If you want to know
what life is all about, and you
happen to be a member of a gamete-swapping
species like ours, the answer is obvious:
sex—reproductive sex,
recreational sex, any kind of sex
you like. From Darwin
to Deepthroat, sex is fundamental,
vital, unavoidable. Take sex out
of life's mysterious dance and
pretty soon the microbes will have
the world to themselves again.
Take sex out of human life,
and our future suddenly looks horribly
bland, not to mention finite.
You see, despite
our heartfelt
claims to intelligence, decency,
spirituality and all the rest, we
are animal too. Decidedly
so. We obey the same principles
of biology as anything else
that runs, walks, or crawls,
and the unstoppable instinct
to go forth and multiply
is clearly one of our central preoccupations.
This much is indisputable.
Any educated person who thinks
otherwise is living in a
fantasy world.
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of
fantasy-worlders about.
Their favourite belief—that
humans are qualitatively
different from other animals; that we are somehow elevated,
special, the chosen
ones—might be comforting
to them, but it smacks of
insecurity to me. Sigmund
Freud, who single-handedly
thrust sex into the intellectual
spotlight a century ago,
took an even dimmer view.
He thought that this kind
of appeal to the supernatural
was "infantile". I agree.
Now, Freud was something
of a mixed bag himself, to say
the least. But while he may have been way off course with his ridiculous,
androcentric notions of penis envy
and the Oedipus complex, he was
bang on about one thing—the main
thing: the desire for pleasure
is what drives us. I can't help
it, nor can you. We are "desiring
machines" as
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari put it.
We desire pleasure—as
much of it as we can get—especially sexual pleasure.
Ask an evolutionary
psychologist and she will tell
you that this is the heart of human
nature; the rest is gravy.
Now, generally speaking I
don't like to dwell too long
on this rather reductionist
view of existence; after
all, gravy has its moments
too. But given that I'm a
single man living in San
Diego, where many of the
world's most mouthwatering
women seem to live, I can't
in good conscience claim
that this basic drive doesn't
take up a lot of my time.
A billion years of sexual
evolution, plus one as a
singleton, have left me with
more sexual desire than I
know what to do with. Sorry,
I know it isn't very polite,
but there we are. My point being that sexual desire is as much
a property of nature as gravity or E=mc2.
Why then are we so burdened with sexual taboos?
I think the answer has a lot to do with that most primitive of human obsessions, religion.
A moment's reflection tells
us that thanks to religion, we have to learn to be
ashamed of our bodies and our secret, filthy
desires, because we certainly weren't
born with the stigma. As a single mother
once lamented to me about her openly
onanistic toddler: "she has a better
sex life than I do!"
St. Augustine was one of those
responsible for formalizing this most absurd of neuroses.
He poisoned the world with
the brilliantly simple, and totally psychotic
idea that whatever is pleasurable must also
be sinful. And given that nothing is as pleasurable
as sex (and if you disagree with that you simply
can't be doing it right), then presumably nothing
is quite as sinful either. And indeed, to prove the point, in some
parts of the world sex is so sinful that adultery
still carries the death penalty (for women
that is—different rules apply to men,
but that's another rant).
Having said all that, I am not seriously suggesting that
we should throw off our cultural conditioning
and begin to act out our sexual desires willy-nilly,
in some kind of Friedmanesque
sexual economy. As Katherine Hepburn said to
Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen,
"Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in
this world to rise above." And to some extent
she's absolutely right—there are worthwhile
things in life besides sex, and to pretend
otherwise would be churlish to say the least.
But to brand nature (sexual desire) as sinful,
as Christian teaching has sought to do for
nearly two thousand years, is as stupid as
it is abhorrent. Religiously enforced sexual
repression may have played a central role in
building civilization, as Freud claimed, but
it is surely redundant now. We can have the
best of both worlds. We can be free.
