Yeah, this is almost a straight paraphrase of one of the stories in there, unless I’m misremembering the contents of the book. It seems that any sexual ideology, even one of sexual liberation, can lead to dissatisfaction.
The problem, I think, is that sex is an ambiguous, muddled and confusing thing, whether or not it’s got prudish cultural baggage attached to it. Whether we conform to the popular conception or seize upon alternative views, we need some kind of cognitive framework to help us simplify and deal with our sexuality. But, under the (I think) reasonable assumption that truly satisfying sexuality doesn’t boil down to any such simple framework, mistakes are bound to be made.
Like anything else, therefore, healthy sexuality requires practice and trial-and-error, and we’re unlikely to get it right the first time. I think one of the most dangerous cultural ideals is that sex should only happen when everything is just right (especially if you’re a woman, but that’s a whole other conversation). If we can learn not to beat ourselves up over sexual relations that turn out to be less than ideal, maybe this sort of thing will be less of a problem.
Missing the point a little. If I read NancyLebovitz right, she’s pointing out that Sally’s generally sexually liberated abstract ethic doesn’t imply that Sally herself is feeling any desire for sex right then with this one guy. And yet, women’s sexuality is so blanked out in the culture that her lack of active negativity to Bob’s desire for sex is read—even by herself—as a choice to go ahead.
The problem here is not that sex is ambiguous or confusing in itself. Rather, the culture is causing people’s eyes to slip past and over half the question. Naturally the answers make no sense!
Yes, I understand. It’s certainly a problem that women’s desires are glossed over in the popular view of sexuality (when they aren’t actively discouraged). I was simply proposing that the problem runs deeper than that: for men and women alike, one’s individual sexual desires have to be explored at length before they are fully understood. When you’ve never had sex before, it may seem like a fine idea in the abstract, but to actually recognize concrete and unambiguous sexual desire (or its absence) requires a certain amount of self-awareness and emotional sophistication that can only be gained through a learning process.
In no way does this undermine the fact that the dialectic needs to be reshaped to include the desires of women and transpeople in addition to those of men, I’m just not sure that’ll be enough to prevent awkward and emotionally confusing first sexual encounters. Maybe we should just accept those as OK (modulo prohibitions against sexual coercion, etc.).
I’m actually a little wary of assuming there are pre-existing “desires” which exist but wait to be understood. Rather than for example, a handful of inborn influences, a heap of cultural and situational influence, and a gradual accumulation of preferences from cognition and experience.
Consider that you’d think the above description was quite sensible when applied to food preferences,
I mostly agree, but the existence of gay people who found out the hard way that heterosexual sex simply wasn’t satisfying for them looks to me like a strong counterexample.
I’m referring to the gay people who married someone of the other sex back when that was thought to be a cure for homosexuality.
Hmm, no I actually disagree. That assumes that “trying” ought to change it. On the contrary, I don’t see that a situational + cognitive origin implies a conscious toggle switch.
Consider food again. I watched my brother learn to hate honey—he liked it initially, until one day he was disgusted to find bee parts in it. Then we as kids teased him with it, building associations of disgust. As an adult he finds it nauseating. I have no expectation that he could will himself to like it.
I think that people have been pushing the “can’t change” aspect as a way to defend gay people from bigots, specifically to fight the religious charge of sin (because it undermines the idea of guilt), and to fight the quack science of willed change (“ex gays”). Culturally, when we hear “can’t change”, we go looking for it in the genes. Personally I haven’t heard strong evidence for genetic predetermination (versus a genetic preference rather like having a sweet tooth). I have heard evidence it can’t be willed to change. But why expect that it could? And I have also heard (anecdotal) evidence that it can change on its own or situationally, such as when trans people transition.
There probably aren’t genetic correlates per se (they’d get bred out of the population pretty quickly if so); but as I understand, there are fairly solid links between incidence of homosexuality and the hormonal environment in the womb during certain critical periods of pregnancy. That being said, sexuality is fluid to some extent, but not by a lot, and it doesn’t seem to be under conscious control.
The situation makes a lot more sense when you realize that “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”, etc., aren’t atomic properties of a human being, but rather statistical tendencies in the response of certain (largely unconscious) cognitive and biological functions to environmental stimuli. Even the straightest dude can get a bit of a man-crush once in awhile if the object of his attraction happens to trigger the right affective states, whether by having unusual pheremones, pleasing physical features, an especially compelling personality, or anything else which might activate some quirk of said straight dude’s brain.
To describe the process of sexually maturing as a process of discovering one’s innate desires, then, is perhaps somewhat misleading, as you pointed out, insomuch as we are at risk of reifying those desires; but the effect of (mostly) unchangeable physiology is still significant in this case. We can view the process of sexual self-discovery, then, as that of an inexperienced neocortex learning to maximize the reward signals it gets from the black box of its limbic system.
As for food, those preferences are actually easily changeable. There are a number of foods (falafel, grapefruit, mustard, pickles) that I couldn’t stand in the past, but kept occasionally trying anyway; as my body learned that these were sources of valuable nutrients, I eventually grew to like them. Similarly, a bout of food poisoning turned me off avocados for about a year and a half, but through repeated exposure I came to enjoy them once more. Extremely spicy foods are another good example. The stomach needs to learn what it can eat, in order to adapt to changing nutritional needs and environmental conditions. In contrast, there’s no particular selective pressure for a person to experiment with screwing different kinds of people, animals, objects, etc., so we should expect our attractions to remain largely autonomous of our efforts to change them.
I don’t see how that is a strong counterexample, actually.
I mean, it’s clear that in those cases there’s a sexual desire for men, and no sexual desire for women, but it’s not at all clear that either of those are the result of a “pre-existing desire” as opposed to “a handful of inborn influences, a heap of cultural and situational influence, and a gradual accumulation of preferences from cognition and experience.”
Admittedly, it’s not clear to me what would be a counterexample, or more generally what I’d expect to experience differently if Julian were right or wrong.
So perhaps I’m merely misunderstanding altogether.
That is an interesting question. What would a strongly foreordained desire look like? (NB I am deliberately not saying inborn, with its genetic implications) And how would it look different to an accumulated desire?
Well, that’s basically my question to you, actually.
That is: you’re saying you don’t believe in pre-existing desires, and believe instead in desires that emerge from a variety of influences (inborn, cultural, situational, cognitive, and experiential).
I’m not really sure what the difference between those two things even is, in terms of anticipated experience, so I’m not sure there’s any meaningful difference to be discussed.
For my own part, when a pattern of desire is common across multiple cultures and situations and individuals, I’m not inclined to treat it as primarily an emergent property of cultural, situational, or experiential influences.
Yeah, this is almost a straight paraphrase of one of the stories in there, unless I’m misremembering the contents of the book. It seems that any sexual ideology, even one of sexual liberation, can lead to dissatisfaction.
The problem, I think, is that sex is an ambiguous, muddled and confusing thing, whether or not it’s got prudish cultural baggage attached to it. Whether we conform to the popular conception or seize upon alternative views, we need some kind of cognitive framework to help us simplify and deal with our sexuality. But, under the (I think) reasonable assumption that truly satisfying sexuality doesn’t boil down to any such simple framework, mistakes are bound to be made.
Like anything else, therefore, healthy sexuality requires practice and trial-and-error, and we’re unlikely to get it right the first time. I think one of the most dangerous cultural ideals is that sex should only happen when everything is just right (especially if you’re a woman, but that’s a whole other conversation). If we can learn not to beat ourselves up over sexual relations that turn out to be less than ideal, maybe this sort of thing will be less of a problem.
Missing the point a little. If I read NancyLebovitz right, she’s pointing out that Sally’s generally sexually liberated abstract ethic doesn’t imply that Sally herself is feeling any desire for sex right then with this one guy. And yet, women’s sexuality is so blanked out in the culture that her lack of active negativity to Bob’s desire for sex is read—even by herself—as a choice to go ahead.
The problem here is not that sex is ambiguous or confusing in itself. Rather, the culture is causing people’s eyes to slip past and over half the question. Naturally the answers make no sense!
Yes, I understand. It’s certainly a problem that women’s desires are glossed over in the popular view of sexuality (when they aren’t actively discouraged). I was simply proposing that the problem runs deeper than that: for men and women alike, one’s individual sexual desires have to be explored at length before they are fully understood. When you’ve never had sex before, it may seem like a fine idea in the abstract, but to actually recognize concrete and unambiguous sexual desire (or its absence) requires a certain amount of self-awareness and emotional sophistication that can only be gained through a learning process.
In no way does this undermine the fact that the dialectic needs to be reshaped to include the desires of women and transpeople in addition to those of men, I’m just not sure that’ll be enough to prevent awkward and emotionally confusing first sexual encounters. Maybe we should just accept those as OK (modulo prohibitions against sexual coercion, etc.).
I’m actually a little wary of assuming there are pre-existing “desires” which exist but wait to be understood. Rather than for example, a handful of inborn influences, a heap of cultural and situational influence, and a gradual accumulation of preferences from cognition and experience.
Consider that you’d think the above description was quite sensible when applied to food preferences,
I mostly agree, but the existence of gay people who found out the hard way that heterosexual sex simply wasn’t satisfying for them looks to me like a strong counterexample.
I’m referring to the gay people who married someone of the other sex back when that was thought to be a cure for homosexuality.
Hmm, no I actually disagree. That assumes that “trying” ought to change it. On the contrary, I don’t see that a situational + cognitive origin implies a conscious toggle switch.
Consider food again. I watched my brother learn to hate honey—he liked it initially, until one day he was disgusted to find bee parts in it. Then we as kids teased him with it, building associations of disgust. As an adult he finds it nauseating. I have no expectation that he could will himself to like it.
I think that people have been pushing the “can’t change” aspect as a way to defend gay people from bigots, specifically to fight the religious charge of sin (because it undermines the idea of guilt), and to fight the quack science of willed change (“ex gays”). Culturally, when we hear “can’t change”, we go looking for it in the genes. Personally I haven’t heard strong evidence for genetic predetermination (versus a genetic preference rather like having a sweet tooth). I have heard evidence it can’t be willed to change. But why expect that it could? And I have also heard (anecdotal) evidence that it can change on its own or situationally, such as when trans people transition.
There probably aren’t genetic correlates per se (they’d get bred out of the population pretty quickly if so); but as I understand, there are fairly solid links between incidence of homosexuality and the hormonal environment in the womb during certain critical periods of pregnancy. That being said, sexuality is fluid to some extent, but not by a lot, and it doesn’t seem to be under conscious control.
The situation makes a lot more sense when you realize that “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”, etc., aren’t atomic properties of a human being, but rather statistical tendencies in the response of certain (largely unconscious) cognitive and biological functions to environmental stimuli. Even the straightest dude can get a bit of a man-crush once in awhile if the object of his attraction happens to trigger the right affective states, whether by having unusual pheremones, pleasing physical features, an especially compelling personality, or anything else which might activate some quirk of said straight dude’s brain.
To describe the process of sexually maturing as a process of discovering one’s innate desires, then, is perhaps somewhat misleading, as you pointed out, insomuch as we are at risk of reifying those desires; but the effect of (mostly) unchangeable physiology is still significant in this case. We can view the process of sexual self-discovery, then, as that of an inexperienced neocortex learning to maximize the reward signals it gets from the black box of its limbic system.
As for food, those preferences are actually easily changeable. There are a number of foods (falafel, grapefruit, mustard, pickles) that I couldn’t stand in the past, but kept occasionally trying anyway; as my body learned that these were sources of valuable nutrients, I eventually grew to like them. Similarly, a bout of food poisoning turned me off avocados for about a year and a half, but through repeated exposure I came to enjoy them once more. Extremely spicy foods are another good example. The stomach needs to learn what it can eat, in order to adapt to changing nutritional needs and environmental conditions. In contrast, there’s no particular selective pressure for a person to experiment with screwing different kinds of people, animals, objects, etc., so we should expect our attractions to remain largely autonomous of our efforts to change them.
I don’t see how that is a strong counterexample, actually.
I mean, it’s clear that in those cases there’s a sexual desire for men, and no sexual desire for women, but it’s not at all clear that either of those are the result of a “pre-existing desire” as opposed to “a handful of inborn influences, a heap of cultural and situational influence, and a gradual accumulation of preferences from cognition and experience.”
Admittedly, it’s not clear to me what would be a counterexample, or more generally what I’d expect to experience differently if Julian were right or wrong.
So perhaps I’m merely misunderstanding altogether.
That is an interesting question. What would a strongly foreordained desire look like? (NB I am deliberately not saying inborn, with its genetic implications) And how would it look different to an accumulated desire?
Well, that’s basically my question to you, actually.
That is: you’re saying you don’t believe in pre-existing desires, and believe instead in desires that emerge from a variety of influences (inborn, cultural, situational, cognitive, and experiential).
I’m not really sure what the difference between those two things even is, in terms of anticipated experience, so I’m not sure there’s any meaningful difference to be discussed.
For my own part, when a pattern of desire is common across multiple cultures and situations and individuals, I’m not inclined to treat it as primarily an emergent property of cultural, situational, or experiential influences.
Er, good point; thanks for the reminder.