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Sex vs. the State of the World

by | June 28, 2021 | | 2 Comments

I had several ideas for a blog post this month, but too many other events and news items have distracted my attention. When this happens, I ask myself how much of what passes through my stream of consciousness has to do with sex. The answer that comes to me is: everything! We all crave pleasure, but there are obstacles in the way.

I recently watched a documentary on the revival of Druidry in Britain. A ceremony to welcome the sun at Midsummer at Stonehenge was shown. A mature-looking man in a white robe held a branch of mistletoe aloft, and described it as the healing semen of the gods which never touches the ground in its natural state. Each person in the circle got a small piece of the branch, then they all cheered the sunrise and danced in a circle. At Midwinter, of course, mistletoe is supposed to encourage kissing.

My earliest ideas for erotic stories were fantasies about sex as a religious ritual, even though I couldn’t seriously imagine such a thing happening in the real world. Like most other people raised in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), I was brought up to think of sex as a necessary evil that needed to be contained. Even though my parents had a liberal approach to Christianity when I was growing up, and my father declared himself an agnostic later on, their warnings to me about sex were probably similar to the sermons they got from their more orthodox Protestant parents: sex is for making babies, and if I ever “let” anyone have carnal knowledge of me outside the bounds of heterosexual monogamy, I would “pay the price.”

In spite of all that, a spiritual connection with the forces of nature seems sexual by definition.

The Midsummer ritual I watched looked like a welcome change from a torrent of bad news: the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves on the sites of residential schools for Indigenous children in Canada. Most of the people I know have decided not to celebrate Canada Day (July 1) because of the policies enforced by the Christian churches that ran these schools, and the federal Canadian government that funded them and forced children into them from the time Canada became a nation in 1867 to much later. The last residential school near me closed in 1996. The official rationale for these places was to “civilize” Indigenous children by teaching them Christian values and useful skills, but the high death rate in them was a clue to their real purpose: genocide.

While ground-penetrating radar is revealing an ever-growing number of small bodies whose families (in most cases) were never told what had happened to them, Britney Spears is fighting in court to regain the rights of an adult. Her apparent “breakdown” thirteen years ago served as a reason for her father to claim legal control of his adult daughter, supposedly for her own good, and to control her income. Like others in the “Free Britney” movement, I find it mind-boggling that she is able to maintain a gruelling schedule as an entertainer, but is officially considered incompetent to handle her own affairs.

Please note that I’m not equating the legal control of one person with a national policy that resulted in mass deaths, but there are some connecting threads. A traditional belief that certain people are too wild or irrational to make their own choices has been applied to people who are not white, not male, or not thought of as adult. (And on this note, I’ve blogged here and elsewhere about the flexible boundaries of “childhood,” depending on who is defining this state and for what purpose.)

To avoid sinking into a hell-pit of despair, I visualize the flow of sexual energy as something that can never be destroyed as long as human beings are still living on the earth, which still nourishes us. Those of us who write sexual fantasies can keep reminding ourselves and each other that pleasure is our birthright, and it doesn’t belong only to a privileged few.

Taking a break from social media and spending time outdoors is a good way to rekindle hope for a better future. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the season for it. Happy summer to everyone living north of the equator, and may the Antipodeans find comfort in winter.

A Sex Book That May Actually Change Your Life (And It’s Not Fifty Shades of Grey)

by | October 18, 2015 | | 1 Comment

by Donna George Storey

I’m fascinated by sex.

I think about it a lot and enjoy it in the flesh as much as is possible given the constraints of real life. I write about it for fun and sometimes profit. And I read about it whenever a book on the topic catches my eye, although I will admit I’m more selective in that area now because experience has shown that a lot of these volumes, whether in the guise of scientific analyses or guides to great orgasms, are the same old sexual tease that ultimately leaves a reader unsatisfied.

Fortunately this month I’d like to talk about a book I do recommend, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. The book is not perfect, and I’ve noted a few reservations below. However, rather unusually, it did give me a fresh perspective on several key areas of my favorite topic. In other words, I’m glad I read it. This is by no means always the case.

Come As You Are has much to recommend it, but I’d like to focus on one topic that stands out as my personal take-away: the dual control model of sexual desire.

Nagoski makes an excellent point that “most of what our culture teaches us about women’s sexuality is Men’s Sexuality Lite—basically the same but not quite as good.” (p. 66) Thus, because Viagra provides men with a use-me-all-night woody which has revived the sex lives of millions of older men in particular, there should of course be a pill that will do the same for women (although I shudder to think of how a “horny pill for women” would be abused by frat boys among others). Nagoski argues that this pill is unlikely to be developed because sexual desire is not just about plumping up the genitals. Rather it operates under the aforementioned dual-control model. Humans have a sexual accelerator, or a Sexual Excitation System, that processes information and tells the genitals to “turn on.” But we also have a sexual brake, or Sexual Inhibition System, that notices all the potential threats in the environment (STI transmission, grandmother in the next room, doubts about potential partner) and sends signals to “turn off.” Each of us has a unique level of sensitivity in both our SES and SIS, and thus it is not surprising that due to cultural training as well as hormonal response, more men balance out with a stronger accelerator and more women have stronger brakes.

For me, the articulation of the dual model is less a new discovery than a confirmation of my own realization some decades ago that I need a transition period between real life and being ready for a hot time in bed. And now I understand that this period is when I ease up on my brake. Since I began writing erotica, I’ve found it much easier to make that transition because I have a go-to place in my head where I feel comfortable being erotic. In any case, being aware of this dynamic is important, and I believe it might help many couples who experience what the media characterizes as a desire gap, usually portrayed as the dynamic between an amorous, initiating man and a woman who is too tired from doing the double shift to be interested in anything but sleep.

Now I know this is a complex issue. Cases of women desiring sex more than their partners are doubtless under-reported, and there may be many reasons a partner of either gender might be less interested in sex–a relationship that is troubled out of bed as well, for example. But when we consider the dual control model, other ways to frame the situation are suddenly possible. First of all, turning off the brake is not as simple as whining, “Just relax!” which is a pathetically common prescription for any kind of sexual inhibition. Our brakes deserve attention and respect and Nagoski believes that desire issues are more likely to be solved by focusing on the SIS.

The accelerator-brake model also points out that the initiating partner has already stepped on the accelerator and turned off the brake, while the propositioned partner is starting at “ordinary life” settings. Thus it might be a tad unfair to label the latter as inferior in desire. Indeed in another sex book I read for historical reasons, What Really Happens in Bed: A Demystification of Sex by Steven Carter and Julia Sokol (1989) the authors found from their interviews that “men were no more thrilled by having women start tearing their pants off when they were trying to watch the evening news.”

Taking time to sympathetically ease up on that brake and create a comfortable context for sexual pleasure is well worth it. (Remember, “Just relax!” is not a sympathetic way to do this). Again this is where erotica—whether reading it alone or together or remembering favorite experiences or fantasies—can be helpful. Full confession: I mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey in my title because whenever I do, I get five times more reads than for other blog posts. But it is relevant because many husbands of the female readers of the book mentioned their wives were much more interested in sex with images of Christian and Ana in their heads. I’m sure all of us at ERWA hope our own books can be the portal to sexual bliss as well, but it is worth considering how erotica might work to ease us from the real world to Sex World.

The dual control model is but one of the thought-provoking points in Come As You Are including: the emotional context of sex, a sex-positive life in a sex-negative world, and the fact that lubrication and erections are not signs of desire but rather reflex reactions. However, I do have a couple of critiques of Nagoski’s book. Every time an intriguing issue is presented, it is briefly discussed, but then we are told we will hear more about this in chapter three and learn practical steps to deal with it in chapter ten (as an example). This happens over and over again. It might have been less frustrating to the reader to organize the book so that we can fully consider one issue in detail in one chapter. Or at the very least, give us the page numbers of the later discussion so we can create our own coherent consideration.

My other critique derives from a cultural convention that is certainly no fault of the author. Basically our society allows us to take on one of three personas when we talk about sex in published form.

First, we can be serious experts, either scientists who use jargon, statistics and studies or historians who’ve dispassionately combed through documents kept in the Private Case Erotica Collection in the British Library.

Or we can take on the surrogate lover persona, which is the role adopted by most eroticists and porn star experts, in that we speak of sex with the hope of, or at least no fear about, sexually arousing the reader.

Emily Nagoski consciously chooses the third option, which I’ll call “The Dr. Ruth” persona. That is, she has an accessible, accepting attitude toward sexuality expressed in a tone of relentlessly cheerful humor. Dr. Nagoski is the Director of Wellness Education at Smith College and thus it is her job to make young adults feel comfortable discussing their intimate sexual fears and concerns. In order to achieve this standing, however, the speaker must not be what our society considers “sexy.” Indeed her author’s photo shows a plump, bespectacled young woman whose smile promises caring friendship rather than seduction. Again this is less a criticism of Nagoski or Dr. Ruth and their upbeat, nonthreatening energy than an observation that in our society, sex is dangerous when it’s sexy and of course the intellect and sensuality must always be divided in a public presentation to keep us all safe. So, in spite of the “progress” that this book represents in its content, its formal conventions show that we still have a long way to go before our culture fully accepts that sexuality and sensuality exist in all of us.

That said, however, Come As You Are is a book on sexuality that is well worth reading, one of the few that does, for once, fulfill the promises on its cover.

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Problems and Pleasures of The Myth of the Uncontrollable Urge

by | March 13, 2015 | | 6 Comments

Minotaur crouching over sleeping woman; Picasso, 1933

I’m going to begin this essay by asking you for the benefit of the doubt. I’m going to ask you to assume
I’m not an insane or immoral person. I’m asking this of you because I’m about
to wade into the uncomfortable, murky waters of consent, intentionality and
biological imperative when it comes to sex – both fictionally and factually.

Attempts to unpack these issues, to examine philosophical, historical,
institutional, artistic and socially constructed understandings of human
sexuality reveal uncomfortable realities. They don’t always accord with the way
we want things to be or live up to our ideals. But I’d like to argue that approaches that seek to present the issue as uncomplicated for the sake of clarity, are not realistic or productive ones.

I just watched the documentary “India’s Daughter.” It
chronicles the events of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder of a woman
identified in the film as “Jyoti”. Some Indian feminist have
criticized the film because it allows a number of the rapists, their defense
lawyers and a few others to air, what to most Westerners and many Indians, too,
are deeply misogynistic views on where women belong in society and the part
they play in their own victimization. These statements are not directly and
immediately rebutted in the film – it allows the audience to be appalled at
them. The strategy works well in the context of a Western liberal audience that
is probably unaware of the extreme schisms of social attitudes surrounding
women. But for an Indian audience, where these views are not uncommon or unknown,
it fails. The Indian Government has banned
the airing of the documentary, ostensibly because it offers a platform for
views it wishes to eradicate. However, this decision might also have been influenced by a recent incident in which a
mob of thousands pulled an accused rapist out of a prison in Dimapur, and
beat him to death. The event is more complex than it appears. The accused was a
Bangladeshi, so there are both issues of religious and immigration tension that
have played significant roles.

I’d like to examine the myth that humans are at the mercy of
their animal instincts, driven by their biological imperatives; how old and
widespread this fallacy is and how deeply it has embedded itself into many cultures;
and what part it plays in both our fictions and our social norms.

It’s all Aristotle’s Fault.

Not really, but at least in Western culture, Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics has served, through the centuries as a font of great wisdom
on the matter of the human condition. In Part Seven of the Ethics,
Aristotle submits that, once in the thrall of sexual arousal, humans are no
longer capable of exercising reason, restraint or judgement. Historicity and
language is a bit of a problem. We don’t know what stage of arousal Aristotle
is referring to. Perhaps he was referring to the moment of orgasm, in which
case he’d be spot on. The problem is that our historical unease with the
specifics of the human sexual response led to very broad generalizations about
states of sexual arousal. This myth that a human in any given state of sexual
arousal is incapable of exercising choice, or control, or good judgment, has
been responsible for a millennial get out of jail free card when it comes to
sexual ethics.

Sorry, Different Department.

By the time we did get around to studying human sexual
response in the mid-20th Century, courtesy of Kinsey and Masters
and Johnson, the sciences had specialized. People who were interested in
philosophy, ethics, sociology or psychology had all been given their own
departments – nay – buildings on another campus. Let me tell you, interdisciplinary studies of human
sexuality are a rare, belittled, and underfunded species.

However, we know humans can and routinely do exercise
enormous control over their ‘animal’ instincts. We seem to be able to restrain
ourselves from peeing in our nests, we often find ways to negotiate our
territorial instincts, and unsurprisingly, we manage to restrain ourselves from
spending all our time mating – even though some of us spend an inordinate
amount of time thinking about it. There are men and women of diverse religious
orders who manage to live a life of complete sexual celibacy. Even
hormone-addled 16-year-olds don’t generally rampage through the countryside
raping every orifice they encounter. To look at it more quantitatively and at
more extreme levels of sexual arousal, practicing the ‘withdrawal method’ (27
pregnancies in 100) is still vastly more effective than using no birth control
method at all (85 pregnancies in 100). So, even at the abyssal precipice of
orgasm, it’s clear that we can and do have the capacity to exercise some
choice, some judgment.

Once We Were Dumb Mammals

Meanwhile, in the realm of society, we consistently ignore
that fact. Historically and to the present day, we create narratives about
humans helplessly carried away by the urgency of erotic bliss. Our literature,
drama and films are full of it. But, more darkly, so are our laws, our judicial
systems, our security structures. 
We may acknowledge rape as a crime in theory, but even in the most
‘enlightened’ egalitarian social systems, it is astonishing how often
responsibility is shifted from the person who refused to exert control over
themselves and onto something or someone else. It was the clothes the victim
was wearing, the fact that she was out alone, the fact that she wasn’t
accompanied by a relative, the fact that she (or he) came up to the rapist’s
apartment, alcohol, drugs, peer pressure, prison, porn, the prevalence of a
‘rape culture’. The list of reasons why an individual is not wholly, personally
accountable for their actions goes on and on. Whether you find yourself in a
culture that denies women autonomy, or one that offers them an equal legal
status, the
myth of the uncontrollable urge always rears its head.

Mythological Beasts

We can control ourselves and we enjoy the lie that we can’t.
It’s not really that surprising: biological drives are compelling, and it takes
effort to refuse their call. It makes sense that humans would have fantasies
about respite from that control. In his book “Speaking the Unspeakable:
The Poetics of Obscenity,” Peter Michelson explains the liberating appeal
of pornography. It is, he says, a space where we can luxuriate in relinquishing
the very real control we have over our animal instincts. There is romanticism,
authenticity and empowerment in our fantasies of giving in to our animal
natures. I don’t wholly agree with Michelson on the specific mechanisms of
this, because I think our ‘animal natures’ are themselves a fantasy
construction.  Nonetheless, he
presents an excellent argument: there is erotic pleasure in the prospect of relinquishing
control only because that control is, in fact, so real and so often exercised.

Meanwhile, romance often features motifs of being swept
away, overcome, overwhelmed, desiring beyond the boundaries of social
acceptability. The pursuer can’t help but want the object of his or her desire.
It obsesses them; it drives
them to extraordinary and unruly lengths within the context of the storyworld.
And the pursued, it usually turns out, cannot refuse the pleasure of being that
object of desire and, if all is well, return the feeling.

Fictional Outposts

One of the reasons I champion
fictional, eroticized portrayals of reluctance and even rape is because to deny
that these ideations have semiotic power is dangerous. But also, to attempt to
force limits (i.e. to have rape fantasies is a betrayal of feminist ideology)
on what metaphors, what metonyms, what ‘signifieds’ might be is also futile. I
think fiction is a safe space in which to negotiate the uncomfortable fantasies
and nostalgias humans possess for the lawless, reasonless, unempathic animals
we used to be. I’m not convinced of the veracity of that earlier state of
natural ‘innocence’, but it haunts us and calls to us nonetheless. Fantasy and
fiction are the only safe places we should give it power or credence. To
situate this myth of the uncontrollable urge in fantasy and fiction is to put
it exactly in the place it belongs – beyond the pale of the everyday world and
civil society, and to underscore that it is the ONLY place it belongs.

One of the stark messages of “India’s Daughter” is
that it is social attitudes, the tolerance of real world inequities, the historical
absence of women’s voices, their lack of power and the perpetuation of utterly
baseless justifications that create an environment in which crimes like this
are possible. The shocking testimonies of rape-apologists in the documentary
are offensive as hell, but they serve to remind us that these attitudes don’t
survive and are not perpetuated through fictional works, but through entirely
real-world levels of tolerance that predate ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and even
basic literacy.

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