All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (11 page)

Yet women may still in intimate relations also want men who are or can be idealized as superior to them–stronger, more powerful, more intelligent, more like that Daddy who stood so tall and powerful in their infancy, before he went off to satisfy his lusts and left Mummy crying in the bathroom. Or they may love the Mummy in their men, since that was where they learned to love, yet that tenderness may bear little relation to the penetrative act. They may laugh at the trappings of romance, yet simultaneously yearn for it, with either a gay or a heterosexual partner. They may want to engage in ‘easy’ sexual relations–with men or women–while continuing to believe in and wanting ‘the one and only’. They may want babies, though they may not necessarily want them with the men with whom they have sex. These inner contradictions breed dissatisfaction: when unacknowledged, they can lead to a succession of partners blamed for the lacks that reside in the self’s own murky conflicts.

Driven by the damaging, hypersexualized images in our media, women certainly internalize too young an injunction to look attractive and be brazenly ‘sexy’, enact a Barbie-like aesthetic or mimic glamour models or play at
Sex and the City
. But at the same time, they want to be considered for more and other than their looks. Or they may confuse ‘empowerment’ with the freedom to behave like porn stars, to ‘behave badly’, learning too late that when the men they want to entice behave badly, it often brings violence in its train.

There is nothing unusual in any of this. The muddle exists and is all too human. It can only grow in our image-rich world where young women’s bodies, air-brushed into the year’s iconic perfection, are still used to convey the desirability of any number of products, while women themselves are urged to tone, exercise, massage, diet, and undergo surgical interventions to attain that perfected youthful desirability. All this brings along with it the heavy goods train of rampant anxiety.

When things change for women, they change for men, too: women’s sexual liberation has liberated male sexuality. It has also created equivalent muddles and ambivalences for men. Even if young men, before the advent of the pill, had easier access to sex than women, they would certainly, if middle-class, have had to scale a class or age divide to find lovers. Their peers were forbidden sexual territory: here respect, courtesy, an extended courtship ritual was demanded of them. This is far less necessary if women do the chasing or the asking or have already engaged in sex with numerous partners.

But while, rationally, a young man may have bought into the ‘sexual equality’ culture, he may nonetheless feel ill at ease with it, threatened by a woman’s sexual experience, let alone her dominance. This can somehow ‘unman’ him. Boys, young women say–and it is largely to women that they speak their fears–worry about their comparative experience, prowess and size. Often, too, they can have a residual sense that a woman who has had a string of partners is somehow unclean, something of a slut, and can be no sooner had than abandoned. Though they say they want a partner who is sexually, intellectually and economically their equal, they are also uneasy about it and complain that ‘women have lost their capacity for kindness’, that ‘they don’t know how to compromise’.

The challenge to men to rewrite traditional sexual scripts has come hand in hand with a growth in pornography and reported violence against women. A 2009 report by the British children’s charity, the NSPCC, revealed that a third of teenage girls suffered from unwanted sexual acts; one in four, some as young as thirteen, had been hit by their boyfriends, ‘one in nine had been beaten up, hit by objects or strangled’, while a million women a year were victims of domestic violence.

Immersed in film and visual violence, sometimes alongside a history of violence at home, trapped in a sense of inadequacy, young men lash out, exhibiting strength where it doesn’t otherwise reside. The increasing sexualization of ever younger women’s bodies abets the process, making it difficult for a ‘no’ to sex to be respected. So, too, does porn, so pervasive now amongst all age groups, even children, that it is radically altering our experience of human bodies and sexuality, distorting our expectations of the human. A stimulus to solitary sex, porn provides none of the challenges of an embodied other, who can come and go, talk back and laugh or evoke a need that can’t be answered. Instead it offers an array of sexual objects who stimulate, without demanding emotion or intimacy. The gaze is in charge, the two-dimensional image complicit in returning to the man absolute phallic power. The rise of violence against women and the rise and rise of porn, the total and addictive power of the click that can delete and make manifest in rapid succession, are perhaps in part a destructive response to the waning of female complicity in assuring men of their dominance. For the young, particularly girls, porn, like all visual culture, educates them in aspiring to a ‘look’ that asks to be mimicked, since this is what men seem to want. So on with those five-inch heels that damage backs, and a variety of sexual acts that may garner applause for performance, but little more. Gay culture is enmeshed in the same dynamic.

Our cultural emphasis on sex as ‘casual’–that body, mind, sexuality and psyche somehow walk separate paths–can mask the fact that all sexual relations carry some intimate meaning, however short-lived or hidden. Defending against that meaning, disavowing it, can store up difficulties for those occasions when it needs to come into play. Witness the slide into so-called commitment-phobia that plagues the agony columns of our day. Even when the young may feel a need for ‘commitment’, it is all too easy to fall prey to the unending search for the perfect partner, blind to the fact that no being, let alone oneself, is perfect.

Our desire, Adam Phillips has noted, is always in excess of the object’s capacity to satisfy it. Humans regularly want more than they can have or can in fact live with. We all know stories of children (or adults), like Freud’s daughter Anna, who dream of more and more ‘stwaberries’ or chocolate cake, yet the gorging results in stomach ache. Our sexual fantasies, whether spurred by romance or porn, can as easily disguise or displace our wants as express them: the satisfactions they promise can lie in the promise alone. Though we may pursue them, they are rarely an utterly realistic indication of our wants.

One way of understanding the Don Giovanni character ever in pursuit of a new conquest is to grasp that he is as much or more interested in keeping the tally of his
mille tre
–one thousand and three–with his servant, Leporello, than in the conquest of the actual women he rapes or seduces. The satisfaction of the mounting list seems to be greater than that of the activity engaged in. Indeed, fantasies may well keep at bay a sense of hopelessness, but their realization, like the wishes fulfilled in a fairy-tale, often end in unhappiness.

So, too, the restless pursuit of ever more women may disguise or displace inner difficulties and inhibitions: the man may not want a ‘better’ or ‘more suitable’ woman at all, but to be recognized by his peers, or by his mother or father. This is complicated by the fact that men seem to have a particular talent for separation: early in childhood they give up their first love object–the mother who, at best, offered unconditional love–in order to become males, like their fathers. A casual sexual environment makes the repeated leaving of relationships far simpler for them than it is for women–even though it may leave neither particularly satisfied. Or the man may need to hide, especially from himself, an unconscious dependency on a powerful mother: fearing her replication in a girlfriend, fearing a trap or engulfment, his manhood is proved by abandoning her. Indeed, men’s age-long misogyny, amongst much else, masks a panic about helplessness, a fear of the overpowering mother of infancy.

Added to all this, men’s bodies too have now become objects of consumer desire, eased, certainly in the media, by an acceptance of gay culture. Gone are the days when men were valued largely for their actions or status. Beautiful muscled hunks adorn hoardings and strut through ads. Well defined shoulders, the six-pack abdomen, preoccupy youths in gyms and–sometimes guiltily–outside them. Just as women now bear the challenge of competing in the workplace, so men now feel they need to compete in the body-beautiful stakes. Eating disorders amongst young men are on the rise.

The relative ease and acceptability of homosexual encounters, while a definite plus for men and women who are certain they are gay, has created other kinds of difficulties. If you make love with someone of your own sex, as a proportion of the young do and have long done, does that mean you have to enter a domain of fixed biological or cultural identity? There may be pressures to do with ‘coming out’ or even deciding on a permanent ‘identity’ for yourself, gay or straight, at a period of love and life when experimentation is rife and all identities relatively fluid. Then, too, while it can be exhilarating to have a greater option of gendered and age relationships, too much choice can be hard to bear. Its very proliferation can create deep anxieties, or indeed that paralysis of the will which has now become medicalized into depression. A choice means giving something up, and we have lived through a long cultural moment in which a greedy more and more, rather than an austere less, has been vaunted.

The public climate has altered radically since my youth in another way, too. Lady Chatterley no longer has to be read covertly under the bedsheets in order to gain a sense of what sex might be: images of love and sex proliferate. Advice is everywhere on hand: ‘Tips for Mind-blowing Foreplay’, ‘40 Ways to Have the Best Sex of Your Life’, ‘100 Sex Positions You’ve Never Tried’–such articles fill magazines for young and middle-aged alike, even increasingly for the old. Film, television, magazines, newspapers, books and the Internet explicitly not only portray sexual acts but also make available an attendant language of emotion and relationship. Millions of columns and websites offer know-how on everything from how to get and keep your mate to how to behave in bed to maximize an assortment of pleasures. Details of intimate lives, real or fictional, circulate freely. Sex sells, as does sex advice. Yet its commodification brings us little pleasure and less fulfilment, though it brings its purveyors a great deal of dosh.

Throughout the nineties and the beginning of this century, ‘to have sex’–as if it were a thing rather than an act which brought some interiority of self and other into play–has become something of an injunction in the West. Sex is ubiquitous. Millions of billboards, films, adverts, television programmes and porn sites have turned sexiness into a desirable commodity, one that brings glamour, cool and happiness. Yet this visual sex that turns us all into voyeurs bears little relationship to the reality and variety of living bodies, their feel, their touch and smell, their imperfections and precise delights–not to mention the reality of the people who inhabit them.

Meanwhile, self-help and how-to books tell us how to perform sex well and often, while achieving the necessary orgiastic bliss for both partners and on every occasion. Polls count the too-much or the too-little of it that people have or want, and simultaneously count the discrepancies in truth-telling between the sexes: men, it seems, exaggerate upwards and women downwards. (Memory is as selective in this area as in others; we’d rather forget what doesn’t accord with our self-image.) Divorced from love or any idea of an enduring relationship or, often enough, the marker of ‘health’ in an ongoing one, frequent, varied and orgasmic sex, perhaps accompanied by one or other of a proliferation of toys and aids, has become the measure of a good life. Even grandparents feel they have to have ‘it’.

Whereas the Freudian superego, that part of the self which, like a conscience, takes in and acts on behalf of the parental and public order, turned sex into something prohibited, dirty and a drain on vital inner resources, today’s superego could be said to issue a command to rampant, calisthenically perfected sexuality. Sex has become hard work. The goals and targets issued by an equally rampant advice industry defy the pleasurableness of pleasure. To cap it all, sexual performance has also become a crucial marker on that touted gauge of ‘self-esteem’ we are all urged to live by–as if self-esteem could always be rationally elicited. Girls of thirteen in Philadelphia suburbs feel impelled to give boys blow jobs on school buses. Other young women, prey to the culture that makes advertised images more potent than lived experience, post mobile-phone pictures of themselves ‘doing it’ to boyfriends, only to find them generally available on the Web once the relationship is over. Pensioners on singles holidays boast of their exploits, often fuelled by Viagra. Families are torn asunder because wife or husband isn’t providing that seemingly most vital of commodities, according to the performance targets or rates laid down by the latest magazine or expert. Young, middle-aged and newly young old inwardly flagellate themselves because they’re not living up to the supposedly universal standard of sexual fulfilment now enshrined as a right–as well as a marker of good physical and mental health.

Few seem satisfied, or satisfied for long, under this new aegis. It is as if a public disciplinarian authority has stepped in to encourage and monitor activity in a private park where pleasure lies in the very fact of secret intimacy, unexpectedness and at least an aura of transgression. Therapeutic or medicalized ‘normality’ may have displaced Victorian morality, but anxiety about performance targets or pleasure levels seems to be no easier to bear than guilt. A balance here has been tipped, and things are awry. We have grown more concerned about this fetishized thing called sex than about those with whom we engage in it.

What does it mean to live in a society where excess is seen as a desirable good–enshrined in the lives of our stars, whose insatiable greed often extends beyond multiple partners to drugs, wealth, even an accumulation of babies; or alternatively, into an excess of purity, of the kind that we see in anorexia or religious fundamentalisms? The excess of others, as Adam Phillips has pointed out, can fill us, sometimes simultaneously, with both fascination and amazement as well as envy, disgust and a wish to be punitive. So what is this excess about? Phillips cites examples of so-called commitment-phobes, men who come to the consulting room because ‘they are either more promiscuous than they want to be or more celibate than they want to be’. He also cites the case of Kafka’s Hunger Artist, a man who performs fasting for a living. ‘Asked why he devoted himself to starving himself in public,’ the Hunger Artist answers he couldn’t help doing it ‘“because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you and everyone else.”’