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

3.

To flesh out his theory, Worringer proposed that people who are calm, cautious and rule-driven will often be drawn to a kind of art that is passionate and dramatic, and that can thus compensate for their feelings of desiccation and sterility. We can predict that they will be highly susceptible, for instance, to the intensity of Latin art, admiring the blood-red darkness of Goya’s canvases and the phantasmagoric architectural forms of the Spanish baroque. But this same bold aesthetic, according to Worringer’s thesis, will frighten and turn off other sorts of people whose backgrounds have made them anxious and overexcitable. These jumpy characters will want nothing to do with the baroque, locating far greater beauty in an art of calm and logic. Their preferences are more likely to run to the mathematical rigours of Bach’s cantatas, the symmetry of formal French gardens and the quiet emptiness of canvases by minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin or Mark Rothko.

4.

Worringer’s theory enables us to look at any work of art and ask ourselves what would have to be missing in someone’s life in order for him or her to judge it ‘beautiful’, as well as what might be frightening to a person who would regard it as being ‘ugly’. The very same approach can also provide fascinating insight into why we find some people sexy and others not.

As with art, so with sex: here too the accidents of nature and the quirks of our upbringing cause us to reach adult life in an unbalanced state, overly endowed in some areas and severely lacking in others, either too anxious or too calm, too assertive or too passive, too intellectual or too practical, too masculine or too feminine. We then declare people ‘sexy’ when we see in them evidence of compensatory qualities, and are repelled by those who seem prone to drive us further into our extremities.

Confronted by two individuals who are by appearances equally healthy – for the sake of this exercise, let’s choose Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson – we may well feel, thanks to the unique mapping of our psychobiography, that only one of them is properly arousing in our eyes. If we were traumatized by overly theatrical and unreliable parents, we may decide that something about Scarlett’s features suggests that she has just a little too much of a taste for excitement and melodrama. We may deem that her cheekbones indicate a capacity for self-involvement that we are already all too familiar with in ourselves, and that her eyes, though they seem at peace in the photograph we are studying, make her look too easily capable of exploding into just the sort of destructive rages to which we are in any case prone, and that we really don’t need any help in bolstering.

Scarlett Johansson (left), Natalie Portman (right). Why aren’t all healthy, attractive people equally appealing to us? Why do we have such pronounced individual preferences?

We may end up favouring Natalie, who is objectively no more beautiful than Scarlett, because her eyes reflect just the sort of calm that we long for and never got enough of from our hypochondriacal mother. We may be turned on by the steely, practical resolve we detect in Ms. Portman’s forehead, precisely because we cannot lay claim to the same trait ourselves (we’re always losing the house keys and feeling confused about how to fill out insurance forms). And we may be seduced by her mouth because it implies a reserve and a stoicism that perfectly balance out our painful inclination towards brashness and intemperance.

In short, we can explain our relative attractions to Natalie or Scarlett by taking stock of what we are missing in ourselves, just as we can account for our preferences for the paintings of Agnes Martin or of Caravaggio by considering the different and particular ways in which we are deficient adults. We need both art and sex to make us whole, so it is not surprising if the mechanisms of compensation should be similar in each case. The specifics of what we find ‘beautiful’ and what we find ‘sexy’ are indications of what we most deeply crave in order to rebalance ourselves.