All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (10 page)

The creation of erotic excitement is rarely a mere matter of the rubbing together of two epidermises. It can be, the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller writes, ‘every bit as subtle, complex, inspired, profound, tidal, fascinating, awesome, problematic, unconscious-stalked, and genius-haunted as the creation of dreams or art’. Brain-imaging studies concur: orgasm is a subtle mixture of psychological and bodily impulses; it also requires ‘a release of inhibitions, engineered by the brain’s centre of vigilance’. In clinical trials of people who complain of low libido, placebo effects work as well (or as badly) as hormonal patches.

So sex begins well before penetration and its aftermath colours future acts. It may in many cases not include penetration at all, which is why President Clinton’s assertion that his doings with Monica Lewinsky were not ‘sex’ raised such consternation. Why, too, technical sex education classes raise sniggers from the young and rarely hit the mark. Even in adolescence, when, particularly for boys, the body’s urges feel paramount, the physical act brings much else in train–guilt, hatred, status, a sense of power, accomplishment or disappointment, perhaps even love.

A mere kiss, let alone penetration, transports you inside another’s body: the liberation of breaking your own boundedness can be exalting. Someone else is sharing you. Acknowledging the bits you hated or may have been ashamed of. You’ve emptied yourself of problems.

It can also be terrifying. You might be swallowed up, sucked into an abyss, disappear. Or you might feel invaded, poisoned, no longer an intact self.

Indeed, sex calls up the most intense, the most difficult feelings we have. The act is intrinsically bound up with who we are or may want to be. And even when there is no animal act in question, even when we’re abstinent, we carry on having a relationship to desire or its lack.

When I was an undergraduate in the sixties, before the pill had come in and the women’s movement had taken hold, virginity was still a freighted fact, far more substantial than the hymen which distinguished it. Losing one’s virginity carried all the significance of a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. There was a distinct before and a mysterious after. An aura of danger attended the act. The risk of pregnancy, the tales of torrents of blood, were real enough. But there was less tangible matter, too. If something was to be lost–what did that loss entail? Purity and chastity were symbolically loaded words. Yet what meaning could they hold after all those excited fumblings on sofas and back seats of cars? God had little place in my family, and my Dad, his only representative, much as he might scowl at some of the boys who entered the family house, had little time for such decidedly female matters. Mothers, and not only my own, were clear enough: what potential husband would want used, let alone soiled, goods?

None of my circle of female friends paid much heed. We were rebellious. We were certainly not going to become suburban wives and mothers. Though we were still some years away from Alex Comfort’s
Joy of Sex
(1972), we all knew that in sex lay a treasure trove of experience. We read D.H. Lawrence, after all, and Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
was making the rounds. Though his sly character Pursewarden may have written a postcard upbraiding Lawrence for his ‘habit of building a Taj Mahal around anything as simple as a good f––k’, we somehow wanted both the sacred Taj Mahal and the excited seriality of Durrell’s ‘simple’ sex. All that stood in the way of both was virginity. But that tiny membrane was resistant and sometimes felt as big as Sisyphus’s boulder. You’d get to a certain point and something would stop you. Boys, too, were a little in awe, even when they had managed to lose their own less burdensome virginity with one or t’other of the more ‘forward’ girls at school.

Much has changed since my youth, when sex and pregnancy came in one dangerously glittering package. Now first sex, if not necessarily first love, comes for most young people at the age of about sixteen and a half in the US, Canada and Britain, far younger for some. The rest of Europe has followed suit. First sex often long predates marriage or cohabitation, which comes for the majority as they move towards thirty. Most women, like most men, will have sex in their teens and may well have a series of partners before engaging in a long-term relationship. Young women who grow up in immigrant families from more traditional cultures are caught in painful contradictory tugs between what their families ordain and what their peers enact. The increasing number of young Muslim women in Britain who have donned the hijab or the burkha, in the process perhaps rebelling against the more moderate customs of their parents, are engaging in a rebellion against both their parents and the culture’s permissiveness.

For women first sex may still invoke or provoke first love. But the experience that once united them is now widely separated. In clubs or on campuses in Britain and America, the young hook up for a night or three or more, with no strings or even names attached. Intimacy, not to mention social or emotional continuity, is not an issue. Alternatively, in another standard arrangement, ‘friends with benefits’ provide sex for each other without any acknowledgement that the act has taken place, until one or other of them may grow attached, and then it’s time to ‘move on’. The package of love and sex has been dismantled–or so the blithe, socially accepted, hypothesis would have it.

Though disciplinary voices decry our sexually permissive times and idealize earlier supposedly more moral epochs, these, for certain sections of the male population, had equally casual sexual arrangements. More stringent codes brought their own burden of ills, and not only for those sectors of Western society who sought to conform to the rules of ‘respectability’ that the nineteenth century enshrined and which were reinvigorated for some fifteen years after the Second World War. In his novella
On Chesil Beach
Ian McEwan minutely describes the excruciating wedding night of a ‘young, educated’ couple whose lives are blighted because their union took place at a time just before the sexual revolution, ‘when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible’. His hero Edward’s sudden and premature ejaculation, which sends his heroine Florence into a panic of revulsion, precipitates the end of their marriage before it has quite begun. This despite their genuine love for one another: Edward never meets anyone, he reflects in his sixties, ‘he had loved as much’.

Freud was only one of many reformers to analyse the human damage repressive sexual mores can precipitate. Before the Great War when middle-class men married late and women were kept shrouded in sexual ignorance, the toll in middle-class neuroses was high. It was more than equalled by the social cost of rampant prostitution and the often destructive, cavalier relations between the bourgeois male and any number of shop or servant girls, sexual stand-ins for ‘respectable’ women imprisoned as objects of idealized love, even when their own desires might eventually dictate otherwise.

It’s useful to remember here that people have always coupled once their bodies permitted it and often enough before, whatever the prevailing moral regime and attendant public discourse. Agrarian workers, servants, the industrial working class, the hordes of child prostitutes who populated Victorian cities engaged in what we now call teenage and unmarried sex, even when the Church railed against it and the moral climate was one that sought to keep the middle classes pure and sexual activity repressed. Though illegitimacy rates through history are hard to come by with any accuracy, they do indicate that in country and city alike ‘illicit’ sex was engaged in and babies born at rates that bear comparison with our own, though whether our high rates of contraception equal previous epochs’ unreported rates of illegitimacy is something that can only be guessed at. Suffice it to say that as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, in Munich, one-third of
all
children were born out of wedlock. The growth of foundling hospitals suggests a similar story for an earlier period; while the ravages of syphilis throughout the nineteenth century until a cure was found in 1910 indicate that human beings engaged in the ‘animal act’ outside marriage whatever the dictates of Church and state.

Indeed, as that greatest of Renaissance sages, Michel de Montaigne, wrote towards the end of his life and centuries before Freud or Lawrence or our permissive West had launched its sexual revolution: ‘The whole movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation. It is a substance infused through everything, it is the centre towards which all things turn.’ Nor did Montaigne, who lived in times when chastity for women was prized and enforced, here differentiate between the sexes: both women and men are subject to Venus’s ‘frenzy’, he tells us, citing a host of classical texts from Plato to Virgil to bolster his case–and, good modern that he is, propping it up further with ethnographic examples.

Our own sexual revolution has come in tandem with a social revolution. We no longer quite so emphatically have differing ‘rules’ for the rich and for the poor, for men and for women. The double standards of past centuries no longer prevail. Gone are the epochs that saw one law for the male, permitted sexual congress from a young age, albeit sometimes under the cloak of hypocrisy, and another for the young woman exhorted to keep her virginity intact until what might well be a late marriage. Yet the traces of such attitudes linger within us and without, even when they no longer carry the weight of general consensus. In our globalized and multicultural world, we are ever and always aware of places elsewhere and in our own midst where they are also intact. The vying forces of puritan religions–for instance, the Catholic stance against contraception, Evangelical edicts against premarital sex, Muslim injunctions on female modesty and against homosexuality–and commercialized sexual permissiveness are internalized as contradictions and rumble uncomfortably through individual lives.

We may want sex and hate our bodies or feel little pleasure in what they get up to; or engage in sex, while feeling alienated from or disavowing what we do. We may perform sex with the rampant exhibitionism or increasing brutality of porn stars. In a West where neural and chemical explanations are becoming so dominant, we instrumentalize sex and translate it into a matter of healthy highs–less intercourse, a conversation between two bodies and the people inhabiting them, than a solitary performance enacted for our own seeming good.

Pleasure can remain elusive, or become as addictive as a drug, its compulsively sought highs never quite satisfying enough in repetition. Alternatively, as one suspects from the confessional detailing of the sex stars of the blogosphere, such as Abby Lee aka Zoe Margolis, the pleasure may come as much from the anonymous telling, sharing and writing of it as from the assiduous repetition of performance. Teenagers today may get far more satisfaction from detailing their conquests to friends than from the act itself, sometimes forgotten in a mist of accompanying drugs or drink. We are narrative creatures, and the stories we tell friends and ourselves occupy our consciousness for longer than the acts we engage in.

Excess and Its Discontents

In contemporary Western societies, the radical transformation of woman’s condition has probably been the most important factor in leading to a shift in attitudes to love and sex. Girls brought up in the eighties and nineties largely believe they can do anything that boys can do, whether it is a question of career, working life or having a multiplicity of sexual partners and ‘behaving badly’. Manifestations of girl power are everywhere, most notably in school achievement and university attendance. Equality is hardly total, as the statistics on glass ceilings and women’s pay make clear. However, since the sixties, a proliferation of women has moved out of the private world of home into the public sphere. Politicians, journalists, newspaper editors, broadcasters, business leaders, academics, even scientists can be and are female. So, too, is a panoply of celebrities, some of whom have risen on little more than a display of surgically enhanced body parts.

Change, of course, is never simple and brings backlash from certain quarters as well as a host of paradoxes in its wake. Women no sooner win certain equalities in the workplace than studies with a scientific imprimatur come along to naturalize an array of characteristics which clearly contain a large cultural component–from their supposed shortcomings in the field of scientific abstraction to their supposed relational proclivities. Men are no sooner applauded for bringing their ‘sensitivities’, their ‘new man’ sides, into play than evolutionary biologists remind them that they can’t help their genetically propelled selfish rapaciousness. With the boost of a twenty-four-hour and omnipresent media, ever hungry for stories and simplifications, such ‘science’ feeds into the creation of urban legends and cultural myths and engenders contagious looping effects, self-fulfilling prophecies: as with horoscopes, we tend to find in ourselves and others the very properties we are told we have and name them ‘essential’.

So, too, within our personal lives, there are no clean breaks where sex and love come into play. Embedded in the structures of family life and in the cultural sphere, their traditions haunt us through the generations and shape what are often enough unconscious habits and expectations. We may not always want what we think we want. Nor do we want it all the time. We may want exhilarating sexual freedom, yet tire of its enactment. Women may want what men have always seemed to have. They certainly want equality and no longer go along with male primacy and sexual dominance, or they may want to mimic the supposed dislocation between sex and emotion that men seem to find so easy–one of the plot lines for
Sex and the City
.