TOO MUCH
SEX, TOO LITTLE
JOY?
by Rollo May
---------------
IN VICTORIAN times, when one never mentioned sex in polite
company, males and females dealt with each other as though
neither possessed sexual organs. Even William James, who was far
ahead of his time in everything else, treated sex with polite
aversion. In two volumes of his epoch-making Principles of
Psychology, he devotes only a page or so to sex, at the end of
which he murmurs, "These details are a little unpleasant."
Such repression, of course, was scarcely healthy. Thus
Sigmund Freud, one Victorian who did look at sex, was right in
his delineation of the neurotic symptoms which result from
cutting off so vital a part of the human body and the self.
Then, in the 1920s, a radical change took place. In an
amazingly short period following World War I, we shifted from
acting as though sex did not exist to being obsessed with it.
Sexual expression rather than repression became dogma in liberal
circles, until today we place more emphasis on sex than any
society since ancient Rome. Far from not talking about sex, we
might well seem, to a visitor from Mars dropping into Times
Square, to have no other topic of conversation.
Partly as a result of this radical shift, therapists today
rarely see patients who exhibit repression of sex in the manner
of Freud's pre-World War I patients. If anything, they find the
opposite: a great deal of talk about sex, a great deal of sexual
activity, and practically no one complaining of cultural
prohibitions. What patients do complain of is lack of feeling
and passion. "The curious thing about this ferment," says one
authority, "is how little anyone seems to be enjoying
emancipation." So much sex and so little meaning or even fun in
it!
Thus, one paradox of sexual freedom: enlightenment has not
solved our sexual problems. To be sure, there are important
positive results, chiefly in increased freedom for the
individual. Books on sexual technique can be bought in any
bookstore; contraception is available; couples can, without guilt
or squeamishness, discuss their sexual relationship and undertake
to make it more meaningful. Let these gains not be
underestimated. External anxiety and guilt have lessened.
But internal anxiety and guilt have increased. And in some
ways these impose a heavier burden upon the individual. The
challenge a woman used to face from men was simple and direct:
Will she or won't she?--a direct issue of how she stood vis-a-vis
cultural mores. But the question men now ask is, Can she or
can't she?--which shifts the challenge to the woman's personal
adequacy. In past decades, women could blame society's
restrictions for their hesitancy and thus preserve their self-
esteem. But when the question is simply how one performs, one's
own sense of adequacy is inevitably called into question.
Sexual enlightenment has proved frustrating in other areas.
For example, the battle for freedom of expression in the arts has
been won, but has it not merely become a new straitjacket? The
realistic chronicles on stage and in novels are self-defeating,
for realism is neither sexual nor erotic. Indeed, there is
nothing less sexy than sheer nakedness.
A second paradox of sexual freedom is that the new emphasis
on technique can backfire, that tenderness and joy in fact bear
an inverse relationship to the number of how-to-do-it books
rolling off the presses.
Certainly nothing is wrong with technique as such, whether
one is playing golf or making love. But emphasis on technique
beyond a certain point makes for a mechanistic attitude, and the
age-old art tends to be superseded by bookkeeping and timetables.
Did he (or she) pay the right amount of attention to me during
the evening? Have we made love often enough in recent months?
Are we behind schedule? One wonders how the spontaneity of this
most spontaneous act can survive.
Even the sexologists, whose attitude is generally the more
sex the merrier, are raising their eyebrows these days about the
anxious over-emphasis on achieving orgasm, on "satisfying" the
partner. Such technical preoccupation robs the act of its
essence--spontaneous abandon--and can lead to alienation,
depersonalization and feelings of loneliness. For when we cut
through all the rigmarole about performance, what still remains
is how amazingly important the fact of intimacy is--the meeting,
the growing closeness, the excitement of not knowing where it
will lead, the assertion of the self and the giving of the self.
A third paradox is that our highly vaunted sexual freedom
has turned out to be nothing more than anew form of puritanism--
not to be confused with the original Puritanism which came to us
via our Victorian grandparents. In those days, sin meant giving
in to one's sexual desires. Today's puritan believes it is
sinful not to have full sexual expression. The tendency in
psychoanalysis is speak of sex as a "need"--in the sense of
tension to be reduced--plays into this puritanism.
This use of the body as a machine means, of course, that
people must not only perform sexually but must make sure that
they do so without letting themselves go in passion or unseemly
commitment (which might be interpreted as the exertion of an
"unhealthy" demand). Thus the final irony:Where the Victorian
sought to have love without falling into sex, today's puritan
seeks to have sex without falling into love!
Where have we gone wrong? Why has sexual freedom proved so
disappointing? Perhaps because, in our headlong rush to
"enlightenment," we have left behind the concept of eros.
Early Greek mythology tells us that when the world was
barren and lifeless, it was Eros who breathed the "spirit of
life" into the nostrils of the clay forms of man and woman. Ever
since, "eros" has signified the giving of life, in contrast to
sex, which is the releasing of tension. The end toward which sex
points is gratification;eros, on the other hand, is a desiring,
a longing, a forever reaching out.
And here's the problem:In anesthesizing feeling in order to
perform better, in using sensuality to hide sensitivity, we have
separated sex from eros. We have, in fact, used sex to avoid the
anxiety-causing involvements of eros.
Understandably, the experience of falling in love--of
surrendering to eros--is frightening to some. When we fall in
love, the world is vastly widened;it confronts us with regions
we never dreamed existed. Are we capable of giving ourselves to
our beloved without losing ourselves in this dizzying new
continent?
The answer, of course, is yes. For a basic truth of human
experience is that eros drives us to transcend ourselves, to leap
barriers, to unite with another person in relation to whom we
discover our own real self-fulfilment. Eros--not sex--enables
us to realize the deepest meaning of love.(#)
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Under construction but accessible too.
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Specially adapted short stories for young people of all ages, from all over the world, by Amy Friedman.
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Heavy stuff that were lifted by several decades to its present location, ZDS' third floor.
You can't find writers who can still keep their distance from their topics like these two.
(Highly recommended for the philosophical. Not too easy to digest in one sitting. Anyway, it's better than tons of history and anthropology books.)
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