· (Note: this essay may be easier on the eye by
reading it online – see link at end of article – as the images provided help
break up the many paragraphs)
One of the most fundamental aspects of
being human is a sense of division between what seem to be our higher and lower
selves, the former focused on tenderness, generosity, responsibility, reason
and respect, the latter obsessively directed towards that constantly
disruptive, exciting and puzzling force: our sexuality.
Our sexual instincts generally compel us to want to
do things which stand completely at odds with our more sober commitments in
other areas of our lives. Summing up the disruption, in old age, the English
novelist Kingsley Amis commented of his own libido: for 50 years it was
like being chained to an idiot.
The most understandable but at the same time
pernicious response to the apparent peculiarity of our sexual desires is shame.
We have – as a species – been ashamed for a very long time. The story of Adam
and Eve largely hinges on the birth of disgust for our bodies and their wants.
A God furious at our first disobedience burdens us with a guilty relationship
to our own physical – by which one understands principally sexual – nature.
If the Biblical story resonates outside of a
theological context, it is because it is also and at the same time the story of
our own path to physical maturity. We too once wandered innocently and
unselfconsciously around the Garden of Eden, which might have been our
backyard, unconcerned if anyone saw us naked, our three-year-old bodies
cherubically acceptable and inoffensive to all. But adolescence forces us all
to adopt far greater circumspection, to consider that what we desire could
appear ‘dirty’ and taboo to almost everyone we meet. We begin to stand divided
against ourselves, unreconciled to what half of us is and wants. Our priorities
rarely change as dramatically and swiftly as they do in the moment after
orgasm.
Despite all this, at one level, our shame sits
oddly with us because we’ve taken to heart the idea that we live in an era of
sexual liberation. We tell ourselves a story of progress, from the repression
of the Victorians and the religious fanatics to the openness of modernity.
There are some signs of genuine change. Stand-up comics can make jokes about
masturbation, women’s sexual appetites have been recognised, bathrooms are
designed to feel airy and open. Yet the notion that we are liberated causes us
problems all of its own, because it brings with it the assumption that hang-ups
and awkwardness cannot legitimately exist any longer.
But in truth, of course, true liberation remains a
radically unfinished project, ‘unfinished’ because we continue to struggle –
today – to admit some key things about who we are from a sexual perspective.
This becomes especially painful around relationships, given that for many of
us, the dream of love is that we will, at last, be able to admit to who we are
sexually without embarrassment. Yet the reality is more awkward. We frequently
find ourselves facing an apparent choice between being honest and being liked.
The choice is not good for us. The sense that we
need to hide, deny and bury away key elements of who we are is not, overall,
very good for us. When we repress things that are important, they make
themselves heard in other ways. As psychoanalysis has revealed, the ‘dirty’
parts of ourselves can show up disguised as greed, harsh opinions, bad temper,
the longing to boss other people about, alcoholism or other forms of risky, damaging
behaviour. There is a high price to disavowing powerful parts of ourselves. Our
sexuality can become entirely split from our more enduring relationships, we
may lose potency and desire with those we love, so unacceptable does our
sexuality appear to be to us, so at odds with our higher feelings in a pattern
that Freud first noted in early 20th century Vienna: ‘Where they love, they
cannot desire. Where they desire, they cannot love.’
True sexual liberation or self-acceptance doesn’t
have to mean abandoning all control or the deliberate flaunting of our less
elevated needs at every turn. We don’t have to fully embrace every impulse, we
still need privacy and bathroom doors; we just need to be able to admit in an
unfrightened way to ourselves and at points to our partners who we really are.
There’s still a central place for restraint and politeness. And yet the core
point of true liberation is to reduce the unfair and debilitating burden of
shame with which we continue to wrestle only too often.
Shame means that too many couples still find it
difficult to be honest with one another about who they are and what they need
to feel satisfied. This cuts them off from sources of affection and honesty.
Sexual loneliness remains a norm. We shouldn’t suppose that we can always and
invariably share our every sexual proclivity with others, but there’s a lot we
should perhaps feel more confident about expressing. Things that seem strange
can turn out to be quite understandable when we consider them rationally; there’s
an important role for philosophical analysis in the path to sexual liberation,
enabling us to stretch the understanding we have of our own desires.
Our goal should be to adopt a mature
unfrightened perspective on our own sexuality and to increase opportunities for
moments of courageous and relationship-enhancing honesty.
The core skill for a more properly liberated
sexuality is a richer, more enlightened vision of what sexual desire actually
aims at. It is so easy to become disgusted with ourselves because our desires
seem so opposed to our more caring or intelligent sides. But properly
understood, the most apparently ‘dirty’ or peculiar practices reveal a logic
that is far more connected than we might have imagined to our more standard
self-image and sense of dignity.
We get disgusted by ourselves when we feel that our
erotic longings move directly against the promptings of our better nature. We
generally want to be kindly, dignified, reasonable and loyal. But our erotic
selves appear at crucial moments to have a radically divergent agenda. We might
want to violate or be violated, we want to slap someone hard or be beaten up,
we want to be rough or say incredibly coarse things; we long to wear garments
we’d not normally be seen dead in or wish our partner to dress in ways that run
entirely contrary to our usual preferences. We may want to enter someone anally
or lick their sexual organs. There’s an infinite variety of individual
variations on this theme but they all point in one direction: the apparent
unacceptability to our normal selves of who we are around sex.
The key move here is to examine more closely and
more generously our seemingly bizarre erotic wishes. What we are really seeking
– via sex – is usually something very admirable (and entirely in line with the
rest of our lives): closeness to another person and warm recognition of who we
are. The means might be disconcerting but the goal isn’t. If we can take this
point deeply to heart we can see that we’re much less divided in ourselves than
we often suppose. We’re not really going against our own better nature, we’re
just pursuing it in less familiar guises.
Really lust and erotic excitement are for the most
part just equally intense longings for communion that happen to be expressed
via the body. The other person’s willingness to do the most intimate bodily
things with us is the outward sign of their inward acceptance of who we are.
They feel close enough and trusting enough to lower their guard and let us into
the most private and guarded spaces of their being.
We are constantly drawn to the idea that sex is
primarily about the body, reflected in our essentially athletic conception of
great sex (involving piston like thrusts and acrobatic changes of position).
But at its core, sex is a mental and psychological phenomenon. It is the
meeting of two minds or souls – enacted with the help of the body. However,
some of our darker and more complex desires might initially look, our sexuality
is really built around a longing for acceptance and the communion that acceptance
allows. We get erotically excited by deeply tender things – even in the midst
of words and actions that look quite aggressive, degrading and bad.
We can examine this thought via a closer
examination of four particularly striking sexual practices/ideas: cunilingus,
anal sex, rape fantasies and pornography:
Cunilingus
Oral sex can seem like a quite strange
way of enjoying oneself sexually. The mouth – which is normally reserved for
speaking, eating, coughing, yawning and breathing is put into service on the
genitals of another human being. It is jammed up against someone’s vagina or
pressing towards their testicles. In the light of everything we’ve learned and
are, there are few things weirder to connect than a face and the sexual organs.
The thrill of oral sex is connected to
the brief, magnificent reversal of the generally quite sensible taboos we’ve
internalised. It’s a potent symbol of our trust and feeling of acceptance and
closeness that with a partner, we can do this otherwise forbidden and shameful
thing. The act of caressing with one’s tongue and lips and gently nibbling and
sniffing a penis or vagina breaks down the barrier of loneliness that usually
surrounds us. Our partner is in effect saying to us – the usual barriers don’t
hold anymore. With me you can forget about your learned anxieties and
prohibitions. With me you don’t need to be ashamed or disgusted with yourself.
I am excited by who you are – especially by the parts of you that aren’t
supposed to be nice and acceptable. The act is physical but the ecstasy is
really emotional relief – because oral sex permits our secret self, with all
its ‘bad’ and dirty sides, to be witnessed and enthusiastically endorsed by
someone we like. The privileged nature of a relationship is sealed by an act
which, with someone else, would have been sickening. The bond of loyalty
between a couple grows stronger with every increase in explicitness. The more
unacceptable our behaviour would be to the larger world, the more we feel as if
we are building a haven of mutual acceptance.
Sex has the power to liberate us for a time from
that punishing dichotomy between dirty and clean. It can literally purify us –
by engaging the most apparently polluted sides of ourselves in its games. We
can press our mouths, the most public and respectable aspects of our faces,
eagerly into the most contaminated parts of the other – thereby symbolising a
total psychological approval, much as a priest would accept a penitent, guilty
of many transgressions, back in the fold of the Church with a light kiss upon
their head. The pleasure of oral sex is deeply rich and significant. It isn’t
primarily about a pleasant physiological sensation at all, it’s about
acceptance – and the further promise of an end to loneliness.
Anal Sex
Much the same holds true for anal sex. For long
periods, and in many places, anal sex has been regarded as contrary to nature.
In a limited but important sense this is obviously right. Sticking a penis into
another person’s rectum does not aim at procreation, which is the primary
objective of sexual activity in the animal realm. The anus was regarded as not
having evolved to accommodate a tongue, two or more fingers, a length of
rubberised plastic or a string of latex beads.
The error has been to suppose that being contrary
to nature is bad thing. It’s not; going deliberately against nature or
evolution is one of the most important things we ever do. It’s not natural for
people to recover unscathed from smallpox; evolution left us vulnerable to the
bite of the Yellow Bellied Sea Snake; it is contrary to nature to live in
centrally heated houses, to fly in planes across multiple time zones or use
knives and forks (when we have beautifully adapted fingers). The fact that
ejaculating into someone’s anus does not lead to procreation is a quality
shared with writing novels and playing tennis, which are also interesting and
often enjoyable activities that have no direct connection to having children.
By common consent, the anus is the most disgusting
part of the human body. It’s the most strongly connected to germs and disease
rich outputs. We’ve developed strict rules about the need for extreme privacy
around our bottoms. We take care to shut the bathroom door; it’s horrific in
public restrooms to sense that there’s someone in the next cubicle and
nauseating to hear them going about their business. The sphincter muscles tend
to clench whenever we feel anxious.
But all this feeds into the tenderness and
sweetness of being allowed to explore this part of another person or of letting
them do this to us. The more powerful the social barrier the greater the sense
of intimacy is when it is lowered. We’re not forgetting that the anus is the
locus of special disgust – we’re relishing this fact. Anal play would quite
possibly lose its capacity to delight us if it were regarded simply as clean,
healthy fun. If the anus were seen as no more ‘dirty’ than someone’s forehead
or shins, its capacity to fascinate us would be reduced. Anal sex would be
robbed of its deep psychological significance – which is dependent on someone
letting us do something avowedly filthy with them.
For many couples, anal sex remains off
limits even if they have been together quite a while. The sense can persist
that this is not a very nice thing to do. But this feeling isn’t necessarily
the end of the matter. Far from signalling something you should avoid, the
reluctance might actually be a good target for gentle, generous investigation.
Because it is exactly the feeling that something is wrong, perverse or obscene
that makes the mutual agreement to try it so great a mark of love.
Rape Fantasy
There are many things that it would be wrong,
illegal, dangerous or crazy to do in reality but which we enjoy thinking about
doing in ways that are innocent, kindly, safe and very sane. This is very
familiar outside of the sexual arena.
As a child one might have enjoyed
imagining going to the South pole, wrestling and then making friends with a
polar bear, adopting a pet penguin with a broken wing, feeding it chocolate
cake, getting trapped in the worst blizzard of the century (for one and a half
minutes), then spending the night (another 37 seconds) in a cosy, dry igloo
before getting rescued by some outlandishly dressed but charming pirates
cruising past in their four masted, nuclear powered, ship in search of a
youthful captain. In the real world this would be by turns horrific,
impossible, dangerous and in breach of maritime law. But in our heads it is
lovely. Make believe is so enjoyable because it takes a scalpel to experience
and cuts away everything that would be genuinely awful in the real world.
We understand make-believe when we read
novels. It can be delightful to curl up on the sofa, munch a toasted sandwich
and imagine being a cold-blooded hitman, an alcoholic spy in the process of
betraying their country, the narcissistic, luxury-addicted mistress of a
provincial French doctor, a power-obsessed tyrant or a member of a disorganised
gang of drug-traffickers. As we enjoy these things we don’t worry that
we’re about to turn into the character for real. We’re very good at seeing the
difference – and the many safety-guards in our minds and in our society that
make it impossible for us to do, or even to want to do, these things for real.
After a long, sensual soak, you are
lying on the bathroom floor, touching yourself and getting more and more turned
on. What if a thuggish character climbed through the window, aching with
aggressive lust? They’d not care what you wanted or felt, they’d seize you
roughly and force themselves on you; you wouldn’t be able to do anything; you’d
try to scream but they’d clamp a hand forcefully over your mouth; you’d try to
struggle free but they’d have your arms pinioned behind you. Your brain is on
fire with excitement as you edge towards orgasm.
But once this story is finished, you
might be struck by a wave of guilt and self-disgust. How could you get excited
by this thing which in actual life would be abhorrent? When – sickeningly – you
hear that anything remotely like this has happened for real you feel a savage
anger and hatred towards the perpetrator.
But fantasising about being raped is
profoundly different from the appalling reality. At any moment you could flick
a switch in your mind (or just get distracted by noticing a cobweb on the ceiling)
and the mirage would vanish. The character in your mind has no life or
volition of their own, they are entirely your own creation. The nice things
about being overwhelmed and giving up control and being forced are cut cleanly
away from the horrors that would accompany them in the real world. The fantasy
has nothing to do with sly approval or encouragement of sexual crimes (no more
than enjoying a film about someone who wants to blow up the world means you
secretly want the planet to explode).
From the other side, imagining forcing
oneself on another person can be exciting precisely because one is so intensely
conscious that it would be totally wrong (not to mention deeply traumatic) to
do this for real. Imagining being wicked does not on its own suggest one has
any desire at all to really do awful things. In playing this out with a partner
one is entirely reliant on the fact that they are having a great time and if
for a moment one even suspected that they were not deeply excited and thrilled,
it would be a complete turn off. This is the diametric opposite of the
mentality of an actual rapist for whom it is decisive that their victim is
unwilling and unhappy.
Fantasies around rape gain much of
their excitement because they provide a relief (in imagination) from caring so
much about other people. Caring too much kills desire, because it makes us
preoccupied with being nice to the other person which is at odds with the
sources of sexual excitement. The erotic charge of the fantasy does not reveal
that deep down we are callous to the suffering of others. On the contrary it
depends on the profound, extensive commitment we already have to the welfare of
other people. It’s because we normally care so much that it’s occasionally
exciting to cast off this attitude and briefly imagine ourselves as cruel and
heartless.
We can, in this context, briefly
consider the phenomenon of impotence. A man is with his female partner, they
are kissing touching, foreplay is going well; he slides on top of her or
perhaps she sits up to straddle him, maybe he’s already inside her and
thrusting away – but then his penis starts to wilt. She looks at him expecting
him to increase his efforts and renew his potency. But nothing happens. He
desperately wants to stay hard but the erection is fading. It’s what the French
writer Stendhal termed ‘a fiasco’. He feels ashamed and desperate. He thinks
he’s a sexual failure, no good in bed, messed up. His partner is worried too.
She thinks that maybe he doesn’t find her attractive anymore, maybe he doesn’t
really love her. If it happens repeatedly she might start to wonder what she is
doing with this dud.
Often, the cause of impotence is
something we’d not initially expect. It’s not lack of desire that leads the
erection to fail. The man certain is turned on. But his desire is joined up
with a fear. He’s worried that he’s imposing on his partner, that she doesn’t
want him as he actually is. If he told her what he most wanted to do sexually
she’d feel he was horrible and strange. And out of kindness and consideration
for her feelings he holds back from pursuing what he’d really like. He’s
terrified that she will be disappointed with him and find him unsatisfying as a
sexual partner. It’s easily seen as a sign of not wanting. But that’s usually
not the case. He’s impotent not out of lack of sexual desire but out of a worry
that his desires won’t be welcome. Impotence is, at base, a symptom of respect,
a fear of causing displeasure through the imposition of our own naked desires.
In passing, this sheds some light as
well on a female experience which – to some extent – parallels impotence: the
feeling of becoming disengaged and distant around sex which is sometimes called
frigidity. Rather than being caused by lack of desire – which is what seems to
be the case at first glance – she may be going through the same kinds of
anxieties: the fear that her partner might be disappointed or upset if she was
direct about what she wanted. Or maybe she feels that she won’t be able to
please her partner and out of generosity is reluctant to get him excited.
Again, the cause is not really lack of desire so much as tenderness and
kindliness – giving so much space to what might not be very nice for the other
person that one opts out for fear of distressing them in a more grave way.
The popularity of pharmaceuticals
designed to combat erectile dysfunction or frigidity signals the collective
longing of the modern era for a reliable mechanism by which to override our
subtle, delicate, civilized fear that we will disappoint or upset others. It’s
actually very touching that we have this problem – it’s a consequence of some
very nice things about us.
A better, drug-free approach might
consist in a public campaign to promote to both genders – perhaps via a series
of billboards and full-page ads in glossy magazines – the notion that what is
often termed ‘nerves’ in a man or coldness in a woman, far from being a problem
is in fact an asset that should be sought out and valued as evidence of an
evolved type of kindness. The fear of being disgusting, absurd or a
disappointment to someone else is a first sign of morality.
This benevolent perspective on
impotence also tells us how much ruthlessness can be welcome in sex. Of course,
in general being very considerate is a great thing. But around sex not giving a
shit is a turn on; it’s a welcome relief, for the woman, from her own
self-consciousness – hence fantasies of rape. The point isn’t to abandon
kindness across life. But just to be more accurate in our understanding of
where and when it is genuinely helpful. Being unselfish is mostly a very
admirable quality – but there are occasional points where we should abandon the
desire entirely.
Pornography
Porn very often feels like the enemy of a sexual
relationship. Instead of focusing their erotic desires on their partner a man
or – a bit less frequently – a woman gets drawn to online content. Hours are
spent seeking the perfect scenario. It can seem (to another person) selfish and
rejecting.
All the same, a love of porn is deeply
understandable. The business of living is so desperately hard, relationships
are so challenging, work often so unfulfilling or boring, family dynamics so
tricky and the capacity for honest, kindly conversation so restricted, we may
through no particular fault of our own fall into despondency – of a kind that
leaves us extremely vulnerable to the sudden intense highs offered by short
films about lesbians trying anal or muscled hunks whipping each other. Also,
our brains are setup to respond to visual erotic stimulation, which worked well
enough when there wasn’t much around. We simply happen to be living at a time
when, thanks to technology, the most powerful stimulants are on hand all the
time. It’s a level of temptation we are scarcely equipped to deal with. We
should forgive ourselves – and our partners – for being so drawn to these
intense highs.
But a love of porn is more complex than
it might at first appear – and is actually circling round some important and
very good things.
Sympathy
Pornography takes our erotic interests very
seriously. It doesn’t criticise you for being fascinated by threesomes or the
idea of kinky librarians or films of people ejaculating on each other’s faces.
Instead of saying: you are revolting and disgusting, a porn site is welcoming
and compassionate. It’s offering online something we might ideally wish to get
from another person: acceptance of the curious ways our libido happens to work.
A reduction of loneliness
So often we feel ashamed of our sexual desires
because we suspect that they run very much against what it is normal for people
to want. We can easily imagine that we are unusually filthy. We worry about for
being excited by things that – we assume – no-one else likes. In our normal
social encounters with other people we never get to see what they are turned on
by. Others seem so sane and reasonable, much of the time. We feel alone with
our freakish interests. Porn sends out the consoling message that we are, in
fact, much more normal than we tend to think. It revises in a helpful direction
the notion of what normal actually means.
Distance
Closeness to a real life partner bring with it many
complications that militate against excitement. There’s a backlog of unresolved
resentments; there a daily need to put up with this person’s less reasonable
sides or to be apologetic for one’s own failings; there’s the pressure to be
moderately respectable and civilized. All of these are dampers on sexual
exploration – and they fall away around porn. The porn site doesn’t care if you
didn’t take the rubbish out or chewed a bit loudly; it doesn’t mind that you
slammed the cupboard door or gave a monosyllabic answer when asked how your days
was; it doesn’t want to go into detail about why you didn’t ring your mother on
her birthday or take you up on your attitude to credit card debt. Porn in
effect says: we don’t mind about anything else in your life – just concentrate
on this for a bit. Porn can be – therefore – a huge relief from the burdensome
complications of intimacy. It usefully – and blissfully – removes sex from the
emotional landscape of a relationship.
Education
Porn invites us to think that there might be a lot
about sex we don’t yet understand properly. It touches on a range of
significant questions: What specific things (scenarios, actions, kinds of
people) make me feel aroused? What, ideally, might my sex-life be like? What do
I need from another person? And, what can I offer someone else?
Porn doesn’t – unfortunately – usually provide very
good answers to these questions. But the point is that what draws us to
porn isn’t simply a desire for a quick thrill. In the background we’re
searching for important kinds of emotional education and assistance.
When we get annoyed with porn for objectifying
women or encouraging loutish behaviour or for encouraging inflated expectations
we are – strangely – paying it a backhand compliment. We are recognising that
porn influences people and lamenting the particular ways that influence can go
badly wrong. We might not spell it out but the thought is: porn is an educator,
just not a very good one. So the conclusion might be that porn should ideally
be improved rather than just blamed for its very real shortcomings. Porn is
where most of us learn about sex. And that opens the way to imagining a kind of
pornography that educated us better.
Good Porn
The idea of good porn can seem
paradoxical. Many of us are used to thinking of all porn as ‘bad’. Yet when
people eat badly, we don’t try to stop them eating at all. We hope to improve
their diet. The aim isn’t to abolish food, just because some food is terrible.
We want good food to be more widely and easily available. The same move could
apply to online sex sites. We can’t abolish porn. So the goal is to get good
pornography. Better porn isn’t stuff that’s even more thrilling or exciting. It
is ‘better’ in the sense of being better for us – less at odds with the rest of
our lives.
We shouldn’t be negative about porn, just because
of how most of it seems today. In 1800, many people offering medical services
were quacks. They didn’t know what they were doing. There was a hunger for
remedies – however misguided. So ‘being a doctor’ was nothing like the
respectable career choice it is today. What changed was the realisation that we
needed really serious, thoughtful and honourable people to go into this field.
Health was too important to be left to self-appointed peddlers of fanciful
potions.
We’re hugely aware of the terrible things that can
go wrong around porn in the age of the internet. But the longing for sexual
stimulation isn’t going to go away. Given how vast the demand is, and how
crucial the role of sexuality is in life, it is tragic that comparatively so little
talent, wisdom, intelligence, maturity and aesthetic imagination has been
direct to it. We’ve rightly come to fear bad porn, because it damages so many
lives. Good porn could help us deal a little better with the complex, tricky
fact of being – at the same time – highly sexual and highly reasonable beings.
*****
We have to find a new way of thinking
about our sexuality that is more alive to what we are truly seeking to do in
our erotic lives. Throughout the 20th century, the biggest influence on how people
thought and felt about sex came from psychoanalysis. The work of Sigmund Freud
moved sex from being a marginal topic of discussion to the centre of the
cultural conversation. Freud insisted that sex is profoundly connected with
almost everything else in our lives. But unfortunately he made it sound as if
everything else was degraded and made sinister by this connection: you might
have thought you were interested in noble things like art or politics but
really, Freud seemed to suggest, you are just being very dirty and base in a
disguised way. By extending the range of topics coloured by sex, Freud gave the
impression that pretty much everything was polluted by it.
But in truth, sex seems strongly connected with
high-minded concerns. The implication is exactly the reverse of Freud’s
thinking. It’s not that when we look at art or politics, we are merely kinky.
It’s rather that when we think we’re being kinky, we are actually pursuing some
very serious and intelligent goals. Our sexual lives are much more impressive
than we tend to suppose – much more deeply in contact with more elevated
interests. What seems a bit filthy is actually an endeavour to reach some
rather pure and honourable goals by bodily means.
The suggestion here is that sexual
excitement is in fact fairly easy to understand and not at all contrary to
reason. It is continuous with many of the things we want in other areas. Though
our erotic enthusiasms might sometimes sound odd (or even off-putting), they
are in fact motivated by a search for the good, a search for a life marked by
understanding, sympathy, trust, unity, generosity and kindness. The things that
turn us on are, at heart, almost always solutions to things we fear and symbols
of how we’d like things to be.
Let’s analyse a few common turn-ons in this light:
GLASSES
The Anxiety: Glasses
are symbols of thoughtfulness and seriousness. They’re worn by people who seem
to have a lot on their plate and perhaps a lot of significant thoughts in their
minds. The worry is whether these sort of people have any time for us. They may
be too important to pay us and our desires much attention.
The Erotic: Yet
many sections of erotic websites feature people in glasses. Why? Because when
glasses are invited into sex, a natural – and important – anxiety is being
addressed and (temporarily) resolved: the worry that thoughtfulness and
seriousness on the one hand, and bodily excitement on the other might be
incompatible. The imagined solution is that the person in glasses can turn out
to be not only thoughtful but also extremely interested in sex and the body.
Sex with glasses symbolises that the life of the mind is not separate from that
of sensual pleasure, that sensitivity and seriousness can be properly
reconciled with, and profoundly sympathetic to intimacy.
UNIFORMS
The Anxiety: We
often fear that authority will be hostile to us, that it will not understand or
sympathise with our needs. It will simply make our lives irksome and dull. All
the things we want to do will be forbidden and we will be required to be tame,
uninteresting versions of ourselves.
The Erotic: A
sexual fantasy involving people in uniforms is an imagined solution to fears
around authority. All kinds of uniform are capable of sparking excitement: most
often business suits but also the outfits of doctors, nurses and pilots… These
are the professions that scare and intimidate us, but in our sexual games, we
invite the uniform in to reduce their power over us. The uniform still stands
for authority but now authority has moved to our side, paying us exactly the
right kind of attention. The pilot, far from being impassively at the controls,
is thrilled to be here with us, she is no longer our enemy but our
collaborator.
The ideal which we are seeing, played out in an
erotic context, is that authority might help rather than hinder us, reassure
rather than intimidate us. We are, as it were, imagining a utopia in which
strength, organisation, neatness and order are there to make us feel more at
ease, more relaxed and truer to ourselves.
SLAVERY
The Anxiety: We
are taught from a young age that we must become independent. We live in an
individualistic culture that constantly vilifies dependence and pushes us
towards an ideal of solitary maturity.
The Erotic: And
yet it seems, in our sexual selves, many of us are deeply turned on by the idea
of thorough passivity and submission, as a form of escape from the
over-strenuous demands of grown-up life. Being a ‘slave’ means that someone
else will know exactly what you should do, will take full responsibility, will
take choice away from you. This can sound appalling because most slave owners
we can imagine (or even just most bosses) are awful. They won’t have our best
interests at heart. They won’t be kind. So we want to be independent in part
because there doesn’t seem to be anyone around nice enough to deserve our
submission.
But the deep hope in the erotic scenario is that at
last we can be with someone who is worthy of our complete loyalty and devotion.
It’s a common feature of all sexual fantasies that
they do not – of course – genuinely solve the problems from which they draw
their excitement. But we shouldn’t worry if the fantasy fails to solve the
problem in reality. What we’re looking for here is simply a way of explaining
and sympathising with the desire.
DOMINATION
The Anxiety: Modern
life demands extreme politeness and restraint. We have to keep our bossiness in
check. Of course, in private, we go through life often thinking that we know
what’s good for another person or feeling that someone deserves some rather
harsh treatment. In our hearts, we might like to be very bossy, very
demanding and insistent. We would like to enforce absolute obedience on all
those who defy us. But of course, in the real world, this is made difficult by
the fact that very few people trust us to exercise such power; we simply
are not able to rise to the status which would allow us to exercise power as we
would want.
The Erotic: The
fantasy is that someone else will acknowledge our strength and wisdom, will
recognise our talents and will put us wholly in charge of them. No more need
for restraint, no more need to hold our tongue. In the sexual fantasy, someone
puts themselves in our hands, as we always hoped might happen. This is an
attempt to address the very delicate, and very real problem, of when one is
right to exercise decisive power over another person. And now in the sexual
game, instead of this being a situation fraught with anxiety – because one
might be mistaken about another’s wishes, because there might be resentment,
because one might hurt someone – the commands are met only with delight by the
person on whom they are exercised.
VIOLENCE
The Anxiety: In
childhood, we were able to jump around and hit one another a bit and that was
fine, even great fun. But now in adulthood, we are infinitely more circumspect.
All violence is prohibited. We are terrified of force, against us or by us.
The Erotic: But
in daydreams: it can be nice to take a swipe, to have someone hit you; they
could get rough; and you could get forceful. It would be violent, there’d be a
savage edge. And yet, magically, no one would really be harmed. No one would be
left bereft. The other person would accept one’s violent, extreme
possibilities. They wouldn’t be shocked. One wouldn’t have to be so careful;
afterwards there would be love and cosiness, till next time.
It is the fantasy that violence is no longer bad
for us and others; that our anger and aggression can be expended safely, will
not make others unhappy, but in fact will be welcomed by them – and that the
fury of another will not wreck our lives but, in fact, bring us a kindly
thrill.
OUTDOOR/PUBLIC SEX
The Anxiety: We
easily become shy about the public realm; we sense that we have to be guarded,
on our best behaviour: out there in the elevators, public plazas, shopping
centres, garage forecourts of the world. Even nature is seen as quite hostile –
a cold, dangerous place where enemies may set upon us.
The Erotic: So
the longing arises that we could be as much at ease in the outdoors, in public
and in nature, as we can be at home. It would be a solution to a kind of
oppression to have sex in the elevator, in the library stacks, out behind the
petrol station, in the park… Sex outdoors is pleasurable for the same reasons
as picnics are: they are ways of taming the world by taking the domestic out into
it. Any activity which has become linked to indoors can be blissful when done
outside because it symbolises a conquest of our anxieties – it is a way of
imagining being more at home in the world than we normally can be.
LESBIAN HETEROSEXUAL FASCINATION
The Anxiety:
A man who is interested in women might quite often find himself thinking – and
getting aroused by the idea – of two women kissing, fondling one another,
licking each other and going on to do the whole range of erotic things that
might appeal to him, one ties up her partner and drips heated wax on her
nipples; they take turns with a strap-on and eagerly perform anal sex. He seeks
out online porn in which women do to each other every exciting thing he can
think of. A great many straight men are hugely aroused by the idea of
lesbianism. If they happen to have a female partner who knows about this
interest, she’s likely to find it annoying. It seems like a sign of arrogance.
Does he expect he’s going to be invited to join in? Does she think that they
are only interested in each other because there isn’t as yet a man around?
There’s a more benevolent explanation
that sees this fascination as addressing a basic problem of the male psyche – a
problem that was identified early on in the history of psychoanalysis. The
majority of men, during a crucial period of childhood believe that their
mothers are virgins. It’s a primitive, barely conscious, factually non-sensical
notion. But it’s playing an important role. They imaginatively separate their
(usually) kindly, intensely-loved mother from the alarming, exciting and
naughty realm of sexuality. It’s offensive to the imagination of the young boy
that his mother might be aroused by other males.
If things go reasonably well in
childhood he will have many powerful experiences of her sweetness, tenderness
as she says goodnight, as she helps him with his homework and gets impressed by
the bulldozer he’s made out of Lego. She gets him to wash his face, eat
properly, not have too many biscuits and listens carefully to his ideas. All
these experiences point away from erotic life. He builds a picture of her as
pure, devoted and focused on him and as someone who would be saddened and a bit
revolted by sex and sexual things.
This fundamental template – formed
around the most important female in the boy’s life – is then projected onto
other women. The now adolescent boy thinks that if a woman is loving and
kind she can’t also be very engaged by anything erotic. And at key moments in
his teens, it is very likely that this attitude will join up with the idea that
females are more reluctant and more cautious around sex than boys. (He’s not
necessarily right in thinking this, of course, but what matters is what’s going
on in his head). And this happens at the same time as his own libido is
probably gearing up, he’s maybe starting to masturbate and feeling obsessed
with sex. This gap between the way he experiences himself and what he imagines
women are like creates a lot of guilt around sex. He sees men, especially
himself, as dirty and desperate. Sex is a nasty, compulsive but shameful male
secret.
The Erotic: If
lesbian sex is so exciting to him it is because it proves incontrovertibly (at
least to him) that sex isn’t just some obscene, primitive, private male thing.
The women, in lesbian porn, are shown as highly enthusiastic; they clearly want
sex as badly and intensely as men. And they are like this entirely in the
absence of men. They are presented as just as carnal and lust driven and dirty
as men.
Even if he happens to be excluded from
this particular instance of female desire, the man gets relief from seeing that
he is clearly not the only one who wants sex in general. The thrill isn’t the
assumption that these women really want to sleep with him: that they are just waiting
for a man to join them. It’s teaching a different, more interesting and more
reassuring idea: namely that women don’t need men to get sexually excited. They
contain the sources of excitement and (perhaps) depravity in themselves.
They’re not – it seems – just being reluctantly talked into by men. The burden
of guilt and loneliness is removed.
* * *
One can analyse almost any so-called fetish
(shyness, cardigans, flat shoes, boots, cigars, stockings, striped socks etc.)
and find similar structures: an anxiety and a corresponding longing, to which
an erotic charge has become connected.
Looked at like this, sexual scenarios can be
explained to ourselves – and, crucially to other people in our lives – in
fairly rational, sensible terms. We can take people into our history: we can
explain how our fear that sensitivity and seriousness had to be disdainful of
the body was formed. We can tell them how, when we were adolescents, there were
some instances that really seemed to make this idea problematic, how we got
searching for a solution to it, and how glasses got involved.
By talking like this, we can hope that sexual
tastes will become less a little shameful and a little less threatening – and
our erotic solutions a bit more reasonable and, in their own way, a lot more
logical.
Unfortunately though, the fear of being
‘too dirty’ runs deep. They tend to come to the fore in long-term
relationships. The qualities demanded of us when we have sex stand in sharp
opposition to those we employ in conducting the majority of our other, daily
activities. For example, an average marriage tends to involve – if not
immediately, then within a few years – the running of a household and the
raising of children, tasks which often feel akin to the administration of a
small business and which draw upon many of the same bureaucratic and procedural
skills, including time management, self-discipline, the exercising of authority
and the imposition of an agenda of renunciation upon recalcitrant others.
Sex, with its contrary emphases on
expansiveness, imagination, playfulness and a loss of control, must by its very
nature interrupt this routine of regulation and self-restraint, threatening to
leave us unfit or at the least uninclined to resume our administrative duties
once our desire has run its course. We avoid sex not because it isn’t fun but
because its pleasures erode our subsequent capacity to endure the strenuous
demands which our domestic arrangements place on us.
Sex also has a way of altering and
unbalancing our relationship with our household co-manager. Its initiation
requires one partner or the other to become vulnerable by revealing what may
feel like humiliating sexual needs. We must shift from discussing practical
projects – debating what sort of household appliance to acquire or where to go
on holiday next year – to making the more challenging request that, for
example, our spouse should turn over and take on the attitude of a submissive
nurse, or put on a pair of boots and start calling us names. The satisfaction
of our needs may force us to ask for things which are, from a distance, open to
being judged both ridiculous and contemptible so that we may prefer, in the
end, not to entrust them to someone on whom we must rely for so much else in
the course of our ordinary, upstanding life.
The common sense notion of love
typically holds that a committed relationship is the ideal context in which to
express ourselves sexually – the implication being that we won’t have to be
embarrassed by revealing some of our more offbeat needs to the person we have
betrothed ourselves to for eternity, at an altar in front of two hundred
guests. But this is a woefully mistaken view of what makes us feel safe. We may
in fact find it easier to put on a rubber mask or pretend to be a predatory,
incestuous relative with someone we’re not also going to have to eat breakfast
with for the next three decades.
While the desire to split people into
discrete categories of those we love and those we can have sex with may seem a
peculiarly male phenomenon, women are far from innocent on this score
themselves. The madonna/whore dichotomy has an exact analogy in the no less
common nice-guy/bastard complex, wherein women recognise the theoretical appeal
of warm, nurturing and communicative males but are at the same time unable to
deny the superior sexual attraction of those cruel bandits who will take off
for another continent the moment the lovemaking is finished. What unites the
‘whore’ and the ‘bastard’ in these two scenarios is their emotional and actual
unavailability and therefore their power not to act as permanent witnesses to,
and evocators of, our sexual vulnerability and strangeness. Sex may sometimes
be just too private an activity to engage in with someone we know well and have
to see all the time.
Sigmund Freud went far beyond than
this. It was he who first, and most starkly, identified a much more complex and
deep-seated reason for the difficulty many of us experience in having sex with
our long-term partners. In an essay written in 1912 and bearing the awkwardly
beautiful title ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of
Love’, Freud summed up the wrenching dilemma which seemed so often to afflict
his patients: ‘Where they love, they have no desire, and where they desire,
they cannot love.’
By Freud’s reckoning, our sex life will
gradually be destroyed by two unavoidable facts connected to our upbringing:
first, in childhood, we learn about love from people with whom taboo strictly
forbids us to have sex; and second, as adults, we tend to choose lovers who in
certain powerful ways (though unconscious) ways resemble those whom we loved
most dearly when we were children. Together these influences set up a devilish
conundrum whereby the more deeply we come to love someone outside of our
family, the more strongly we will be reminded of the intimacy of our early
familial bonds – and hence the less free we will instinctively feel to express
our sexual desires with him or her. An incest taboo originally designed to
limit the genetic dangers of inbreeding can thus succeed in inhibiting and
eventually ruining our chances of enjoying intercourse with someone to whom we
are not remotely connected.
The likelihood of the incest taboo’s
re-emergence in a relationship with a spouse increases greatly after the
arrival of a few children. Until then, reminders of the parental prototypes on
which our choice of lovers is subconsciously based can be effectively be kept
at bay by the natural aphrodisiacs of youth, fashionable clothes, nightclubs,
foreign holidays and alcohol. But all of these prophylactics tend to be left
behind once the pram has been parked in the hall. We may remain ostensibly
aware that we are not our partner’s parent, and vice versa, yet this awareness
will have a habit of becoming a more porous concept in both of our unconscious
minds when we spend the greater part of every day acting in the roles of
‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. Even though we are not each other’s intended audience for
these performances, we must nevertheless be constant witnesses to them. Once
the children have been put to bed, it may not be uncommon for one partner – in
one of those slips of meaning Freud so enjoyed – to refer to the other as ‘Mum’
or ‘Dad’, a confusion which may be compounded by the use of the same sort of
exasperated-disciplinarian tone that has served all day long to keep the young
ones in line.
It can be hard for both parties to hold
on to the obvious yet elusive truth that they are in fact each other’s equals,
and that however off-putting the thought of having sex with a parent may be,
this is not really the danger they are facing. All this explains the role of
rape fantasies (or sex with casual strangers). There are many things that it
would be wrong, illegal, dangerous or crazy to do in reality but which we enjoy
thinking about doing in ways that are innocent, kindly, safe and very sane.
This is very familiar outside of the sexual arena.
As a child one might have enjoyed imagining going
to the South pole, wrestling and then making friends with a polar bear,
adopting a pet penguin with a broken wing, feeding it chocolate cake, getting
trapped in the worst blizzard of the century (for one and a half minutes), then
spending the night (another 37 seconds) in a cosy, dry igloo before getting
rescued by some outlandishly dressed but charming pirates cruising past in
their four masted, nuclear powered, ship in search of a youthful captain. In
the real world this would be by turns horrific, impossible, dangerous and in
breach of maritime law. But in our heads it is lovely. Make believe is so
enjoyable because it takes a scalpel to experience and cuts away everything
that would be genuinely awful in the real world.
We understand make-believe when we read novels. It
can be delightful to curl up on the sofa, munch a toasted sandwich and imagine
being a cold-blooded hitman, an alcoholic spy in the process of betraying their
country, the narcissistic, luxury-addicted mistress of a provincial French
doctor, a power-obsessed tyrant or a member of a disorganised gang of
drug-traffickers. As we enjoy these things we don’t worry that we’re
about to turn into the character for real. We’re very good at seeing the
difference – and the many safety-guards in our minds and in our society that
make it impossible for us to do, or even to want to do, these things for real.
After a long, sensual soak, you are lying on the
bathroom floor, touching yourself and getting more and more turned on. What if
a thuggish character climbed through the window, aching with aggressive lust?
They’d not care what you wanted or felt, they’d seize you roughly and force
themselves on you; you wouldn’t be able to do anything; you’d try to scream but
they’d clamp a hand forcefully over your mouth; you’d try to struggle free but
they’d have your arms pinioned behind you. Your brain is on fire with excitement
as you edge towards orgasm.
But once this story is finished, you
might be struck by a wave of guilt and self-disgust. How could you get excited
by this thing which in actual life would be abhorrent? When – sickeningly – you
hear that anything remotely like this has happened for real you feel a savage
anger and hatred towards the perpetrator.
But fantasising about being raped is
profoundly different from the appalling reality. At any moment you could flick
a switch in your mind (or just get distracted by noticing a cobweb on the
ceiling) and the mirage would vanish. The character in your mind has no life or
volition of their own, they are entirely your own creation. The nice things
about being overwhelmed and giving up control and being forced are cut cleanly
away from the horrors that would accompany them in the real world. The fantasy
has nothing to do with sly approval or encouragement of sexual crimes (no more
than enjoying a film about someone who wants to blow up the world means you
secretly want the planet to explode).
From the other side, imagining forcing
oneself on another person can be exciting precisely because one is so intensely
conscious that it would be totally wrong (not to mention deeply traumatic) to
do this for real. Imagining being wicked does not on its own suggest one has
any desire at all to really do awful things. In playing this out with a partner
one is entirely reliant on the fact that they are having a great time and if
for a moment one even suspected that they were not deeply excited and thrilled,
it would be a complete turn off. This is the diametric opposite of the
mentality of an actual rapist for whom it is decisive that their victim is unwilling
and unhappy.
Fantasies around rape gain much of
their excitement because they provide a relief (in imagination) from caring so
much about other people. Caring too much kills desire, because it makes us
preoccupied with being nice to the other person which is at odds with the
sources of sexual excitement. The erotic charge of the fantasy does not reveal
that deep down we are callous to the suffering of others. On the contrary it
depends on the profound, extensive commitment we already have to the welfare of
other people. It’s because we normally care so much that it’s occasionally
exciting to cast off this attitude and briefly imagine ourselves as cruel and
heartless.
If we think of skill in connection with sex, we
usually have in mind some kind of technical or physical prowess. But there are
two fundamental aspects to the emotional skill around sexuality that we need to
learn: self acceptance and communication.
Self-acceptance begins with a better understanding of what sex aims at. It also
hinges on a secure appreciation of the enormous gap that exists between fantasy
and reality. Fantasy – which may be unique to humans – is central to our
sexuality for a big reason. Fantasy stresses what’s going on in our minds – not
what our bodies are doing or will do. There’s a crucial difference between
fantasy and acting out. You can fantasise rape, for instance, but that doesn’t
at all make you a rapist or anything like one. It’s not that the person with
the fantasy is gearing up to do this for real. They’re not readying themselves
to actually attack someone sexually or be attacked.
If during sex we want to be called a useless piece
of shit or a heartless bastard it’s not because we genuinely wish someone to
normally see us in this way – and (for instance) sack us from our job, divorce
us or persuade our friends of our general worthlessness. The erotic charge of
these words has nothing to do with how we’d usually want to be treated. In
fact, the real meaning of the excitement is about trust and intimacy – I can
risk you saying these things to me because I so deeply trust that you precisely
don’t think they are true. We have to be very sure of the other person’s
real-world regard for us before we can play at having them shout insults at us.
The verbal abuse is (contrary to its initial appearance) a search for love and
appreciation. Just as it is only to our dearest friends that we feel we can
safely reveal our most awkward troubles: it’s because we know they will
continue to be kind and supportive that we can dare to tell them about our
failings and problems. What can look from the outside as a sordid episode is
better understood as a deeply honourable endeavour to share the most vulnerable
parts of oneself with someone who will understand. What seems ‘low’ and brutish
is revealed to be actually rather tender and dignified.
Sexual liberation is also dependent on forming an
accurate picture of what other people are truly like. Comparison is a
fundamental source of doubts about one’s own normality or decency. One thing
that makes us unaccepting of ourselves is the background suspicion that other
people – particularly the people we know and like – have more straightforward
sex-lives than we do. We know all our own erotic oddities, obsessions and
quirks from the inside. But it can be hard to imagine that other people are
like this too. It feels deeply weird to imagine the carefully suited colleague
or a considerate friend furiously masturbating or getting excited at the
thought of being flogged by a masked stranger or fantasising about being the
opposite gender – it feels brutish and degrading to think of them in these
terms, even if these are familiar features of our own erotic landscape. Very
sweetly we readily give others credit for being wiser and more moderate than we
are ourselves. And the fatal outcome is that we see ourselves as freakish when
we’re almost certainly close to average.
The internet has been a very ambivalent friend in
the search for a more correct grasp of the sexuality of others. Search engines
potentially reveal that we are far from alone with our particular sexual
enthusiasms. But this doesn’t necessarily have much of an impact because it
doesn’t reveal anything directly about the people we take the strongest cues
from about what’s acceptable: namely the people we live with and are around
day-to-day. We can end up knowing that out there somewhere in the world there’s
a band of fellow travellers equally fascinated by the erotic power of dressing
up as a pirate or having hot wax dripped on their nipples – but still feel
radically out of step with the people we meet in the real world.
And pornography may do us an unexpected disservice.
The people we witness doing things we find exciting tend to be not at all like
us in other ways. It’s as if they are saying: the people who are into these
things are like us, not like you. They don’t show how to connect our normal
world with our erotic interests. They don’t say: here’s someone who (perhaps
like you) is interested in biochemistry, gardening and the Renaissance and who
is also into fur-lined handcuffs and spitting. Instead they seem to be suggesting:
the people who are into these things have no interests or much intelligence
outside their narrow area of fetish. So one ends up feeling like a different
kind of strange being – a grotesque hybrid.
The solution, curiously, does not lie so much in
finding concrete evidence of the sexual delinquency of those one lives in
proximity to. Rather it’s a move of the imagination and understanding that is
required. It means recognising that whatever the outward evidence might seem to
show, others must be – in their own ways – as complex as oneself. It’s a very
useful act of modesty to give serious weight to the thought that one is very
likely to be not particularly special. There’s a crucial realisation that other
people have exactly the same thoughts about you as you do about them. They know
you from the outside so they’re not going to automatically associate you with
the more wayward contents of your sexual desire. But you know you have these
thoughts and feelings and longings. A reasonable, modest logic argues that
what’s true of you is going to be generally true of many, many people. And
that, irrespective of the apparent evidence one cannot really be terribly
strange.
These thinking-moves change our feelings. They work
against the feeling of self-disgust by showing that it is far from justified.
By going over them often enough in our own heads we can move ourselves to a
more sane and reasonable position: we are individuals but not, in fact,
terribly odd ones and that we don’t truly need to think badly of ourselves for
what are after all the ordinary impulses of human nature.
Sexual liberation involves improving the
conversation we have with ourselves about sex – and also, subsequently, the
conversations we can have with lovers. Honesty with lovers can be fraught. We
would love to be understood by our partners – and welcomed for who we are. We’d
love to be able to explain to them what we really want. But so often we find
ourselves getting worked up, agitated, defensive or sullen. We go silent, we
blame them for not automatically intuiting our needs; we feel hurt they don’t
understand even though we don’t feel we ought to have to do any explaining. All
this is connected once again with the assumptions Romanticism has made
semi-automatic. Romanticism has been entranced by the ideal of wordless
communication: we should look into one another’s eyes and intuit the depths of
the soul. Around sex, Romanticism suggests, if a couple are right for one
another their instincts will be magically aligned. Though in reality we are
usually very far from these experiences we still tend to hold onto them as a
description of what things are meant to be like.
Nothing sounds less Romantic than giving one’s
partner a regular hour long seminar on why exactly one wants them to strut
around the bedroom in a pair of thigh-high boots or how (despite being a deeply
law-abiding citizen and respectful cohabitee) one would very much enjoy
pretending, as realistically as possible, to rape them or have them shout foul
insults as one approaches orgasm. The whole idea of having to provide lengthy,
complex explanations to a sceptical partner seems almost farcically out of step
with our picture of how things are meant to be. Yet actually a commitment to
trying to explain ourselves sexually to our partners is a central sign of love:
it’s because we want the relationship to go well that we have to do this
apparently anti-romantic thing: we have to teach them about who we are
sexually.
The emotional skill of communication builds around
a group of key ideas. Firstly, we need to accept the legitimacy of the task.
Put yourself in the other person’s shoes for a moment: they can’t see into your
head, they don’t know all the things that have made you as you are; they didn’t
necessarily sign up for this kind of sex (you are asking quite a lot of them).
So it’s not their fault that they are unaware of certain things you might like
sexually and especially of why you like them and what they mean to you. Their
ignorance doesn’t stem from a lack of love. Their fears and worries are
legitimate – however irksome you may find them. Recognising the scale of the
task is crucial because it allows us to budget properly for dealing with it. If
we can admit that we face a big and fair challenge here we won’t be expecting
to get immediate and easy results. Sexual Communication is a sub-set,
specialised instance of teaching (though we don’t typically think of it in this
way). And a crucial issue in all successful teaching is realising that certain
things take a while to get across. We’ve collectively admitted this very well
in some areas: we know it’s going to take someone a while to learn to drive or
master quadratic equations.
Recognising the scale of the task also means it
matters a lot when and how communication takes place. We have to choose the
moment – probably many different moments – when the stakes aren’t too high: not
when we’re already keyed up and hopeful around sex and want to instantly
persuade our partner on some point that feels urgent. We panic and teach badly
because we have such a big interest in the outcome. Like any other complex,
prolonged educational project, the teaching should take place when it’s safe enough
for the message not to get across instantly. We need to factor in the
assumption that it could take quite a while, that there will be a lot of tricky
moments, that we might not be very adept teachers as yet. And we need, in some
deep place in ourselves, to accept that it’s OK for our partners not always to
get it.
The explanations we give ourselves – the real
insights and self-acceptance – are the key bits of material we need in order to
help another person make sympathetic sense of us. We stumble around trying to
think up on the hoof what to say to explain our sexual interest and desires. We
get defensive – and teach badly – when we don’t really believe that our case is
a good one. But if we really do believe we’ve got a good case we can afford to
make it patiently and clearly. Yes, of course, they will raise objections, they
will have fears, they will have pockets of disgust. But part of understanding
ourselves and accepting ourselves is that we’ve already gone through this
process in our own minds: we’ve faced our own feelings of shame, our own worry
that we’re weird and our own confusion whether we can genuinely love the other
person if we want to do these things with them. And we’ve come up with proper
answers to them. This is the material we need to dig into in order to gradually
make certain aspects of ourselves less frightening and less absurd in the eyes
of a partner.
All this said, we may at times need to be settle
into a melancholy or tragic view of sex – but it matters immensely that we can
do so without bitterness or rage against a partner. Tragedy occurs not so much
when something goes badly wrong, but when there is a conflict between two good
and desirable things which – sadly – can’t go together in the life we find
ourselves leading. We really want to be open and honest, to share the range of
our inner life with our partner. But we also might want to – or need to be –
adventurous and exploratory in ways that would be deeply upsetting to them.
This idea of tragedy as conflict between
conflicting ideals has a long cultural history. It was very dear to the
imagination of ancient Greece. It turns up in Sophocles’ tragic play Antigone.
In the play the lead female character, Antigone, is caught between two
loyalties that can’t both be pursued in the situation in which she finds
herself. She has family loyalty to her brother – the warrior Polynices.
But she’s also to loyal to the city-state in which she lives, Thebes. Normally
that wouldn’t be a problem at all. But her brother has become a rebel and is
killed leading an attack on the city. Antigone wants to bury him with honour.
But this goes against the needs of the whole society – which see him as a
terrifying traitor. It’s not in this case possible for her to be both a good
citizen and a good sister. The two completely reasonable ideals she holds dear
are in tragic conflict.
The Greeks were helpfully admitting that not
everything we care about can be reconciled. And they were heroically honest
about admitting how severe a trial this is – how it can bring great sorrow in
someone’s life. They took the view that the human predicament – with horrible
regularity – sets us up in situations where we have to sacrifice one important
thing to another.
The mature response to a tragic situation is
melancholy – the pained but justified view that life contains some deep sources
of sorrow that can’t be put right. It’s a perspective on existence in which
we’re not shocked when we have to sacrifice one good thing in order to save
another. We can remind ourselves that Melancholy in relation to choice is not
an aberration that visits us in this part of our lives alone: it is a
fundamental requirement that keeps cropping up across the human condition. It
was most clearly identified by the 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard in a famous intemperate comedic outburst in his book Either/Or:
“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you
will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh
at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret
that too… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will
regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either
way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both.
This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
This melancholy attitude, and recognition of a
tragic conflict, might well be the best response around desires which are
simply too painful and threatening for one’s partner to hear. We have to accept
that there will be barriers to communication that we can’t cross. There will be
things we really shouldn’t try to share even with those we are closest too. We
would love to be honest, we would love to be understood and forgiven. But we
accept the melancholy fact that we just can’t say these things. If we hold back
it’s not because we are devious or unscrupulous but because of a tragic flaw in
the human condition – that not all good things can co-exist – for which we are
in no way to blame.
Sex is supposed to be one of the great thrills of
life – a source of release, closeness and huge pleasure. But we also know that
often it is linked to shame, disgust, coldness and disappointment. This isn’t
something we’re publicly keen to admit to but it’s a widespread experience.
This doesn’t happen because sex is essentially wicked or nasty, but because it
presents strange and difficult challenges to us. We long for communion but we
are also very frightened of rejection. We are excited by things that don’t seem
to sit easily with the rest of what we genuinely care about and the ways we’d
like to be.
The solution, we’ve been arguing, is to start by
recognising that sex is an essentially complex thing and that it is more about
our minds than about our bodies. In sex we’re trying to accomplish very
honourable and important goals but we’re pursuing them in ways that shock and
disturb our normal attitudes. So we should budget – in ways we don’t usually –
for the idea that sex is likely to be an area of difficulty in life. When we
assume that sex is always supposed to be great and easy we get very worried and
panicked when it isn’t. The better starting point is the more accurate, more
pessimistic, notion that of course sex is going to be an area that’s awkward,
where there often are disturbing tensions, where communication isn’t easy, and
where there are many opportunities to feel ashamed and ill at ease with
oneself.
From this less rosy starting point we can then
modestly and realistically start to put in place the skills that will help us
get things to go better. Realistically this won’t mean that everything will go
wonderfully well. We probably won’t get the ideal sex lives we want. Great sex
is quite rare – so many things need to come together for it to happen. But
that’s OK. Because the issue we face isn’t usually that our sex lives are just
a touch short of perfect and we’re fretting about how to add the final little
details that will make it everything we could ever hope for. We’re starting,
mostly, much further down the scale. We’re just seeking real improvement, not
erotic paradise. We’ll still face bouts of loneliness, we’ll still meet with
incomprehension and dismay, we’ll still get touchy, we’ll still have to
probably keep some secrets and have to give up on getting some things we really
want. But we’ll be better equipped to cope with the inevitable difficulties and
to work our way – fitfully and with reversals – towards a modest but highly
important goal: a slightly fuller measure of sexual satisfaction and a few,
possibly rare, wonderful experiences.
Sexual Liberation -The School of Life Articles
