Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

We all know, or think we know, what sex is: that so varied but unmistakable pleasure that may issue in a thrill, a spasm, that experience most like a fit which is none the less gratifying. Alfred Kinsey taught us long ago to be a bit more matter of fact about this mystery of the body, to count connections and orgasms - with ourselves, with other individuals of our sex, of the other sex, both serially, of our age, older, younger, much younger; with groups of people, with puppets or machines, with preferred objects, with members of other species, with deities or Deity. Love we may think of as different, a broader business connecting us with all of the above but in ways more engaging of diverse emotions. Sex may seem to be sex - just sex; love a lot of things, romantic, familial, in friendship, in worship. Yet a pressure felt throughout the last century, perhaps most easily attributed to Sigmund Freud yet widely diffused, says the two are not so easily distinguished. The pressure is not mainly the old cynical one, wanting to say that love is just an unclear sublimation of clearer, simpler drives. It is rather the opposite, that sex, now often renamed pleonastically sexuality, is a lot more than getting it off, a momentary jerking in clitoris, penis, male or female g-spot, breasts, anus, underarm or anywhere: the body being pleasured becomes itself diverse, diffuse, a concept of ‘human ... log in or subscribe to read full text