Treating sex as something that only affects our genitals, an idea inherited from Freud and now outdated, leads us to disregard its fundamental role in our health, well-being and personal relationships.
Our sex life, our sexual behavior is often talked about as if it is something completely different from the rest of our life, from the rest of our behavior. As if our loving gaze suddenly turned into a sexual gaze, as if complicity turned into sexual complicity, as if being comfortable with someone became sexual at a given moment.
Sometimes, trying to find a reason why we use this word so much, we think we find the justification in the intention behind it: a look, a gesture, a caress, a conversation is “sexual” if it intends to end up having sex, as if it were part of a courtship ritual before mating.
Sex beyond animal instinct
This confusion of what is sexually relevant to humans with animal behaviors makes us continue to think like in the 19th century. This unsympathetic gaze tells us that we are human beings, except when we let ourselves be carried away by the animal, the instinctive, the irrational, the uncontrollable. A narrative that became very popular with Freud and that remains at the bottom of our beliefs what is sexually relevant in our lives.
“To explain the fact of the existence of sexual needs [derivadas de la condición sexuada animal] (die geschlechtlichen Bedürfnisse) in man and animal Biology hypothesizes a “sex drive” (Geschlechtstriebes). In this we proceed by analogy with the nutritional impulse: hunger. Popular language lacks a term corresponding to the word “hunger”; science uses “libido”.
FREUD, S. (1905), Three Essays on Sexual Theory
But “sexual” doesn’t just refer to the genitals. Sexually, much more affects us than the genitals: we are affected by our hormones, our neurotransmitters, the education we receive, our ideas as a society about sexuality, the symbolic power of concepts, ideas, rituals and behaviors, explicit and implicit. norms, stigma, prejudice, shame, guilt for so many things.
We are affected by our bodies, the bodies of others, our feelings, our emotions, our desires, our fantasies, our fears, our expectations, our disappointments, our experiences in life, our relationships, our sorrows, heartbreaks and joys, our biographies. . All of these and many other things in life affect what we might call our sexuality.
The silence about what happens “down there”
But, despite the richness of human sexuality, it often turns to the genitals. And this makes it increasingly difficult for us to understand that the so-called sexually transmitted infections are actually transmitted through the body, because they also participate our mouths, tongues, hands, all over our skin. Thinking about a sexuality only related to the genitals prevents us from understanding that the “affective-sexual” concept It’s an error because it continues to perpetuate the idea that the sexual is not related to the affective.
Talking about our genitals as something apart from the rest of our lives makes it more difficult for us to understand that genital diseases are closely related to our urethra, kidneys, intestines, our whole body. What happens to us “down there” is just as important and has the same dignity whether it’s appendicitis or our genitals.
What has to do with the genitals often ends up being a terrain where silence ends up reigning. And this causes many professions to be on their toes when something affects our genitals, as if it doesn’t affect our entire biography.
All these problems continue to fall into silence, not really knowing what to do with them. So many themes that are very common (men with erection problems, women with orgasm problems) and who have been led to believe that they are something so rare, so extraordinary and that, since no one asks us about them, we believe we must solve it on our own.
This silence, so common, in which we don’t know why we are sold there, or why our hands seem like a woman, a man’s back, a woman’s legs, why we don’t live like one thing or another, we should be one rare animal. We don’t know why we’ve been in a relationship for so many years and not having sex. Why do we have so little or no desire and we don’t know how to get out of this situation when we want to. We don’t know why we have such weird fantasies that we don’t dare tell anyone, why erections or lubrication come when they shouldn’t and why they don’t come when they should. This is the immense lack of sex education that we have dragged on for so many decades.
Why don’t we talk about sex?
And so each discipline takes care of its own. We go to the health center to talk about our diseases and, when sexual problems appear, well, we are ashamed to suffer to comment on the consultation. Or when we are assisted in social services, where so many topics are addressed: drugs, mental health, disability or work. And the sexual thing? “Well, now you have bigger problems to solve.”
A lot of people who take some medicine that affects arousal, orgasm, that affects their sexuality, relationships. However, they are unable to link these problems to the medication because no one has told them anything. And since you don’t know which part is because of the medication and which part is because of your own problems, the shame and silence come again.
These are all topics that, in one way or another, we feel are related to “sex”. But if we identify sex only with the genitals, with the irrational, with the dirty, the dangerous and the abuse, it will cost us a lot to talk about sex. In fact, sex is many things in our lives, things that matter a lot to us and that, cultivated individually and collectively, will make our lives more satisfying, we will feel more comfortable with those who matter most to us. When we stop talking about those things that matter so much to us, little by little they become poorer in that silence, ignorance, guilt and fear.
“Sex is not a natural event. It is not given by nature. Sex is a creation of human beings: tailor-made, by them and for them. This is what it means to say that sex is a value. if it improvises, it doesn’t come out of nowhere. A value is designed and built, cared for and cultivated”.
(Amézua, 2006)
Miguel Vagalume is a sexologist specialized in couple relationships, activist and promoter, and co-creator of Sexological School.