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

1.

We might be so much better off if we didn’t have a sex drive; for most of our lives, it causes us nothing but trouble and distress. In its name, we do revolting things with people we don’t really like, only to feel disgusting and sinful afterwards. Those we desire usually dismiss us for being too ugly or not their type; the cute ones have always already got a boyfriend or a girlfriend; most of our early adult life is a continuous round of rejection, sad music and bad pornography. It seems a miracle when eventually someone takes pity on us and gives us a chance, yet even then, we find ourselves before long starting to take an interest in other people’s legs and hair again. We would be so nice without sex – nice in the way that seven-year-old boys and girls are, full of sweetness and wonder about the lives of marmosets or deer. As we age, we can look forward to the horror and humiliation of not being able to perform, of looking lustfully at the wrists and ankles of people who turn out to have still been babies when we were already at university and of having to watch the slow collapse of our own once fresh and elastic body. On a bad day, the entire enterprise appears designed to defeat us.

2.

But there is of course another side to it, one of ecstasy and discovery. Perhaps the best time to get a sense of this is on a clear evening in a large city in the summer, at around six-thirty, when the workday is largely over and the streets smell of diesel, coffee, fried food, hot tarmac and sex. The pavement swarms with people in suits, cotton print dresses and loose-fitting jeans. Already the lights on the bridges have come on, and airplanes are pirouetting above; all the sensible folk have headed back home to the suburbs for their children’s bathtime, but for those who are staying, the night promises warmth, intrigue and mischief.

Sex gets us out of the house and out of ourselves. In its name, we stretch out our horizons and intermingle unguardedly with random members of our species. People who otherwise keep themselves to themselves, who tacitly believe they have nothing much in common with the ordinary mass of humanity, enter bars and discos, climb nervously up tenement stairs, wait in unknown precincts, shout to make themselves heard over the throb of the music and talk politely with respectable mothers in living rooms adorned with ornaments and school-prize photos, while upstairs the mothers’ grown-up children change into new pairs of trim grey underwear.

In the name of sex, we expand our interests and our reference points. To fit in with our lovers, we become fascinated by the details of eighteenth-century Swedish furniture, we learn about long-distance cycle riding, we discover South Korean moon jars. For sex, a burly yet tender tattooed carpenter will sit in a cafe opposite an elfin PhD student with a fringe, half listening to her tortuous explanation of the meaning of the Greek word eudaimonia and letting his eyes trace patterns across her flawless porcelain skin as someone grills sausages in the background.

There would be so much less to do without sex. No one would bother to open jewellery stores, embroider lace, serve food on silver platters or hoist hotel rooms onto pontoons over tropical lagoons. The greater part of our economy would be meaningless without sex as a driving force or an organizing principle. The mad energy of the trading floors, the padded gold-leaf dressing rooms of Dior on Bond Street, the gatherings at the Museum of Modern Art, the black cod served at rooftop Japanese restaurants – what are all these for if not to help along the sort of processes whereby two people will eventually end up making love in a darkened room while sirens wail in the street below?

Only through the prism of sex does the past become properly intelligible. The apparent foreignness of ancient Rome or Ming Dynasty China cannot in the end have been so great, whatever the barriers of language and culture, because there, too, people felt the pull of flushed cheeks and of well-formed ankles. During the reign of Moctezuma I in Mexico or that of Ptolemy II of Egypt, it would have felt more or less the same to enter into or be entered by someone and to gasp at the pressure of her body or his against ours.

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately. We could age respectably, get used to our privileges and think we understood what was going on. We might disappear into numbers and words alone. It is sex that creates a necessary havoc in the ordinary hierarchies of power, status, money and intelligence. The professor will get on her knees and beg to be flogged by an unschooled farmhand. The CEO will lose his reason over an intern; it will seem of no consequence that while he commands a few million, she rents a basement room. His only priority will be her pleasure. For her he will learn the names of bands he has never heard of before, he will go into a shop and buy her a lemon-yellow dress that won’t fit her, he will be kind where he has always been dismissive, he will acknowledge his folly and his humanity and when it is all over, he will sit in his expensive German car outside his pristine family home and weep without measure.

We might even embrace the pain sex causes us, for without it we wouldn’t know art and music quite so well. There would be so much less point to Schubert’s Lieder or Natalie Merchant’s Ophelia, to Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage or Nabokov’s Lolita. We would be so much less well acquainted with agony, and therefore so much crueller and less ready to laugh at ourselves. When every contemptuous but fair thing has been said about our infernal sexual desires, we can still celebrate them for not allowing us to forget for more than a few days at a time what is really involved in living an embodied, chemical and largely insane human life.