Moitta 18/03/2021
Minhas Notas
Whatever discomfort we do feel around sex is commonly aggravated by the idea that we belong to a liberated age – and ought by now, as a result, to be finding sex a straightforward and untroubling matter.
We were bothered by sex because it is a fundamentally disruptive, overwhelming and demented force, strongly at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society.
Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should.
Unsurprisingly, we have no option but to repress its demands most of the time. We should accept that sex is inherently rather weird instead of blaming ourselves for not responding in more normal ways to its confusing impulses. This is not to say that we cannot take steps to grow wiser about sex. We should simply realize that we will never entirely surmount the difficulties it throws our way. Our best hope should be for a respectful accommodation with an anarchic and reckless power.
But deep inside, we never quite forget the needs with which we were born: to be accepted as we are, without regard to our deeds; to be loved through the medium of our body; to be enclosed in another’s arms; to occasion delight with the smell of our skin – all of these needs inspiring our relentless and passionately idealistic quest for someone to kiss and sleep with.
In a world in which fake enthusiasms are rife, in which it is often hard to tell whether people really like us or whether they are being kind to us merely out of a sense of duty, the wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.
In our sex games, we are able to rewrite the script: now the nurse wants to make love to us so desperately that she forgets she is there to take a blood sample;
As we have passionate sex in an imaginary stall in a hospital toilet or on the floor of an imagined stationery cupboard, intimacy – symbolically, at least – wins out over status and responsibility.
Many formal physical settings can be unexpectedly erotic in and of themselves. Just as uniforms can inspire lust by their evocation of rule-breaking, so too – and for similar reasons – it can be exciting to imagine sex in an unobserved corner of the university library, in a restaurant’s cloakroom or in a train carriage.
Our defiant transgression can give us a feeling of power that goes beyond the merely sexual. To have sex at the back of an airplane full of business travellers is to have a go at upending the usual hierarchy of things, introducing desire into an atmosphere in which cold-hearted discipline generally dominates over our personal wishes.
Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate. It is as if we need to be reminded of convention in order properly to appreciate the wonder of being unguarded, or to keep crossing the border into the vulnerable self in order to sense with the right amplitude the special qualities of the place we have been allowed access to. This explains the appeal of memories of our first night with someone new, when that contrast was at its most vivid, but also, more sadly, the lack of eroticism we can feel at a nudist beach or with a long-term partner who has forgotten to guard his or her nakedness against the ever-present dangers of our predatory ingratitude.
As a rule, we cannot win the respect or affection of anyone without severely repressing all that is ostensibly ‘bad’ within us: our aggression, our heedlessness, our impulse towards greed and our contempt. We cannot both be accepted by society and reveal the full spectrum of our minds and moods. Hence the erotic interest we feel (which is more accurately an emotional satisfaction) when sex permits our secret self to be witnessed – and then endorsed.
In the presence of someone who seems utterly assured of our virtuousness, we dare to share aspects of ourselves that we are otherwise frightened and ashamed of.
The bond of loyalty between a couple is apt to grow stronger with every increase in rudeness. The more horrifying we believe our behaviour would seem to the larger, judgemental society we normally live in, the more we feel as if we are building a paradise of mutual acceptance. Such rudeness makes no sense from an evolutionary– biological point of view; it is only through a psychological lens that being slapped, half strangled, tied to a bed and almost raped starts to feel like a proof of acceptance.
The precise origins of our enthusiasms may be obscure, but they can almost always be traced back to some meaningful aspect of our childhood: we will be drawn to specific things either because they recall appealing qualities of a beloved parental figure or else, conversely, because they somehow cancel out, or otherwise help us to escape, a memory of early humiliation or terror.
What Freud said of dreams can like-wise be said of sexual fetishes: they are a royal road into the unconscious.
In all their infinite permutations, clothes make statements about values, ethics and psychological dispositions, and we judge them to be either ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ depending on whether we approve or disapprove of the messages they carry.
To pronounce a certain outfit ‘sexy’ is not just to remark on the possibility that its wearer might be able to produce thriving children; it is also to acknowledge that we are turned on by the philosophy of existence it represents.
Worringer argued that we all grow up with something missing inside us. Our parents and our environment fail us in distinctive ways, and our characters hence take shape with certain areas of vulnerability and imbalance in them. And crucially, these deficits and flaws determine what is going to appeal to us and repel us in art.
We crave in art those qualities that are missing in our lives.
As with art, so with sex: here too the accidents of nature and the quirks of our upbringing cause us to reach adult life in an unbalanced state, overly endowed in some areas and severely lacking in others, either too anxious or too calm, too assertive or too passive, too intellectual or too practical, too masculine or too feminine. We then declare people ‘sexy’ when we see in them evidence of compensatory qualities, and are repelled by those who seem prone to drive us further into our extremities.
As we have learnt to regard the weather, so too should we understand those who tell us so sweetly that they feel like making an early night of it. We don’t choose whom we want to sleep with; science and psychoanalysis have by now made it clear that there are hidden forces that make the choice for us long before our conscious mind can have any say in the matter.
The solution to long-term sexual stagnation is to learn to see our lover as if we had never laid eyes on him or her before.
In further considering how we might manage to re-desire our spouse, we might find it instructive to look at the way in which artists approach the task of painting the world. While going about their quite different types of business, the lover and the artist nonetheless come up against a similar human foible: the universal tendency to become easily habituated and bored, and to declare that whatever is known is unworthy of interest. We are prone to long unfairly for novelty, kitschy romanticism, drama and glamour.
It lies in the power of certain great works of art, however, to induce us to revisit what we think we already understand and to reveal new, neglected or submerged enchantments beneath a familiar exterior.
However exemplary Manet’s technical skills may have been, his painting achieves its stunning effect not by inventing the charms of asparagus but by reminding us of qualities that we knew existed but that we have overlooked in our spoilt and habituated ways of seeing. Where we might have been prepared to recognize only dull white stalks, the artist observed and then reproduced vigour, colour and individuality, recasting his humble subject as an elevated and sacramental object through which we might access a redeeming philosophy of nature and rural life.
To rescue a long-term relationship from complacency and boredom, we might learn to effect on our spouse much the same imaginative transformation that Manet performed on his vegetables. We should try to locate the good and the beautiful beneath the layers of habit and routine.
There are two reasons we tend to forget we are angry with our partner, and hence become anaesthetized, melancholic and unable to have sex with him or her. Firstly, because the specific incidents that anger us happen so quickly and so invisibly, in such fast-moving and chaotic settings (at breakfast time, before the school run, or during a conversation on mobile phones in a windy plaza at lunchtime) that we can’t recognize the offence well enough to mount any sort of coherent protest against it. The arrow is fired, it wounds us, but we lack the resources or context to see how and where, exactly, it has pierced our armour. And second, we frequently don’t articulate our anger even when we do understand it, because the things that offend us can seem so trivial, finicky or odd that they would sound ridiculous if spoken aloud. Even rehearsing them to ourselves can be embarrassing.
These hardly seem matters worth lodging formal complaints over. To announce, ‘I am angry with you because you cut the bread in the wrong way,’ is to risk sounding at once immature and insane. An objection of this sort may indeed be both of those things, but given that immaturity and insanity by and large constitute the human condition, we would be well advised to stop subscribing to (and then suffering from), any more optimistic notions.
And when arguments did flare up, she would urge each of them to see the other as being wounded and sad rather than malicious and spiteful.
By overwhelming consensus, our culture locates the primary difficulty of relationships in finding the ‘right’ person rather than in knowing how to love a real – that is, a necessarily rather unright – human being. Our reluctance to work at love is bound up with our earliest experience of the emotion. We were first loved by people who kept secret from us the true extent of the work that went into it, who loved us but didn’t ask us to return affection in a rounded way, who rarely revealed their own vulnerabilities, anxieties or needs and who were – to an extent, at least – on better behaviour as parents than they could be as lovers.
The boldness displayed by middle-aged married men when they are trying to seduce other women should never be confused with confidence: it is just the fear of death, which breeds an awareness of just how infrequently they are ever going to have the opportunity to sample such moments again. It is this that gives Jim the energy to press on in ways he never would have dared to do when he was young and single, when life seemed like a limitless expanse stretching out before him and he could still afford the luxury of feeling shy and self-conscious.
Certainly adultery grabs the headlines, but there are lesser, though no less powerful, ways to betray a partner, including not talking to him or her enough, seeming distracted, being ill-tempered or simply failing to evolve and enchant.
In other words, marriage shifted from being an institution to being the consecration of a feeling, from being an externally sanctioned rite of passage to being an internally motivated response to an emotional state.
The greater part of our economy would be meaningless without sex as a driving force or an organizing principle.