Sex Understood: A Philosophy That Isn’t Shocking Isn’t Useful
“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.”
Henry Miller, 1891–1980
“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” Henry Kissinger once said. Many in the 1970s thought this a fascinating observation from the most high-profile secretary of state in U.S. history.
A sentiment of this sort was unsurprising coming from a distinctly unattractive male wielding enormous political power. It reflected a world such a person might prefer to imagine; a world in which even he was the subject of desire—and that's understandable enough.
Looking just a little deeper, it’d be impossible not to notice that this statement came from a man regarded by many as the biggest warmonger representing the biggest warmongering nation in modern history. Coming from the leadership of a nation that so often used its force to compel others to do its bidding, it’s appropriate to ask: what’s the role of power in sex?
At the very least, using power to obtain sex through pressure or coercion represents a misuse of power. Thankfully, everything from requiring sex of employees to exploiting star-struck interns has come to be seen for the undesirable conduct that it is. More to the point, power as the ultimate aphrodisiac is a sentiment that would seem at home in the mind of a common rapist.
We have no reason to believe that a man credited with (by some estimates) the deaths of four million human beings as a result of his policy recommendations was involved in anything so tawdry as sexual assault. But, the fact that Kissinger spoke of power rather than strength is telling.
Strength is attractive for many—both men and women; but power is about the use of force—compelling action irrespective of the wishes of others. Strength, on the other hand, is attractive, persuasive—a true aphrodisiac.
Being strong is an admirable quality, like being sensitive or articulate. We can be physically strong, emotionally strong, or intellectually strong; we can demonstrate a strength of character. Being strong is a quality like subtlety—whereas power is, at bottom, about coercion.
Even so, that does not make strength the ultimate aphrodisiac. Strength, like intelligence or physical beauty, can attract others—but a real aphrodisiac is about closing the deal. Which is why the ultimate aphrodisiac is consent.
We can be attractive to others, but their being attracted to us isn’t the endgame. The endgame of consent is at once the only absolutely necessary prerequisite to sex and the most exciting part of it. To appreciate the truth of this we must reflect on the various forms of consent.
Saying “yes” I want to have sex with you is the sort of consent naively imagined in college ethics courses, but not the sort of thing that usually happens in life—or even what people really want. More often in life, consent is manifested by conduct—behavior communicating our agreements.
A law school illustration of this principle went something like this: a homeowner wanted her house painted. She was sophisticated enough to know that a legal doctrine known as the Statute of Frauds required contracts worth more than $50 to be in writing. The homeowner met with a prospective painter to discuss the job. The painter gave her an estimate of $3,000 but then misunderstood the homeowner to say that she’d agreed to her price and wanted her to paint the house.
The homeowner watched as the painter painted her entire house, but when she asked for her $3,000, the homeowner refused, saying they’d made no written agreement for payment. The painter sued. The homeowner had to pay her the $3,000 because her agreement was manifested by her conduct of passively watching the painter paint her entire house when she could have stopped her right at the beginning to say she hadn’t agreed to her price. They’d formed a contract by conduct—the painter by painting and the homeowner by watching her paint without taking any steps to stop her. The fact she didn’t speak-up when she easily could have implied her agreement.
In human relationships consent is often an ongoing process. When a phone number is given: consent. With a handshake: consent. A lunch date agreed to: consent. A warmly-received light touch on the arm: consent. Leaning-in when your date moves toward you for a kiss: consent.
Consent itself is a concept, but its manifestation can be in speech, writing, or behavior. In order to manifest consent to a future duty, consent must be spoken or written. Usually, manifesting consent behaviorally with the body can only occur in the present moment. Which is a part of the reason sexual consent can only occur in the present. A contract by conduct for future sex isn’t possible.
In fact, sex itself is impossible without consent. Without consent there can only be violence. Sex without consent is the crime of rape. This principle, by the way, also extends to nonsexual conduct.
To some degree, consent involves being informed. The medical profession speaks about informed consent. In our personal lives there’s something special about being loved by someone who knows everything about us—warts and all. That said, a lover can also consent to knowing less than everything about us. There’s even a kind of consent on both sides of a glory hole.
If we tell a prospective lover only half of what’s so about us they can only give us half consent (unless they knowingly waive the rest). If we give them the wrong name, if we tell them the wrong age, if we tell them untruths about our past, then, to that degree they cannot consent to be with us. If we tell them 10 percent untruths, they can only give us 90 percent consent. Which is why there’s no greater intimacy than that in which our partner knows everything there is to know about us and still wants us.
That said, let’s not be extremists. It’s really not normal to know 100 percent about any other person, not even our spouse. As Kahlil Gibran advised, let there be space in your togetherness.
By virtue of being human we consent to interacting in all sorts of ways with others, intimate and not, without knowing everything about them. We can consent to being intimate with limited knowledge of one another. There’s just the possibility of a deeper level of intimacy when that consent is so fully informed that we honestly feel as if nothing’s been held back.
Consent is an ongoing real-time process throughout the sex act itself. When lips are parted for a kiss: consent. When pants are pulled down: consent. Asking our lover to touch us: consent. Erection: consent. Lovemaking consists of dozens of individual manifestations of consent. Sex is a dialogue that goes something like: yes and yes and yes and yes—perhaps for hours on end.
Since sexual consent can be withdrawn at any time, like intimacy itself, sexual consent exists only in the present moment. The most thrilling thing about sex is knowing that our lover wants us to be doing what we’re doing together right now. That’s because they’re actively consenting. If we reflect on it deeply enough, we’ll see that what excites us most is the knowledge that our lover wants us. More than anything, we all need love.
Which is why consent is so very sexy. Consent is fully at our discretion—even with our spouse or partner. When someone gives us sexual consent they’re saying that they want us in this very moment. They’re giving us permission to touch them here and now—and that’s incredibly hot.
Consent is so powerful that, in some ways, orgasm represents our deepest level of consent. Consider how often the word “yes” is uttered in such moments—sometimes over and over again.
Consent is the basis of civilization itself, as well as the basis of law in democracies. Voting is a manifestation of our consent to be governed, for example. Without voting, there’s no democracy.
Just as consent is so central to our sexuality as to be virtually inseparable from it, sexuality itself is underappreciated as being fundamental to our ability to perceive reality. At a time when, on a daily basis, propagandists and political con artists are telling us that black is white and up is down, our personal mooring to reality is being tested like never before.
How can we know what’s real when we can’t trust what many around us are saying? We must be personally grounded to physical reality; we must literally feel the ground beneath our feet. One of the best ways of doing this is by being scrupulously honest within ourselves about our own sexual experience. If we can’t be completely open and honest within ourselves about our own sexuality, what could we ever really know? And if we’re to see our broader reality for what it really is, we must follow that truth wherever it takes us.
It’s been estimated that sex has been around for some 1.2 billion years. Since we’ve only had written language for about 5,000 years, that means we have no memory of the first 1,199,995,000 years of our sexual history. Maybe it’s time for a trip to the clinic. To say the very least, we don’t understand everything there is to know about human sexuality and our shared sexual history.
Los Angeles, California (Hollywood more specifically), is known as the center of the world's film industry. L.A. County had also been known as the capital of that other film industry—it had been the worldwide center of pornographic film production.
But, in 2012, L.A. County passed a law, citing workplace safety concerns, requiring actors in the pornographic films produced there to wear condoms during intercourse scenes. Within just a few years, L.A. County porn film permit applications fell by 95 percent, representing, by some estimates, a loss of $6 billion in film production revenue. Why?
Admittedly, porn actors didn’t like this condom requirement and publicly objected to it. Supporters of the law claimed it’d been enacted for their benefit and protection—something the actors themselves found disingenuous and condescending. They said they felt the real reason for the passage of the law was the ongoing discrimination against them and their industry based largely on the anti-sex views of the religious and some like-minded feminists.
But, important as the feelings of their actors might have been, the porn industry didn’t flee, eyebrows-cocked, to Las Vegas to be free of this condom requirement primarily on the basis of the dissatisfaction of their actors. Instead, what they found (which was unsurprising to them) was that many of their customers didn’t like seeing condoms in their films and would, therefore, rather see films made in locations without condom mandates.
Many people (both men and women) find condom use to be on a continuum from awkward to unsexy. Many men find that condom use causes them to lose their erections and/or to be unable to climax. Others, of course, appreciate that condom use can increase protection from STDs—but few would describe them as enhancing the sexual experience. At best they’re a necessary evil for those who use them. So, it’s understandable why many people avoid using condoms.
That said, there’s not much of a dramatic difference in the appearance of a penis in a film with or without a condom, especially when you consider that, in a sexually explicit film, the penis remains hidden within the bodies of other actors much of the time. Why, then, would viewers care so much about whether or not the actors in those films were wearing condoms?
The answer to this question is as obvious as it is important. The viewers of pornographic films are mentally putting themselves into the places of those actors—just as the viewers of any film do. Film viewers identify with the actors they’re watching—taking up their struggles and celebrating their victories right along with them. That’s why cinema is the most influential art form ever created.
More to the point, the viewers of porn films were feeling those condoms, just as the actors did. Which confirms the most underappreciated thing there is about porn: pornography is based on human empathy. This is why pornography is so compelling for literally billions of people on Earth.
There are popular porn sites today that each show their viewers the equivalent of centuries of film-time in a single year. This isn’t because the world is full of troubled degenerates (as some claim) but rather because we’re such profoundly social animals that we find sharing in the pleasure of porn actors to be more compelling than anything else we could find on an Internet featuring the entire sweep of human knowledge. For better or worse, that’s just how it is.
Most adults today (both male and female) view pornography. Why would religious alarmists (or feminists) prefer to believe that the majority of ordinary adults are sick—or just bad people—rather than that normal, healthy people enjoy observing and sharing in the pleasure of others?
The popularity of pornography illustrates that empathy, the desire for human connection, and a genuine interest in witnessing and sharing in the pleasure of others is central to the human experience. Far from the negative connotations frequently suggested for pornography, it's a natural and deeply humane interest in happiness for one's self and others that accounts for its popularity. Understanding that, it’s interesting that the religious condemn it so strongly.
Maybe pornography is so compelling because it taps into the genetically transmitted experience common in prehistoric/pre-linguistic times in which hunter-gatherers, living (for safety’s sake) in small groups, observed one another copulating. In those prehistoric times without houses, rooms, or even walls of the sort that separate and divide us today, witnessing others having sex must have been quite common—in fact, it must have been the norm. It must also have been arousing seeing members of one’s group being openly sexual with one another..
Hidden remnants of those prehistoric times are with us still—and not just reflected in our powerful natural interest in pornography. For example, how are we to account for the plunger-like head of the penis, other than as a biological adaptation for plunging-out the fresh semen of other males before inserting one's own semen as deeply as possible for hopeful egg implantation over that of those other males? This adaptation must have been important enough to evolve over millennia.
This, in turn, suggests that it was once common (and for a very long time) among humans and maybe even protohumans for multiple males to mate in rapid succession with individual females. This specialized penis shape must have evolved responsive to many millennia of this kind of group behavior in order to have been important enough to have been genetically selected.
Should we necessarily conclude that our prehistoric ancestors were regularly engaging in some form of group sex? If a female had been sexual with another male the previous week, for example, this plunger-like aspect of the penis would have had little functional benefit. Might it have been designed for pleasure—to motivate females to reproduce? Women rarely climax from penetration alone. No, this was an adaptation based on the rapid succession of multiple males mating with individual females. In fact, this must have been the norm for hundreds of thousands of years.
Why else would we have evolved into men who climax quickly (and require rest immediately afterwards) and women who can experience virtually unlimited orgasms? Additionally, women often experience increased energy after orgasms—the very opposite of their male counterparts.
In short, women evolved to receive the sexual attention of multiple men concurrently, or in rapid succession, while men evolved to please women as best as they could and then go off and nap while other men carried on with her fulfillment. This accounts for the fact that it takes woman far longer than men to be stimulated to orgasm but eventually, once aroused, women can experience orgasm after orgasm—potentially for hours.
This also explains why semen is such a good lubricant. A man typically stops penetrating a woman after he climaxes—so the lubricating properties of his own semen aren’t useful to him. But if multiple other males are going to have intercourse with that same female, the additional lubrication from each successive male would be useful in minimizing frictional discomfort for her.
Which also argues against the idea that such group sexual engagement might have been unwanted by the women involved. This evolved to be pleasurable for females. In this way, the greater number of men penetrating her, the larger the quantity of lubricant introduced into her body to minimize irritation and discomfort. It all makes perfect sense when you think about it.
Perhaps prehistoric women did not have their first orgasm until after the second or third male had satisfied themselves in her. What evolutionary need might have been met by this behavior that, no doubt, seems shocking to many of us today? Simply put, an ovulating female was more likely to become pregnant through receiving the sperm of many men—rather than just one.
If this seems unnatural, consider that, even today, the most common sexual fantasies of women include: sex with multiple/many men at once, sex with strangers, sex in the outdoors, and being overpowered sexually. Perhaps there's a reason such fantasies remain so much on the minds of women. Perhaps this was natural for us as human beings for hundreds of thousands of years.
There’s nothing immoral about the fact that our ancestors likely had frequent open group sex as a matter of routine. The true perversion would be ignoring the evidence and putting on blinders to brainwash ourselves like children being told fairytales in Sunday School. If we’re to survive much longer as a species, we must become more clear-eyed about ourselves and what motivates us.
Not only was there nothing immoral about our ancestors having open group sex, there’s nothing immoral about doing so today. What’s troubling, though, is hoarding wealth while children starve to death. What’s immoral, if we’re to use such terms, is to overpopulate and pollute Earth to the point of human uninhabitability for future generations. The blinders we wear, often as a result of religious indoctrination, confuse us so much that we actually think that group sex is immoral but starving children to death through our economic policy is a perfectly decent way to live.
The arrogance of our minds is rooted in prejudices about which we're often unaware. Our minds are like javelins thrown by the mighty arm of prehistory—but in our arrogance we believe them to be missiles flying through space under their own marvelous power.
This has been excerpted from the forthcoming book Coming To, On Being a Body with a Mind.
Joseph Frederick Curren is a writer and lawyer. He can be reached at wordtoaster@yahoo.com.