There is not and has never been a single human being that I have not tried to understand. As soon as a phenomenon comes before us –from a stone to a sunrise, from a suffering to a dilemma or a joy–, we always try to make sense of it, that is, to understand it. We cannot and should not avoid it, because that is perhaps the most radical condition that characterizes us. This implies that we are problematizing beings, which does not mean that we become jerks giving the tabarra in front of every question that appears in our existence, but that amazement and fascination dominate us . For us, everywhere there may be a problem, that is, following the Greek etymology of the term problem, something to throw – ballein – in front of us – pro – and with whose action – ma – we have to focus sight and understanding because the presence of that thrown before us prevents us from continuing the step.
Just as they say that painting was born out of the desire to retain the shadow of the loved one on a wall before his departure, it is said that philosophy began with a question: “Tí esti” (“What is it?”). Naturally, this question must have started to crush us long before Plato called the attitude of facing existence philosophy. For this reason, it is possible that not all of us have a soccer coach inside, but what is undoubted is that we have a philosopher, someone who wonders what the hell is that that has been put in front of me. Naturally, there are people with greater and lesser involvement when it comes to answering what is it ?, since most are content to assume what some decided was what now challenges us , but it is in all of us, at least as long as we continue to be humans, the desire to solve the enigma, the riddle, the imperishable what is it?
That also applies to our sexual condition. But what is sex? What does the fact of being sexed produce us emotionally and ethically? Sex is one of our great vital questions, a problem that, given its magnitude, tends to overwhelm us and the vast majority of times have tried to silence, calm or respond with platitudes and banalities elaborated by what the majority thinks. And that majority opinion has been enormously influenced by ideological and religious aspects that have almost always had a repressive condition: the “child, that is not touched” – which would be equivalent to “child, that is not necessary to understand” -.
All this has not prevented characters with a great social projection and, therefore, public opinion makers, from having been able to utter their juicy judgments about how it acts, about what produces us or about what that specific aspect of our sexual condition is. Next, we are going to try to capture and briefly analyze a few of those famous sentences, see what they may be true and the drifts in our understanding that they may have entailed. Some of these phrases or sentences have a comic vocation; others, academic and formal. But in all of them there is hidden, whether it is seen or not, a very serious attempt to satisfy our longing for understanding.
The incisive question is posed, credibly, by a genius guy who was born in New York in 1890: Julius Henry Marx, better known as Groucho Marx. The question raises the relationships between two concepts such as love and sex. And it is not by chance that they are confused: there is a legendary ideological tradition that they are. In principle, humans are always willing to interact sexually. We do not have a biological conditioner, such as jealousy, that determines when we can and when we cannot, which is a scandal and an inexhaustible source of conflict, particularly for those who understand our sexual condition as a curse. So we’ve looked to countless resources to determine when we should and when we shouldn’t.
Love as a precondition for the enactment of our sexual condition is one of those conditioning factors. And following the same logic of brotherhood, we understand sex as an infallible method of validating love.
It is surprising how many individual and couple sexual difficulties underlie this erroneous synonymy between sex and love even today. The rotundity of expressions such as “he no longer loves me because he does not want me” or “he loves another because he has sexual relations with him” is one of the greatest poisons that poison any sentimental relationship with a vocation to project itself in time. And it costs life itself trying to make people understand that one thing does not inevitably imply the other. What encourages us to get involved in a sexual interaction with someone is not, in the vast majority of cases, love, but eroticism.
It is a powerful gravitational force, a gratifying attractive inclination, but it is not necessarily, I insist, love. It is not made of the same substance, it does not require the same efforts and it does not involve the same obligations. In addition, and due to the enormous pressure that associating one with the other exerts on us, when we feel that greed, that attraction for someone, we deceive ourselves that what we feel is not the desire to interact sexually, but love. Those in love should not forget the retreat of another great guy, Woody Allen, when he affirmed that “ sex without love can be an empty experience; but as an empty experience it is one of the best ”.
This phrase, which has become a kind of tweet summary of a work with more than a thousand pages, is part of the so-called second wave of feminism, one that claims the particularity of the feminine and its unacceptable submission to the masculine, but without wanting therefore to abolish from the face of the Earth everything that smells of man. Simone de Beauvoir’s sentence referred to women, but it is also applicable to any human being. “You are not born Pepito Pérez: you become one” or “you are not born an asshole: you become one” would still be valid. There is nothing substantial or predetermined in us, but what we are is the plastic and dynamic process that has been happening and for which we must assume the greatest responsibility. For this reason, a human being can be born with a certain biological sex, but it will be society – “civilization”, Beauvoir prefers to say – who “elaborates that product” – referring to women – with a series of conditions, impositions and restrictions, of so that the subject, feminine in this case, conforms to what we all expect from “femininity.”
Did De Beauvoir mean that sex is a mere cultural construct, something that exists but has no known solid foundation? Or that a question like biological sex does not exist, that is, that a vulva or a penis have no influence on shaping men or women? In my opinion, Simone de Beauvoir neither went that far nor intended – at the most, she wanted to explain the genesis of the genre and the unjust submission of one to another. But this thesis that nothing sustains or conditions us –not even being born with a vulva or with a penis or with both or with a mixture of both– to become what we are has been, both for its originality and for its irreducible dogmatism , an issue that not only manifests itself in universities, but has penetrated the depths of society. And that is because, with those words, De Beauvoir did not write a sentence, but opened, as geniuses do, a real tap. By the way, when they asked him what he had left to do before he died, he replied that he should write down his sexual memories. That might no longer have been a tap, but a dam breaking.
You cannot be a fine observer of the human condition, like Woody Allen, without having learned things like this. Sex or, more specifically, the substrate of the erotic imaginary that sustains it, loves transgression. But, and this must be understood well, his transgression does not seek to annul the prohibition. Because the erotic imaginary, which drives desire, which is the activator of excitement, likes to play. He is the great comedian, the actor who enjoys his role as a bank robber but who in no case becomes a robber or legitimizes with his interpretation that banks can be robbed. A sexual interaction is a great representation in any of the erotic shows in which it is presented. It has of necessity to put itself in function within the enchantment of a scene. Otherwise, if we saw things as they really are – if we saw an ass as seen by a proctologist or vaginal discharge as seen by a gynecologist who does a smear – the erotic desire could never be sustained.
Thus, a sexual interaction requires the possibility of the hidden, of sordidness, of what is not legitimized in another framework of understanding. You cannot insult me or slap me on the ass in “real life”, where order and tenderness must prevail; but in the tragicomedy of sex, things are different.
It may, at least, be different and must, on many occasions, be. Currently, in relation to sex we pretend to be too transparent; there is an excess of normalization, regulation and rationalization of the erotic. Genital stimulation gadgets are already more like Brancusi sculptures: rounded, harmless, aseptic, with no hint of abyss in their beauty. Even the language in this serious game of sexually interacting is intended to proceduralize, establishing what can and cannot be said. But desire feeds on the unknown. That is why the enactment of our sexual condition continues to demand the Dionysian from us, what loves the hidden, the sordid … The dirty. It is in this situation when another phrase from Allen that complements the previous one makes sense and makes us smile: “I miss those times when the air was clean and sex was dirty.”
That, heard from Marilyn Monroe, must have sounded irresistible. However, there is a very common starting mistake that, without a doubt, we would forgive Marilyn: trying to understand our sexual condition and its processes and consequent acts as something natural, implying that sex should not be subject to conditioning factors, limitations , restrictions and taboos imposed by society and the gaze of the other. But we make a double mistake: believing that the human sexual act is natural as it would be, for example, that of the musk ox, and believing that the natural, what God wants, the law of life is something good and not something that we have been trying. correcting for our own survival from the moment we plant wheat, build a hut, discover the antibiotic, or create a vaccine.
It is our own condition as symbolic, representative and rational animals that makes the human sexual act a true wonder of extremely complex understanding. All our erotic processes and our sexuality are often coerced and blocked by what constitutes them, giving, for example, place to the so-called common sexual difficulties – loss of erotic desire, inability to reach orgasm, erectile dysfunctions, etc. – that are not explicable from an organic point of view, but because of the fears and the difficulty of understanding that being animals immersed in culture causes us. Despite depending on organic processes that, under conditions of non-cultural interference, would function alone –like our sexual response–, we have the blessing and the curse, as well as the responsibility, of being an open project that has to be limited and coerced in order to be able to materialize. Thus, pretending to solve everything with a “do not give it more laps … if sex is natural!” is treating us like a platypus. Considerations aside, for someone like Marilyn to say that they don’t have a hard time interacting sexually is like melting steel. Curiously, this effect that Marilyn used to cause was due precisely to the fact that she was a human and cultural being with a very unnatural sexual condition.
Let no one be scared or take out the sword to decapitate misogynists or the heteropatriarchal oppression detector, even if the sentence of good old Karl Kraus is despicable. Because we are going to turn the phrase around … Kraus was a stubborn defender of the ethical causes that plagued Europe between the 19th and 20th centuries, and he knew perfectly well that women masturbate, that we do not lack imagination and that, For this reason, the gender of the sentence could pass to the masculine without the sentence losing an iota of sharpness.
The sharpness of the observation and the reasons why we bring it here are two: the claim of masturbation as an erotic of its own, which justifies itself without having to be a substitute for anything, and the claim of the imagination to the time to put into action our sexual condition. The first, the absurd and millenary moral condemnation that has persecuted masturbation is due to the persecution that all erotic women whose purpose was not reproduction, or what in sexology we call the model of the locus genitalis, have received .
Thus, any unproductive eroticism, from sodomy to voyeurism or fetishism, passing through masturbation, have always wanted to be presented first as a sin, then as a pathology and, finally, as a paraphilia. But the truth is that masturbation is not only an autonomous erotic, but it is also the most useful tool for the deployment of our dynamic process of sexuality. In addition, the claim of masturbation is to slam the absurd enthronement of intercourse as the exclusive, totalitarian and omnipresent eroticism that limits our sexual interactions to always being resolved by pushing . Masturbation is also where our erotic desires and sexual fantasies are displayed and enhanced. There, in that place that Montaigne called l’arrière boutique (the reboot), everything works out wonderfully, the good and the sordid, the approvable and the reprehensible, without thereby conditioning our reality. And all this was also known to Kraus, as he knew perfectly well that any sexual interaction requires a lot of imagination, because we do not make love on a bed, but on it, on our imagination.
