Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Struggle of Youth: Incels, Adolescents, and the Manosphere between Genitality and Anxiety (with Reference to Pier Paolo Pasolini)

“The sexual struggle of youth,” a 1932 text by Reich, is central to the development of his Freudian-Marxist thought. Based on his field analyses, young people find themselves in a condition of sexual repression that can only be resolved through revolutionary action. This form of sexual uneasiness, after the wave of 1968, still reverberates today: one need only observe the global phenomenon of ‘Incels’ Involuntary Celibates angry and suffering men who develop the “character armor” so extensively discussed by Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution. The hatred toward women that ‘Incels’ develop goes hand in hand with female emancipation and with that “loss of the father” which Massimo Recalcati, following Lacan’s footsteps, has analyzed. It is particularly interesting to compare Reich’s analyses of youth with those of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who, in the cultural genocide of popular cultures brought about by neo-capitalism, identified the loss of a genuine popular sexuality, replaced by docile bodies manipulable for consumption precisely what Reich’s vision, thirty years earlier, had already anticipated and foreshadowed.