Warhol's ironic case for chastity

repress yourself!!

I wrote about Warhol’s ironic subversion of consumerism in First Things last week. This piece will apply the same analysis to his hot takes on sexuality.

It’s the long life-spans that are throwing all the old values and their applications out of whack…That’s a long time to play around with the same concept. The same boring concept. I’d rather laugh in bed than do it. Get under the covers and crack jokes, I guess, is the best way.

-Andy Warhol

So in my review of Manuel Betancourt’s book, I cited Andy Warhol’s case that sexual continence (especially for inverts/gays) is more conducive to literary/artistic creativity. As much as Warhol was far from chaste (and probably wasn’t completely celibate…and was indeed rather perverse), the fact that he lived in tension with the ideal of chastity—rather than freely and mindlessly indulging his impulses—enabled him to be one of the most creative artists of the century (or so I’d argue).

Surely, plenty of others would agree that learning to keep it in your pants helps to inspire creativity. For one, you’re not wasting time chasing around sexual partners (or raising a family). But also, as Freud taught us, the work of sublimating your desires forces you to channel all that erotic energy into other directions. And while full-on repression is bad (and sad), the fact that it will drive you crazy will make you a much more dramatic person…and thus a more interesting artist/writer.

I wanted to dig a little deeper into Warhol’s ironic or “aesthetic” case for chastity, especially given the mission of Cracks in PoMo. Remember, our priorities are metaphysical/ontological and aesthetic before they are moral or political. We believe that one cannot understand ethics (or politics) without first engaging the metaphysical and aesthetic.