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

Something similar had happened to his partner, now on her knees before him. At thirteen, she too underwent a transformation. She had previously enjoyed needlework, horseback riding and baking banana bread. Then, all but overnight, her pastimes dwindled to one: going into the bathroom, locking the door, lying on the floor, pulling off her trousers and watching herself masturbate in the full-length mirror. How could such an activity fit in with what other people knew of her? Could anyone accept the whole of her? In the guilty, exhausted moments after reaching orgasm, she knew some of the pain felt by Masaccio’s Eve as she was ushered out of Paradise by a punitive deity.

What is now unfolding between our couple in the bedroom is therefore an act of mutual reconciliation between two secret sexual selves, emerging at last from sinful solitude. The couple tacitly agree not to mention the stupefying strangeness of their respective physical forms and bodily desires; they accept without shame what once seemed so shameful. They admit through their caresses to being driven in unusual yet compatible directions. What they are up to is starkly at odds with the behaviour expected of them by the civilized world – it clashes, for instance, with the memory of their grandmothers – but it no longer seems either wicked or unique. At last, in the semi-darkness, the couple can confess to the many wondrous and demented things that having a body drives them to want.

Excitement – Authenticity

They lie down on the bed and caress each other further. He reaches down between her legs and presses gently upwards, realizing with intense joy that she is wet. At the same time, she stretches her hand across to him and takes comparable satisfaction in discovering the extreme stiffness of his penis.

The reason such physiological reactions are emotionally so satisfactory (which means, simultaneously, so erotic) is that they signal a kind of approval that lies utterly beyond rational manipulation. Erections and lubrication simply cannot be effected by willpower and are therefore particularly true and honest indices of interest. In a world in which fake enthusiasms are rife, in which it is often hard to tell whether people really like us or whether they are being kind to us merely out of a sense of duty, the wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.

So delightful are these involuntary reactions that, after making love, our couple will return to discussing them in relation to the earlier part of their evening in the cafe. He will ask her with a slightly mischievous look whether she was wet during her anecdote about going to Barcelona with her sister. And she will answer, with a smile, that yes, of course she was, the whole time, even from the moment they first sat down to order their drinks and ice creams. He will in turn confess that his penis was hard inside the folds of his trousers – producing a further round of mutual arousal at the thought that, beneath their sensible conversation, their bodies were already experiencing a desire radically in advance of their surface social interactions.

Moments when sex overwhelms our rational selves have a well-known habit of being erotic. A few weeks from now, our couple will go off to the seaside for the weekend. On the Saturday evening in their hotel, after a day of sunbathing and swimming, they will lie in bed together talking, and eventually the topic of sexual fantasies will come up. Both will admit that they rather like uniforms. He will tell her how much he loves the idea of a dignified and austere nurse wearing a sensible white overall; she will confide – flashing a teasing smile as she looks out of the window – that she occasionally feels turned on by men in elegant woollen suits, in particular the type of well-dressed young executives who look concentrated and stern as they walk across city streets, carrying their briefcases and copies of the Financial Times.

The eroticism of such uniforms stems from the gap between the rational control they symbolize and the unbridled sexual passion that can for a while, if only in fantasy, gain the upper hand over it. Most of the time, the people we come in contact with in daily life – from doctors and nurses to investment managers and tax accountants – aren’t of course wet or hard while they talk to us; they haven’t even noticed us properly and certainly are not about to interrupt a medical procedure or cancel a conference call for our sake. Their businesslike indifference can be painful and humiliating for us – hence the peculiar power of the fantasy that life could be turned upside down and its normal priorities reversed. In our sex games, we are able to rewrite the script: now the nurse wants to make love to us so desperately that she forgets she is there to take a blood sample; the capitalist, for once setting aside all consideration for money, sweeps the computers off the desk and begins a heedless kiss. As we have passionate sex in an imaginary stall in a hospital toilet or on the floor of an imagined stationery cupboard, intimacy – symbolically, at least – wins out over status and responsibility.

Many formal physical settings can be unexpectedly erotic in and of themselves. Just as uniforms can inspire lust by their evocation of rule-breaking, so too – and for similar reasons – it can be exciting to imagine sex in an unobserved corner of the university library, in a restaurant’s cloakroom or in a train carriage. Our defiant transgression can give us a feeling of power that goes beyond the merely sexual. To have sex at the back of an airplane full of business travellers is to have a go at upending the usual hierarchy of things, introducing desire into an atmosphere in which cold-hearted discipline generally dominates over our personal wishes. At 35,000 feet up, just as in the office cubicle, the victory of intimacy seems sweeter, and our pleasure increases accordingly. We call the scenario in the plane bathroom ‘sexy’, but what we truly mean is that we are excited at having overcome an otherwise oppressive kind of alienation.

Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate. It is as if we need to be reminded of convention in order properly to appreciate the wonder of being unguarded, or to keep crossing the border into the vulnerable self in order to sense with the right amplitude the special qualities of the place we have been allowed access to. This explains the appeal of memories of our first night with someone new, when that contrast was at its most vivid, but also, more sadly, the lack of eroticism we can feel at a nudist beach or with a long-term partner who has forgotten to guard his or her nakedness against the ever-present dangers of our predatory ingratitude.