And when I put that out there into the public sphere of the internet, I got this reply: "Might want to include 'consensual' and 'between adults.' " And my first reaction was something like, "Well, duh. Obviously." And I was just about to make some polite reply about a 140 character limit and all that noise, when I stopped. Because you know what?
Duh. Obviously.
"Non-consensual sex" is not a thing that exists, world. Non-consensual sex is RAPE. And rape is not sex. When did sex, as a word or an idea or an act, become so tainted that it has to be minutely distinguished from rape in public discourse? Is sex so dirty, so awful, and so much of a violation that it is inherently indistinguishable from rape? No. And it is both disturbing and deeply saddening to come to the realization that a lot of people might feel it so.
Sex is not bad. Sex is beautiful. There is nothing wrong with sex.
While I do think that at least some fear of sex stems from a deep-seated misogyny (you should read some of the things that Bukowski and Warhol had to say about sex and women, golly geez) I don't think it's a universal explanation. The woman that told me I ought to add "consensual and between adults" to my exhortation that there is nothing wrong with sex, for example: I don't think she hates women.
Rather, I think there's a strange modern conflation of love and sex, and also love and marriage, that ends up creating a bizarre triangle in which the points are love, sex, and marriage and everything becomes a tangled mess.
To wit, physical intimacy and emotional intimacy do go hand-in-hand. And it's not a purely female thing, as so many want to claim. Yes, women form attachments when they sleep with someone. So do men. Men are, in fact, capable of rich emotional lives. Sex is better, for both parties, when there's love involved, and trust, and respect. Anais Nin said, "Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy." And she was right.
Sex is often seen as proof of love, which is where things begin to become murky. "Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from." (Margaret Atwood) Feeling unloved really does feel an awful lot like dying, and because the connection between love and sex is so deeply instilled, the urge to go out and have a lot of sex to stave off that death, that desperation, that utter loneliness can be strong. Nothing in modern culture has captured the absolute soullessness of using sex as a bandaid like Steve McQueen's Shame. I was horrified to read reviews of that film talking about "normal human sexuality" and "unsexiness." The thing that makes Shame such a powerful film is that it is not about normal human sexuality, or sexiness, and yet its protaganist is still a sympathetic and poignant character. McQueen and Michael Fassbender together have created a space in which behavior that be would be considered depravity and degeneration in less capable hands is instead merely tragic. The moral judgment against sex itself is removed, and the obvious distress of the character is the moral grounding of the narrative.
Like everything else in the emotional landscape of a human being, there are greys and gradations in sex. If sex within love is ecstasy, and sex by self-destructive compulsion is tragedy, there are a million things in between those two extremes. All sex that occurs without the merging of hearts and bodies is not the desperate self-destructive behavior of Shame.
"Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good." - Woody AllenThat grey world is where most of us live. We neither find "true love" nor do we descend into addiction. And in that grey world, there is nothing wrong with sex. Sex without love might be meaningless, as Mr. Allen says, but not everything in life must be pregnant with meaning. Not every conversation must be weighted, not every book must be serious, not every film must be exposing social thought constructs, not every sexual experience must be Capital-E-Ecstasy. There is nothing so inherently wrong about sex that it cannot be lighthearted and fun.
“It would be perfect if everyone who makes love, is in love, but this is simply an unrealistic expectation. I'd say 75 percent of the population of people who make love, are not in love, this is simply the reality of the human race, and to be idealistic about this is to wait for the stars to aline and Jupiter to change color; for the Heavens to etch your names together in the sky before you make love to someone. But idealism is immaturity, and as a matter of fact, the stars may never aline, Jupiter may never change color, and the Heavens may never ever etch your names together in the sky for you to have the never-ending permission to make endless love to one another. And so the bottom line is, there really is no difference between doing something today, and doing something tomorrow, because today is what you have, and tomorrow may not turn out the way you expect it to. At the end of the day, sex is an animalistic, humanistic, passionate desire.”
― C. JoyBell C.
Which brings us to the other point of this triad, the other intersection tangled up in all this mess: the conflation of love and marriage. Let me be clear: I believe in love. I absolutely believe in love. And I believe in marriage. But they are not the same thing.
Love is a personal, emotional good. It is the thing that creates empathy in us, it is the thing that causes us to act against survival instincts and for a better world, it is the thing that allows us to see beyond the borders of our bodies and create meaningful connections in the external world. Marriage, on the other hand, is a purely social good. The benefit of marriage is the social stability it represents. But love is not marriage and marriage is not love. You do not have to get married if you love someone. And if you do get married, you do not necessarily love the person you marry.
I think that a significant portion of the "sex in marriage" movement could really be more aptly defined as "sex in love" if we could all just recognize that love and marriage are not the same thing. Way back when marriages were arranged, it was clear to everyone involved that a marriage was a social contract and that love had nothing to do with it. I don't advocate returning to such a system, mostly because of the way it treated women as chattel. But that doesn't mean that we need to dismiss the idea of marriage as a social good. Rather, in a world like today when marriage is not the only basis of social stability, it is even more important that we remember that marriage is merely a social good. One singular one. It is not a magic bullet that will solve any and all problems, either personal or political. Getting married will not make your life suddenly better; if you weren't happy before, you won't be happy long-term after the novelty wears off. And falling marriage rates are not to blame for the plethora of social problems we face (ahem, Grothman/Santorum/et al.). There are other causes, because while marriage is a social good, it is not the social good.
There is nothing inherently wrong with sex, whether meaningful or meaningless. Sexual identity and appetite, in all their varied forms, are not evidence of some other problem. We all need love, yes. And sex is not love. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have sex. And we all want love. But that doesn't mean we should all get married right now.
It’s as if the triad architected in your post starts with three major points of realism and the adjoining integrated landscape forms the idealistic – with the highest ideal at the center where love, sex and marriage intertwine. All areas are valid, pure, and stem from unashamed fundamental truths: love is a birthright (the ability to give and receive respect, adoration, care), sex is ‘humanistic…desire’ both natural and satisfying even when absent of emotional connection, and marriage is an inexclusive social good. The spectrum between these realist fundaments and the ideal is righteous because the realist fundaments themselves are righteous. This is what I see to be your point.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with the segment of C. JoyBell C.’s quote “…idealism is immaturity…” Yes, waiting for the alignment is idealistic, but it is simply less likely, not less feasible, and the whole is certainly no more or less worthy that the sum of its parts. For this reason, I find her strictly realist perspective to be as limiting as a strictly idealist one.
On the contrary, I found your triad metaphor to be brilliant in that it morphs realism with idealism, validating both philosophies by not only defining the realist truths but in essence showing these truths stem from a dissected ideal. As a liberal idealist who often holds objective realist viewpoints, it’s refreshing to read something merging the two with articulation that does not appear contradictory. The question, ‘How can something be both realist and idealist?’ is complex but that does not mean there is not an answer. Communicating and understanding both realism and idealism can exist harmoniously and in support of one another is such a challenge it causes an unnecessary divide. This very divide keeps idealists from the awareness of the fundamental truths you’ve outlined and the realists from the beauty of possibility. I appreciate your post for bringing this forth and articulating something larger and anything but simple.
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ReplyDeleteSex is lovely thing we have to do this thing and feel enjoy in it.. Sex shows how you love your partner..
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