The Sex in Society and The Society in Sex

The unorientability of sex and society.

“For psychoanalysis, sex and civilisation are in a tight dialectical relationship: human sexuality is unnatural, meaning it goes beyond the programme that can define life. Sex needs life to create forms that can meet its anarchic, unquenchable nature. Sex presses us up against the ways we attempt to organise its excess. Sex disorganises. What might contain it? Whatever our solutions or satisfactions, from artistic expressions to scientific inventions, the multitude of institutions centred on the body, on education, on consumerism and the family, these are always, only, partial solutions - for a time, for one singular individual, for one specific societal locale. If we start to fear that we cannot offer adequate containment, we can initiate attempts to bring desire under wraps and at our most violent, kill it, desiccate the environs, even at our own cost. This desire and its impediments, civilisation and its discontents, defines what psychoanalysis understands about human life as sex life.”

Jamieson Webster, “Disorganisation and Sex”, pages xi-xii

Sex and society. At first glance, these two things seem as though they couldn't be farther apart. Sex, whether we're talking about the act or anatomy, is often associated with notions of our most base and animalistic aspects and impulses. Meanwhile, society arouses in us thoughts of humanity's highest achievements of culture, such as art, science, or politics. And yet, if you look carefully, where you see one, more often than not, you can usually find the other. Sometimes it's just beneath the surface, other times it's just around the corner, and in still other situations, one serves as the very means through which the other is supposed to make sense. This is not to say, however, that our initial intuition was too far off base. Not because of how distant they are from each other. Rather, it's because their surprising proximity is characterized by antagonisms, antagonisms that both shape and disturb them from within.

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It's not too hard to find various strange and unusual tensions and oppositions that, under varying conditions, can flip into the very means by which sex or society actualize each other in practice. A fine example of such unorientability is when we think about sex and friendship. It is not an uncommon piece of advice to be careful about attempting to form a sexual relationship with someone who's a friend. Oftentimes, such a tension results in the imagined choice between either sex or friendship. The risk that the emotional turbulence generated from pursuing a sexual relationship with a friend often carries the potential of ruining the friendship, and the task of preserving a friendship can sometimes mean avoiding the possibility of sex. And yet, ironically, as Nietzsche has said, "a good marriage is founded on talent for friendship." There are many examples of how good and long-lasting sexual relationships are built on friendship, and despite the risk, many friendships can become successful sexual relationships. How is it that sexual relationships both threaten and are sustained by friendship?

Another interesting example of this same sort of odd disorientation between sex and society is the relationship between sex, marriage, and family. In contemporary Western societies, the sexual relationship serves as one of the bases of the union of marriage, and the union of marriage is the foundation of the family, itself often considered the bedrock of greater social forms. In many cases throughout history, marriage and its ultimate culmination in the family have been used as the justification or legitimization of having sexual relations. Many moral taboos have historically been created to prevent sex outside of a marriage or outside of the procreative function of a marriage, as though sex were a dangerous but necessary fuel that has to be highly regulated.

And yet even within a marriage, built as it is on the sexual relationship, sex also acts as one of the most disruptive elements of a marriage and of a family. How many couples have ended up in couples counseling because they stopped having sex, or because one person wanted more sex than the other, or because someone had sex outside the marriage? And how many families have fallen apart due to a couple being unable to navigate the failures of the sexual relationship? But then again, sexual problems in a marriage are rarely just sexual problems. They often relate back to this question of the quality of the friendship between partners. It is as though the relationship between the sexual and the social is like a matryoshka doll. If you look deep enough into one, you're bound to find the other somewhere.

Sex, in particular, is the more obviously ambiguous of the two terms. Sex is used to mean both the practice of sexual activities between people and the categorical division of the human species via biological morphology and reproductive functions. But the ambiguity extends further than just the multiple meanings of the term. Both sex as a division and sex as a kind of union lose any ultimate relevance, significance, or meaning for us outside of the contexts created by and within society. Without social institutions and the structures of meaning that emerge in and through social relations, sex, while still Real, is meaningless. Notice that we do not talk generally about males and females, unless, of course, we are talking about animals. Rather, when referring to human beings, we think of them in terms of the words man and woman.

But nothing is more abstract, socially encrusted, and historically contingent than a given society's ideas of masculinity and femininity and its socially prescribed roles of man and woman. Every generation seems to have its unique sense of masculinity and femininity, and their ongoing development in the social imagination is part of a continuous conversation between past and present generations. And yet, throughout the generations, many of the defining traits of being a man or a woman in society have only been tangentially related to sex. And even when pursuing sexual relations, people often eroticise these roles and ideas associated with them as much as the actual bodies of those in these roles. In sexuality, bodies often become a means of signifying these ideas and playing out their phantasmatic drama, which gives form and meaning to what could otherwise appear to be the senselessness of bare sex and the ambiguity of sexual difference. Despite how much sex gets associated with our most base animal natures, in our actual experiences of encountering it, it is surprisingly lacking in an inherent and natural substance.

And yet, nature is often the very thing that is used to justify the ways that sexual difference gets written into the social substance. Or perhaps we could say it is more the case that society writes itself where sexual difference can not be properly written, and then treats its writing as the natural order of things. The indefinite quality of sexual difference makes it a highly exploitable site for establishing a social order. One need not travel too far into the past to see how social relations have exploited the ambiguity of sexual difference and the lack of a definite sexual relation. Patriarchal society is founded on this exploitation. Women's political exclusion, social suppression, and subordination in patriarchal society were built on beliefs about women's supposed nature and their natural relation to men. And yet, many men and women were personally invested in these beliefs and the way they guided their lives. This exclusion was presupposed and assumed as part of a greater "harmonious" natural order, and it enabled specific kinds of social relations and institutions.

The early feminists who contested this exclusion, and the social order built upon it, faced a lot of resistance. They were often accused of threatening the natural order of things, and that it would be the ruin of society for women to be given the same social and political rights as men. In this way, the Real (sociopolitical) difference, which cut through the whole of society like a fault-line beneath the earth's crust, was obscured by the supposed harmony of the separation of the spheres. The reality, however, is that men and women were not "separate but equal." Rather, they were and are "the same but unequal." This asymmetrical split of the same world, and not the relation between two wholly different worlds, seems to be characteristic of the way sexual difference and its antagonisms manifest in society. As such, what the early feminists initiated in their time was nothing less than the earthquake of forcing society to face the problem of sexual difference as such.

There is so much more that could be said here, both about sex and about society. And the list of ways in which sex and society find themselves in strange and paradoxical tensions is vast. But, as I hope to have highlighted, we can not think one without inevitably ending up at the other somewhere down the line. Holding on to that tension, rather than either keeping them apart or reducing one to the other, is essential to gaining greater insight into the concerns of both. Our lives are not only permeated by both, they are defined by the way we reconcile with the problems they present to us, and to that end, such insight is invaluable.

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