Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Sex as a Language

In the last half century or so, it seems, our society has swung from utter abandon in pursuit of sex of every tawdry, extreme and bizarre form, to outright rejection of sex, either with tablets of law from a mountain top or in expressions of sexual indigestion.

Chani, aka Thailand Gal, had this to say in response to my post yesterday:
I am incapable of being a slave to other people's needs, especially someone's sexual needs.
By all means, give up being a slave to someone's sexual needs. But must we forget that sex is a language -- like Thai or English or French?

A better analogy might be a special purpose computer language. Xbase. (I'm not really a techie, I just can do a reasonable imitation.) Few people still program in Xbase, although it's very sturdy and useful to handle databases.

Theoretically, you could write a compiler (a program to make programs) in Xbase and you could create a computer game. But why would you want to?

Xbase, originally dBase later Clipper and other variants, was invented in 1978 to go directly and intimately to the core of the information in a database, to build relations between sets of data, to link up what is often not obvious or easy in a deceptively simple way.

Like sex.

Technically, you could have sex with goats or design a robot to fulfill your every fantasy, but why would you want to?

Sex is a special purpose language that involves seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. (And, let's not forget, that off chance of reproduction.)

The combination of thought, word, mime and physical contact meld into a whole new dimension of contact with the core of another person. At the same time, we shed the layers of our selves. Then, at a powerful ego-barrier-destroying instant we all associate with intense pleasure, we have an exchange of being occurring that defies logical comprehension or comparison.

Sex is the language of love between two peers.

How to speak such a powerful language? In window shopping for love, look but don't touch, wrote Snoskred a few days ago. Touch and listen to the soul, responded Genevieve.

Chani reminded me that I've already expressed my dislike the idea of shopping for love (here), when I attempted to speak about love as an absolute value.

Yet my original question a week or so ago was whether love occurred one at a time, whether two or more might be touched by love. All in light of the idea that "The One" is largely a chimera (on this Chani's observations seem to match mine, although I have not quite abandoned the possibility).

One answer is to keep a certain distance. Another is to take a little nibble, as of a canape.

Yet another is the approach Leonard Cohen expressed in an interview aeons ago, in which he compared sex to a form of communication. Might we not be able to have several sexual conversations going? This would not be window shopping at all.

One is not intending to "buy" anything, but to share something of oneself and to receive from another, to practice the phrases, the verbs, the syntax of the complex language of love. If all of us could experience an all-connecting orgasm together, wouldn't wars cease, dog-eat-dog competition end, hatred dissipate?

This is not an invitation to a worldwide orgy. (Although ... what are you doing next Saturday?) No, seriously.

I repeat: Sex is the language of love between peers. We are not all peers. Sex should be an expression of equality, of similarity or complementary polarity, of abandonment and trust in another. It is often an instrument of oppression, a stand-in for power, a soft-touch leash.

In the end, sex between everyone and everyone else is not appropriate. But neither is no sex between anyone.