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

Rudeness – Love

As they are making love, the woman manages to let the man know, in one of those subtle, almost wordless ways in which lovers sometimes communicate, that she would like for him to pull her hair. He feels tentative about it at first, it doesn’t seem like a ‘nice’ thing to do, but it is evident that she is no longer interested in any standard definitions of that term. So he takes her chestnut strands in his hands and brutally pulls to the rhythm of their lovemaking. Encouraged by her enthusiasm, he then ventures to insult her, partly because he feels so tenderly towards her. With equal affection, and at a pitch of excitement, she accuses him of being a bastard, a monstrous and demeaning intruder. He holds on roughly to her shoulders. The next day, scratch marks will be visible across her back.

Normal life continually demands that we be polite. As a rule, we cannot win the respect or affection of anyone without severely repressing all that is ostensibly ‘bad’ within us: our aggression, our heedlessness, our impulse towards greed and our contempt. We cannot both be accepted by society and reveal the full spectrum of our minds and moods. Hence the erotic interest we feel (which is more accurately an emotional satisfaction) when sex permits our secret self to be witnessed – and then endorsed.

In the presence of someone who seems utterly assured of our virtuousness, we dare to share aspects of ourselves that we are otherwise frightened and ashamed of. We use words and gestures that would cause us to be labelled as maniacs in the world beyond. It can be a sign of love to be allowed to slap someone hard across the face or to clasp our hands forcefully around another’s neck. Our partners thereby demonstrate to us that they know we are essentially honourable. It doesn’t matter to them that we have darker sides; they can – like the ideal parent – see us whole and recognize us as being fundamentally good. We are granted an extraordinary opportunity to feel comfortable in our own skin when a willing and generous lover invites us to say or do the very worst things we can imagine.

When we are on the receiving end of this type of violence and rudeness, we may find a parallel pleasure, and a certain sense of strength, in being able to decide for ourselves just how insulted, hurt and dominated we are going to feel. We spend so much of our lives being maltreated by others in the ordinary world, we are so often forced to submit to the malevolent will of our superiors at a time of their choosing, that it can be truly liberating to turn the dynamics of power into our own theatrical performance, to subjugate ourselves voluntarily, in circumstances wholly of our own design and before someone who happens to be, at heart, both kind and good. We work through a fear of our fragility by being slapped and insulted at our command, enjoying the impression of resilience and empowerment afforded by encountering the worst that someone can think of inflicting on us – and surviving.

The bond of loyalty between a couple is apt to grow stronger with every increase in rudeness. The more horrifying we believe our behaviour would seem to the larger, judgemental society we normally live in, the more we feel as if we are building a paradise of mutual acceptance. Such rudeness makes no sense from an evolutionary– biological point of view; it is only through a psychological lens that being slapped, half strangled, tied to a bed and almost raped starts to feel like a proof of acceptance.

Sex temporarily liberates us from the punishing dichotomy, well known to every one of us since childhood, between dirty and clean. Love-making purifies us by engaging the most apparently polluted sides of our selves in its procedures and thereby anointing them as newly worthy. This is never more true than when we press our faces, the most public and respectable aspects of our selves, eagerly against our lovers’ most private and ‘contaminated’ parts, kissing, sucking and thrusting our tongues inside them and thus symbolically lending our approval to their entire selves, much as a priest will accept a penitent, guilty of so many transgressions, back into the fold of the Catholic Church via a chaste kiss on the head.

Fetishism – Goodness

Our couple both have fetishes and as they make love, they take note of them and thread them into their gathering excitement. The word fetish is normally associated with extremity, even pathology, and certain pieces of clothing or physical features – like long nails, leather outfits, masks, chains and stockings. However, none of these appear on our couple’s list of proclivities.

In a clinical sense, a fetish is defined as an ingredient, typically quite unusual in nature, which needs to be present in order for someone to achieve orgasm. The earliest, most well-known investigator of fetishes was the Austro-German doctor and sexologist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886, identified some 230 different kinds of fetishes, among these stigmatophilia (love of tattoos and piercings), dacryphilia (love of tears), podophilia (love of feet), sthenolagnia (love of muscles) and thilpsosis (love of being pinched).

The extremity of these examples can make it seem as if only the insane have fetishes, but this is of course far from the case. Fetishes do not have to be either extreme or incomprehensible. We are all fetishists of one sort or another, but for the most part rather mild ones who are well able to have sex without having recourse to our favoured objects. In this wider sense, fetishes are simply details – most often related either to a type of clothing or to a part of another’s body – which evoke for us desirable sides of human nature. The precise origins of our enthusiasms may be obscure, but they can almost always be traced back to some meaningful aspect of our childhood: we will be drawn to specific things either because they recall appealing qualities of a beloved parental figure or else, conversely, because they somehow cancel out, or otherwise help us to escape, a memory of early humiliation or terror.

The task of understanding our own preferences in this regard should be recognized as an integral part of any project of self-knowledge or biography. What Freud said of dreams can like-wise be said of sexual fetishes: they are a royal road into the unconscious.

The male half of our couple has a fetish for a particular style of shoe. At the start of their evening out, he noticed with considerable excitement that the woman was wearing a pair of flat, black, sensible loafers (of the sort often associated with librarians and schoolgirls, and in this instance manufactured by the Italian company Marni), and now, as they make love on her bed, though both are otherwise entirely naked, he asks if she might put them back on to enhance his pleasure.

To explain why the man delights in his partner’s shoes, his whole past must be invoked. His mother was a successful actress who dressed in loud and immodest clothes; she especially loved leopard-skin prints, mauve nail polish and very high heels. Significantly, she also made it clear that she did not much like her son. She never praised him or showed him affection, instead giving all her attention to his older sister and to her various lovers. She didn’t read her boy bedtime stories or knit winter jumpers for his teddy bears. Even now, as an adult, the man is secretly terrified of women who remind him of this self-involved and unsympathetic matriarch.

Although the man is not aware of it, his psychological history is the omnipresent filter through which he looks at shoes, and by extension at the women wearing them. Tonight’s date, for example, could have taken a very different turn if his companion had arrived in a pair of Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos: had the two of them ended up in bed at all, he might well have been impotent. But the loafers were, and are, perfect. They are a concentration of the qualities he is most anxious to find in a romantic partner. In two narrow assemblages of well-worked leather precisely twenty-two centimetres long, he detects the identity of his ideal woman: someone calm, endowed with good sense, restraint, decorum, modesty and a degree of shyness to match his own. He is able to make love to their owner, but if circumstances demanded or permitted – if, say, she went away on a business trip and he were left alone to house-sit for her – he could also, and without difficulty, achieve orgasm with the shoes themselves.

The woman, meanwhile, has a fetish of her own. She loves the man’s watch, of the old-fashioned, second-hand kind with a well-worn leather strap. She keeps her eye on it while they make love; at one point she squeezes the man’s forearm between her legs and is thrilled by the feel of the metal and glass against her skin. The watch is of the same sort her father used to wear. He was a kind, playful, brilliant doctor who died when she was twelve, leaving an unfillable hole in her heart, and all her adult life she has sought out men who somehow summon up his particular aura and smell. The sight of the watch makes her nipples harden because it sends a subliminal signal that her new lover may have important qualities in common with the person she most admired in the world.

Talking of things around wrists, the man has another fetish in this area. He noticed after first kissing the woman that she was wearing a rubber band around her left-hand wrist. Krafft-Ebing never got around to discussing this: there is as yet no recognized phenomenon called bandophilia – but this only shows how immature the field of fetishism still is and how much work remains for researchers still to do (also, how much work there still is for pornographers, because the fetishes that show up on porn sites and in films reflect a woefully narrow range of the sort of things that actually excite us. There are still so many websites to be built: to name only a few, sites for people turned on by cardigans, by blushing, by people driving and by people reading). The man likes the rubber band because it seems to have been placed there in a cheeky, casual, androgynous and robust gesture. It suggests someone who isn’t bothered by the canons of high fashion, who feels inwardly free enough to dabble with an object of low perceived value. Once again, he is turned on by something that frees him from the shadow of his mother, who only ever wore jewellery from expensive shops (much of it bought for her on the side by men who were not his father).

An interesting, unexpected and surely unintended explanation for fetishes may be found in Socrates’ famous dinner-party discussion about love, described in Plato’s Symposium. Using Aristophanes as his mouthpiece, Plato articulates what has since become known as the theory of the Ladder of Love, which argues that whatever we are attracted to through our sense of sight leads us ultimately away from the merely visual, away from the material, and into a wider positive category referred to by Plato as ‘the Good’. This construct of a ladder connecting the world of objects to that of ideas and virtues may usefully be co-opted to rescue our fetishes from the depressing alternative interpretation, which holds that they are trivial and inconsequential because merely sexual. Thanks to Plato’s philosophy, a pair of beautiful loafers, a handsome vintage watch or an elastic band will no longer need to be dismissed as meaningless and incapable of producing anything more than unimportant and irrelevant pangs of desire. Rather, these and all our other fetishes may be seen as sitting at the foot of a ladder that climbs up to what we might love most in another human being. They turn us on because they are emblems of the Good.

Objects turn us on as emblems of the Good.

Orgasm – Utopia

The orgasms that our representative couple end up enjoying in the early hours are, in sum, far more than just physical sensations generated by the friction and pressure of two sets of sexual organs obeying a biological command to propagate the species. The pleasure we derive from sex is also bound up with our recognizing, and giving a distinctive seal of approval to, those ingredients of a good life whose presence we have detected in another person. The more closely we analyse what we consider ‘sexy’, the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

The orgasm itself marks the supreme moment when our loneliness and alienation are momentarily overcome. Everything we have appreciated about our lover – the comments he has made, the shoes she is wearing, the mood expressed by his or her eyes or brow – all of these are combined into a concentrated distillation of pleasure that leaves each partner feeling uniquely tender towards and vulnerable with the other.

There are of course ways to have an orgasm that have very little to do with finding common purpose with another person, but these must be thought of as a greater or lesser betrayal of what sex should really be about. At the near end of the spectrum, this explains the hollow, lonely feeling that normally follows masturbation; at the far end, it justifies the outrage we feel on hearing about cases of bestiality, rape and paedophilia – activities where the pleasure one party takes in the other is appallingly lacking in mutuality.

4.

One of the difficulties of sex is that it doesn’t – in the grander scheme of things – last terribly long. Even at its extreme, we are talking of an activity that might only rarely occupy two hours, or approximately the length of a Catholic Mass.

The mood thereafter will have a tendency to be subdued. Post-coital sadness often settles over a couple. One partner or both may have an impulse to fall asleep, to read the newspaper or to run away. The problem is typically not the sex itself so much as the contrast between its inherent tenderness, violence, energy and hedonism and the more mundane aspects of the rest of our lives, the eternal tedium, restraint, difficulty and coldness. Sex can throw the challenges we face into almost unbearably high relief. Moreover, with our libido spent, our recent transport may seem inhibitingly strange and disconnected from what we think of as our regular self and our normal concerns. We may strive ordinarily to be sensible, for example, but only a moment ago – can it really be? – we were desperate to flog our lover. Contented though we generally are to be living in a modern and democratic society, we have just now passed the better part of an evening acting out a desire to be a sadistic nobleman holding a damsel captive in a medieval dungeon.

Our culture encourages us to acknowledge very little of who we normally are in the act of sex. It seems as if it might be a purely physical process, without any psychological importance. But as we have seen, what happens in love-making is closely bound up with some of our most central ambitions. The act of sex plays out through the rubbing together of organs, but our excitement is no boorish physiological reaction; rather, it is an ecstasy we feel at encountering someone who may be able to put to rest certain of our greatest fears, and with whom we may hope to build a shared life based upon common values.