Treating sex as something that affects only the genitals, an idea inherited from Freud and now outdated, leads us to leave aside its fundamental role in health, well-being and personal relationships.
Our sex life, our sexual behavior is often spoken of as 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 became sexual complicity, as if being comfortable with someone became sexual at a certain 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 you intend 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 for humans with animal behavior makes us continue to think as in the nineteenth century. This unsympathetic look 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 basis of our beliefs what is sexually relevant in our lives.
“To explain the fact that there are sexual needs [derivadas de la condición sexuada animal] (die geschlechtlichen Bedürfnisse) in man and animal Biology formulates the hypothesis of a “sexual drive” (Geschlechtstriebes). In this we proceed by analogy with the nutritional impulse: hunger. Popular language lacks a term that corresponds to the word “hunger”; science uses “libido” for that.
FREUD, S. (1905), Three Essays on Sex Theory
But “sexual” doesn’t just refer to the genitals. We are sexually affected by much more than our genitals: we are affected by our hormones, our neurotransmitters, the education we receive, our ideas as a society about sexuality, the symbolic power of explicit concepts, ideas, rituals and behaviors and norms implied, stigma, prejudice, shame, guilt for so many things.
We are affected by our bodies, the bodies of others, our sensations, our emotions, our desires, our fantasies, our fears, our expectations, our disappointments, our experiences in life, our relationships, our pains, dislikes and joys, our biographies. All of this 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 repeatedly turns to the genitals. And this complicates more and more that we understand that so-called sexually transmitted infections are actually transmitted through the body, because they also participate our mouths, tongues, hands, all our skin. Thinking about a sexuality related only to the genitals prevents us from understanding that the “affective-sexual” concept this is an error because it continues to perpetuate the idea that the sexual is not related to the affective.
Talking about our genitals as something separate from the rest of our lives makes it harder for us to understand that genital diseases are closely related to our urethra, kidneys, intestines, our entire body. What happens to us “down there” is just as important and has the same dignity if it’s appendicitis or our genitalia.
What has to do with the genitals often ends up being a terrain where silence ends up reigning. And that makes many professions tiptoe when something affects our genitals, as if it doesn’t affect our entire biography.
All these problems remain silent, not quite knowing what to do about them. Many topics that are very common (men with erectile problems, women with orgasm problems) and who have been led to believe that they are something so rare, so extraordinary and that, as no one asks us about them, we believe we should solve it for ourselves.
This silence, so common, in which we do not know why we sell here, why our hands seem like a woman, a man’s back, a woman’s piernas, why we do not live as one thing or another, we must be one rare animal. We don’t know why we’ve been dating for so many years and not having sex. Because 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 strange fantasies that we dare not tell anyone, why erections or lubrication show up when they shouldn’t and don’t show up 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 illnesses and, when sexual problems appear, we feel ashamed of suffering to comment on the consultation. Or when we are assisted by social services, where so many issues are covered: drugs, mental health, disability or work. And the sexual thing? “Well now you have bigger issues to take care of.”
Many people who take some medicine that affect their arousal, their orgasms, that affect their own sexuality, their relationships. However, they cannot relate 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 back.
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 be difficult for us to talk about sex. In fact, sex is many things in our life, 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. When we stop talking about these things that matter so much to us, they get poorer and 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: made-to-measure, by them and for them. That is what it means to say that sex is a value. A value is not improvised , does not come out of nowhere. A value is designed and built, cared for and cultivated.”
(Amezua, 2006)
Miguel Vagalume is a sexologist specializing in couple relationships, activist and promoter and co-creator of sex school.