Amygdala

The Japanese are way ahead again. They invented dancing plastic plants to replace the boring, static ones that die. They gave us bleeping mini-eggs as pets and we cared for them more than we care for our aging parents. And they built robots so pervily lifelike that you just knew they were the kind of robots that would get their willies out at you on Barnes Common on a cold, wet November night.

Now though, they’ve invented a society where people don’t want sex, or a partner, which is really just a way of confirming that they like machines so much that they have become a society that no longer wants to be made up of people.

In Japan, sixty-one percent of unmarried men aged 18 and 34 do not have a partner, nor do half of unmarried women the same age. More than a quarter of the men and 23% of the women said they were not even looking. Some cited a shortage of money, others a belief that it is impossible to find a good partner once they had passed the age of 25. Many of the women also said single life suited them better than how they imagined marriage would be.

The survey also found that more than quarter of unmarried men and women between 35 and 39 years old said they had never had sex.

That’s pretty full-on. At first I put it down to the fact that the Japanese have been so experimental with sex that they may simply have grossed themselves out. In the film Tampopo young Japanese lovers fondle fruit in supermarkets to get off and swap a raw egg from mouth to mouth while kissing. It’s just lucky I’d bought popcorn that day and had something to throw up into.

Japanese businessmen think eating raw fish off naked women is erotic rather than an odd allusion to a lack of intimate hygiene; they had and maybe still have street vending machines in Tokyo that sold used women’s knickers; and apparently people sat below glass ceilings in clubs and watched escorts shit on them from above. Certainly Japanese porn has an unhealthy obsession with schoolgirls, extreme bondage and the in-out irrumation and draining of the colons of tied up beauties. Or so I am told.

So perhaps having achieved an abundance of food, sex and wealth, the Japanese forgot to worry about death and worried instead that conventional sex was rubbish and, like the gramophone and film camera, could be improved. But having found their improvements ruined it, they turned to miniaturization and have accidentally made sex disappear.

Sadly I think it’s worse. I think I remember all this from Asimov’s Robot Series. On one of his planets, perhaps it’s Aurora, humans evolve into people who live alone, communicate only via screens and mate remotely in a sort of Brave New World bottle factory. It seems Isaac was right. If you give us enough opportunity, we’ll entertain ourselves with virtual worlds and immersive games and shun physical contact with other humans. The Japanese have taken this to the logical conclusion. Replace humans with robots and shag them or not at all. Achieve costless, effortless sexual release reading eye-popping hentai where perfect male/female hybrids ejaculate by the bucketload in worlds full of dodgy looking snakes.

Maybe our ultimate goal is to avoid the nuisance that is human interaction. Or maybe we’ve just created such noisy, crowded, stressful cities that if we’re rich enough we can hide away from the constant bedlam with our cuddly Angry Birds as lovers and Assassins’ Creed as our, er, creed.

I also wonder if binning sex is linked to the role reversal that seems to worry so many men in the pages of our glossy magazines. With young women now paid better for the same job as men the same age, and with career women having to hide their earnings from their husbands in case they get all upset and have to shag women who earn less, maybe relationships have just become too complex and unnecessary for women to bother with and too humiliating for the male ego to endure.

It must be a next generation thing though. I’ll iron as many business skirts as you like for the run of a flat in Chelsea, use of the Aston and £500 a week in spendies. And I don’t care if you’re screwing the guy who runs the bank.  I know what you have to do to climb the greasy pole and I’m right behind you greasing it. I also wonder whether men who say they’re threatened by successful women don’t secretly mean they want to shag younger women than their current belles. “You earn too much” is all post-modern and sensitive while “I want a 21-year old who incidentally earns less than me” is just the same old stone age story.

Whatever the truth, I’m glad to say that the British have their own refreshing take on de-evolution. While the Japanese create a machine world of simulated everything, we too have concluded that we should be extinct and have taken a more enjoyable route to annihilation. Unable to compete with the Russians in suicidal drinking, Britain has stepped up to the plate of population control and licked it clean.

British women are the fattest in Europe with a quarter so overweight their health’s at risk and more than one in five British men classed as obese. Only the U.S. and Ireland have higher obesity rates in the developed world.

What this means of course is that British women are now so fat you can’t have sex with them without going on a health and safety course. And British men are so obese that if they did have sex they’d either explode or have a heart attack. These two trends also mean that soon few Britons will actually fit together in any known variation of the karma sutra.

Still, the Japanese strategy is spooky. Eating and drinking yourself to death is wilful, hedonistic and animal. It’s two fingers to the frontal cortex and another flaming sambuca for the amygdala. The Japanese are trying to die the other way round, with a bleep and a flicker in a sterile world stripped of external sensation.

I think it’s all going to go wrong. You don’t throw off the shackles of your primate past that easily. Consciousness is an uneasy truce between rational thought and the dark passions of your reptilian hindbrain. We may like to think the big white fleshy bits have won, but no-one is ruled by their thoughts. Feelings triumph every time. It’s why prison doesn’t work, alcoholics drink and people need sex. Those Japanese virgins are a time bomb waiting to blow. And it’s going to be messy.