by Неизвестный
SOME MODERN MYTHS
This way of describing and in consequence experiencing sexual phenomena I believe to be founded in five myths. Some of the myths originate in wishful thinking, and some in scientific and pseudoscientific theories.
The first myth is that sexual desire is desire for a particular kind of pleasure, located in the sexual organs. On this view all sex is like masturbation—a manipulation of the sexual organs for the sake of pleasure. The other person is a stimulus to the desire, but not an object of it. The desire is not for him or her but for a pleasure that could be obtained in other ways. The effect of this myth is to remove sexual desire and sexual pleasure from the realm of interpersonal responses, and reconstitute them as purely sensory appetites, like the desire to scratch and the pleasure of scratching.
Why should people believe that? There are two dominant reasons, I think. One is that it simplifies the phenomena of sex in a way that makes them intellectually manageable. Sex becomes like eating and drinking: the desire is for sensory gratification, and is part of the general pleasure-seeking character of the animal organism. The instinct on which this pleasure depends is aroused by the sight of or contact with another person: and that explains the function of sexual pleasure in the life of the human organism, and why it is usually aroused by a member of the opposite sex. This pleasure helps the reproductive process, in just the way that the pleasure of eating helps to keep the organism fed.
The other reason for believing this myth is that it simplifies the phenomena of sex in ways that make them morally manageable. If sex is just like eating, then personal relationships, commitment, and the rest can be discounted from the moral point of view. As long as the other person sits down with you voluntarily to enjoy the meal, the elementary requirements of morality are satisfied. Maybe you should be careful about the diet, but only for health reasons. All those old reasons for care, such as shame, honor, marital duty, and the rest, are as irrational as the Jewish dietary laws and a mere survival from an era in which “safe sex” was difficult to guarantee.
The second myth is that sexual satisfaction depends upon such factors as the intensity and duration of sensory pleasure, culminating in orgasm, and that “good sex” is a matter of getting those things right. This is what lovers should aim at, and what ultimately cements the bond between them. Around the myth of “good sex” has grown an enormous literature, both popular and “scientific.”
Like the previous myth, this one serves to simplify the phenomena of sex, both factually and morally. It reduces to a technique what is more properly described as an art, and represents as a means what is understandable only as an end. In short, it “instrumentalizes” the sexual act.
The third myth is of a different kind, since it involves an attempt at, or at any rate a pretense of, science. This is the myth that sexual urges need to be expressed, and that the attempt to “repress” them is psychologically harmful. The origins of this myth lie in the theories of Freud, who did not, however, endorse the view that repression is harmful. What Freud did do was to introduce the “hydraulic” imagery with which sexual desire is now so often understood. The urge welling up inside can be kept down for a while, but eventually will seek a channel to escape, and if not allowed to escape through one channel may escape through another. The longer it is kept down, the more dangerous might its inevitable eruption be, if it finds release in activities such as sadism or child abuse. The great apostle of this view was Wilhelm Reich, who saw orgasm as a kind of release, sex as the technique for securing it, and repression as the path to insanity.
Associated with this third myth is a fourth, which is that sexual desire is the same kind of thing, whatever the nature of the partner who arouses it. The urge welling within me might be stimulated by a woman, or a man, or an animal, or an imaginary being. Convention and decency set limits to how a human being should satisfy his sexual urges. But nothing in the urge itself demands any particular kind of partner. Sexual “orientation,” as it is now called, is simply an ingrained habit of arousal, trained on a particular object.
This myth goes naturally with the other three, but the motive for adopting it is rather different, namely the desire to revise and perhaps even abolish the traditional idea of sexual normality. For the fourth myth offers an easy path to the conclusion that there is no such thing as sexual normality, and that homosexuality (for example) is not in itself a perversion. Homosexual and heterosexual conduct use different instruments, but to the same end, and any argument for distinguishing right from wrong applies equally to both. There should be no coercion, no fraud, no trickery; and each partner must be open and honest with the other, but the sex of the partner is irrelevant to the morality of the act.
Finally, the fifth and in many ways most important of the modern myths about sex tells us that attitudes such as shame, guilt, and disgust are unhealthy. What makes people feel bad is the “judgmental” attitude prevalent in the surrounding culture, which people interiorize, so that they accuse themselves in the very moment of sexual release. Hence we should strive to free ourselves from these hangovers from an old and discredited ethic of “pollution and taboo,” and learn to engage in sexual activity in full awareness that it is in essence no more guilty an activity than eating or drinking—a psychological benefit that need have no psychological cost. Much modern sex education is designed as a therapy for guilt and shame, a way of getting young people to accept their sexual urges and to find ways to express them without feeling bad about doing so. Moral progress means freeing ourselves from this internal judgment, learning to express our sexuality freely, and to overcome the irrational guilt that stems from others and not from our true inner selves.
Now, I agree with the view that we must find ways to express our sexual desires without feeling guilt and shame. But I also think that guilt and shame are often justified, and that what they demand of us is not therapy, in order to remove them, but right conduct, in order to avoid them.
SOME CONSEQUENCES OF THE MYTHS
Not everyone adheres to these myths, and there are of course more and less subtle ways of upholding them. But they define a pattern of thinking in our society, which affects every aspect of the culture. Whenever people write of the “recreational” use of sex; whenever they suggest that there is no basis to sexual morality other than the rule that force and fraud are forbidden; whenever they describe “gay” sex as though it were a mere variation of an activity that exists also in a “straight” variety—they are usually leaning on those myths.
Perhaps the greatest evidence of the triumph of these myths is the growing indifference in our society toward the glut of pornography. For if these myths are true, it is impossible to condemn pornography or the practice of those who use it as a sexual stimulant. Indeed, pornography might even be regarded as the best form of sexual recreation, in that it is free from the dangers—medical, psychological, and personal—of sex with a partner. As Oscar Wilde said of masturbation: “It is cleaner, more efficient, and you meet a better class of person,” by which he meant himself.
Now, I am one of those who think of pornography as something we should avoid ourselves and do everything we can to forbid to our children. But nothing in the modern myths justifies that attitude, and therefore I must search for the error these myths involve, and replace them with a rival picture of human sexual desire.
This is what I wish to sketch in the remainder of this paper. But first, let me make some disclaimers. First, these myths involve an “instrumentalized” view of sexual conduct—the view that the sexual act, in whatever form it takes, is a means to something else, be it sensory pleasure, orgasm, or relief from internal pressure. It does not follow from this that the act does not have some other value. Just as eating is a means to gustatory pleasure and also to nourishment, so does it have another value—especially eating in company, a form of companionship that brings with it both intimacy and comfort.
Second, someone could adhere to the instrumentalized view of sexual desire
and still argue that when we take this pleasure in company there is a social payoff, in the form of an intimacy and mutual enjoyment, and go on to build a picture of “good sex” which reconstructs some of the moral values we associate with loving relations in general and marriage in particular. However these moral values will not be intrinsic to the sexual act. They will be by-products of the act, and will have no intrinsic bearing on the morality of the act itself, any more than the social value of dinner à deux has any bearing on the rightness or wrongness of eating the particular thing that is eaten (and which may in fact be forbidden by some dietary code).
Finally, in opposing these myths, I am not insisting that the only alternative to them is the old morality that regards heterosexual relations within marriage as the only legitimate form of sexual expression, and which, for example, dismisses homosexuality as a perversion. Exactly what moral code is the right one, or whether there is any single right one, is not a matter that concerns me directly in this paper. I am concerned only with the more fundamental question, which is a question of philosophical psychology rather than morality—the question of what to put in place of the instrumentalized view of sex. If I go on to draw moral conclusions, they will be tentative, and based in a sense of what is at risk in our sexual encounters.
PERSONS AND ANIMALS
The first point to make is that sexual desire belongs to that aspect of the human being which we summarize in the concept of the person. Many of the things that we experience we experience as animals, and what we feel does not normally depend upon thought, intention, or personality. We feel the same pain from a wound that a dog might feel if wounded in the same way. But there are other states of mind that only persons can experience. While a dog can experience aggression, he cannot experience remorse or shame, cannot wonder about the laws of nature, cannot judge another dog morally, and so on.
There are some states of mind that are rooted in our animal nature, but are transformed by our involvement as persons. Soldiers in the front line respond to an attack on their comrades by joining with them in the fight, and this response belongs to those collective reactions exhibited by pack animals. However, the soldier who rushes to share the danger of his comrades is not just obeying an instinct. He has risen above that instinct and judged acting on it to be right and honorable. He has not just an urge to join the battle but a motive, and that motive is honor and duty toward his fellows, and shame at letting them down. The soldier is acting for others, and from a conception of himself, and of how he looks in others’ eyes. Such a motive can prevail over the animal instincts of fear and dread only because the soldier also has the virtue that enables him to act on it—the virtue that we know as fortitude or courage. In short, he acts from a full, free, personal involvement in his predicament, conscious that he is judged for what he does, and aiming at a good that he understands in personal terms.
Exactly similar things should be said of sexual desire. Sexual desire is rooted in instincts we share with the other animals, and the pursuit of one person by another may not look so very different from the encounter of horse and mare in a field. However, just as in the case of the soldier, the person who responds to these instincts also stands in judgment upon them. Is it right or wrong to respond? When he responds, he responds from a judgment that this is the right person, that in doing this thing he is in her eyes not demeaning himself but gaining her acceptance, just as she is in his. They share a reciprocity of glances, a gradual accommodation in which their consent is woven into their desire, so that the desire becomes an expression of something other than instinct. Of what?
To answer that question we must look a little more closely at the concept of the person. Most animals are not persons, and some persons are not animals. We, however, are both. Hence there are features of our mental life that non-personal animals do not share. We have rights and duties; we make judgments, reflect on past and future, on the possible and the impossible; we are self-conscious, distinguishing self and other, and attributing our mental states to ourselves on no basis; we relate to each other not as animals but as persons, through dialogue, judgment, and moral expectations. Indeed, there are arguments for saying that the concept of the person is essentially tied to interpersonal relations: To explain what a person is, we must explain how persons relate to each other. One vital feature of interpersonal relations is their emotional content. My stance toward self and other is reflected in my emotional life. Emotions such as shame, guilt, anger, remorse, gratitude, forgiveness, and rejoicing are essentially directed toward persons—whether self or other—and learning to feel these things is part of what it means to grow up, i.e., to pass from the animal to the personal condition.
Fundamental to all these emotions, and to the life of persons generally, are our beliefs about freedom and responsibility. No two philosophers agree as to what freedom and responsibility presuppose, but for our present purposes we can leave the philosophical controversies to one side; my sole concern is to examine how we actually envisage ourselves in our lives as persons. In all our conduct toward each other we treat both self and other as free. My responsibility is revealed in my shame, and my freedom in my forgiveness. The belief in freedom and responsibility is presupposed in anger and resentment, in gratitude and love. Take that belief away and little would remain of our emotional life and its rewards.
The heart of freedom is the self. Kant suggested, in his lectures on anthropology, that the distinctiveness of the human condition is contained in the fact that human beings can say “I.” Self-consciousness brings with it the condition of freedom, and the knowledge of both self and other as responsible. But there is a yet more remarkable fact about the use of “I.” By my use of this word I create a new center of being: I set my body aside, as it were, and replace the organism with the self, and present to others another target of their interest and response. To know my mind, and also to change it, they do not examine my body: They look to my words, my opinions, my thoughts. They enter into dialogue with this thing called “I,” and see it as standing in the arena of freedom, both part of the physical world and situated on its very edge.
Something like this is assumed in our ordinary human relations. Just think of your response, when your friend betrays your secrets. You don’t think of him as you would of a computer, in which you stored information that somehow got out. You don’t ask yourself about who hacked into his brain. You go to him and you address him in the second person, I to I: “You promised,” you say, and your words are addressed to that very center of being where his “I” resides. In accusing him you are not trying to provoke some physical reaction. You are expecting a response from that I—a response from the center of freedom where he resides, one self-conscious subject among others. You expect him, in other words, to take responsibility for what he did, to say “I am sorry,” and maybe to show how he is going to atone for his fault, to make amends, and in this way re-establish your relations in such a way that you will forgive him. There is a process here, in which one “I” faces another, both of them exercising their freedom, taking responsibility for their choices, and acting as the sovereign of the human animal.
This does not mean that there are two things here—person and animal. There is one thing—an organism, organized as a person. That is how we treat each other in all our free relations.
PERSONS AND DESIRE
Now for sexual desire. It is rooted in animal instincts, but in a person desire is recentered, self-attributed to the I, so as to become part of the interpersonal dialogue. It is an interpersonal emotion, in which subject and object confront each other I to I. Hence sexual desire, as we know it, is peculiar to human beings. In describing sexual desire, we are describing John’s desire for Mary, or Jane’s desire for Bill. And the people themselves will not merely describe their desires, but also experience them, as my desire for you. “I want you” is not a figure of speech but the true expression of what I feel. And here the pronouns identify that very center of free and responsible choice th
at constitutes the interpersonal reality of each of us. I want you as the free being who you are, and your freedom is wrapped up in the thing that I want.
You can easily verify this, as I show in my book Sexual Desire, by studying sexual arousal. This is not a state of the body, even though it involves certain bodily changes. It is a process in the soul, a steady awakening of one person to another, through touches, glances, and caresses. The exchange of glances is particularly important, and illustrates a general feature of personal relations. People look at each other, as animals do. But they also look into each other, and do this in particular when mutually aroused. The look of desire is like a summons, a call to the other self to show itself in the eyes, to weave its own freedom and selfhood into the beam that calls to it. There is a famous description of this phenomenon by John Donne, who writes in “The Ecstasy”:
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.
So to engraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one;
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
The experience described by Donne is known to every sighted person who has ever been aroused. Likewise the caress and the touch of desire have an epistemic character: they are an exploration, not of a body, but of a free being in his or her embodiment. They too call to the other in his freedom, and are asking him to show himself.
All the phenomena of desire can be understood in that way, as parts of a mutual negotiation between free and responsible beings, who want each other as persons. And this has an important metaphysical consequence, which in turn has important moral consequences. Persons are individuals in the strong sense of being identified, both by themselves and by others, as unique, irreplaceable, not admitting of substitutes. This is something Kant tried to capture in his theory of persons as “ends in themselves.”
