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

3.

Sex manuals, ranging from the Kama Sutra to The Joy of Sex, have been united in locating the problems of sexuality in the physical sphere. Sex will go better – they variously assure us – when we master the lotus position, learn to use ice cubes creatively or apply proven techniques for attaining synchronized orgasm.

If we occasionally bristle at such manuals, it may be because – beneath their encouraging prose and helpful diagrams – they seem intolerably humiliating. They want us to take seriously the notion that sex is troublesome to us chiefly because we haven’t tried postillionage or got the hang of the Karezza method. Yet these are adventures at the luxurious end of the spectrum of human sexuality and mock the sorts of challenges we are more normally faced with.

For the majority of us, the real cause for concern is not how to make sex even more enjoyable with a lover who is already keen to spend several hours on a divan with us trying out new positions, amid the smell of jasmine and the song of hummingbirds. Rather, we worry about how problematic sex has become with our long-term partner due to mutual resentments over childcare and finances; or about our addiction to internet pornography; or about the fact that we seem to crave sex only with people we don’t love; or about whether, by having had an affair with someone at work, we have irretrievably broken our spouse’s heart and trust.

4.

In the face of these problems and many more, we might question our expectations of how often we can rightly look forward to sex going well for us – and, contrary to the spirit of the age, might conclude that a handful of occasions in a lifetime may be a fair and natural limit to our ambitions. Great sex, like happiness more generally, may be the precious and sublime exception.

During our most fortunate encounters, it is rare for us to appreciate how privileged we are. It is only as we get older, and look back repeatedly and nostalgically to a few erotic episodes, that we start to realize with what stinginess nature extends her gifts to us – and therefore what an extraordinary and rare achievement of biology, psychology and timing satisfying sex really is.

For most of our lives, sex seems fated to remain steeped in longing and awkwardness. Whatever the manuals may promise, there are really no solutions to the majority of the dilemmas sex creates for us. A useful self-help book on this subject ought hence to focus on the management of pain rather than its outright elimination; we should hope to find a literary version of a hospice, not a hospital. Yet though we cannot expect books to dissolve away our problems, they can still provide opportunities for us to discharge our sadness and discover a communal confirmation of our woes. Books retain a role in offering us consoling reminders that we are not alone with the humiliating and peculiar difficulties imposed by our unavoidable possession of a sex drive.