The elephant in the room (14 July 2009)

"Why does the conversation always have to turn to sex?" -- But isn't sex the one thing no one actually talks about precisely because it's all around us? Old women on The View talk about masturbation like it's the most "natural" thing in the world; there's only one reason we care that someone has a hot body; we make distinctions between friends and lovers; we watch porn. But still we close our doors, we laugh at Freud ... and we still watch porn. Isn't it entirely possible that the more we think we are "open" about sex--by posting pictures on the Internet and sexting people from Manhunt--the less we experience actual sex and not sex mediated by fantasies of victory and recognition?

"Teens are being encouraged to masturbate since they have a right to an orgasm a day." -- This is perhaps the most common illusion about sex--i.e., to think we are not "prudish" or "conservative" when we can accept sex as "perfectly natural". What do we really mean by "natural"? The experience of the human orgasm is not the same as that of other animals, for example--we cannot exhaust a description of an orgasm physiologically. Is it really possible to say that sex is "natural" because it is about things that happen in/to the body? Doesn't it make a difference that it is a specifically human body? We would not say that someone who eats his partner after sex or someone who has sex with ten partners a night is being "perfectly natural". The human body is always more than simply a body: what is "natural" for a human body is always already involved in the cultural.

If we are really going to be "open" about sex, we cannot hide behind the illusion that sex is "simply natural". The real question is how our sexuality is directed and formed. The ideology of "natural sexuality", which reduces sex to the body, leads us to think that sexual intercourse primarily involves the organs and does not let us see that real sex--real inter-course--involves more than just mouths and hands: it involves the entire space we occupy, the words that pass between us, the distance that separates us when we are not together, the look in my eyes, the memory of you ... There is no such thing as "foreplay" in real sex, since what passes as "foreplay" is not simply a prelude to "the real thing". Sex is not "natural" at all--it is a unique and rare experience of a certain type of relation to another person. This is why real sex cannot be displayed in porn and we should take porn for what it is, i.e., a display of fantasy; and also why most of what passes for sex is, at most, something more like mutual masturbation.