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

1.

Even if we appreciate the complexity behind the concept of sexiness, we can still feel puzzled by the fact that different people are turned on by such different things. Why don’t we all like the same faces or clothes? Why are our sexual tastes so varied?

Evolutionary biology confidently predicts that we will be drawn to people on the basis of their evident health, but it has not put forward any truly convincing theories about why we should prefer one specific healthy person over another.

2.

If we wish to account for our mysteriously personal sexual tastes, we might by first trying to understand our no-less-subjective tastes in art.

Art historians have long been at a loss to explain why people should have such strong preferences for one particular artist over another, even when both are acknowledged masters who have created works of great beauty. Why does one person love Mark Rothko, for instance, but have an instinctive fear of Caravaggio? Why does another recoil from Chagall but admire Dalí?

A highly suggestive answer to this conundrum can be found in an essay entitled ‘Abstraction and Empathy’, published in 1907 by a German art historian named Wilhelm Worringer. Worringer argued that we all grow up with something missing inside us. Our parents and our environment fail us in distinctive ways, and our characters hence take shape with certain areas of vulnerability and imbalance in them. And crucially, these deficits and flaws determine what is going to appeal to us and repel us in art.

Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: we may say that a given painting is either serene or restless, courageous or careful, modest or confident, masculine or feminine, bourgeois or aristocratic. Our preferences among these traits reflect our psychological histories – more specifically, what is vulnerable in us as a result of our upbringing. We hunger for artworks that contain elements that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help to return us to a healthy mean. We crave in art those qualities that are missing in our lives. We call a work ‘beautiful’ when it supplies the missing dose of our psychological virtues, and we dismiss as ‘ugly’ one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by.