How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

1.

Before considering the many problems that sex causes us, it is worth taking a detour to look at the opposite side of the coin: to ponder the question – not as obvious as it may seem – of why sex should, on rare occasions, be such a deeply pleasurable and rewarding activity.

In so far as our age is interested in this topic, it tends to put forward a single over-arching explanation derived from evolutionary biology. This discipline, which is ubiquitous in the modern world, informs us that human beings, like all other animals, are genetically programmed to reproduce themselves and need the pleasures of sex as a reward for undertaking the immense efforts of getting together and raising children with a partner.

According to evolutionary biology, what we find sexy is really just a reflection of something that will further the species. We may be drawn to intelligence, because this indicates a quality that is important in ensuring the survival of our young. We like to see people dancing well as this indicates a vigour that will come in handy when protecting the next generation. What society calls an ‘attractive’ person is ultimately someone whom the unconscious intuits will be good at fighting off infections and go into labour without complications.

This evolutionary–biological thesis clearly isn’t wrong. It is, however, blunt, disconnected from our actual experiences of sex – and in the end a little boring. While it successfully explains why sex exists, it doesn’t begin to shed light on our conscious motivations for wanting to sleep with particular people or on the range of pleasures we derive from doing so. Evolutionary biology may provide us with an overall motive for our actions, but it doesn’t develop any reasons that we actually have in our own minds while we invite someone for dinner and later try to unbutton their jeans on the sofa – and on this basis, it doesn’t provide us with a very satisfactory account of why sex should really matter to us as reflexive humans.

2.

In search of an explanation that we can more directly relate to, we might begin by focusing on a singular moment in the dating ritual, one whose recollection, even many years later, will almost always be accompanied by a unique sense of excitement: the first time we kissed, and thus physically and openly admitted our attraction to, a particular person.

It might have been inside a car after a long dinner during which we barely dared to eat, or in the corridor at the end of a party, or quite suddenly, before parting outside a train station, without any concern for the many commuters pressing past on all sides. We may not be the finest conversationalists, but when we are describing how we met and the run-up to our first kiss, we are rarely dull.

This first moment, which decisively shifts us from relative strangers to sexual intimates, thrills us because it marks an overcoming of loneliness. The pleasure we take is not rooted purely in stimulated nerve endings and the satisfaction of a biological drive; it also stems from the joy we feel at emerging, however briefly, from our isolation in a cold and anonymous world.

This isolation is something we all become acquainted with after the end of childhood. If we are lucky, we begin comfortably enough on this earth, in a state of close physical and emotional union with a devoted caregiver. We lie naked on her skin, we can hear her heartbeat, we can see the delight in her eyes as she watches us do nothing more accomplished than blow a saliva bubble – in other words, than merely exist. We can bang our spoon against the table and inspire uproarious laughter. Our fingers are tickled, and the fine hairs on our head are stroked, smelt and kissed. We don’t even have to speak. Our needs are carefully interpreted; the breast is there whenever we want it.

Then gradually comes the fall. The nipple is taken away, and we are blithely induced to move on to rice and morsels of dry chicken. Our body either ceases to please or can no longer be so casually displayed. We grow ashamed of our particularities. Ever-expanding areas of our outer selves are forbidden to be touched by others. It begins with the genitals, then spreads to encompass the stomach, the back of the neck, the ears and the armpits, until all we are allowed to do is occasionally give someone a hug, shake hands or bestow or receive a peck on the cheek. The signs of others’ satisfaction in our existence declines, and their enthusiasm begins to be linked to our performance. It is what we do rather than what we are that is now of interest to them. Our teachers, once so encouraging about our smudgy drawings of ladybirds and our scrawls depicting the flags of the world, seem to take pleasure only in our exam results. Well-meaning individuals brutally suggest that perhaps it is time for us to start earning some money of our own, and society is kind or unkind to us chiefly according to how successful we turn out to be at doing just that. We begin to have to monitor what we say and how we look. There are aspects of our appearance that revolt and terrify us and that we feel we have to hide from others by spending money on clothes and haircuts. We grow into clumsy, heavy-footed, shameful, anxious creatures. We become adults, definitively expelled from paradise.

But deep inside, we never quite forget the needs with which we were born: to be accepted as we are, without regard to our deeds; to be loved through the medium of our body; to be enclosed in another’s arms; to occasion delight with the smell of our skin – all of these needs inspiring our relentless and passionately idealistic quest for someone to kiss and sleep with.

3.

Let us imagine some incremental steps in the story of a couple seducing each other for the first time – and in so doing analyse their pleasures in relation to this thesis about loneliness. Let us begin by picturing the couple in a cafe at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night in a large city, eating ice cream after seeing a film together.

There is doubtless a biological explanation for the sexual excitement this couple are feeling, connected to an unconscious narrative about reproduction and genetics, but the man and the woman are also turned on by the overcoming of the many barriers to intimacy that exist in normal life – and it is this dimension we can focus on to explain the greater part of the eroticism they will experience on their way to the bedroom.

The Kiss – Acceptance

Spoon in hand, the woman is describing a holiday she recently took to Spain with her sister. In Barcelona, she says, they visited a pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe and ate in a restaurant that specialized in seafood with a Moroccan influence. The man can feel her leg beside his, and more specifically the elasticity of her black tights as they taper to the hem of her grey and yellow skirt. When she is in the midst of relating an anecdote about Gaudí, he moves his face towards hers, ready to pull back if she gives any indication of fear or disgust – but his advance is met, to his enchantment, by only a tender and welcoming smile. The woman shuts her eyes, and both parties register the unique, unexpected combination of moisture and skin across their lips.

The pleasure of the moment can be understood only by considering its wider context: the overwhelming indifference against which any kiss is set. It goes almost without saying that the majority of people we encounter will be not merely uninterested in having sex with us but positively revolted by the idea. We have no choice but to keep a minimum of sixty or, even better, ninety centimetres’ distance between us and them at all times, to make it absolutely clear that our compromised selves have no intention of intruding into their personal spheres.

Then comes the kiss. The deeply private realm of the mouth – that dark, moist cavity that no one else but our dentist usually enters, where our tongue reigns supreme over a microcosm as silent and unknown as the belly of a whale – now prepares to open itself up to another. The tongue, which has had no expectation of ever meeting a compatriot, gingerly approaches a fellow member of its species, advancing with something of the reserve and curiosity exhibited by a South Sea Islander in greeting the arrival of the first European adventurer. Indentations and plateaus in the inner lining of the cheeks, hitherto thought of as solely personal, are revealed as having counterparts. The tongues engage each other in a tentative dance. One person can lick the other’s teeth as if they were his or her own.

It could sound disgusting – and that’s the point. Nothing is erotic that isn’t also, with the wrong person, revolting, which is precisely what makes erotic moments so intense: at the precise juncture where disgust could be at its height, we find only welcome and permission. The privileged nature of the union between two people is sealed by an act that, with someone else, would have horrified them both.

Then again, if we lived in another culture where acceptance was signalled in other ways entirely – for example, where a couple who wanted to show one another signs of affection would eat a papaya together or touch each other’s toenails – these actions might in turn also become eroticized. A kiss is pleasurable because of the sensory receptivity of our lips, but we shouldn’t overlook that a good deal of our excitement has nothing to do with the physical dimension of the act: it stems from the simple realization that someone else likes us quite a lot, a message that would enchant us even if it were delivered via another medium. Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us – which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced (as it may need to be, for instance, when two lovers are already married to other people) by a declaration of that desire – a confession which may in itself be so erotic as to render the actual kiss superfluous.

The Undressing – An End to Shame

The man and woman drive back to her flat in a part of town he doesn’t know well and together climb silently up to the third floor. Inside, the curtains are open and the bedroom is illuminated by the orange light of a streetlamp. They kiss once more by a cupboard. Emboldened by their privacy, he undoes the clasps on her beige blouse, she unfastens the buttons of his blue shirt. Their movements grow impatient. He reaches around to her back and grapples awkwardly with the hooks on her bra. With a forgiving smile at his ineptitude, she reaches around to help him. A few moments later, they behold each other naked for the first time and begin tenderly caressing each other’s thighs, buttocks, shoulders, stomachs and nipples.

It can hardly be coincidental that in Genesis, one of the principal punishments visited by God on Adam and Eve in their expulsion from Paradise was a sense of physical shame. The Judeo-Christian deity decreed that the two ingrates should forever feel embarrassed about exposing their bodies. Whatever we may make of the biblical origins of this feeling of corporeal shame, it is evident that we wear clothes not only to keep warm but also – and perhaps even primarily – for fear of provoking repulsion in others by the sight of our flesh. Our bodies never look quite as we would want them to; even in the most beguiling and athletic moments of our youth, we are rarely lacking a long list of features we would prefer to alter. Yet such anxiety is based on something more existential than a cosmetic distaste. There is something fundamentally embarrassing about revealing any kind of naked adult body – which is to say, any body capable of desiring and having sex – to a witness.

It wasn’t always this way. The shame begins in adolescence. As our bodies mature and become physically ready for sex, so we run the risk of appearing obscene before the wrong eyes. A division begins between our ordinary public selves on the one hand and our sexual and private identities on the other. A large portion of who we are as adults, from our sexual fantasies to our parted legs, becomes impossible to share with almost anyone we know.

Let us return to our male lover, who is now passionately sucking his partner’s fingers. For him, the division of selves and the feeling of infamy began in the middle of his fourteenth year. One month, he was happy to play cowboys and Indians in the garden with his brother and visit his beloved grandmother; the next, all he wanted was to stay at home in his room with the curtains drawn, masturbating to the memory of a woman’s profile that he had glimpsed on the way out of the newsagent’s. There was no way to reconcile his desires with what was expected of him by others. His era could countenance his thinking of holding the hand of or even kissing a girl he liked, but such benign and innocent activities seemed to have little in common with the macabre depravity unfolding daily in his runaway imagination. Soon enough he was dreaming of orgies and anal sex, obsessing about obtaining hard-core pornography and fantasizing about tying up and defiling his maths teacher. How could he still be a nice person? His shame prompted him to develop an inner self that he feared he would never be able to introduce anyone to.