screw about five or six times a month in the nineties, nowadays on average we hardly manage to do it about three of four times.

According to this National Survey,the main reasons are: work stress and the universal presence of communication technology in our life. Increasingly, our laptops and smart phones lie in our bed between us and our partners. Online sex appears to be more practical, quicker and more hygienic than that messy performance in our bedroom. Sex robots provide the masturbating human with a new arsenal of possibilities. It seems that private fantasies and actual physical human contact are becoming more and more removed from each other.

People used to see sex as a reproductive means and a social pastime, but nowadays it has become some form of self expression. At the same time, a number of European countries contend with decreasing birth rates. Is there a link? In some regions, the shrinkage is so huge, that we think that becoming extinct can only be prevented by immigration.

Dying out as Utopia

The above-mentioned train of thought provides the basis of the fictitious world as sketched in The Future of Sex. The performance portrays the decline of a culture. This decline is not only threatening and pitiful; in the major religious and revolutionary traditions, decline is accepted with open arms as the seed of a new age.

In the future of sex – the sex of the remaining people – the characters look into the abyss, lonely and self-conscious: the self-elimination as an ambition, dying out as a Utopia. Obviously, there are languishing specimens who cherish the covert wish that a new human being will arise from their ashes. Some people cling to technology. Others pin their hopes on fertile, virile fugitives. That migrant is not always pleased with that role: ‘I am not your sex slave.’

The text of this performance is the result of a continuous interaction between Arnon Grunberg and the Wunderbaum actors. In addition, The Future of Sex forms part of Wunderbaum’s four-year project The New Forest. The huge social transformations, as examined by the group in this project, are traced back, in this item, to the most elementary instrument of the human being: our lonely, yearning body.