Baudrillard: Sex as Work

"All the referentials combine their discourses in a circular Möbian compulsion. Not so long ago, sex and work were fiercely opposed terms; today both are dissolved in the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history derived its power from violently opposing itself to that of nature, the discourse of desire to that of power - today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios."

Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra (1978) p.18

"The Disaster of Liberation.

For us sex has no symbolic meaning - the sexual has become the staging of desire in a moment of pleasure. Ours is the culture of premature ejaculation.

The imperative for immediate realization of desire. Repression and liberation are part of this code.

Baudrillard asks us, what should we do after the "orgy" of sexual permissiveness - the desublimation of repressed desires, following the 1960s?

Answer: see it as a disaster leading to an oppression which parades as liberation."

Chris Horrocks, Introducing Baudrillard (1996) p.90