Sex, Sexuality, and the Emancipation of the Imagination

I’m a heterosexual man; I find women attractive. I could explain why, but seeing how I’m a heterosexual man you probably already know why. You probably find women attractive, too. Or men. Or both. The options are limited. Again, you probably know why. There’s nothing wrong with sex, or sexual attraction. We’re supposed to be attracted to each other, to varying degrees. Sexuality is the basis of much - in some cases most - of our social interaction; propagation of the species is the goal of sexuality and social bonding. That isn’t our decision; rather, it’s the goal of our genes. Their purpose is to reproduce themselves and we are their vehicles. To quote Daniel Dennett, we are “gene machines.” But that doesn’t mean we are robots, or that genetics is a licence to pursue our biological imperative with amoral abandon.

We are our genes and our organs and our nervous systems and the instincts that drive us toward certain acts (over and over and over again); but we are also our cultivated minds, our emotions, our social and familial relations. There is, of course, continuity between our genes and our higher mental and emotional faculties; they are all constituted in the same organism: us! And this continuity, in evolutionary terms, is important. However far we travel, socially and technologically speaking, we are never too far from our biological roots – we are our biological roots. But we are more than our biology; this is the beauty of our humanity. We can transcend our instincts (I have reservations about the word “transcend” but it suits the purpose here).

We transcend our instincts through art and the aesthetic perception of nature and ourselves. But the aesthetic perception of the human body is grounded in our biology. The aesthetic perception of the human body is grounded in its sexual associations; what is beautiful about the human body always seems to revolve around the sexual organs. Perhaps not always, but often enough to produce a trend. And that’s OK. I like breasts, because I’m a heterosexual man. But the female face is also attractive to me; the face has no sexual function – no reproductive function – but the face is the seat of emotional and linguistic communication. We kiss, which entails the use of the mouth, the same orifice that speaks and moans and cries and frowns and smiles; the face is the locus of expression and the most immediate and attractive part of any human being. It isn’t all about sex, it’s also about communication, interaction, intersubjectivity.

Sexuality is a form of communication. The sexual act itself, however, is only one part of sexuality; to conflate the two is a dangerous error. Sexuality is the extension of the basic sexual facts into the realm of the imagination. That is to say, human sexuality has metaphoric dimensions above those of our basic sexual behaviours. No other animal has this projective capacity; other animals can plan ahead, anticipate, or calculate, but none can occupy that projective space in the same way that we can. That space is the imagination, and we do a lot of wonderful things with it. Language is an important component of our imagination, so is the ability to produce pictorial representations. Literature, poetry, painting, and photography are the products of those components of our imagination, and they have fashioned our social existence for our entire history. In fact, human history begins when art begins.

Sexuality and the human body, for the same length of time - that is, for all of time - have been the object of our imagination, and this pervasive and persistent attention has changed our bodies, as well as our sexuality. To be sure, we've had a turbulent relationship with our imagination and its treatment of sexuality and the body; what is more, repressive sexual politics haunts us to this day. But this repressive politics is borne out of a base human instinct: the instinct to control. It is a different kind of projection; it is imposition, and I have discussed this previously.

It is entirely common, and most acute in the realm of sex and sexuality, to see the imposition of "values," which have the same conceptual basis as that which their imposers are trying to repress. The world of sexual politics is replete with hypocrites because this irrepressible intersection. The same mind that seeks to impose its preferred sexual narrative is the same mind that imagines the perversions it's so offended by. There is no shortage of tales of, usually conservative, politicians and social leaders falling foul of their sexual desires at the cost of their political careers. The U.S. is particularly rich with such tales.

I should explain more explicitly what I mean when I say "sexuality is a form of communication." By definition, as a form of communication sexuality is reciprocal. It is both projection and reception, predicated on the existence of similarly-constituted others. There is no sexuality without others - sexuality is not simply private (although it is certainly that in some respects), it is a public and collective mode of communication because it is predicated on the existence of others. Because it is a public and collective mode of communication it is also contested, sometimes by the aforementioned politicians who seek to take advantage of divisive positions (no pun intended). We share our sexuality in various expressive forms, from the conventional to the radical.

We don't just produce representations of the body, we use the body itself as a canvas for representation. No other aesthetic object is so thoroughly employed. We can communicate sexual availability, preference, and defiance all at once; we can even transform the very notions of sex and sexuality. We can do this because we have an imagination. What is more, we can do this because we all have the same imagination, the same capacity to imagine. But, and it's a very important but, imagination, like biology, is no licence to indulge with amoral abandon. This is no morality I am preaching, but a subtle and fundamental truth. Sexuality is predicated on the existence of similarly-constituted others, and that includes the metaphoric capacity of imagination.

The central claim of feminist politics, and sexual and gender politics more generally, is grounded in the subtle fact that we occupy the same metaphoric space of imagination through which we communicate and shape our perception of the world, including and especially with regard to sexuality and social interaction more broadly. The demand for gender or sexual equality is a demand for an equal share of the collective imagination, by which we generate the value-systems that govern our behaviour, and which are sometimes legislated to very dangerous ends (think of the punitive divorce laws and sodomy laws that have at one time existed in Western countries, and still exist in many non-Western countries).

The sexual act is not the determinant factor for human sexuality because the act itself is surpassed by the metaphoric projections of our imagination, and it is in that space, not strictly speaking the biological space that we now operate. To be sure, biology dictates certain outcomes. Reproduction and orgasm are the two most important forces to a sexual body (though not necessarily in that order, and not necessarily both). What is important, however, is that the imagination is emancipated from the demands of either. As strange as it might seem, reproduction or orgasm are not required outcomes for human sexuality. A woman doesn't have to have baby just because she is sexually active, and a man doesn't have to ejaculate just because he is aroused by the sight of a woman, or a man for that matter.

This is an aesthetic emancipation and it is the true source of human sexuality. Perhaps perversely, this emancipation is also a site of manipulation and coercion. Again, the drive to impose upon others is always present. Not only are there repressive forces contesting the ground of the collective imagination, there are exploitative forces as well. True emancipation only comes through a collective broadening of the aesthetic boundaries of sexuality. In a sense, it requires an emancipation of sexuality as a form of communication from the sexual act itself. Reproduction and ejaculation aren't a mandate dictating to, or stemming from, sexuality as a form of communication.

The history of the representation of the human body provides a fascinating case-study in how the collective imagination has changed, from the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf to the Greeks' obsession with the naked male form, to the medieval fascination with small breasts, to modern representations of the human body. The emancipation of sexuality would require at least a cursory understand of human representations of the human body have changed throughout our history. But this is a topic for another blog!