Sexuality

Robert Nozick

THE MOST INTENSE WAY we relate to another person is sexually. Nothing so concentrates the mind, Dr. Johnson noted, as the prospect of being hanged. Nothing, that is, except sexual arousal and excitement: rising tension, uncertainty about what will happen next,occasional reliefs, sudden surprises, dangers and risks, all in a sequence of heightened attention and tension that reaches toward resolution. A similar pattern of excitement also occurs near the end of closely matched athletic contests and in suspense films. I do not say our excitement at these is at base covertly sexual. Yet the sexual is so preeminent an exemplar of the general pattern of excitement that these others also may hold sexual reverberations. However, only in sex is such intense excitement shared with the object and cause of it.

Sex is not simply a matter of frictional force. The excitement comes largely in how we interpret the situation and how we perceive the connection to the other. Even in masturbatory fantasy, people dwell upon their actions with others; they do not get excited by thinking of themselves or of themselves masturbating while thinking of themselves. What is exciting Is interpersonal: how the other views you, what attitude the actions evidence. Some uncertainty about this makes it even more exciting. Just as it is difficult to tickle oneself, so too sex is better with an actual partner on the other end. (Is it the other person or the uncertainty that is crucial?)

Sex holds the attention. If any wanderings of the mind from the immediate sexual situation are permissible, it is only to other sexual fantasies. It bespeaks a certain lack of involvement to be ruminating then about one's next choice of automobile. In part, the focus of attention is on how you are touched and what you arc feeling, in part on how you arc touching the other person and what he or she is feeling.

At times we focus in sex upon the most minute motions, the most delicate brushing of a hair, the slow progress of the fingertips or nails or tongue across the skin, the slightest change or pause at a point. We linger in such moments and await what will conic next. Our acuity is sharpest here, no change in pressure or motion or angle is too slight to notice. And it is exciting to know another is attuned to your sensations as keenly as you are. A partner=s delicacy of motion and response can show knowledge of your pleasure and care about its details. To have your particular pleasures known and accepted, to linger in them for as long as you will without any rushing to another stage or another excitement, to receive another=s permission and invitation to loll there and play together -- is there such a thing as sex that is too slow? -- to be told in this way that you are deserving of pleasure and worthy of it, can bring a profound sigh.

Not only are old pleasures sensitively and delicately awakened and explored, but one becomes willing to follow to somewhere new, in the hands and mouth and tongue and teeth of someone who has cared and caressed knowingly.

It is not surprising that profound emotions are awakened and experienced in sex. The trust involved in showing our own pleasures, the vulnerability in letting another give us these and guide them, including pleasures with infantile or oedipal reverberations, or anal ones, does not come lightly.

Sex is not all delicacy of knowledge and response to nuanced pleasure. The narrative that begins there, and occasionally returns, also moves along to stronger and less calibrated actions, not so much the taking of turns in attentiveness to each other's pleasures as the mutual growth of stronger and broader excitements --- the move from the adult (or the infantile) to the animal. The passions and motions become fiercer and less controlled, sharper or more automatically rhythmic, the focus shifts from flesh to bones, sounds shift from moans and sighs to sharper cries, hisses, roars, mouths shift from tongue and lips to teeth and biting, themes of power, domination, and anger emerge to be heated in tenderness and to emerge yet again in ever stronger and more intense cycles.

In the arena of sex, our very strongest emotions are expressed. These emotions are not always tender and loving, though sometimes, perhaps often, they are. Such strong emotions bring equally strong ones, excited and exciting, in response. The partners see their strongest and most primitive emotions expressed and also contained safely. It is not only the other person who is known more deeply in sex. One knows one's own self better in experiencing what it is capable of: passion, love, aggression, vulnerability, domination, playfulness, infantile pleasure, joy. The depth of relaxing afterward is a measure of the fullness and profoundity of the experience together, and a part of it.

The realm of sex is or can be inexhaustible. There is no limit to what can be learned and felt about each other in sex; the only limit is the sensitivity or responsiveness or creativity or daring of the partners. There always are new depths -- and new surfaces -- to be explored.

The one maxim is to experiment attentively: to notice what excites, to follow the other=s pleasure where it is and goes, to lean into it, to play with variations around it, with stronger or more delicate pressures, in related places. Intelligence helps, too, in noticing whether what excites fits into a larger pattern or fantasy, in testing out that hypothesis and then, through congruent actions and words, sometimes ambiguous, in encouraging it. Through fresh experimentation one can bypass routinized or predictable pleasures. How nice that freedom, openness, creativity, daring, and intelligence -- traits not always so amply rewarded in the larger world-- bear such exceedingly sweet private fruits.

Sex also is a mode of communication, a way of saying or of showing something more tellingly than our words can say. Yet though sexual actions speak more pointedly than words, they also can be enhanced by words, words that name one's pleasure or lead ahead to greater intensity, words that narrate a fantasy or merely hint at exciting ones that cannot comfortably be listened to.

Like musicians in jazz improvisation, sexual partners are engaged in a dialogue, partly scored, partly improvised, where each very attentively responds to the statements in the bodily motions of the other. These statements can be about one's own self and pleasures, or about one's partner=s, or about the two of you together, or about what one would like the other to do. Whether or not they do so elsewhere in life, in sex people frequently and unconsciously do unto others as they would have others do unto them. By the placing or intensity or rate or direction of their pressures and motions they are constantly sending signals, often unawares, about what they want to receive. In manifold ways, also, some parts of the body can stand for or represent others, so that what happens, for example, at the mouth or ear (or palm or armpit or fingers or toes or bones) can intricately symbolize corresponding events elsewhere with coordinate excitement.

In verbal conversations, people speak in different voices, with different ideas, on different topics. In sexual conversation, too, everyone has a distinctive voice. And there is no shortage of new things two people can say, or older things that can be said newly or reminisced about. To speak of conversations here does not mean that the sole (non-reproductive) purpose of sex is communication. There is also excitement and bodily pleasure, desired for themselves. Yet these too are also important parts of the conversation, for it is through pleasurable excitement and the opening to it that other powerful emotions are brought into expression and play in the sex" arena.

In this arena, everything personal can be expressed explored, symbolized, and intensified. In intimacy, we let another within the boundaries we normally maintain around ourselves, boundaries marked by clothing and by full self-control and monitoring. Through the layers of public defenses and faces, another is admitted to see a more vulnerable or a more impassioned you. Nothing is more intimate than showing another your physical pleasure, perhaps because we learned we had to hide it even (or especially) from our parents. Once inside the maintained boundaries, new intimacies are possible,

such as the special nature of the conversation new partners can have in bed after sex. (Might they engage in sexm partly in order to have such unposed conversations?)

Is there a conflict between the desire for sexual excitement including orgasm and the deepest knowing of one's partner and oneself? A rush to immediately greater excitement, a focus upon everything else merely as a means to orgasm, would get in the way of deeply opening to another and knowing them. Everything in its proper time. The most intense excitement too can be a route to depth; people would not be so shaken by sex, so awed sometimes by what occurs, if their depths had stayed unplumbed.

Exciting for itself, orgasm also tells your partner how very pleased you are with him or her. When it takes a deeper form, when you allow yourself to become and appear totally without control, completely engulfed, you show the other, and show yourself too, the full extent of that other=s power over you and of your comfort and trust in being helpless before him or her.

Pleasing another feels best when it is an accomplishment, a surmountable challenge. Consequently, an orgasm is less satisfying to the giving partner when it comes too early or too late. Too early and it is no accomplishment, too late and only after very much effort, it states that the giving partner is not exciting and pleasing enough. The secret of success with orgasm, as with comedy, is timing.

Orgasm is not simply an exciting experience but a statement about the partner, about the connection to the partner; it announces that the partner satisfies you. No wonder partners care that it happen. Here, too, we can understand the unitive force of simultaneous orgasm, of feeling the most intense pleasure with and from the other person at the very moment that you are told and shown you intensely please him or her.

There are other statements, less about the whole person, more about parts. The penis can be made to feel a welcome entrant in the vagina; it can be kissed lovingly and unhurriedly; it can be made to feel nurturative; it can be delighted in and known for itself; in more exalted moments its fantasy is to be worshiped almost. Similarly, the sweetness and power of the vagina can be acknowledged in its own right, by tender kissing, long knowing, dwelling in the tiniest crevices and emitting those sounds this calls forth. Knowing a partner's body, meditating on the special energy of its parts without rushing anywhere else, also makes a statement the partner receives.

Unlike making love, which can be symmetrical, tender, and turn-taking all the way through, what we might (without any denigration) call 'fucking' contains at least one stage where the male displays his power and force. This need not be aggressive, vicious, or dominating, although perhaps statistically it frequently slides into that. The male can simply be showing the female his power, strength, ferocity even, for her appreciation. Exhibiting his quality as a beast in the jungle, with a lion or tiger's fierceness, growling, roaring, biting, he shows (in a contained fashion) his protective strength. This display of force need not be asymmetrical, however. The female can answer (and initiate) with her own ferocity, snarls, hissing, scratching, growling, biting, and she shows too her capacity to contain and tame his ferocity. It is even more difficult to state in quite the right way matters of more delicate nuance, the special way a woman can at some point give herself to her partner.

In sexual intimacy, we admit the partner within our boundaries or make them more permeable, showing our own passions, capacities, fantasies, and excitements, and responding to the others. We might diagram sexual intimacy as two circles overlapping with dotted lines. There are boundaries between the partners here, yet these boundaries are permeable, not solid. Hence, we can understand the oceanic feeling, the sense of merging, that sometimes occurs with intense sexual experience. This is not due merely to the excited feelings directed toward the other; it results from not devoting energy to maintaining the usual boundaries. (At climactic moments, are the boundaries dropped or are they made selectively permeable, lowered only for that particular person?)

Much that I have said thus far might apply to single sexual encounters, yet a sexual life has its special continuities over time. There is the extended being together over a full day or several, with repeated and varied intimacies and knowings, scarcely emerging or arising from the presence of the other, with fuller knowledge and feelings fresh in memory as a springboard to new explorations. There are the repeated meetings of familiar partners who scarcely can contain their hunger for each other. There are the fuller enduring relationships of intimacy and love, enhancing the excitement, depth, and sweetness of sexual uniting and enhanced by it.

Not only can one explore in sex the full range of emotions, knowing one's partner and oneself deeply, not only can one come to know the two of you together in union, pursuing the urge to unite or merge with the other and finding the physical joy of transcending the self, not only is (heterosexual) sex capable of producing new life which brings further psychological significance to the act itself- perhaps especially saliently for women, who are able to become the carriers of life within them, with all its symbolic significance--but in sex one also can engage in metaphysical exploration, knowing the body and person of another as a map or microcosm of the very deepest reality, a clue to its nature and purpose.